“Conference staffing at all levels will be reassessed and
redesigned with the support of the human resources department and input from
communities of faith to address current needs based on our strategic priorities
by June 1, 2014.” We on the ‘Design Taskforce’ have a comprehensive and
difficult job ahead of us but we want to keep the conference, clergy, &
laity up to date to where we stand.
As a group we decided that there are a few key pieces that will be
the foundational as we move forward. First, we needed a working
definition of the words ‘transformation’ & ‘disciple’ in order to be
faithful to the Mission statement of the Iowa Annual Conference; my colleague
Rev. Curt DeVance will be addressing this in another article.
Second, we affirm the Strategic Design and we are committed to
including the Healthy Church Initiative & Healthy Small Church Initiative
into our final proposal; my colleague Rev. Mike Morgan will be addressing this
as well.
The third piece of our foundation is that we believe in a
grassroots approach in moving forward with our task. I am sure many of
you have heard this story before but it goes like this, once there was a young
Methodist minister, fresh out of seminary. He got a call to this
wonderful little church in Georgia. He was anxious to make a great start and
get things going. He pulled up to the church, and the first thing he noticed
was a gnarled old tree blocking the side doors of the building. He
thought, “I’m going to cut that tree down and show this church how ambitious I
am.” What he didn’t know was that John Wesley had planted that tree on his
mission to Georgia in the 1730s. So, he ended up cutting down Wesley’s
historic tree and was removed as pastor, before he even got to his first
Sunday. The good news was he didn’t even have to unpack his bags. The bad news
was he wasn’t ministering there anymore.
This story is a top down approach to ministry in which the one in
power imposes their will upon others. This approach doesn’t typically
work within the church. If I impose my agenda on my congregation there
will be opposition to all that I do and it will not last.
At the last church I served we had an empty lot beside the
fellowship hall. Often I would look at this property and think to myself,
wouldn’t it be neat to have a community garden? I would ask others what
they thought about that empty lot and they would tell me why we have it, what
we planned to do with it, and why it remained empty, but sometimes I would hear
their dreams for what it could be. Over the course of a year and half the
congregation grew in their faith and had a willingness to try new
ministries. One night at a Trustees meeting someone mentioned using the
empty lot for a community garden and my reply was, “I love that idea!”
For all intents and purposes the ‘Strategic Priorities’ are a top
down approach and so it is ironic that I write about a grassroots design.
Yet, when you take a hard look at the priorities they are designed to make the
laity, clergy, and churches flourish from the bottom up. The real
question is how do we implement them without imposing them?
As a design taskforce we are strongly committed to designing a
structure that allows congregations and local churches a greater voice.
We want to design our conference staffing so that their primary focus is to
help local churches make disciples for the transformation of the world!
Every few years we go through a restructuring process hoping that
this one will be the one that stops our decline. We want to design a
structure that makes a big enough Band-Aid to stop the hemorrhage. As the
‘Design Taskforce’ we ask for your prayers and support during this
process. On a final note, I can make one guarantee, this new design will
not be perfect, but we do follow one who is. So as we move forward please
consider the words of the Pharisee Gamaliel found in Acts 5:38-39, ““If this
program or this work is merely human, it will fall apart, but if it is of God,
there is nothing you can do about it—and you better not be found fighting
against God!”
In Christ,
Rev. Tim Frasher
Thanks for beginning this conversation here, Tim.
ReplyDeleteIn creating the strategic priorities, we did have a lot of grassroots input, it just came from many sources that were not specifically part of the priority writing process such as interviews, the FACT assessment, HCI, district events, etc. In many ways, we were the team that was called together not to create something new from the top, but to distill hundreds of pages of comments, recommendations, interviews, etc. from the people of the Iowa Conference into those three priorities.
Yet, perception is everything! And communication is paramount! So thanks for learning a bit from the places we stumbled and sharing your process as you go.
I think the key in what I hear from you/the team is in these two sentences:
"...they are designed to make the laity, clergy, and churches flourish from the bottom up. The real question is how do we implement them without imposing them?"
My prayers go with you and all of the Iowa Conference as we work to embrace these priorities and you help give us some structure for doing so.