Charting the Future: Discerning the Present

On November 8 at 10:15am in the Fellowship Hall we’ll hold the second of our three Discerning gatherings. October took up the past. This one is the present: what we are actually doing at Our Savior’s right now, and what that says about us.

If you want to know what a congregation really values, the calendar and the checkbook will tell you. So will the sign-up sheets, the parking lot on a Wednesday night, and the list of who shows up to set out the tables and who stays to put them away. That’s a more honest inventory of what we believe than any statement a committee could write, because it’s the record of where our hours, our dollars, and our attention actually went.

So that’s the work for November 8. We’ll walk through what our congregation does in a normal year: worship on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, the radio broadcast on KKOJ, Lighthouse and confirmation on Wednesday nights, Branches for the high schoolers, VBS in the summer and the no-rehearsal Christmas pageant, the Bibles we hand out at age three and again in third grade, the quilts our graduating seniors take with them, the funerals and the weddings, and the property work nobody notices until the furnace quits. Then we’ll ask what each of those things reflects about our ethos, and we’ll set it next to the Gospels.

Some of it will be easy to name. Some of it is a habit we’ve kept so long that none of us remembers choosing it, and a few things we care about most may not be on the calendar at all. That’s the useful part. Jesus says that where your treasure is, there your heart will be also, and an honest look at our treasure takes about an hour.

These gatherings are only as good as the people in the room. If you’ve watched our congregation do something for years and wondered whether anyone else values it, this is the Sunday to say so. If you’re new, you have something the rest of us don’t, which is an outsider’s read on what this place actually cares about. Bring it.

Everybody is welcome and there’s no prep work. If you missed October, you’re not behind. Come to this one.

See the Charting the Future Schedule

Please keep this work in your prayers.

In Christ,

Pastor Ted