An Intensive, In-Depth Training Opportunity in Missional Church Leadership... Limited spaces available...

Pastors and lay leaders . . .

empower the laity,

God’s primary agents

of mission in today’s world

Improve your leadership

Deepen your spirituality

Make the Sunday to Monday connection for every member

Meet new colleagues

Member Mission Leadership Institute

October 6-11, 2008

From this 4-plus day event, starting with dinner on October 6 and ending with breakfast on October 11, you will come away with a wholly new way for your congregation and all of its members to understand mission and what it means to be “on mission.”

You will leave better equipped to lead your congregation and its members to embrace more fully what it really means to live as a Christian every day.

Spiritual Life Center at Greenwich, New York

(45 minutes from the Albany Airport)

Registration: $100

Up to 50% travel reimbursement

Space is limited. Register by September 15, 2008

For information: www.membermission.org, click “Training”

or 518-561-1184

GCFA Wants Your Input!

Companions,

GCFA (the finance and statistics folks for the denomination) are seeking input about the forms congregations use to report their "progress" at each charge conference.

As we've discussed here before, it's a basic organizational reality that we reward what we measure, and we measure what we want to reward. That's true across all organizations.

It's also a reality that what we measure in the UMC is hardly missional, much less even Methodist!

We measure worship attendance, pastor's salaries, membership, income, apportionment giving to denominational causes, and small group participation. None of those are bad things to measure, but none of those really gets to the core of what it means to be missional or Methodist, either. None of these says word one about whether we are living into the General Rules-- which were the defining standard of the Wesleyan Way.

We can do better and need to at every level. Your input about forms is one way that can begin to happen.

Of course it's not enough. We actually have to live this where WE are. Changing labels and even metrics at the forms level doesn't guarantee that we are doing that. But it may help support an atmosphere across the church that begins to encourage more of our congregations to try.

So go do the survey-- and encourage folks at GCFA to re-examine radically what we're measuring.

http://www.gcfa.org/ofrsurvey/index.html?sm=jO2eXGdo21_2fZmPNKWA7_2fyQ_3d_3d

Peace in Christ,

Taylor Burton-Edwards