Dear Church,  

Between now and the end of July, I’ll be working with our staff, elders, and various core ministry leaders to collaborate in launching new and ongoing ministry efforts.  We want to continue to strengthen already strong team ministries in pastoral care, peacebuilding, and music.  We want to add greater preaching capacity by forming a preaching team (see last week’s blog).  We want to build on the various family engagement ministries with children and youth, making sure we as a church are complying with Pennsylvania law and regulations for child safety clearances, and making sure our teachers have adequate access to curriculum resources that they will use. We want to develop more creative expressions of worship on Sunday morning. We want to generate stronger adult formation opportunities in the Sunday Second Hour, and beyond. We want to increase our capacity for neighborhood engagements of invitation and service. Finally, as we head toward the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement, we want to advance into new global connections and possible partnerships with the church around the world.   Through these ministry efforts, we want to strengthen our identity as people shaped by the grace of Jesus.  We want to belong to a community of faith at Blooming Glen that encounters the rich, stubborn love of God.  We want to find greater purpose in service to our neighbors near and far as a fellowship of the Holy Spirit. 

Part of my journey in these last two years with you has continued to be one of leading a transition from being a church with a staff who mostly does ministry to the congregation, and instead becoming a congregation unleashed to do ministry in our local townships, villages, boroughs, and school districts with support from a pastoral, program, and administrative staff who can coach the congregation with best practices and spiritual habits, so that we together follow Jesus into the great commissions of the gospels. 

This active work of transition has not been perfect, nor is it yet complete.  My work among you so far has not, apart from preaching, had a strong program leadership component.  I have not had a mandate from the CLB and the congregation to change much regarding our public ministries, such as worship, Sunday School, or peacebuilding.  Your call to me has been about reengineering the systems, and helping Blooming Glen change its culture of staff set up over a long period of time and accelerated during COVID as gatekeepers of ministry.  To that end, I introduced the REDS strategy for our church staff (recruit, equip, deploy, and support others for the ministry of the congregation).  I’ve worked with the staff to provide greater confidence, cohesion, and collaboration through an emphasis on gratitude, thanksgiving, and understanding the liminal space we inhabit.  I’ve worked with the staff to identify the core ministries of curating worship, community care, and cooperative mission. I’ve worked with the staff and elders to form a collaborative partnership in uniting together with core ministries.   

Now, a big part of my work in these next six months is to gear up these core ministries to become more ready and able to work in concert to fulfill our congregational mission of disciplemaking.   

Watch this space.  More will be revealed…as we discover it together. 

Pastor Jeff
jeff@bgmc.net 

PS - I’ll be at the Broad Street Grind in Souderton for a Friday afternoon cup of coffee, on February 9 and February 16, from 3:30 to 4:45 pm.  I’ll be at the A&N Diner on Monday, February 12 from 7:30 to 8:45 am.  My purpose is to listen to whatever is on your mind.  If those dates don’t work for you, and you still want to give me a piece of your mind, please call Gretchen, mornings at the church office, or text me, and let me know what time and place would work for me to stop in and listen.  Thanks.

Dear Church,  

It really is good to be back in Pennsylvania. While the time in Southern California was great with grandsons, busy with doctors and dentists, and getting some repair work scheduled on our home, each day away was a reminder for me that there is still more joy-filled work to be done in my role as interim pastor with you.  In the next six months there is still much to accomplish by way of structuring how we as a congregation engage in cooperative mission, how we become more intentional in adult formation, and how we become more multi-voiced in the preaching ministry of our congregation.   

A primary focus for me over the next six months will be a concerted effort in preparing and implementing a sustaining and sustainable preaching team.  While in an interim role, offering a more monologue diet of preaching was important for reinforcing and clarifying the restructuring and realigning process, the time has now come for beginning to implement a more multi-voiced approach to preaching.  According to Stuart Murray Williams, multi-voiced preaching is consistent with the witness of scripture, practiced in our historic Anabaptist-Mennonite traditions, honoring of the importance of the preaching ministry (if preaching is central to the life of the church, then more than one person ought to do it), it trusts the work of the Holy Spirit in Christian community, and it fosters discipleship rather than dependency.   

What must be avoided in moving from monologue models of preaching to multi-voiced approaches is the tendency of creating preaching beauty pageants as described in 1 Corinthians 1.10-17 (“I follow Paul … I follow Peter … I follow Apollos …”).  The purpose of preaching is two-fold:  It is foundational – to build the life and witness of the church on the loving truth of Jesus the crucified Lord. And it is aspirational – to lift up Christ the resurrected Savior, who is the counter-cultural power of God and wisdom of God. 

To begin this multi-voiced preaching ministry, Josh Meyer has been invited into a seven-month experiment.  Josh is not on our church staff, he is simply joining us one Sunday per month, to preach and then graciously stick around and offer an opportunity for discussion.  Nevertheless, this experiment will hopefully begin to take us down a new road – not of preaching as an individual act of monologue – but on the pathway to a persistent and resilient discipleship as we collaborate in the Word each Sunday morning we meet. 

There will be all sorts of obstacles to Blooming Glen becoming a multi-voiced community of gospel proclamation.  Inertia with the present way will be a problem, so will the challenge of relearning both listening skills and teaching skills.  Creating an ecology of collaboration among the developing preaching “bench” will challenge old assumptions about church once jettisoned and challenge us all to think in fresh ways about how to publicly declare the gospel of Jesus for the purposes of resilient discipleship and the ministry of God’s people. In the miasma of post-Christendom, chronic COVID, and the separation of knowledge and wisdom, becoming a multi-voiced church is a risky and messy journey on which we are about to embark.   

But I think we are able.  More importantly, most importantly, I believe God is able. 

Pastor Jeff
jeff@bgmc.net 

PS – With Debbie and I back in Pennsylvania, I want to resume inviting you into times of listening.  I’ll be at the Broad Street Grind on Friday afternoon, February 2 (3:3m-4:45 pm).  I’ll be at the A&N Diner on Monday morning, February 5 (7:30-8:45 am).  And I’ll be back at the Broad Street Grind on Friday afternoon, February 9 (3:30-4:45 pm).  These are opportunities for you to ask questions, dialogue with me, and/or one another, and practice the discipleship art of radical candor:  to express abiding care for one another and, at the same time, to challenge one another directly.  Hope to see you there!