Message from the Rector

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Strategic SPIRITUAL Planning

 

 Over the past several months, the vestry and staff have spent many hours developing the basis and framework for a strategic plan to guide our parish over the next several years. What are our core values? What are we called to be and do? What are our strengths and weaknesses? What path is Messiah being called to follow? What and who are we being called to become? These are the questions that have engaged and challenged us over this spring.

In a new book entitled If the Church Were Christian: rediscovering the values of Jesus, the author Philip Gulley poses some questions that he believes modern  Christians must ask in order to know where the Body of Christ is going - sort of a strategic planning process for the spiritual realm. While I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, I find his questions to be thought-provoking and pass them along for your contemplation.

  “If the Church were Christian …

… Jesus would be a model for living, not an object of worship

… affirming our potential would be more important than condemning our brokenness

… reconciliation would be valued over judgment

… gracious behavior would be more important than right belief

… inviting questions would be more important than supplying answers

… encouraging personal exploration would be more important than communal uniformity

… meeting needs would be more important than maintaining institutions

… peace would be more important than power

… it would care more about love and less about sex

… this life would be more important than the afterlife.”

As I said, I find some of his questions disturbing (which is his point) and don’t always care for his answers, but I wholeheartedly join in his hope:

“In the end, what I’m hoping for is a church a little less full of itself, and a little more full of love. It wouldn’t take much, for love and grace and kindness have a way of multiplying. We can start with just a few bones of it, and watch it build into something so vast it boggles the mind - a divine extrapolation, if you will.”

In my view, the final question for every Christian is: How can God’s divine extrapolation begin with me? And our ultimate prayer: May I be open to being used by God.

 

                                                                                  --Keith Marsh