Rector's Note: Gather-Transform-Send-7.2.26

It will take some time to process all that we learned a few weeks ago at the College for Congregational Development training in Maryland. Rector’s Warden Deborah Way; postulant and parishioner Rosalinda Ibañez-Memba and I spent five solid days learning numerous models for enhancing and facilitating parish life.

This is a good space to introduce some of this thinking. You’ll also see some of this wisdom showing up in parish forums, leadership trainings and Vestry meetings this year. So buckle up.

One of the first models that we learned plays to St. Peter’s strengths and also challenges us to think even more deeply about how we bring people into our community and send them forth to do the work of a disciple.  It can be described in a diagram titled “Gather-Transform-Send,” which is an apt description of our work as church.

The idea is that our role as church is to gather people together, to facilitate the transformation of hearts minds and actions, and to send them out into the world to do the transformative work of God – all within the unique context of our Glenside neighborhood (and beyond) and the faith community of St. Peter’s.  There was a handy little diagram that went with this, but I think you get the idea.

Each one of these facets deserves some thought, prayer and discernment of how we can live into this call more deeply.

Gathering itself has a lot to it, including inviting people to come in our doors, greeting them and making them feel welcome when they arrive, ensuring they are oriented to our physical spaces and our people and our programs, and then incorporating them into the life of the community if they want to settle with us.

We might ask ourselves how well we do these things and how we can do them even better. How well we invite and raise questions about our visibility in the neighborhood. Can people see our church, find us on a map, and how do they learn what is happening inside our doors? Our banners are a start. Susanne and Chris Teleha have been painting signs for large parish events to make things more visible. Some folks learn about us through social media, Facebook and ads in the paper. And others receive direct invitations from parishioners and friends.

I feel that our Welcome Team has really given us a leg up on Sunday morning greetings. Visitors don’t leave without a warm welcome, a chance to fill out an info card for follow-up, and an invitation to coffee hour. The team ensures people don’t sit alone, and I don’t miss a chance to meet new people. How else might we extend welcome when it’s not Sunday? I’ve seen many a parishioner take on the role of tour guide, responder and helper when people wander through the maze of our building.

Orienting helps people understand who we are and what we are about at St. Peter’s. The parish directory and web page go a long way there. But here is where we also might make room for newcomer classes, introductions to the Episcopal Church and its polity and practice, and Bible Study.

All of this falls under the heading of gathering. That’s just a start really. The big transformative work of the church is more gradual. It happens in the practice of the life of faith – worship, fellowship, study, pastoral care, and service. Our culture and climate also determine how our community is formed into disciples over time.  The context that makes us uniquely St. Peter’s in Glenside is an organic web that makes up a living system. How might we better understand the context that we live and move in? Our team brought back some thought-provoking exercises on exploring who is in our neighborhood and what our relationships look like beyond our walls, which we’d like to explore in more depth with the parish. Imagine some large maps that plot our community relationships by street and neighborhood, and help us think about partnerships that are waiting to be forged.

Some additional questions around context are:

• What are the questions, joys and longings that we are carrying right now as members of St. Peter’s?

• What issues are we wrestling with on a local, state or national level?

• How might we explore these questions together?

• What does our neighborhood look like and what gifts do we bring to it, and it to us?

• What faith practices best sustain us to be disciples in the context that we find ourselves in, and how might St. Peter’s better support them?

  
  

Finally, the great commission of our Christian faith is to take the Good News of a loving God out into the world we live in. That includes family, work, social and civic sectors, creation in all its glory, as well as the life of the church. How can our life together help foster the reconciling, peace-building, justice-loving work of Christ wherever we go?

These are wonderful and ongoing questions for us, and just a taste of the brilliant ideas that Deborah, Rosalinda and I spent our week in Maryland swimming in. We look forward to exploring them in more depth in the near future. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your ideas on how we might better “gather, transform and send” as St. Peter’s.