Project Name:

Gather Us In: A Year of Reweaving, Discernment and Embracing

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: Our first year’s work will aim to build on the progress by prompting a reflective evaluation of how our congregation is now called to live in our church home with a renewed gaze at each other’s vocation, God’s call to us, and how we might call our broader community in a voice of evangelization.

Year 1 Goals:

• Come to know and embrace our theological claims, including a renewed sense of mission and calling among our 4,700 parishioner family members.
• Embark on a journey of prayer and gift discernment that embraces the parish history, and seeks to align parishioners, staff, and friars around a shared sense of identity and calling.
• Deepen our understanding of who we are and what we are called to be both here in this church house and beyond the church doors – and work together to create structural support for helping new and existing church family members to discover their calling and charisms.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• A two-day visioning session with parishioners, ministry leaders, volunteers, staff, friars, and stewardship committees.
• Learning sessions and church tours with church historian.
• Photo installation that includes examples of people living their callings through witness stories, poetry, and artwork.
• Completion of the Called and Gifted Program by the Stewardship Committee, St. Francis staff, and Liturgy Committee.

Questions & Context:

After many years of doing, building, and making in an effort to answer the call for a school and additional facilities, we are asking questions like: How is our church family living out God’s call? Where is God among us now at this moment in human history? Are we at a moment of necessary pause? Inspired by Saint Francis, what are our communal dreams that will perpetuate a sense of purpose and new goals?

Project Name:

Colonial Church: A Community of Calling

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: Our congregation seeks to welcome each person as beloved; wrestle with the tensions in God’s Word and world; and do good in the world.

Year 1 Goals:

• Educate our church community and broader community on the language and theology of calling and vocation. Consider what it means for our lives.
• Create space for reflection on the idea of calling and vocation. Ask questions, offer prayers, and process ways that God calls individuals.
• Take vocation and calling outside the walls of the church, beyond Sunday, so that our community members will be supported by the church in their work in the world.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Intentional integration of vocation into worship, including entering worship with the same verse about calling all year, praying a ‘sending’ blessing about calling during the Benediction, and handing out prayer cards.
• Wednesday night adult education classes, speakers, and discussion groups focused on calling.
• StrengthsFinder and Enneagram workshops in the fall and spring.
• Weekly ‘calling’ text reminders to help people think about calling in their daily lives.

Questions & Context:

We hope our project addresses the following questions: What is my role in the world as an individual who is called? What is the corporate calling for our church? In what ways can Colonial Church reach outside the walls of our church to confront social injustice and be a good neighbor while strengthening the sense of individual calling in others?

Project Name:

Pouring a Foundation

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: In order to sustain and strengthen the work we do in the world, we need to nurture and strengthen our personal connections to God, our understanding of who we are as individuals and what our gifts are and deepen our relationships with people we are working alongside. Our project this year helps us put a fraction of the passion and care we offer to our neighbors toward our own health and spiritual wellness.

Year 1 Goals:

• Help Edgewood members develop their connection to God and experience spirituality, using prayer practices and the language of vocation and calling.
• Excavate our Stories by providing multiple opportunities for people to articulate their faith story and share that story with others in our faith community.
• Develop specific cohorts to cultivate deeper sharing and connection around stages of life and/or identity beginning with LGBTQ+ folks and youth.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Lay preaching on personal experience of vocation and how they felt God moving in their life through that particular call
• Lenten spiritual practice series to develop personal practices of prayer.
• Preaching and workshop on spirituality and aging.
• Partnership with the Islamic Center to explore the intersection of work and religion.
• Small group opportunities, including a Queer Connections LGBTQ+ group.
• An all-church weekend retreat to connect cross generationally, to model Sabbath for renewal and reflection, and to begin to imagine where our congregational exploration might take us in 2020/2021.

Questions & Context:

The language of call – and everyone having a particular call from God – is new to our congregation. We generally have a strong understanding of Edgewood’s call to justice and service, but we struggle to articulate our individual calls within the community. Folks want to learn how to place the individual story of their life in the context of a larger community and Christian narrative. We heard many similar themes and shared challenges (life transitions, aging, integrating faith with daily life) but often people assumed they were the only one struggling with this challenge. We discovered a desire to know they are not alone and to share their experiences with folks who “get it.”

Project Name:

GIFT (Growing in Faith Together): Created, Claimed, and Called

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: In the current political and social climate, our commitment to live as people of faith has never felt more important, and we find ourselves yearning for more clarity about what God is calling us to be and do as disciples of Christ. How can we most effectively care for the wellbeing of our world and its people? In what ways can we be bearers of God’s hope for this time?

