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Dear Ball Camp Church Member,
I hope you have a sense of excitement about our church. If you do not, I hope that you begin to develop one in the days ahead. One of the reasons that I am exciting about our church is that we are beginning our strategic visioning process, Future, Forward, Faith.
Future, Forward, Faith is first of all a recognition that our future as a church belongs to God and that God has called and continues to call us forward. We look forward and move toward our future with the faith that God is calling us to it. Future, Forward, Faith is the process of listening to God and to each other as we look to the future and move forward in faith. This statement reflects our best sense of what we want God to accomplish with us as we move through our strategic visioning process. We will be utilizing an approach called Appreciative Inquiry that will focus our attention upon what we do well—and that will enable us to create a design for the future that will be true to our vision and mission.
Our Strategic Visioning Leadership Team will have its first meeting May 10. One of their first tasks will be to recruit thirty church members to conduct interviews with as many of our members and regular attenders as possible. These interviews will begin on or around the first of June. Be prepared for a member of the interview team to call you and to set up a time for your interview. Each member of the interview team will be assigned 8-10 interviews. Interview assignments will be made in such a way that each adult or high school aged young person in a household will be interviewed by a different interviewer.
On August 1, we will gather after worship for a light lunch and see what we learned from the interviews. From these results, we will form three to six design teams. These teams will work independently to design a plan to meet the needs in their particular area. By mid-September these designs will be given back to the Strategic Visioning Leadership Team. The SVLT will consolidate the work of the design teams into a unified plan and assign responsibility for carry it to one or more or our existing committees or leadership teams and report back to the church on by the end of October. Then we do the plan.
The purpose of this process is not for us to develop a new vision or mission statement. We have a mission and we have mission statements. We know what we are supposed to do and we know our purpose. The purpose of this process is for us to intentionally look to our future and plan to live our mission faithfully. At different times in the life of church, we have made an effort to summarize what we feel that it is important for us to do and be as a congregation. As a result of those efforts, we have a purpose statement and a church covenant in our bylaws and a mission statement that appears in our committee and leadership team handbook each year. While these three statements were developed at different times in the life of the church they cover remarkably similar ground. You will find a copy of each of these statements enclosed. Please familiarize yourself with them as preparation for your interview.
Finally, please be in prayer for this process. Pray for each church member and attender who will be interviewed. Pray that as we share our stories with one another we will hear again the voice of God speaking in our midst as we look forward to our future with faith.
Joy and Peace,
Ed
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