| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Initiated at last year’s Board of Directors meeting in the library of the Princeton Theological Seminary, a Vision task force of the Board has been working on an evaluation of CI’s present missional vocation and discernment of its next 2-7 years of transitions. The taskforce, led by the Rev. Dr. Bruce Modahl, Senior Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest, IL, involves both members who have been with us from the beginning and relatively new members of the Board. The taskforce has a report to make to this Fall’s Board Meeting that calls for several major developments over the next two to seven years in organizational development but urges us to stay the course on our sense of missional vocation and identity as a part of life of the Church. Succinctly stated by the Chair of the Board of Directors, the Rt. Rev. Mark MacDonald, National Indigenous Bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada, Church Innovations from its beginnings sought to be a Christian community of spiritual discernment joining together consulting and research for innovating the capacities of our partners to be renewed in God’s mission in the world. This Christian community of spiritual discernment joined Dwelling in the Word and other time-honored Christian spiritual practices to the disciplines of the social sciences in a process of Christian innovation. Mark further noted that Church Innovations was from the beginning a community of spiritual discernment that was both prophetic and strategic about the new missional era. In its beginnings Church Innovations was one of a few voices moving beyond the clamor of various prophets of doom about a post-Christian, post-modern world to articulate a proactive vision for engaging the new missional opportunities. Then, this prophetic voice was very much on the margins of most church conversation: evangelical, catholic, and mainline. Growing out of the same convictions that created the Gospel and Our Culture movement around the world, including North America, Church Innovations added a strategic trajectory to our work. From the beginning we had local churches and those who care about them as partners in our work of spiritual discernment. We had a prejudice toward action based upon critical reflection. We were fully at home in both academy and church. We remain so. However, the situation in North America, and also with our partners overseas, has significantly changed. The prediction of increased and profound transformation of denominational systems now is commonplace. The deep changes in culture and the increasing alienation of many forms of church in the face of these deep changes is commonly articulated but I still believe not truly understood. The call for a missional church has become cant, almost cheap, frankly. What was prophetic and disturbing truth articulated in love thirty years ago now sounds like beating on a tin cymbal, the cymbal of legitimating the very systems that need profound innovation. The temptation for CI and others who took up this cause decades ago is to walk away from this cant, disdain the clanging of the tin cymbal, and find new language to continue the prophetic character of Christian innovation for the new missional era. And, as my last Newsletter piece indicated, I am so tempted. The Vision taskforce is, too. But they chose to call for staying the course on the basic prophetic and strategic missional vocation. They are making a substantial proposal for changing the organizational culture of CI and how we go about engaging our missional vocation, but the primary direction remains: stay the course. For me, as a founder and first President of Church Innovations, I was most thrilled that the Taskforce did its work on its own, with reports on various matters from staff, but taking the primary fiduciary responsibility upon themselves as a part of the Board. They are presenting a report that I had access to but that I did not author in any way. The result: a major step in this organization’s maturing. For this I am thankful to the Taskforce and filled with a sense of the work of the Holy Spirit. As the Board of Directors works with the report and perfects it, it will become public. I hope that those of you who have been with us from the beginning, and those who have joined us on the way, might be able to share its vision for our future with others who would want to share in this work of Christian innovation. Peace, Pat Keifert |
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