Goals.....

Yesterday we had our Congregational Annual Meeting.  As a part of that meeting we presented the goals the Council has set for the next year.  There were two that I spoke too:

1. Building Community Internally
2. Building Visibility and Community Externally (co-incidentally--or not--I preached on Witness & Testimony yesterday morning.  Maybe a post about that tomorrow...)

These goals grew out of a review of the visioning discussions that the Council has had over the last year or so. When the chair and I looked back over the notes we saw some trends and those trends grew into the goals.

Now of course comes the work.  It is easy to name goals.  But how shall we live them out?  How does one build community?  How does one make a church (a downtown church that has been in the same place for a century and yet some longtime residents drive by it every day and don't know where it is) more visible/known?  How do you build community connections?

We have some ideas.  Some of them are continuing and strengthening what is already happening (like monthly meal-based events, or strengthening the links we have with outside agencies through our outreach committee).  Some are to revive what has been done before but allowed to lapse (like wearing nametags so we know each other's names).  One option I have suggested in my annual report was that I want to visit with more folks--and openly asked for invitations (now to see if anyone actually read that part).  Maybe we will do something about signage.  Maybe finally, after years of talking about it, we will do something to connect with the local college community.

Last year at a council meeting a comment was made that we were the church more people stayed home from than any other church in town.  Maybe if we can work at both those goals fewer of those people will stay home???   And even if they continue to stay at home, hopefully we will be a stronger community, and a stronger community presence because we have given attention to those things....