Preparing for the next five years of ministry...

A few weeks ago, after returning from our mini-get away for our anniversary, I had the chance to speak with my church council about looking forward to our next five years in ministry. Some may know that I was called to Pittsfield in 2007 to engage the people, my gifts and God's Spirit in a quest that is sometimes called "church renewal." So now, after almost six years, it is clear that we're ready to take this work to a deeper level.

At the close of my first year, our leadership team discerned a clear mission that has guided our efforts and helped us stay the course.  It is as follows: In community with God and each other we gather to worship, to reflect on our Christian faith, to do justice and to share compassion.  For the past 5 years we've given major attention to building community through reflection and worship. We've also deepened the ways we share compassion with one another and the wider community, too.  Over the next five years, while each of these commitments will mature, we must also find the best way to actively engage in doing justice.  Clearly our decision to be an Open and Affirming congregation will drive some of this work as will our recent commitment to help bring to birth a regional, inter-faith, congregation-based justice organizing project that is affiliated with the Inter-Valley Organizing Project (http://www.intervalley project.org/)

Two up-coming events speak to me of how the Spirit is now leading us to give shape and form to this mission:

+ First, on Saturday June 1st, we will meet for a full day leadership

team retreat. The day will start with Eucharist and prayer. Then we'll move into a critical reflection concerning each component of our mission statement - worship, reflection, justice and compassion - and what themes/insights from Scripture and tradition help us best understand what the Spirit is asking from us at this moment in history. In addition to eating together, we will close the day by sorting out how our historic, beautiful, expensive and always broken building helps us advance our mission.  Believe me, there are some intense and complex decisions about all of this that need to ripen during this retreat - and what we discern will clearly shape our ministry for the next five years. 

+ Second, on Sunday June 2nd, we will sponsor "Beats 4 BEAT" - a rock and soul music concert to benefit Berkshire Environmental Action Team.  Not only will some of our best musicians rock the house with original compositions but we'll pull out all the stops with songs from Canned Heat, Coldplay, Guster, Aretha Franklyn, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Hancock.  Three of the young people from this year's confirmation group will be featured along with some of the top regional performers from beyond the congregation, too. It will be a gas to make beautiful music again with these new/old friends - and - it will showcase a deep spiritual conviction of our ministry:  that beauty can save the world.

The visual artist and theologian, Mako Fujimura, wrote: "Dr. Elaine Scarry of Harvard, in her classic little book called Beauty and Being Just, states, 'Beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors. (pg. 31) In other words, the encounter with beauty convicts us, and that conviction causes transformation. She continues:

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true. Both in the account that assumes the existence of the immortal realm and in the account that assumes the nonexistence of the immortal realm, beauty is a starting place for education. (pg. 31)

As a faith community, we are learning to trust the beauty of the Scriptures and the Spirit in deeper ways.  And as this happens our imagination is resurrected: now we can see the world - and our church - as it should be rather than worry just about dead-end "facts" or zero-sum bottom lines.  And as a creative community, we are finding new ways to invest in young musicians - and dancers and painters and singers and writers and entrepreneurs, too - regularly bringing them together with time-tested artists so that we might create something beautiful together in community. Lewis Hyde cut to the chase in his book about creativity, The Gift, when he wrote:
 

It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two "economies," a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift, there is no art. (xvi, The Gift, Second Vintage Books edition, 2007)

It is my working assumption that the Spirit is calling forth our gifts in essential ways, too. With prayer and patience, community and creativity, beauty and blessing we are finding a deeper way to be faithful for this moment in time. We have got a ton of work to do in preparation for this weekend of creativity - and over the next five years - but what a sacred privilege, yes?   

credits:
1) labyrinth in tall grass @ www.tallgrassretreats.com
2) sculpture @ www.hancockchurch.org