Fall 2019 Listening Season Kick Off
When your church council began meeting with coach and consultant Beth Estock this summer, we determined that the logical next step along the path toward selling our building would be to hold another listening season this fall. As it happens, your Reconciling In Christ Exploratory Team, working through the Building an Inclusive Church process, came to a similar conclusion that a listening season is also their next logical step. So, rather than try to hold two listening seasons at the same time, we are combining efforts to launch our Fall 2019 Listening Season beginning soon!
Thank you to the following people who have agreed to serve on our listening team:Jill Bierman, Anke Brandstater, Sallie Bullock, Denise DeMarre, Michael Gross, Mark Henderson, Cindy Kinnie, Tracy Litterer, Chris Radford, and Larry Wade. We appreciate your commitment of time and energy to this process. Thank you also to Deacon Bonnie Beadles-Bohling, an experienced faith based organizer in the Portland area, who led our team in a one-to-one listening team training session last Sunday evening. Within the next week, these listening team members will begin reaching out to all of you via telephone or email to schedule a 45-minute one-to-one conversation. It is our goal to have these conversations with as many of you as possible by mid-November.
What Can I Expect from this One-to-One Conversation?
To paraphrase a quote from pastor and author, Frederick Buechner…
The place where God is calling us to go is the place
where our greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.
This listening season is about the first part of that quote, “our greatest joy.” While we feel we have a good sense of who we are as a congregation, we are attempting to go a little deeper in discovering our community identity by sharing with one another our own individual hopes and dreams for our lives and for the comminutes in which we live. In short, when we discover more deeply what the Spirit is stirring up within us individually, we can discern more clearly what the Spirit is stirring up within us collectively. So we ask that you please accept the invitation when you are contacted by a member of our listening team to schedule a one-to-one conversation and be open to sharing what truly matters to you.
What Can I NOT Expect from this One-to-One Conversation?
This will not be a conversation about decisions, logistics and technical concerns (Where will we go? When will we move out of the building? How much money will the sale provide us? etc.). We are already putting into place ways to more effectively communicate this journey to the congregation and surrounding communities, as well as providing ample opportunities for conversation and feedback leading up to specific decisions as they emerge.
What about the Second Part of that Quote?
We hope to explore the question of “the world’s greatest need” by holding an external listening season out in the surrounding communities sometime early in 2020. Similar to the format of our fall 2019 internal listening season, we hope to engage community members and leaders in one-to-one conversations about what truly matters and what the Spirit is stirring up in our local context.
