The Future of Grace, Update #1
April 1, 2010We’re in the midst of a careful but fast-moving process to listen to God’s call to Grace in a fresh way. Our church chair, Jon Boyd, will be bringing us monthly updates on what’s new and what’s next — and here’s the first one, as it was delivered in the worship service on Sunday, March 21, 2010. This accompanied his visual presentation which is available online, so feel free to follow along.
A word or two with you about the future of Grace. Anyone interested? Good. I bet we all are. And you know who else is? Jesus. That’s why it’s so easy to get up here and assure you that the future of Grace is going to be awesome.
But what exactly will that future look like? No one here can really know. But there is someone we can ask: Jesus. If you are really interested in the future of Grace — and you’ve said that you are — there’s one most sensible thing to do: and that’s talk with God about it.
As you may know, as a congregation we’ve been pursuing something called our “Strategic Discernment Initiative” or SDI for something over a year now. SDI is just another way of saying talking with God about the future of Grace. We’ve made good progress, and the project has now entered a second phase. Here’s what’s happening.
The Grace Council — which is an elected group of seven leaders from among you, plus the pastors — is using the lion’s share of all our time together this year to concentrate on “future of Grace” questions. As chair of the Council, I’m organizing our efforts and I’ll also be bringing you monthly updates (like this one), if you can stand it.
The Council has already had a day-long retreat, with time spent together, alone, and with Jesus. We have a solid start on things — which is good, because we need to. Time is important certainly because none of us wants this process to drag on interminably, but also because in 2011 (which is now just nine months off) we’ve got church budgetary issues that will be shaped by what we learn from the discernment process this year.
Our first question is, frankly, nailing down what questions we need to answer this year. Here are some examples of what we’re wrestling with:
- Does Grace have a specific, distinctive mission or reason for being?
- Should Grace try to get bigger?
- What has Grace done particularly well that we should work to get still better at?
- What might we need to do differently in order to fulfill our mission?
- Are there resources we don’t currently have that we’ll need for all this?
The process is a conversation with, yes, Jesus. If we don’t talk to and hear from him, all the rest is just chatter. So here comes the (second-)most important word of everything I’m saying today: Pray. Please pray regularly and attentively about the future of Grace. Tell God what you want, and ask him what he wants for us. I know he’ll hear you, and I hope you’ll hear him. When you do, keep praying about that, and pass it along, too. (We’ll also be hosting prayer meetings and other things like that, so stay tuned.)
Strategic discernment is also a conversation amongst ourselves. What will that look like? Well, first, as you’re witnessing right now, you’ll hear from me and the Council very frequently about what’s happening in the Strategic Discernment Initiative. (My visuals and manuscript are also available on the Grace website for those who aren’t here today.)
Secondly, I and other available Council members will be downstairs for a thirty-minute conversation after the service on Sundays like this. I hope you’ll come tell us what you’re thinking about the future of Grace. When is this? You got it: right after the service today, downstairs. Don’t leave me hanging.
Third — well, we don’t know what’s third, but probably things like surveys, town hall meetings, Facebook, that kind of thing. We’re really going to need your engagement. Because the future of Grace is going to be awesome.