EPIPHANY FALL UPDATE

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Thank you to everyone who was able to participate in last month’s Epiphany Leadership Training event!  A couple dozen Union Avenue members gathered in the Gretchen Brigham Gallery for a Friday-Saturday workshop led by the Disciples Hope Partnership.  There were videos, slideshows, lectures, group discussions, and even some hands-on activities to showcase our leadership skills and styles. (Ask around about trying to get a tent set up with only three PVC pipes, some twine, and a tarp.)  Those participating had a lot of fun, learned to think about Church in new ways, and began to help our congregation see God’s mission for Union Avenue.

Here are some takeaways from the session worth noting:

  • Churches spend a lot of time and energy around the “what” and “how” of ministry, but ultimately real success can only be found when remembering the “why” of ministry.

  • Transformational leadership focuses on empowering others, instilling courage, inspiring others, having agility, and daring to dream.

  • The world has changed forever with the dawn of the technological age, and people’s spiritual practices have changes with it, and the Church must also change or become irrelevant — we no longer live in a “Christian era.”

  • There are many different types of leadership styles (such as managing, initiating, bridge-building, dreaming, and transforming), and a healthy church has the right mix of styles in the right places to grow.

  • There is a difference between membership and discipleship.

Whew!  While the above takeaways are just the tip of the iceberg, we were able to record the entire workshop and hope to have it available for Union Avenue members to view later this fall.

In the meantime, those who participated are getting started on their “homework assignments” from the retreat and will be interviewing different community and city leaders to ask about what the needs, goings-on, and points of action and activity there are in our neighborhood here in the North Central Corridor and along our section of Delmar Boulevard.  Combined with a demographic review of our congregation and our congregational setting along with the official congregational assessment report for Union Avenue by Hope Partnership Services, our leadership (including some of our newly trained leaders!) will begin to craft some future-story possibilities for Union Avenue later in October.  AND THIS IS WHERE WE NEED YOUR HELP.

We can’t have a new future story without everyone’s input.  Walking the path ahead for Union Avenue is the work not just of ministers and lay leaders but of the entire congregation and the Holy Spirit.  We need to talk about these things together, pray about them, learn about them, get excited that God is doing something new with us and is bringing about a whole new chapter of life with us!  And so we will begin our small-group meetings this fall so we can start this vital work for our future.

Ideally, everyone in the congregation will take part in one of these groups about once a month, and our first focus will be to affirm our love for one another and life together as church, and then we’ll explore our values (stated, unstated, intentional, and accidental!), our understanding of our call to mission and how it is evolving, and our vision of what the future can bring.  We’ll also go through the congregational assessment in our groups and share what thoughts and questions arise from it.

This too is the Holy work of God, our conversing together and sharing with one another about who we are as a church and what we are called to do in the name of Jesus Christ as a people and place known as Union Avenue.  This is how we begin to have an epiphany of what we need to be doing to enter into the future God holds for us.  Please keep our congregation in your prayers, and please prayerfully consider how you might participate in our small groups or even and especially if you could host or organize one.

Let us have eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, hearts for caring, minds for exploring, and faith for meeting the opportunity ahead with courage and conviction.  The future is bright but elusive, so let’s not let it slip away from us.  This is our moment.  “Rise up, O Church of God!” — Rev. Michael