Patience, perserverance and prayer are requested

One of my primary concerns has been how to be a good steward of First Trinity's human resources during this Year of the Full Plate. We started out with The Big 3 - stewardship, governance and redevelopment, as our challenges (and opportunities) for the year, knowing they would involve everyone and all our programs.

Then, before the first Council meeting, we added the proposal from St. Matthew's to join in our worship, programs and fellowship for the three years they are building their new church. Now we have The Big 3+1. This will require judicious use of the Council's and congregation's time and energy or we will end up wearied of meetings and unappreciative of the challenges and opportunities God has placed before us. FT has so many programs and ministries that it is easy to forget that we are a small congregation, and relatively few people are involved in a broad array of activities.

For this reason, the Executive Committee met yesterday and discussed how to sequence addressing each of these issues. While it would be ideal to spread them out and only deal with one at a time throughout the year, we determined that was not possible.

• Stewardship - Cindy Knotts has agreed to lead these efforts and to research resources for helping us develop an ongoing stewardship education process. A committee will be named this fall who will meet with someone from the ELCA to discuss options, and bring a proposal to the Council in December and then ultimately to the Congregation at its annual meeting in January. This timeline coincides with program and budget planning and prepares us for the start of the new fiscal year on February 1.


• Governance has been my shorthand for looking at how we can operationalize our recently adopted Mission and Values and ensure we have an infrastructure that can support them. This shorthand label is confusing and limiting, so we need to find something that conveys the broader intent. (Suggestions welcome!) We have discussed many ways of accomplishing this over the past many months, and have now come up with what we believe is an efficient and hopefully effective approach. We want this process to tie into the program and budget planning process which begins November 15, so we need to start that right away also.


• Redevelopment is on-going. We cannot reliably predict when we will have something to report or that the committee will have proposal to recommend. We have input from the congregation on implications of potential redevelopment on current and future programs and what we should think about regarding a transistion should we move forward. This provides a foundation for the Redevelopment Committee and Council. Therefore we will need to fit in redevelopment issues as they arise.


• St. Matthew's needs a place to worship this fall, so we cannot delay this either.
  

All this means that we cannot avoid a very busy fall, especially when adding in the start-up of Sunday School October 12, our relatively new responsibilities for the Food Pantry, all our on-going responsibilities and the upcoming program and budgeting planning cycle. In reality we need to do as much as possible between now and the first week or so in Deccember, since after that we will be busy with Advent and Christmas activities.

Thus, I ask everyone's patience, perserverance and prayer as we move forward on so many fronts in the coming (two) months. There are various ways we can approach our various challenges and opportunities in the coming months. One of them is described in a most interesting article on planning for church leaders that Pastor Tom sent me. I commend it to you: http://www.alban.org/conversation.aspx?id=6472. I would like to discuss this article and its implications for FT in an upcoming blog.

First up

First Trinity certainly has a lot on its collective plate right now, so I thought it would be good to start a blog to share information and perspectives, build community and together work on determining how to respond to the opportunities and resources God has given us. Thus, most of the time posts will focus on the challenges and opportunities faced by FT, but sometimes posts will discuss our broader relationships to the ELCA and our DC Metro community. I find constant inspiration and challenge in reading The Lutheran, and so some posts will attempt to initiate a discussion of issues raised there.

Since we only joined FT two years ago I know I have a lot to learn about the congregation and its ministries. I welcome - and look for - feedback and opinions and opportunities to learn from what will surely be mistakes.

While Council elections are in June, the first meeting of the year was in early September. I have a vision for church councils that is different from those of a non-profit board of directors. For one thing we don't have enough staff to come together once a month, provide oversight and not worry about anything until the next meeting. Members of the congregation have taken on large areas of responsibilities for FT programs and ministries, and the Council must provide active servant leadership to our congregation. Therefore I have asked the members of the Council to look at their role perhaps somewhat differently than in the past. We will be discussing this at the October Council meeting and I will share more about this as the meeting gets closer.

Prior to the first Council meeting the Executive Council, Pastors Tom and Wendy, Vice President Ron Morgan, Minister of Financial Resources Greg Nelson and I, had identified three issues that will involve every ministry of FT in the coming year:

• Stewardship: We all need to be good stewards of all of our resources and all of our opportunities, and this means we need to focus on involving more people willing to share their time and talents. We need to develop ways of talking about and encouraging people to think more deeply about stewardship.
• Governance: In April the Council approved asking the Mission and Values Work Group to look at our existing ministries and those suggested during the development of our mission and values, as well as the way we are currently organized, and to come up with recommendations about how we might be organized to best support and reflect our new mission and values. We will begin this fall. The process will involve talking to Council members about their ministries, the way they operate, the human resources they have and need, and how they might relate and respond to those priorities suggested during the development of our mission and values.
• Redevelopment: Throughout this year we will to look not just at the opportunities and challenges posed by potential redevelopment, but at the transitional needs of the congregation if we were to move forward.

Future posts will focus on each of these issues in detail, as they each in turn become the focus of our attention.

Just prior to the first Council meeting we received a request from St. Matthew Lutheran Church (ELCA) to consider asking them to join with us in our worship and programs while they redevelop their property in Southwest. There has been much positive reaction to this idea and we are now working out the details. An upcoming post will discuss this opportunity in more detail.