A main-line pastor comments on his experience with congregational visioning.

I feel like I've lived in Almond Springs. The first church I served by myself was in a small town in Vermont. The population of the town was about three thousand, and we usually had sixty to seventy people in church on Sunday. Somehow, they managed to support a full-time pastor.

In my experience, the collective sigh of relief that Laura senses from the congregation is very real. A congregation often expects that somehow a new minister will solve all of its problems. When I arrived at my previous church, the congregation had even written a "welcome" song called "Wait for Pastor Smith". They knew that they had put off making important decisions until I got there. Laura and Charlotte are right in thinking that they need to get some kind of visioning process started just so everyone can start talking to each other about their hopes for the church, which they have probably been waiting for Charlotte to articulate for them.

I liken a call to a parish to an arranged marriage. At the beginning, the people involved don't know each other very well. There are a lot of hopes and expectations, and not a lot of reality. For the first year or so, congregation and clergy project their ideals on (idealize) each other. Eventually, that comes to an end as the congregation realizes that the new pastor is not as perfect as they had thought. The new pastor probably realizes that the congregation was not all she had hoped for either. The working through of this process of disillusionment, initiates the real work of love, each putting self on "hold" to attend to the well-being of the other. I have been through this process a number of times now, and I have come to trust that it works. The discomfort of this "falling in love" and becoming disillusioned works to form relationships between pastors and parishes. It is only natural though that Charlotte, who is new at this, begins to feel anxious about it.

The vision statement, "God's hope for our future" represents a good start at developing a vision statement. It is much too broad, vague and general to be very useful, but it does signal that early in Charlotte's tenure in Almond Springs the congregation has begun the process of talking and listening which will someday result in a more-substantial statement of the vision of First Church.

You might think of a church as an English garden. The first year you just wait and see what pops up. Whatever is growing there is just going to keep on growing there. But, after you study this garden for a while, you can see places to prune and form the wildness of it. Then you have a real garden. The same is true of a church. The vision is already there. You have to find it and help to articulate it. During the first year, you need to listen a lot. Pay special attention to the things that people get excited or angry about. These are the things that they care about, and the church's vision is in these things. There need to be many opportunities like the potluck suppers in First Church for people to get together and talk about their visions for the church.

A few years ago, my congregation undertook a big mission and visioning project. The governing board put together a committee which consisted of the most diverse group of congregants that they could gather. They consciously invited a number of people who were not part of the leadership of the congregation into this project. The visioning committee took their work very seriously. They conducted written surveys of the congregation, and hosted meetings for the discussion of the church's vision. The vision that kept coming up had to do with children and with outreach to our community. A consultant had pointed out that our congregation had become inwardly directed, focusing on meeting the needs of our own membership. A consequence of this was a congregation growing both stale and discontented -- "What about MY needs!" Some members expressed anxiety that in aiming ourselves outward in mission, our own membership's needs would suffer. The visioning committee used everything they had learned to prepare a vision statement. The statement was printed on a three foot by four foot poster which was presented to the congregation at the annual meeting. After the vision statement had been presented, a number of people said that they felt left out of the statement as it stood. They were right; we had developed a statement that was very clear about the needs of children and families in our church and in our community, and we had left out the single people among us. At that point, our leadership became more than a little anxious. The committee had worked hard, and they wanted the product of their work to be accepted by the congregation. It became my job to enable enough calm to hear and work through this very valid objection from the congregation. We were able to do just that. We made a relatively small change to the statement so that it referred to "families and individuals" instead of just to families. The willingness of our leadership to make this change enabled broad ownership of our vision statement and generated a lot of excitement and energy. We modified the statement on the poster, and the poster is still available for everyone to see. We also print the vision statement in our weekly bulletin.

As the direct result of our vision statement, we decided to begin a tutoring program for children at the elementary school adjacent to our property. At the present time, forty kids, identified as "academically at risk" are tutored and mentored by volunteers at our church after school. We also upgraded our rather bedraggled nursery facility in the interest of providing better care for our youngest children. The congregation has been very much behind both of these projects. They have raised significant amounts of money and they continue to contribute substantial amounts of volunteer time to the tutoring project.

It is probably time to revisit our vision statement to see what God is calling us to do next.