Dear Friends,
Last week, I was in one of my happy places: being a church nerd among other church nerds at Bellwether Farm. We all love our faith communities enough to spend a week exploring congregational development in the College of Congregational Development (CCD).
Congregational development is the development of congregations of all sizes, locations, and conditions into more faithful, healthy, and effective communities of faith. What I love about this definition is that it includes all congregations, regardless of size, location, or condition. Whether a parish is “successful” or “struggling” or somewhere in between, there’s an opportunity for congregational development. We can all become more faithful, healthy, and effective.
May I give you feedback?* Yes? Good job making it through that dry introduction!
* One of the skills we learned was giving appreciative feedback. The first step is asking the person if they would like to receive feedback.
Our days at Bellwether were full. We learned together in plenary sessions and practiced what we were learning in small groups. If I had to pick the most important thing I learned that week, it would be that using models is a way to look at a faith community from different perspectives. From these different perspectives, we understand our communities in new ways. Let me give you an example.
One of the core models in CCD is “Gather-Transform-Send”, representing what the church does: gather people together, create situations that let us open ourselves to God’s transforming love, and finally, send the people back out into their lives as transformed people. Following this model as a guide, we can ask ourselves about how we gather people: inviting them, greeting them, orienting them, and incorporating them. Are we strong in some phases of gathering but weaker in others? Are there phases where we need to look more closely and identify things we can change? Without this model, we might end up with questions that are too broad to collect meaningful and actionable feedback.
Beyond learning and practice, I can’t describe my experience at CCD without talking about prayer and worship. We were invited to pray regularly for each other, our parishes, and the Diocese. We began each day with morning prayer and closed the day with evening prayer or compline.Starting and ending days praying and worshipping together was an important part of the week. For me, it was a reminder that learning content was not the be-all-and-end-all. We were learning content so that we are able to serve God through helping our faith communities become more faithful, healthy, and effective.
There are now three of us who are graduates of the college: George Benson, Becky Roth, and me. I know that staff has been using CCD models in their work, and we will be using them in other settings as well. (So stay tuned!)
May I give you feedback? Yes? Great job making it to the end of the column!
Can you provide feedback in return? Yes, you can! I would love to talk to you more about CCD and what I learned – and what participating in the College for Congregational Development entails. There’s room for more CCD graduates at Trinity.
Jolene Miller, church nerd