Dear Blooming Glen Friends,
Debbie and I were supposed to be somewhere in Central Plains today, Friday, August 4 taking our time, driving westward with our stuff, and returning to California.
We plan. God laughs.
You’ve opted to continue to welcome us. Thank you. The extended call to continue with you, and serve up to July 31, 2024, is a welcomed gift of continued learning for me. Over this next year, I look forward to continuing to attend to the three buckets you gave me eighteen months ago (with a few twists):
Preach and teach with joy and zeal. I may not preach or teach as often in the next year as I have in the last eighteen month, since I have every hope that I will soon be sharing those duties with a new colleague. Nevertheless, I’ll be working hard to communicate in my preaching and teaching, God’s invitation for us to be, “…followers of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow [into} a community grace, joy, and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flows through us to the world.” I’ll do this by preaching and teaching tirelessly for increased reliance on the scriptures as our authority for faith and life. I’ll preach and teach with zeal about inhabiting a range of peaceful practices that can transform us toward a deeper love for God, one another, and our neighbors. I’ll teach and preach with joy about the potential for transformation found in the practice of the radical candor of caring deeply and challenging directly. And I’ll teach and preach with hope that we will hold fast to our historical commitment to our historic non-resistant faith in the Resurrected Jesus, summed up in the ancient liturgy: Christ has died. Christ has Risen. Christ will come again.
Lead the church staff toward greater cohesion. Our staff has come a long way in the last eighteen month. When I arrived at Blooming Glen there was a good deal of pain and confusion among the staff. Eighteen months later, the staff hasn’t arrived at a promised land of pain-free clarity in their respective calls to ministry – and likely won’t arrive at such a non-existent Nirvana, and there is still a great deal of criticisms, unclear expectations, and counter-expectations, that leave our staff sometimes feeling robbed of the joy of serving God here at Blooming Glen. But I also believe there is a greater trust from church staff in a set of processes and strategies that defines the various roles of governance (policy making, giving/receiving counsel, and asset management of volunteers, finances, and facilities) as distinct and apart from the various expressions of missionary servant-leadership that our church staff are embracing. In the next year, staff will pray more, study more, and laugh more as they seek God’s favor in moving ahead to strengthen our five core ministries. In the next year, staff will seek to become more focused on collecting and interpreting data to act more with a long-range view focused on opportunity and possibility. In the next year, staff will double-down on their best intentions to communicate with increased frequency, greater clarity and with constant charity. And, in the next year, staff will pay increasing attention to positioning Blooming Glen into becoming a congregation renowned for loving neighbors into embracing a journey together with Jesus.
Invite the church systems toward increased transparency, faithfulness, and effectiveness. I look forward to assisting in the on-boarding of a new pastor. I look forward to continuing the process of consultation to strengthen our congregational governance by continuing to clarify leadership roles and expectations. We will collectively learn to appreciate the development of the CLB-created and endorsed strategy of “Process – Communication – Leadership – Cost” that serves as the root of our future organizational collaboration in developing new ministries as a congregation. Our capacity to welcome this strategy, grounded as it must be on our mutual listening for the call of God and our congregational commitment to intercessory prayer, will determine our ability to welcome new, multi-voiced efforts to get Kingdom of God shaped ministry done well.
The work of stabilizing and recentering congregational life is a set of tasks not fully completed over the past eighteen months. It is work that is ongoing. But this next year requires a pivot on my part – and on our part – from solving problems to focusing on opportunities. The challenges of post-Christendom, chronic COVID, and the digital Babylon that exist in our environment today, can neither be conquered nor ignored. We can recite again and again the litany of missed opportunities in the face of post-Christendom, the polarizing effects of pandemic-level COVID, and the isolating factors of the digital world we are creating. If we remain intent on reciting the litanies that prosecute one another for not being faithful enough – then our work as a congregation will collectively fail and our relationships will lie in ruins. Instead, I pray we pivot to the joy of together serving God, one another, and our neighbors. And I pray we zealously embrace emerging opportunities of healing and hope. To be capable of joy and zeal in ways that sustain us and are sustainable, we require constant work at cohesion and an ongoing commitment to transparency, faithful, and effectiveness.
We plan. God laughs. But in these next twelve months, may the chuckle of God that we hear be God’s delight in our joy, zeal, cohesion, and collaboration as a congregation.
Love you, Church. Let’s saddle up for another ride…
Pastor Jeff
jeff@bgmc.net
PS - I’ll be at the A&N Diner on Monday, August 7 (7:30-8:45 am) for one more listening session before I head off on vacation to Oregon on August 8, and California on August 11. Debbie and I will, Lord willing, be back to Pennsylvania on August 25.