| A Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. From time to time, organizations need to articulate how they see themselves and check in with those who are most attached to their work. Church Innovations has been doing that over the last couple of years starting with a Vision and Planning Taskforce on the Board of Trustees and work within staff. We have been checking with those who work with us on a regular basis. We have rearticulated and clarified ourselves as a learning community that primarily sustains the relationships within the learning community through research and consulting. Through our learning community, made up of the schools, institutes, researchers, consultants, and leaders of local churches and the systems who care about them, we have sought to innovate the capacities of your church in God’s mission.
Every year we engage in forming and sustaining this learning community. In January we sustained and formed learning community through our Think Tank that was co-hosted with Abilene Christian University. Almost every weekend of the year our associated consultants, led by Bob Armstrong, not only deliver consulting services but also gather data and test its interpretation in local churches around the world. Bob just returned from a week in the United Kingdom where our pilot PMC cluster is completing its second phase. In a week I will be in Nottingham to take the next steps forward for two more clusters in the north of England and to develop a long term project with theological schools in the UK for relating what we are learning in the PMC local churches with their research and training of theological students. Our research and development staff headed by Dr. Patricia Taylor Ellison has created the learning community of practicioners and scholars who “read” and interpret the research data gathered by those local churches and consultants. They prepare the reports and ascertain their validity within both social scientific parameters and the living realities of the local churches and their leaders so that the research both serves other scholars and teachers but most importantly the local churches who are the primary agents of the missional church. Our research and development staff is completing a three year study of our twenty years of work on conflict and mission in local churches. Returning to central learnings and primary resources for helping local church struggle with and come to shared discernment and action around tough issues, this study has relearned some old lessons and created some new ones. These lessons are integrated into a new resource called Thriving in Change that has its own website and has many free tools for helps local church leaders assess and make positive steps in helping their local churches discern God’s preferred future for them. Dr. Ellison and I have finished a book entitled Dwelling in the Word that has a proven track record of helping lay leaders introduce this vital Christian practice for a missional church. The book should be out in the next few weeks, and we are convinced it can make a huge difference in local churches. Dr. Ellison and I leave for Copenhagen, Denmark, this week to do two things. First, we will participate in the yearly International Research Consortium (IRC) that Church Innovations initiated. We will give papers and updates on our own research, hear reports from scholars from four other continents who have joined the IRC, and discuss plans for further research. Although members of the IRC come from different countries, cultures, and institutional locations in the life of the church, they all are committed to a theologically formed social scientific understanding of local churches and the systems that sustain them. Last year the gathering was at the University of Utrecht, this year at the University of Copenhagen, and likely will be at Stellenbosch University in South Africa next year. While Dr. Ellison and I are in Denmark, we will also work with local church leaders in at least four of the eight dioceses of the Church of Denmark. We will be following up on work done last year and planning for the introduction of the Partnership for a Missional Church in Denmark. We have developed a relationship with a learning community in Denmark that includes members from the Lutheran, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, and Free Church traditions. The learning community expands and deepens through this work. This summer we are inviting church leaders to small retreats in Yellowstone on three topics: Dwelling in the Word, Thriving in Change, and Standing at the Crossroads. Standing at the Crossroads will be a retreat to prepare leaders to introduce a six month process for assessing a local church’s location on the journey towards a missional church. Dwelling in the Word will explore the ways to introduce this powerful practice to local churches. Thriving in Change will be a retreat to explore the resources and practices of spiritual discernment in times of tough change. All of these are designed to provide quiet depth to these topics in one of the most amazing locations to retreat. As many of you know, I spent long periods of my life in Yellowstone country and will delight in sharing my own insights and relationships there with those who join us for the retreats. Please come and be part of CI’s learning community. In Christ's Peace, Pat Keifert |
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