HOLDING ENVIRONMENT CONVERSATION INVITE
Since our retreat in September the Ridder Church Renewal Team has been working on “owning” and “mastering” the following core values and skill sets of the process—and in particular owning and mastering Generating and Sustaining Creative Tension :
- We were to give our word to developing a schedule for completing all of our home work with integrity—doing what you say you will do, when you say you will do it, and in the manner it was meant to be done. Our team meets on the first and third Tuesday of the month to report and reflect on our completed homework.
- Each team member was challenged to develop a relationship with a “sojourner,” (someone who is spiritually disoriented) using the 5 Guiding Principles in a Mental Model of Mission as a guide. You will learn more about the 5 Guiding Principles in our To Grow Means To Go message series.
- As we considered a few weeks ago, to be missional means to be sent. And in order to be sent I must be willing to leave something behind. Part of our homework included confronting an area of habitual disobedience that keeps us from leaving old ways of behavior or thinking behind—those thoughts and attitudes that keep us from faithful and fruit mission. Once we identified our areas of habitual disobedience, we shared them with our team.
- Often times our areas of habitual disobedience have to do with our lack of emotional maturity so each person had to develop a plan for growing their emotional maturity. In addition to participating in our fall series on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, our team also had to read the The Leaders Journey by Jim Harrington and Trisha Taylor. Jim and Trisha are also two of the instructors of the Ridder process.
- In addition to all we are learning and practicing, we were challenged to consider who in our congregation needs to learn what we’ve been learning and to develop a plan on how we would help them learn it.
And this is where you come in! First, the method of sharing what we’ve been learning is called a “holding environment.” A holding environment is simply a safe space to have a crucial conversation about challenging topics.
And in our case the challenging topic is that, if American Reformed Church is going to continue to be faithful and fruitful in mission in a rapidly changing culture, we must move from an attractional model of doing church, to a missional model of declaring and demonstrating the message of the Kingdom of God. Part of the conversation includes identifying the current reality of our understanding of what it means to live on mission.
On December 6, 2016 the Ridder Team held our first “holding environment conversation” with several members of the Consistory and a few other key stake holders of our congregation. Our second conversation with several designated Life Group leaders, Sunday school teachers, and youth ministry volunteers was scheduled to be held this past Tuesday; however it was postponed because of the snowstorm.
And so, we are rescheduling our final holding environment conversation for this coming Tuesday evening January 31 at 7:00 PM in the Fellowship Hall. In addition to those who were invited to last week’s conversation, we want everyone who is interested in engaging in a conversation about the exciting future of ARC to join us. Please understand, we are not asking you to commit to anything more than having this conversation. If the future mission of ARC is something that interests you, please call or e-mail the church office by Tuesday at noon.
Growing and going,
Mike Altena