Looking to the Future

At our Presbytery meeting last month the Pastoral Oversight Committee shared their plans for this year. They intend to visit every Congregation in the Presbytery between April and November. We will learn more about that later. But in their description of how those visits will happen they shared some of the questions they will be asking. One of them is: Where do you see your congregation in 2028?

That will be a challenge – 10 years is a long time, lots of things can change.

As it happens, Council is already asking what the future might hold, though we are not thinking quite that far into the future. And we need your help. After all, We all have a part to play in determining what the future might bring.

As a Council we regularly have some visioning time at our meetings. But we are also aware that as a whole congregation it has been several years since we took a look at the ministry of St. Paul’s. So we are asking for help.

At the Annual Congregational Meeting an invitation will be issued. We are looking for people to host coffee party-type gatherings. At these gatherings we want people to talk about these three questions:

1. What is going well?/What is St. Paul’s good at?
2. Where are the gaps?/What could we be doing more of?
3. What are/should be our priorities as a community of faith serving Grande Prairie?

Each gathering will have a host (can be in your home or at the church) and a facilitator and a recorder. It is our hope that the gatherings will allow us to get input from as wide a range of people in the congregation as possible. We want the meetings to happen between the beginning of March and the end of May. Then over the summer a sub-group of Council will collate the input for Council to look at more closely in the fall.

So who wants to invite a few folks over for coffee (which may or may not actually mean coffee)?

Gord