How Will We Choose? -- Newsletter piece

As we look ahead into the future how will we choose what path to take? How will we know what is the most faithful option?

As the congregation of St. Paul’s heads into a month where difficult questions will be asked and choices will have to be made I am pondering how we can make the best decision. In my mind making the best decision has to start with one big question. Why are we here?

I don’t mean “how did we get in to this situation”, though that is indeed an important piece to talk about. Everything has a history after all. But I think that is secondary to reminding ourselves of our mission, of what we are all about.

Each of our four statements of faith in United Church history say something about what the church is, what it is called to be. In A New Creed (1968, revised in 1980 and 1995) we remind ourselves:

We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.

In A Song of Faith (2006) we read:

We sing of a church
seeking to continue the story of Jesus
by embodying Christ’s presence in the world.
We are called together by Christ
as a community of broken but hopeful believers,
loving what he loved,
living what he taught,
striving to be faithful servants of God
in our time and place.
...
We sing of God’s good news lived out,
a church with purpose:
faith nurtured and hearts comforted,
gifts shared for the good of all,
resistance to the forces that exploit and marginalize,
fierce love in the face of violence,
human dignity defended,
members of a community held and inspired by God,
corrected and comforted,
instrument of the loving Spirit of Christ,
creation’s mending.
We sing of God’s mission.

More recently the General Council Executive approved statements of Call and Vision, the themes of which have been explored in our congregational newsletters over the past year.

Then there are our local statements of Mission and Vision:

Vision Statement: (Approved in 2022)
Celebrating the gifts of the Spirit, we are a loving and supportive congregation in service to the Church, the Community, and the World through faith. We affirm: all are encouraged, inclusive of age, race, gender, gender expressions, sexual orientation, economic circumstance, ability or background, to share fully in the life and work of St. Paul’s United church, and where the spiritual journey of each person is nurtured and supported.

Mission Statement: (Approved in 2019)
Through Faith, we walk on the path Jesus set for us.
The people of St. Paul’s Belong… Believe… Love Listen… Lead.

When we read those words do they help us as we discern how St. Paul’s will respond to our current struggles with financial and human resources? How do we live out our mission in a different way so that the congregation can thrive as a faithful community sharing God’s love and hope in Grande Prairie?

In my experience when we make decision to re-organize how we are as a church we often forget to raise the question of mission to the forefront. Most often decisions to re-structure or make changes are driven by pragmatic concerns (usually money) and the decision gets made to meet those concerns with less time taken to ask how the new way of being will help live out our mission. Personally I think this is at least partially true with our recent national structural change. I find that when we make decisions this way we end up floundering for a while because we are not clear on how to live out our mission in a new way. So the primary question to consider needs to be how the new way intersects with and impacts our mission, our “Why”.

Once we have talked about the missional question we can approach the pragmatics. Mission and vision do not get rid of reality, they don’t take away the struggle about having resource, but they may help us choose how to prioritize resources when reality tells us we can not do everything we used to. We still have to be pragmatic, even when it leads to hard choices and loss.

There is one more criteria trap I think the church, at any levels, falls into in making changes. I am a big believer in the law of unintended consequences. Partly because human communities are often better at short-term thinking than long-term planning and partly because we may only see the obvious results, we find ourselves surprised when things have different results than we expect. Some people say that every solution causes new problems, which may be a corollary of this law. While we can never predict every possible consequence of a change, there are times we miss highly predictable consequences that may lead in a totally opposite direction than we intend. We need to take time to ask some “what if” questions. We need to look at things from a long-term perspective. [And wouldn’t it be nice if our governments took time to do both those things as well?]

This month this congregation will be asked some difficult questions and asked to choose a way forward so that the congregation can thrive (which is different from merely surviving). As you listen to options and give thought to what they mean I hope you will consider who we are called to be and how best we can do that. I hope we can make decisions based on mission and hope rather than on panic. I hoe we will find a way to continue sharing our unique voice within Grande Prairie. I hope we can do our best to avoid unintended consequences and that any new problems created by the solution are problems that help us grow stronger as we live out our part in God’s mission.
Gord.