For the last two months the staff team, parish council and I have been working at synthesizing all of the information we have gathered from the congregation during this period of discernment.
This has been a lot like simmering down a slow cooked meal. Just about my favorite thing to eat are slow cooked lamb shanks. This whole process has reminded me of simmering down all of those ingredients into something that I want to eat.
We started by looking at the hundreds of ideas that were generated from the congregation. We then simmered these down into desires we could hear people voicing.
This is what we heard:
There’s a desire for St Paul’s to develop and strengthen sustainable ministry and to reorient the way we see ourselves. We are no longer a ‘small, less resourced church’ but we want to retain our uniqueness as a congregation. At the same time there’s a desire to work hard in developing our leaders for sustainable, fruitful ministry. There’s a strong desire for our church community to grow in spiritual maturity and for our community to be diverse. We want our church to reflect our area and we want our fellowship to have intentional moments of intergenerational discipleship. There’s also a desire for our property and systems to be strengthened and improved.
This is what we are trying to capture by emphasising going deeper.
There’s also a desire at St Paul’s for our church to be outward looking with ‘something always on the go’. There is a sense in which congregation members want our church to ‘genuinely be a church for all people.’
There’s a strong desire for growth in character, but also for people to be converted and join us. So there is a desire for us to be looking for new ways to reach out to our area with the gospel in word and deed. There’s a desire for our church to be generous with our prayers and our finances, to be a sending church.
This is what we are trying to capture by emphasising going further.
Going with the simmering analogy a little more we then brought these desires down into a statement that is trying to capture the mood, and at the same time inspire us for the next season of our church life. Here’s what we came up with:
In 2025 we will be taking the grace and truth of Jesus deeper into the heart of our church, and further into our community and beyond.
Each of those words is very important and communicates something of the values our church holds dear. In the next post I’ll begin to deconstruct that sentence.