Year 1 Goals:

• Develop a common vocabulary and shared theology of the meaning of Christian vocation and what it means to be called by God.
• Cultivate faith practices and spiritual disciplines so that members can grow in their relationship to God.
• Develop opportunities for members to engage their vocational callings in particular seasons of life.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Weekend retreat and book discussions for core team members.
• Develop a devotional resource for church committees to use for opening/closing prayer.
• Adding stories of calling to weekly devotional emails.
• Guest preachers and lecturers on particular callings.
• Sermon series on prayer during Lent and focus in worship on being called by God.
• Create curricula for small groups on prayer (Lent 2020) and on faith practices and vocational exploration (in late 2020).
• Partnership with Mindful Works that includes opportunities for service and reflection on vocation.
• Reflect on vocation with new small group for parents of teens.

Questions & Context:

How can we help members of our congregation develop a rich understanding and theology of vocation and what it means for them to be called by God? How can we help members discover and deepen practices of discernment and spiritual discipline so that they can grow in their relationship to God? How can we more fully support and enable members to reflect on their callings in various seasons of life – as parents of teens, as young adults, in retirement, and as they prepare for dying and death? How can we enable members to reflect more fully on what our mission as a congregation means for their own calling?

Project Name:

Communities of Calling Project

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: In our context, our greatest hurdle is not convincing people that their lives are indelibly marked by God’s call; our greatest hurdle is equipping congregants to articulate their sense of call and creating spaces for people to connect their call stories and vocational questions with those of their neighbors. We aim to provide opportunities for people to articulate their sense of call and connect their stories and questions with their neighbors.

Year 1 Goals:

• Build a small-group framework that honors diversity and allows for deep connection.
• Empower participants to connect their call stories and vocational questions with those of their neighbors.
• Share this grant’s gifts generously with the wider community.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Affinity small groups formed around particular callings.
• Storytelling and story-listening workshop with Mark Yaconelli.
• Lenten devotional and Wednesday evening worship services in Lent focused on storytelling from the vocational small groups.
• Video project aimed at telling the stories of immigrant-owned businesses.
• Connection with stories of immigrant-owned businesses during Lenten Wednesday evening sessions.

Questions & Context:

Believing that everyone has a story worth hearing, we hope to address the following questions in Year One: How does the church contribute to and stand in the way of people’s desire to be known? How can we equip one another for open-hearted sharing and vulnerable listening? Does leaning into our exploration of vocation allow us to resist isolation and despair? How does deep appreciation for God’s call in our lives and in the lives of our neighbors empower us for collective social action?

Project Name:

Calling in Partnership

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: We want to help deepen and broaden the culture of our community so that people understand calling and vocation as global, relational, and complex.

Year 1 Goals:

• Work with our partners in Llano to deepen our sense of global call together.
• Help the congregation think about how calling happens in relationship with or response to others.
• Introduce and infuse a shared language of calling and vocation.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Shared conversations on calling with partner congregation in El Salvador, including Skype calls, 2020 trip to Llano, and shared prayers.
• Book discussion on Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood.
• Retreat for congregational leaders to discern how our congregation is being called.
• Develop process of gift discernment for new members.

Questions & Context:

We are a financially-secure congregation with mainly middle to upper class members. We are curious about the ways privilege and wealth play into perceptions of calling and vocation. How does privilege relate to vocation and calling? Does vocation necessitate a degree of privilege? We also hope to explore questions around the complexity and expansiveness of calling as it shows up across the lifespan. Our partner congregation in Llano find that for young people, working in the church allows them to express their vocation sin different areas of ministry.

Project Name:

Responding to the CALL (Called to Action after Listening with Love)

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: Our aim is to engage each other in activities beyond worship services and build stronger connections between the diverse groups—to open communication, learn from each other, and serve all. Establishing a common parish-wide foundational understanding of calling will cultivate a healthy environment where relationships, understanding, and awareness of others will flourish.

Year 1 Goals:

• Increase awareness of calling and vocation among parishioners in the church. Create an intentional parish-wide education program focused on calling and vocation.
• Establish a youth group for children ages 12-18 to forge a path to make connections with each other, connect faith and calling with their lives as they move onto young adulthood.
• Establish a lay caregiving ministry to significantly augment the pastor’s capacity to provide care to those impacted by life crises.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Retreat for church leadership on vocabulary and practices of calling
• Parish-wide kick-off celebration event.
• Monthly adult education classes and book discussion group.
• Small group series with Called to Life.
• Social events and activities for youth that help them develop an awareness of God’s calling in their lives.
• Stephen Ministries leadership training and recruitment, training, and commissioning of future ministers.

