Discerning before Deciding

We are launching our strategic visioning and planning process with Tim Johnson from
Kairos and Associates. Our Leadership Team has been recruited and they will be meeting within
the coming week to outline the first steps in this process.

I think it’s important to remind ourselves right at the beginning that strategic planning in
the church is different than it is in the business or academic world. The difference is this: that in
the church strategic planning is actually a process of communal discernment. As a community of
faith—through prayer, conversation with one another, analysis of our congregation and our larger
community—we seek to discern the will of the Holy Spirit for us in these next three to five years.
The discernment question is not: “What do I want?” or “What do you want?” or even “What do
we want?” The question is “What does the Spirit want?” That’s what we are seeking to discover.

We will be doing that in a variety of ways: through a survey called a Mission Assessment
Profile; an instrument called a Leadership Systems Inventory; a Leadership Summit; individual and
small group interviews and listening groups of approximately 50 people; and a Community Leader
Gathering in which we seek to learn of the needs of the larger community and the ways in which
Light of Christ might address those needs. All these are designed to help us discern the will and
way of the Holy Spirit for us.

So I invite you, encourage you, plead with you to participate in this phase of our work together.
The more people we have participating in this discernment and discovery phase the more
fruitful and useful our planning will be. We need to hear from you. We want to hear every voice:
from the youngest to the oldest; from charter members to newest members; from lifelong Delano
residents to newest arrivals; from Bible scholars to Bible novices; from those most comfortable in
the chancel to those most comfortable in the kitchen. We need to hear every voice.

The Book of Acts chronicles the story of the early church. Again and again we read that
when the first Christians had major decisions to make they did it together: when they chose Matthias
to be the twelfth disciple (Acts 1); when they sent Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary
journey (Acts 13); and when they met in Jerusalem to decide how “Jewish” the new Gentile Christians
had to be (Acts 15). They prayed together, talked and listened together, sought the Spirit’s
guidance together. Only then did they make a decision. We need to do the same so that through
our process of communal discernment we discover the path on which the Spirit is leading us.

Together in discernment,
Pastor K