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Looking back over the last few months, I am excited by the way our Board and by extension, the Long Range Strategy Team are increasingly being empowered in visioning and directing where we are heading as UM Community Ministries! In our May board meeting small discussion groups came up with some very good suggestions that were taken then to the Long Range Strategy Team and into other areas of our work. One was the importance of helping local churches connect with and work with the local community. To that end the Long Range Strategy Team suggested we add the word with to our mission statement: the purpose of UMCM is to assist congregations in doing ministry in and with the community where God has called them.
Because of this new emphasis, we will have a training event on Oct 30 with this same focus- how to connect with the local community. It will also be something talked about by speakers at our Community Ministry Festival and Annual Meeting. This emphasis on “community first” or doing ministry with is becoming a theme that keeps coming up in various settings. I am grateful to the board for setting the tone on this.
The second topic we discussed was training and how to do it better. It was suggested that we train mentor/facilitators to better enable outreach committees, small groups or outreach ministries to move forward in mission. The Long Range Strategy Team then met and took up this theme, deciding to call trained persons “facilitators” rather than coaches or mentors. We are scheduled to have the West Ohio Conference leader, Suzanne Goebel from Atlanta, do the workshop at little to no extra cost to us. The workshop will be Sat October 18th from 9am-4pm and will focus on next level listening skills and how to ask powerful questions. We are recruiting twelve persons from across all nine counties, who will then have the skills they need to help facilitate conversations with mission committees and small groups and even county wide coalitions in their counties. This will be an important aspect of our work. We have already made a start at this ministry when we were invited to meet with Wesley Church of Hope UMC. Elaine Steward, Ed Shaffer and I led them in visioning and strategic planning for their outreach ministries. We will meet with them again in six months.
The training small group also suggested decentralizing the way we train outreach leaders. Plans are in the works to offer training for outreach chairs after Christmas in the various counties to encourage greater participation. We want every outreach committee chairperson and other outreach leaders to feel like they have the resources they need to move forward.
Logan County is a pilot project for our work. We have met with outreach leaders there three times now; each time the numbers have doubled. At our last meeting they decided they want to focus on better coordination and communication between all the nine food pantries in the county. Bev Wolf and Gwen Heath have emerged as natural leaders for the group and will create a display showing information about all the food pantries. Working at the county level takes time but is worthwhile.
Recently I had an exciting meeting bringing together outreach chairs from eight of the largest churches in our districts. We had a great discussion about the role of the outreach committee in the large church. They suggested that they need help in really connecting with low income communities and would like to have a gathering of large churches and small churches in low income areas to see how they might partner together in reaching out. Very exciting! Again there seems to be a hunger to really connect in vital ways with people in need.
I have been attending Lou Seipel’s Big View meetings once a month, where persons, who have been through a twenty week course on how to move out of poverty, meet with allies (facilitators) to design various programs. This week we met to set the reciprocity agreement for persons seeking a car- how many hours of community service they should do, and where, in order to get a car. This will be a great connecting point between CPO (Community Properties of Ohio- affordable housing) and various UM community ministries like free stores and food pantries. This program will be similar to Transformation Station at Good Works which we visited in the spring.
Other activities the past few months have included making lots of site visits, a mission tour of Buckeye Lake Water’s Edge ministries, Eastside Hispanic ministry and Church for All People, attended by 15 people, as well as ongoing preparations for our Community Ministry Festival on Sept 23. Our planning committee has met twice and has done a great job making the plans for this event. Stonybrook UMC has been very helpful in preparing for the event as well. Westgate UMC has stepped up to the plate in providing a small orchestra and the choir piece is coming together. I think it will be a great musical night of striking a chord: the harmony of passion, gifts and partnerships in local outreach ministry, the theme that our board came up with the beginning of the year.
