Thoughts On Session One (June 26-July 3)
Of The
Cooperative College For Congregational Development
On June 26, Stacy Carroll, Tommie Moore, Albert White and I joined 66 other
participants from six southern dioceses to begin a program of comprehensive
training in congregational and organizational development. The Conference
was designed to build and sustain “healthy, faithful, sustainable
congregations fulfilling their calling to be the Body of Christ in a
particular place and time and among a particular people.” Using a curriculum
developed by the Rev. Canon Melissa Skelton, Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church, Seattle, Washington and Canon for Congregational Development in the
Diocese of Olympia, our days (and some nights) were filled with plenary and
group sessions, discussion, reading, application exercises and experiential
learning, and planning of projects to be completed back home, work which
equipped us to look at our current parish reality, to discern our future and
to work on strategy/goals/actions to get to the future. –Paul +
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It is important for this congregation to know
that we were not simply picked to attend this "Cooperative College for
Congregational Development". We were sent by you, this congregation who
understands, in a meaningful Christian sense, that to be this body of
Episcopalians is to be Servants of all in need. Galen Holley may have put it
best in the July 17 edition of the Journal as he described the ministry of
Billy Walton, Lynn Phillips-Gaines and all of us in All Saints’; "Perhaps
the best thing about the Episcopal Church is its broad umbrella of
acceptance, and its acknowledgement that ministry takes place in many places
and forms."
This conference is designed to take models of prayer, tradition and reason
to the place where many tools become means by which we equip ourselves as
Episcopalians to better serve us, each other and others. We will be sharing
what was shared with us beginning July 28 at the Wednesday night "pot luck".
Please join us to see and hear that luck has nothing to do with it at all!
--Albert White
