Visioning Committee

Meeting Minutes of January 25, 2010, 7:00 p.m.

In attendance: Dave Allen, Deb Andrews, Chris Dow, Elsa Peters.

Opening Meditation: Joel 2

What is a Vision?
• We understand vision as both a noun and an action word.
• A vision explains who we are, but may be bigger than our church.
• Ideally, a vision is in everything we do.
• It’s something we check in with to see if we’re living up to.
• It is limited to a few words so that it can be easily repeated.
• As a group, we understand a vision is: a goal that we seek to do in our daily life as well as in community.

Why do we need a Vision?
• We need a vision because:
- Helps the congregation appreciate core values
- Suggests direction the congregation might go (projects, activities, etc.)

• It was challenging for us to understand how we would use in the life of the church. We articulated it’s most obvious gift is to be used as an evangelism tool (inviting new visitors, etc).

Where does the Vision come from?
• We understand that a vision comes from:
- God
- Bible (though we’re not totally sure how)
- From the congregation

• We agreed that this is not something this committee can decide but will look toward the congregation in finding information.

What do we need to discover our Vision at FCC UCC?
• We decided that a process of 3-6 months would work best.
• We agree that there are a number of venues we can use to explore this conversation of what our vision is, including:
- Team Meetings
- Small Groups (Eskimos, Guild, Women’s Circle, Choir, YM, etc.)
- Email/Survey Monkey
- Paper handouts on literature tables
- 3-4 facilitated after-church discussions
- Moments in worship: Announcements? Sermon? Prayers?

• These group conversations (including the written formats of paper and email) would follow a questionnaire that is adapted for each setting. (There would be fewer questions for large group conversations.) There would be a few ground rules, including:
- There is no right or wrong answer.
- You can participate in as many of these conversations as you wish.
- You don’t have to answer all of the questions but may answer those that are most interesting to you.

• This committee will work on the questionnaires to be submitted to the congregation in the venues mentioned above. To do so, we will each brainstorm 5 questions that should be asked under the theme “Where do we want our journey to go?” Elsa will collect these questions and organize them on Tuesday February 9.

Additional Thoughts:
• We could resist brainstorming a little on our own. We shared these things that are most important about our church.
- Open & Affirming (accepting of all people, including anyone that is different)
- Peace for everyone, including other faiths
- Community = church family
- Music
- Social justice

The committee will meet again on February 16 @ 6:00 p.m. in the Laity Room. We will meet as many times as we feel necessary to nudge along this process.