Title: Disciples planners set sights on strengthening congregations
Date: May 7, 1998
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
98b-25
INDIANAPOLIS (DNS) -- The General Board of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is poised for its first biennial planning session, to be held amid its July 25-28, 1998, regular meeting here. The heart of its work will focus on the task of strengthening congregational life for mission.
In 1997, the General Board reaffirmed its role as a churchwide planning body. It committed to carrying out that role with greater intention in structured sessions between general assemblies. In the July meeting, more than 200 representatives from all three expressions of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) -- congregations, regions and general units -- will be present to plan for the future.
The guiding question that will give focus to the board's planning comes from the church's Mission Imperatives, adopted by the General Assembly in 1995. "We believe God's mission for the church is to be and to share the Good News of Jesus Christ...We believe God calls us to strengthen congregational life for this mission," the imperatives state. The planning session will explore the issues on "how" the church will strengthen congregational life for mission.
According to General Minister and President Richard L. Hamm, the meeting will "seek to identify vital issues confronting this church as we approach the new millennium and will begin to develop the ways and means to address those issues."
The objectives of the gathering will be "naming issues and identifying directions, not voting on final or finished products or initiating new programs," according to the guidelines of the meeting design team.
The designers hope the General Board will: identify three or four issues vital to strengthening congregations; engage in preliminary thinking on how the whole church can address those vital issues; and commission a "coordinating council" to move the work forward over a four-year period following the meeting.
"In a time when North America has become our primary mission field, and congregations are called to become mission stations in North American culture, what more important business could there be for the General Board than to focus on strengthening congregational life for mission?" Hamm said.
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