Goal Two: Renew Congregations in Context

Each congregation in our diocese is being called to connect or re-connect its ministry directly to its particular mission field and become a community in which discipleship is a way of life for all God’s people. This work is beginning with discernment in individual congregations to discover who they are and what they are doing, as well as learning more about their own communities and finding ways to engage with them in ministry.

What is the context?

Before renewal can happen, the existing context of a congregation must be discerned. Members of the Goal Two Task Team have been visiting region meetings and posing a series of questions for discussion.

The questions were intended to be open-ended and explore the role of our church in our diocese. They were also intended to be leading, so that work could be done in concert with Gospel-Based Discipleship and the diocese as a network to cause the leadership of each congregation to revitalize the life of its members. It is evident from the questions that Goal Two overlaps in many points with Goal One (Spiritual Transformation) and Goal Three (Recreating the Diocese as a Network).

Here are the primary discussion questions:

• What are you most excited about that is happening in your congregation?

• What do you imagine that the community in which your church is located most needs from your congregation?

• If you could look to others for help and coaching to tackle an issue that is troublesome to your congregation, what would that issue be? To whom and where would you turn?

• Suppose there is a day when your congregation looks to help another, what is in your helping hand?

• What is other work that needs to be done?

Engaging with each other

Communities are multidimensional,” says Doug Maust, one of the Goal Two Task Team leaders. “We need to learn how to be engaged with people in our community, inviting them into our lives through our church.”

Congregational context also includes the idea of hubs and nodes — being a mentor or being a learner — a concept also included in Goal Three (Recreating the Diocese as a Network).

“Individual congregations can be hubs in some areas and nodes in others and the idea comes alive when you substitute mentor for hub and learner for node,” says Maust. “Each congregation needs to discern when it can mentor and when it needs to learn from others. Large or small, we need to find the things we can mentor others in so they can become stronger congregations their communities. This takes commitment from both the mentor and the learner. Programs will rise and fall with the interest in and the utility of each program. Hopefully, we will all find what we have to offer as a mentor and who we want to go to school on to make our congregations better contributors to our respective communities.”

“In some ways we’re living this now,” Maust adds. He gives one of many examples: when Nativity, Burnsville, wanted to learn of the Christian education program Godly Play, it consulted St. Clement’s, St. Paul, which had been using it for years. Now Nativity is using the program for its own children. Check the postings on the MSN website to learn of more.

Renewing ministry

Each congregation in our diocese exists in its own unique context — in location, demographics, community, and more. The process of exploring and discovering contexts will take some time, but the Goal Two Task Team members hope that assessment of what each congregation is doing — and could be doing — will result in a spirited renewal of mission and ministry.

Now, please read the task team’s questions again. This time, additional suggestions have been added to help propel the discussions. How might you answer these in the context of your own congregation?

What are you most excited about that is happening in your congregation?

• When you describe the Episcopal Church to someone, what do you say?

• When you invite someone to visit your church what do they find as the most compelling part of the invitation?

• What things that are going on at your place are the easiest to find volunteers to participate in?

What do you imagine that the community in which your church is located most needs from your congregation?

• How do you define your community?

• How does your community currently understand your congregation?

• How would you go about or how have you gone about exploring the needs of your community?

• If you were asked to forego outreach to others, in favor of engagement with your community, what would that mean to you?

If you could look to others for help and coaching to tackle an issue that is troublesome to your congregation, what would that issue be? To whom and where would you turn?

• Who do you stay in communication with other congregations?

• How do you know and what do you know about other Episcopal churches?

• How would you envision using the diocese to help facilitate sharing?

Suppose there is a day when congregations look to help another, what is in your helping hand?

• If your charge was to do one thing well and prepare your congregation to teach others, how would you choose that one thing?

• After you have chosen a specialty, what steps could you take or have you taken to prepare yourselves to teach?

• Can you envision yourselves as teachers for more than one topic?

Other work that needs to be done includes focusing everyone involved in leadership roles with regard to:

• Using the Gospel’s call to action as encouragement and guidance for renewing our congregations in their context.

• Using the diocese as a facilitator of communications between the teachers who are hubs and the nodes who are learners.

• Using the diocese as communicators to hold up and celebrate the success of congregations who best exemplify Episcopal life in our communities.