Finding our common mission through true collaboration

This was a wonderful day for First Trinity, and I hope, for St. Matthew's. I was sorry to have missed our first Sunday together last week, and to have missed Pastor Huber's sermon, which was reported to be excellent.

I was exceptionally happy to be at church today for an incredible worship experience - a full house of warm and friendly people, absolutely glorious music, a super sermon and a fellowship time that would not end. The Holy Spirit was among us, the Gospel was proclaimed, and together we celebrated the Lord's Supper and honored the saints departed from both our congregations.

I visited with many members of St. Matthew's today and I found them to be open and friendly and very positive about joining us in this grand adventure of God's chosing. Our common goal is for each congregation to leave our relationship stronger than we each are today. But between now and then we are called to something more. God brought us together for a reason, and together St. Matthew's and First Trinity must prayerfully and faithfully seek to find it.

Whatever God's purpose for our partnership, the first step seems to me to be to fully integrate our congregations while maintaining and building our individual identities. I believe the way to do this is to go beyond the construct of guest or partner and seek to achieve God's purpose through collaboration.

My mentor, Arthur Himmelman, has defined collaboration as including the exchange of information, the altering of activities, sharing of resources, and enhancing the capacity of another for mutual benefit and to achieve a common purpose. This definition resonates with me because it focusses us on the notion of enhancing both First Trinity's and St. Matthew's capacity for our mutual benefit and as the route for achieving God's purpose.

Collaboration requires the sharing of risks, responsibilities, and rewards. One of the gurus of collaboration, Russ Linden, wrote “Collaboration is about co-labor, about joint effort and ownership. The end result is not mine or yours, it’s ours.” Actually we want the end result to be God's, but the point is we will not achieve God's purpose without collaboration, and by definition collaboration requires two partners, not a merger into a third entity.

All this is to say that members of St. Matthew's need to be integrated into all aspects of our joint worship, both in planning and participation, including as worship assistants, ushers, crucifers/acolytes, I also hope that St. Matthew's members will help with fellowship following service and contributing flowers.

However, we need to go beyond recruiting St. Matthew's for First Trinity-defined tasks and asking for participation in First Trinity's traditions. We must ensure that St. Matthew's traditions survive during our time together. This may take us out of our comfort levels, but then we can well imagine the people of St. Matthew's are already out of theirs.

Integrating St. Matthew's identity into all of our communication materials will be both a vehicle for furthering our parternership and be a symbol of our collaboration. We will need to rethink our communication tools so that they more fully represent and functionally integrate our two congregations.

Together, with God's help, we will find our way.