Partnership for Missional Church

Ron Bordelon, who serves as an elder at the Skillman Church of Christ, shared these thoughts with me regarding their experience with the Congregational Timeline Event from Phase One of the Partnership for Missional Church. Feel free to share your own experiences with this important event (for those of you in the Central Texas cluster), or your hopes and anxieties about engaging in a process like this (for you folks in the Northwest cluster).

---

Our congregational timeline event was a roaring success. About 150 attended (we invited the entire congregation) after worship service; light sandwiches and then on we worked.

Everyone was involved: some shouting out excited memories, some of the older members studying old church bulletins and memoirs. We stratified our history into groups: pre-1960, then one group for each succeeding decade and the teens as their own group. We arbitrarily assigned adult members to the groups, trying to align people with their date of joining the church, though there were exceptions.

To prepare: We went to members with long histories and honed in on some themes: facilities management; high school bible credit; missions; and others. We really prized earlier work on building history and weekly church bulletins (for 50 years). All of the “stuff” (paperwork, trophies, photos, etc.) was placed in a box (for each decade) and handed to the leaders (who had one planning session). What occurred that we had hoped for was for the boxes to be a rewind of childhood as people rifled through them with ah’s and wow’s –like going through an attic.

Each group had a three person leadership. We had a greeting team that expedited the seating, diluting any confusion about the program. We also had the Steering Team float around the room with two of us by microphone “running” the meeting. The 3 leaders per table were: Facilitator – the spokesperson; Scribe – noted comments on Post-it Note (the kind that adhere to a hard surface) flip charts and later (see below) noted additional comments from other “visitors” to the table; Observer – kept the flow so that the Facilitator didn’t have to halt the process (got the timid involved; engaged those who were “hung up” on a single point, impeding the overall flow).

After about 45 minutes, by design, attendees were invited to move to each of the other tables for observation and input. The scribes hung their flip charts on the wall high enough for group viewing and took notes for any new comments from these “visitors”. This process broke down somewhat after about 15 minutes so we closed with a prayer.

We had stellar photographs that continue to add to the experience.

In both the planning meeting for leaders and the main event, the beginning was met with a fair amount of raised eyebrows, “what’s this about?” etc., but after just a few minutes into the process everyone was smiling and enthused.

Really key to our success was our emphasis that the experience is not about precision or even completeness. Instead, it was a bout capturing stories, that surface meaning, that reveal our hearts and what we have in common and believe in. Example: when our long-standing facility manager was approached about mapping building improvements, etc. over the many decades as part of our planning for the meeting, his reply was a question: “Do you know what the first activity was when we added the East Wing?” Answer: His own wedding reception (large smile).

We are still unfolding the exact process of disseminating the information captured on the flip charts. We don’t really know yet, but we are expecting an implicit benefit from this experience is that members who might otherwise be resisting the missional church initiative because they naturally dislike change will see, without any prompting, how much they have already changed as a church.