Goal Setting Update

Wendy Innis

On Sunday, June 4, a committed, hardworking group looked into the future to help us plan for the next year. Based on our mission and our long-term goals, actions can we take to make our church better? These caring members worked thoughtfully in teams and as a whole group.

We began by reflecting on our Mission:

Honor the Sacred

Connect with Each Other

Serve Justice

The next step was a review of the 6 Five Year goals formulate by the Prudential Committee last June.

1. Create a diversity of modalities of spiritual experience for members, friends, children, and youth.
2. Build relationships with diverse mission partners in Worcester
3. Ensure that all participants of our faith development ministries are able to articulate their faith and apply it to their daily lives.
4. Develop ministries which overcome loneliness amount participants
5. Ensure that new comers, new members, and established members report higher levels of welcome and connection
6. Expand and deepen opportunities for charity, service, justice for members, friends, children and youth.

We then divided into the 6 groups with each person choosing the goal they wanted to work on and began the task of prioritizing the actions to make that goal come alive for this church year. Each group discussed their goal for 15 minutes, and then prioritized three most important actions for their goal. From those three actions, each group chose a single, most important action for their goal.

The results were:

1. Engage entire congregation in "Time for all ages."
2. Catalog connections - institutional and personal - skills and interests.
3. To create opportunities to create our own faith statements
4. Develop small groups around interests and/or spirituality
5. Create formalized procedures for welcoming, tracking and communications with newcomers.
6. Become community leaders with governmental officials, policies with ages 12-25

Now came the hard part. We wanted to prioritize these actions to find the one(s) of the six the group thought most important. Each participant chose their top two actions from the 6 actions.

And the action receiving the most votes was:

Develop small groups around common interests and/or spirituality

The runner-ups were pretty evenly split. Each group cared so passionately about their goal and many other great actions were suggested. Thank you to all who came to the goal setting for participating in so caringly and lovingly a manner.

Our church is indeed doing well!

Wendy Innis

Moderator