State of the Church – Oct. 2018

As summer fades, with family vacations just a memory and kids back in school, it’s time to look ahead to my favorite season…fall. And of course that means our Mount Calvary annual meeting is right around the corner—Sunday, October 7 to be precise.

As a prelude to the meeting, I want to offer a refresher this month on some of the key efforts that your church council is working on.
Our most recent strategic plan, which included congregation input from a church-wide survey, resulted in a guiding imperative to celebrate and communicate who we are and to build on our strengths. We learned from our survey that we are clearly doing most things very well, and in these areas we are striving to move from good to great. There are also a few areas that we found which required our attention to make some necessary improvements.

The output from our planning process was the following eight initiatives (included here in abbreviated form), and we assembled a team for each initiative composed of our council members and the pastors. The eight initiatives are:

• Ministry: Grow faith and values through life-stages, and connect the generations.
• Leadership: Develop an organizational development and succession plan.
• Worship: Continue developing and evolving worship to meet the ever changing needs
of our congregation.
• Inclusion: Work to overcome social and cultural boundaries within our walls, and seek
to develop “radical hospitality.”
• Stewardship: Clarify and align relationships between funds/campaigns, and develop
multi-year facilities and benevolence approach.
• Awareness: Develop and deploy an identity plan to tell our theological and community
story.
• Listening: Develop and deploy active ad hoc and periodic feedback disciplines.
• Partnership: Introduce tools to evaluate partnerships, communicate activities and status to the congregation, and solicit volunteers and support for various partnerships.

You will receive an update from one of the initiative teams at our annual meeting, but this will also be a great opportunity for you to ask about any of the initiatives.

I look forward to seeing you on October 7.

Mike Kasprick
Council President