This past Sunday, Andrew and I shared a vision of Keith Church expanding our reach in three different dimensions in 2022. This was not a vision that he or I dreamed up somewhere off on a deserted island. Nor was it a vision that the voice of God delivered to us pre-packaged during a time of prayer. Rather, it was a vision that emerged from our church leadership.
A couple of months ago, on Monday, September 20, our Church Council gathered together for a visioning retreat. There were seventeen of our church leaders that were there that night. We followed essentially the same visioning process that our consultants led us through a few years ago with our children’s ministry.
We started off by asking everyone there to name what they believe to be our church’s “core values,” who we really are and what we value the most as a church. Words like “authenticity” and “inclusiveness” and “compassion” just popcorned up and around until we identified 15 different core values.
We wrote those values up on a whiteboard, and then we asked everyone to vote for their top three values, to mark a little “tick” off to the side of the values they were voting for. (It was all very sophisticated technology.) When they were finished – Andrew and I didn’t vote, we just let the council members vote – we tallied them together. We grouped together some of the values that were worded a little bit differently but were really getting at the same things, and here’s what we found were the top five values that these church leaders identified that night.
- Inclusiveness/open hearts/accepting/hospitality (19)
- Involvement in the community/community outreach/reputation in the community (18)
- Congregational Care (10)
- Worship (8)
- Authenticity/sincerity (6)
I found this exercise to be tremendously helpful in clarifying our leaders’ core values of our congregation, especially as we lean into a still uncertain future not only coming out of the pandemic but also in light of the potential schism within the United Methodist denomination over human sexuality in the coming years. Core values are about who we are. They are what we hope will stay the same about our church, whatever changes or challenges may come.
What became clear in my mind is that our church leaders value an inclusive congregation where absolutely everyone is welcome and invited to be as fully involved in the life and ministries of the church as possible, where the congregation is integrally involved in serving the community where God has placed us, and where we embrace and care for one another in worship, fellowship, and discipleship.
And so a threefold vision for Keith Church began to emerge in my mind from what our church leadership shared with us that night. Each of these three dimensions have to do with the word “reach.”
∙ Reaching OUT to others in love and service in our community
∙ Reaching OVER to one another in care and compassion in our congregation
∙ Reaching UP to God in worship and praise
How can we expand our reach both as individuals and as a community in 2022? Because there are a lot of twos in the year 2022, maybe that can give us a goal to expand by twos in the coming year.
Let’s break each of these three dimensions down one by one:
- Reaching OUT to others in love and service in our community
This first area relates to the top two core values of the church: inclusiveness and our involvement and outreach to the community.
I’ve heard it said many times by many people both in and out of the church, “anytime anything good is happening in Athens, you can bet someone from Keith Church is involved in it.” And I’ve not just heard it said but I’ve seen it myself in the number of Keith folks present at community events like the United Way service days and the Athens Federal grant awards luncheon. What a wonderful thing to be known for – how we reach out to others and serve our community! What a great reputation for a church to have in the community!
And what an easy way to invite new people to get involved in the life of the church! Most folks might be a little hesitant to come with you to a worship service or a small group meeting, but would jump at an opportunity to help you make a difference for others. Like to pack a bag of food for the weekend for our city school kids in the Nourish One Child ministry. Or to decorate the trunk of their car to hand out candy to kids at our Fall Festival Trunk or Treat. Or to take a turn at our Warming Center hosting our neighbors who don’t have a warm place to stay on a night with freezing temperatures.
So here are a couple of goals for each church member for 2022:
(1) to participate in at least 2 hospitality or outreach events of the church in 2022, AND
(2) to invite at least 2 people to join you in participating in those events – a friend, a neighbor, a coworker or classmate – whomever, and together, let’s expand our reaching OUT in love and service in our community in 2022.
And before we move on to the next part of our vision, here’s a question I’d like you to ponder and let me know what ideas you have. I’m sure you’ve seen the new city school buildings that are being constructed across the street, essentially in our church’s front yard. We are the closest church congregation to that new consolidated city school system. We are ideally situated geographically. We already have the Nourish One Child ministry to the city schoolchildren. A majority of the city school board members are Keith Church members. And we have so many retired teachers and others who have worked with the city school system. Perhaps God has placed us here for just such a time as this (Esther 4:14). So here’s my question: How can we expand our outreach to our city school system – the teachers, the students and their families – to be a blessing to them and to serve them even more effectively for the sake of Christ?