We are a team, doing this thing together. Increasingly I feel that we are on the same page and moving forward- a very exciting place to be. Thanks for all your great ideas and input! Also we now have a mission intern, Brittany Browne, who will be able to help us implement all the things we want to accomplish. Brittany was highly recommended by her pastor, John Edgar of Church for All People. She is a Junior at Ohio Dominican University, majoring in Communications, and she brings both people and computer skills, a strong faith and sense of call to this ministry. We are blessed to have her join our team! |
The theme of this year’s Annual Community Ministry Festival was celebrating local outreach ministry across nine counties. It was a great event attended by over 200 persons, with over 40 displays, and banners from every county. This has also been the main emphasis of this past year as we seek toassist local congregations in doing ministry in and with the community where God has called them. One of the highlights of this year was the Follow Your Dream Forums about Community Ministry grants, which we offered eleven times in all nine counties. In all over 250 people attended these events representing 120 churches. This was a great way for United Methodist Community Ministries to get the word out about who we are and what we have to offer in assistance to local churches.
As a result, over fifty churches applied for and received 2008 Capital Improvement grants, helping with furnaces, elevators, handicap accessibility, laundry facilities, roofing etc, and/or Local Outreach Grants, a sixty percent increase over the number of churches receiving grants in 2007! In 2008, your apportionment dollars will provide over $175,000 in funding, helping thousands of needy persons every week! This direct funding is in addition to many other district church extension ministries your apportionments make possible. We truly are able to bring good news to the poor or marginalized through the many faithful United Methodist churches in the nine counties of the Capitol Area Districts.
One way we are building relationships with outreach leaders is through our Quarterly Gatherings offered by our resource team, with pertinent topics chosen by the outreach leaders themselves. For example, in April our topic was Volunteer Recruitment and our topic on October 11 will be Best Practices in Fund-raising. These gatherings are a way for outreach leaders to get to know each other and build a strong and effective network. Other workshops we have offered over the past year have included: Asset Mapping and Radical Hospitality (Inclusiveness) Training. This fall we will offer a two-part Grant-writing workshop, October 20 and 27th, and then a workshop on Understanding the Culture of Poverty on November 3rd. All of these workshops are a way to better assist local churches in responding to God’s call. We also are happy to offer workshops for specific local churches or clusters.
If we do our job right, more and more churches will seek grants and other assistance in doing community ministry right where they live. Over the last few months we have formed a Ministry Development Team to address the need for more funds beyond what we receive from our apportionments and endowment portfolio. We want to be able to offer more churches grants and to increase the dollar amounts we are able to offer to local churches for local outreach ministry or capital improvements. We are in the process of developing specific proposals to raise more money and enable more ministry. We have also developed two new task forces. One is a long term planning task force looking at our vision and strategic plan for the next five to ten years. The other task force is working on a working definition and criteria for the future of District Mission Centers in our two districts. Currently there are three district mission centers, New Life UMC, Church for All People and Westside Free Store. That number may increase or decrease depending on the recommendations of this multi-county task-force. The input of folks as far away as Indian Lake are as important as the input of people here in Columbus. Our goal on all of our committees and board is to have a wide diversity of cultures and views representing all of the churches in our nine county reality.
One area I hope we can give more attention to in the future is that of offering hands on experience in local outreach ministry to churches. So far we have conducted three outreach tours, traveling to six sites, to 35 persons. We plan to offer more tours and outreach opportunities. For example, this coming February we are planning several hands on family oriented mission experiences during Lent as a way for families to build community with each other and learn how to reach out to people in need. Mission trips to far away places are great, but we need to follow up those life- changing experiences with ways to reach out to places nearby.
As we continue to partner or collaborate with others we are getting more and more requests for volunteers for specific community ministries. We hope someday to gradually become a clearinghouse for United Methodist Christians seeking ways to live into God’s call and reach out to people on the margin in our society. There is still so much that can be done and none of us can do it alone. The harvest is too great. But together much can be accomplished. We appreciate the input and questions from all of the churches in the Capitol Area Districts as we seek to move forward in faithfulness to God’s call.
The Rev. Beth Weisbrod -
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