Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 October 2011 17:56:40
Yesterday was our church vision day. It was a really interesting day focused around looking at the 7 marks of a healthy church from the Healthy Churches Handbook. It's not appropriate for me to go into what was discussed and what our conclusions were but something really important came across for me - often it turns out we only know half the story.
If we move into a new church we won't know the stories, vision and history from before we arrived which has an impact on our experience in the present. There is an expectation that everybody understands what we do and why, because quite reasonably they don't want to have to explain everything time and time again to new comers. Yet, often the way newcomers will interact and the perceptions they will gain need to be informed by that history if they are to see things as they really are. I admit I have been under the impression over the last three years that our church is overly concerned with buildings and money and not enough about people outside...yesterday I discovered I couldn't have been much more wrong if I had tried. I had misunderstood much of what was happening simply because I didn't know the relevant bits of the vision.
The issues with this tie into communication, something that I think we all have difficulties with sometimes. How do we get the balance between turning our stories into gut spilling and gynological style self-examination and not telling anybody anything? How do we know when to speak our recent history and when to let it lie?
On a personal level it is something I am struggling with a bit at the moment. I need to have hugs and share about my experiences at Occupy and how they have impacted me and how they are challenging me but at the same time I know that the consensus amongst people appears to be putting up a wall of silence about it with me because of the fear (i) I will start going on, ( a problem I know I sometimes have) or (ii) I might say something controversial or difficult.
The issues tied up with being able to catch a vision, understanding the history and engaging in positive communication and getting the training to do it are why I loved the EDEV course so much a couple of years ago. This course is based on doing exactly these things in a biblical context. The EDEV course quite literally changed my life because it enabled me to start catching a vision, understanding my history within the wider history of the world as illustrated within the bible and church history and then communicating what feelings, questions and desires were arising from that. This was something else I was reminded of yesterday when I was given a short chance to enthuse about the course, which I very much believe is useful for everybody. Third Party went through a later EDEV course than myself and the results of that have been visible for all those locally who know her and have seen the change in her.