2. Reaching OVER to one another in care and compassion in our congregation
Second, let’s expand our reaching OVER to one another in our care and compassion for one another in our congregation.
We already do this in a number of ways – through the prayer group that meets on Wednesday afternoons and sends cards out to folks we’re praying for, and through the Stephen Ministry that pairs trained caregivers with persons going through challenging situations and seasons in their lives. But the main way we extend care to one another is through our small groups – our Sunday school classes, our women’s circles, our youth groups and children’s groups, and others.
In a church our size, with three different worship services, it can sometimes be hard to find where we fit in. Our small groups are where folks can fit in and feel known, loved and cared for. Our small groups are the glue that binds us and bonds us together. That’s where so much happens in our church. That’s where discipleship happens. That’s where fellowship happens. It all happens in our small groups.
Some of our small groups meet in person, some meet online. Some meet at the church, some meet in people’s homes, some meet out in the community. See https://www.keithumc.org/small-groups for a list of our current small groups that are meeting.
The root of the word “religion” is ligare, from which we also get the word “ligaments,” the connective tissue that holds our body, our organs and our bones, together. Our small groups are really the ties that bind.
So here’s a few goals for us all for 2022:
- each member to attend a small group at least 2 times. If there’s not one that meets at a convenient time for you, find a few other folks and form a new one.
- each member invite at least 2 people to attend a small group meeting with you in 2022
- increase the number of our small groups by at least 2 (can be online, too).
3. Reaching UP to God in worship and praise
The third way we can expand our reach in 2022 is in our reaching UP to God in our worship and praise.
Our worship of God is the main thing we do as a church. It’s foundational to everything else we do. Our worship fuels our work and our witness out in the world, the service and outreach we offer to the congregation. And it undergirds the care and compassion that we extend to one another in our congregation.
Our church leaders identified our worship as one of our core values – excellent, authentic, and inspiring worship of God, in both our traditional and contemporary accents. Rev. Dennie Humphreys was a former senior pastor here. He was fond of saying that our goal was to offer the very best traditional worship service that you could find anywhere around, and also to offer the very best contemporary worship service that you could find anywhere around. No matter your worship language, your “love-of-God” language, you can worship God fully from your heart here at Keith Church.
That continues to be a core value and a compelling vision for our church, reaching up to God in excellent, authentic and inspiring worship and praise. So how can we expand our reaching up to God in worship and praise in 2022?
Here are some goals:
(1) everyone attend worship (onsite or online) at least 2 weeks each month. Nowadays, “regular worship attendance” has been defined as at least once a month. Let’s double that!
(2) everyone invite at least two different people or families who aren’t already attending another church to attend worship at Keith Church with you – whether in-person or online – in 2022.
You may think you don’t know anyone not already attending church. But depending on which study you look at, that could be half or more of the people in this county. So reach out to them and invite them to come worship with you. And invite them to have lunch with you after church, or grab coffee with them and talk about the Sunday sermon or whatever may be on their mind or going on in their lives.
Finally, our giving is an act of worship. This goes at least all the way back to the sacrifices of animals that the worshipers would bring to offer on the altar that we read about in the Old Testament. Obviously we don’t do it that way these days! Now it’s through our financial giving. But it’s still an act of worshiping God, of expressing our thanks to God for the gifts and blessings God has given us, and of putting God first in our lives, of trusting that we can give to God what’s “right” and have plenty “left” for ourselves. Our giving is an act of worship.
So a goal for all of us is to increase our financial giving by 2%. However much you have been giving to God to support the mission of the church this year, try bumping that up 2%. If you’re in the 80% or so of folks who give about 2% on average, then commit to bumping that up to 4%. Or if you’re in the about 5% who tithe, who give 10% of your income, then consider stretching that another 2%. If you haven’t given anything of yourself financially to God, then figure out what 2% of your income will be, and commit to giving that.
We know these are challenging times, and not everyone is able to give like they’d like to. But we can all give something of ourselves to God as a part of our worship of the God who gave so much of God’s own self for us in Christ.
So that’s a threefold vision for our church for 2022, based on the core values that our key church leaders have identified. I hope you’ll commit to making this vision your own and join us in expanding our reach in 2022 – our reaching OUT to everyone in our community in love and in service to others, our reaching OVER to one another in care and companionship in our congregation, and our reaching UP to God in excellent, inspiring and authentic worship and praise.
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