Questions & Context:

We desire to become more intentional and proactive in our efforts to help our parishioners recognize their individual God-given gifts, circumstances and callings, and to discern that they are called to serve God at home, at work, at Church and in other moments of their lives. The disparity in geography, age, and interests among our congregation members creates strong friendships and encourages the development of smaller groups who support each other frequently. While the bonds are growing within groups, we discovered that communication and engagement outside the groups languishes. Our team believes God brought this grant to our parish at the most opportune time, as we are in need of extended emotional and spiritual care.

Project Name:

Growing in Discipleship: Living Our Call

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: The purpose of the project is to generate a common understanding of living out one’s call in the context of our discipleship with Christ. This may be lived out in church, in the workplace, at home or in the larger community.

Year 1 Goals:

• Identify and define language surrounding vocation and calling.
• Form parish leadership (staff and lay leaders) in using, implementing and having a common understanding of language surrounding vocation and calling.
• Provide opportunities for parishioners to become acquainted with language around vocation and calling.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Develop curricula for teaching parish leadership about vocation, including building a library.
• Work with council members to dedicate portion of their meeting time to reflection on calling.
• Moments of prayer that incorporate language of calling, including Eucharistic and non-Eucharistic liturgies.
• Ask staff to choose an existing activity within their area and implement language of vocation.
• Lenten parish retreat for adults and spring retreat for youth on vocation.

Questions & Context:

How can conversations be intentional and genuine about vocation? How do vocation and calling relate to how one chooses to participate at Pax Christi? How do we encapsulate the essence of the original calling and draw it forward for a new time? How can we give the calling of this community a root system that will anchor it within the oceans of change that the future will inevitably bring?

Project Name:

Becoming a Language School

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: To grow more fluent in conversing about how faith affects our work and daily life, and consider how to see our work in light of our faith.

Year 1 Goals:

• Provide educational content about vocational discernment that will challenge our congregation to practice more holistic faith.
• Provide a church-wide small group structure that offers participants regular opportunities to converse about faith and their vocations.
• Provide immersion events that offer participants the opportunity to learn about vocation within a particular ministry setting.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Sunday adult “faith-ed” sessions and Sunday evening youth group gatherings about listening to God’s Spirit and vocational discernment.
• Church retreat on spiritual listening for all ages.
• Church-wide weekend with Diane Millis on the sacred art of conversation and how to tell our stories.
• Marriage enrichment retreat on the vocation of marriage.
• “Writing to Change the World” Lenten series.

Questions & Context:

In listening to our congregation, we found people live compartmentalized lives. Questions about work and faith are separate conversations. Our church life reflects our compartmentalized culture. How could we grow more fluent in conversing about how faith affects our work and daily life? How do we see our work in the light of our faith? How could these questions lead Plymouth into a new sense of its vocation?

Project Name:

Weaving Together Our Visual and Virtual Calling

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: We want to engage members of both our physical and digital communities in conversations and practices that will help them become more comfortable talking about their personal understanding of vocation and call.

Year 1 Goals:

• Enrich and deepen our conversations about vocation.
• Weave the arts into our conversations about vocation.
• Deepen our community’s vocation as a liturgical, artistic, and theological resource to the wider Body of Christ by rebuilding and augmenting our already attractive corner lot in the digital commons.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Fall kick-off event and discussion series on StrengthsFinder.
• Lenten series on vocation, inviting community members to speak about their callings.
• Community art project on weaving.
• Enhance and update presence in the digital commons, including developing and deepening our podcasts.

Questions & Context:

We plan to use a multi-disciplinary approach to help individuals in our congregation (both the physical and the digital) wrestle through the question, “How do I understand vocation and how does that understanding impact my life?”

Project Name:

Called Today, Led Into Tomorrow

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: We hope to capture a deeper acknowledgment that God is present in all realms of life and all ages of life. Through an intentional development of small groups, we hope to raise this emphasis so that we may all be asking the questions, “Where do we see God?” and “How is God calling me?”

Year 1 Goals:

• Bless, inspire, and capture the attention and dreams of our members regarding their lives in the world as servants of Christ.
• Strengthen the bonds of “member-ship” in this particular “Body of Christ, with many members,” St Mark’s Lutheran Church.
• Give each member, both communally and individually, the ability to articulate their calling from Sunday (gathering) to Monday (scattering) through their various realms.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Major kick-off teaching event.
• Artistic decorations in the narthex with images of people immersed in their vocation.
• Preaching focus on the call of God into lives of service.
• Define vocation through logo, definition hung up in the narthex, and adult forums.
• Bulletin inserts, printed prayers on magnets and postcards, vocation-related app.
• Weekly class series on vocation.
• Spiritual direction training for parishioners.

