Visioning Workshop Report

Last Saturday, May 6, more than 20 elected church leaders, ministry leaders, ministers-in-covenant, and staff came together to begin developing a Vision for FCCA in the coming three years.

Our skillful facilitator, Karen Bane, led us through a process where we spoke aloud our individual hopes and dreams for the future. This was followed by visually illustrating our collective sense of: new energies we want to nurture, new energies that have already taken birth, mature energies that are now fruitful, and fallow energies whose time has come for composting (whether we wanted it or not).

As a group, it became clear that we all want to Grow the Church’s diversity, intergenerational relationships, and community relevance as we live out our mission to walk in the path of Jesus. The Visions we want to nurture and give birth to can be summarized like this:

• Planting seeds of expanding and rethinking our Children’s and Youth Ministries
• Gestating ways to multiply our Community Connections both internally and externally
• Supporting the re-birth of our Online Presence & Connectivity
• Growing our Welcome to live our values

We also acknowledged that any area that is growing in the church will require volunteer commitments, planning, and staff support. Our energies are finite and therefore, of the perhaps 40-50 ideas that were birthed during the workshop, we’ll need to prioritize and focus on those areas that we feel will have the largest effect on church growth. After all, we must work within our human capacities of time and energy.

In our Worship Service this past Sunday, each of us in the congregation and online participated in a reflective moment to share our individual hopes and dreams for the church. These ideas were collected to incorporate into the larger Visioning process – and there will be another opportunity to do this if you missed it. Additionally, Rev Lacey and I will have a picnic in July with church families with children to explore the ways in which our Children’s and Youth Ministries can be restructured to better serve post-COVID needs for our younger generation.

At the end of the summer, the Church Council will come together to focus on the specific actions that will help to grow the church according to this Visioning process. Thanks to all who have participated thus far and, as always, please share your viewpoints with me along the way if you see an opportunity you haven’t heard spoken about yet.

Blessings,
Eric Hartz, Moderator