Church Innovations Receives 2nd Year Funding from Otto Bremer Foundation
By Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D.

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Church Innovations’ Bremer-funded grant for Civic Engagement and Capacity Building is officially in its second year. The second phase will be funded with a $25,000 check from The Otto Bremer Foundation this month.

Six congregations have all but completed the first stage of work:

• A church and community self-study on Church FutureFinder data base
• A deep listening project to map the culture of the congregation, called Congregational Discovery
• Training in Growing Healthier Congregations, a model for communal discernment over tough issues

Each church invited Church Innovations’ Pat Taylor Ellison and Scott Hagley for a Friday evening and Saturday training. We trained 3 teams of people: one team to complete the big Church FutureFinder study, one team of Listening Leaders to carry out the interviews, and one team to try out and plan uses for the GHC communal discernment model. At the end of the first year’s work, each church receives

• its 40-50 page CFF report displaying all of the numbers and stories the team put into the program
• its 10-12 page Congregational Discovery report, describing the culture (the values, driving forces, anxieties, and hopes) of the congregation
• a means of interpreting all the numbers and stories they have collected

Now that the Year One work is nearly finished, each congregation will begin to discern the issues they might take on, both within the church and out in the community.

The six congregations are

• St Barnabas Lutheran, Plymouth, MN
• Eglesia Paz y Esperanza, Willmar, MN
• Bethlehem Lutheran, St. Cloud, MN
• Faith Lutheran, Madelia, MN
• Our Saviour’s Lutheran, Butternut, MN
• Central Baptist, St. Paul, MN

Our blog for this project can be found at www.blog.churchinnovations.org.

Pat Taylor Ellison, Ph.D., is the managing director of research for Church Innovations.