Questions & Context:

How can we help our members discover their vocation while not adding one more thing to their busy life?  What programs do we already have that we can reexamine under our new vocational lens?  What things can we add that will enhance our mission?  How can we create community among our members?

Project Name:

Called to discern then act

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: During our listening activities, we heard again and again that the congregation wants to work with discernment and at the same time, they want our projects to do good in the world. Both longings have to do with wholeness. Our project will ask discernment questions with loving and prayerful people, which we hope will lead to purposeful work in the world that seeks wholeness for our community.

Year 1 Goals:

• Expand our congregation’s vocabulary around vocation and calling and provide resources for individuals to follow their callings.
• Create a parish culture that encourages discernment through the transitions of life.
• Begin tangible practices that integrate individual calling with our communal calling to a movement toward wholeness.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Exhibition of The Saint John’s Bible.
• Create Holy Listening Groups that offer deep listening in the transitions of life.
• Partner with food pantry neighbors to understand their biggest barriers to escaping poverty and work to address one of those barriers in our community.
• Skill-sharing classes on people’s senses of calling.
• Parish-wide weekend discernment retreat.

Questions & Context:

Members of the congregation are very active both inside the church and out in the community, but they are not able to articulate how the good they do is connected to faith. How can we help members connect doing good with calling language? How can we introduce discernment practices that invite individuals to connect faith with their actions? How can we introduce practices that invite the community to discern together about our collective actions?

Project Name:

CALLED: Experiencing God’s Presence in Our Whole Life

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: We hope our project addresses the basic understanding of God’s call in our lives (our vocation) and the fact that people are called at every stage of their life. We want to have people reflect on how they are called to live and how they are called to die.

Year 1 Goals:

• Provide a foundation and teach a vocabulary for congregation members to understand and talk about vocation.
• Provide opportunity for people to personally engage in the idea of vocation to see how it is a part of their individual life.
• Provide space to tell our story using the language of call and vocation.

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Summer internship for youth to discuss vocation using the pray, study, work model.
• The Gathering – St. Paul’s Lutheran day-long faith formation event for adults on stories of calling.
• “Graceful Ending” Series — community lunch and conversations around topics of grief, death, and dying.
• Sermon series on vocation.
• Incorporating vocation into prayers, hymns, and blessings in worship.
• Sharing “A Day in the Life” stories about the calls of congregational members on social media and display boards in the Gathering Space.

Questions & Context:

Pastor Stephen said it best at the beginning of Wednesday Lenten services: “There has been a robbery; the church has stolen the idea of vocation and kept it for itself and its leaders.” Many people in our congregation think vocation is strictly reserved to those working in the church, if they have even heard the word “vocation” at all. We use the language in our “call” process and when we refer to “calling” a pastor. In talking to some members of the congregation about calling, their responses range from: “I’ve never wanted to work for a church” (because only pastors are called), to “I’ve never thought of myself as having a calling,” to “I felt called from a young age to do this certain thing as a career.” Many of them also wrestled with the idea that we could have multiple callings at the same time. Ultimately, we want to answer the questions: How does God call? Why does it matter that we are called?

Project Name:

Communities of Calling Project

Purpose, Goals, & Activities:

Purpose: We have discovered that our project needs to start at ground zero to establish basic understanding, appreciation, and acceptance of calling as a spiritual concept within our tradition. In order for any forward movement and significant impact within our context, we need to work on helping everyone get on the same page in regards to vocation.

Year 1 Goals:

• Educate, teach, learn, discuss, and train around the theology of calling. Develop the vocabulary and language of calling within our local congregation so people can answer the question: What is calling?
• Use storytelling to answer the questions: Do I have a calling? How do I live fully into who God has created me to be?

Key Year 1 Activities:

• Two-day retreat for ministry leaders to invite individuals to reflect on communal and individual calling.
• Utilize graphic recording and live art as part of the worship experience.
• Incorporate the illuminations of The Saint John’s Bible into our worship spaces.
• Host a bible or book study on calling.
• Host storytelling workshops with Kristy Hinds, author of Everyone Has a Story.
• Collect stories through active listening from people, particularly those who are home-bound.
• Focus worship services on storytelling.

Questions & Context:

Our context is our immediate church congregation at West Morris. While we desire to broadly include everyone in this endeavor, we are going to specifically focus on our ministry leaders as they have regular contact and relationships with individuals in their ministry settings, such as Sunday School classes. These overarching questions will direct our first year’s work: What is calling? (We ask this question in regards to a vocational, social, emotional, spiritual, and most significantly, a biblical understanding.) Do I have a calling? How do I live into my calling? What does that mean? What does my calling have to do with following Jesus?