Excitement found,

Dear friends,

Two important meetings were held last month.  The first was the first combined exploration meeting on February 7th and the second was the annual session retreat in February 9^th.  Thanks to the Hills for hosting the first, Lois van Beers for facilitating and Carol Sakai for taking the minutes! Also thanks to Carol Sakai for hosting the second! In the February Coach’s Corner with the heading “Finding the Excitement” I tried to lay the groundwork for the Feb. 7 meeting by identifying some areas where the mission of the Presbyterian Church USA might intersect with Parkview’s understanding of itself (which emerged from last year’s exploration meetings).  As always our Parkview folks were very good about completing the task put before them and had something to say in each category.  But in the end three areas of excitement came out of the meeting.  These are: 1) Building partnerships with the other churches and  groups in our church neighborhood to address issues of social justice.  2) Using team Parkview to make a difference in our community through our participation in humanitarian causes.  3) Using the worship service as a means of focusing and manifesting our ideas. These are exciting results, because it shows an evolution in how the congregation is seeing itself.  Having been founded as a gathering place for new immigrants (i.e. recreating home), after the war the church became a place of refuge (i.e. a shelter from an unwelcoming world) while in the last twenty years we welcomed people from other backgrounds to our premises (i.e others coming to us).  But these results of the exploration meeting show a congregation ready to step outside its attractive fence more and forging partnerships with other churches and organizations in being agents of change( i.e. we going out to others). What needs to be done now in exploration is to turn these areas of excitement into a new mission statement.  In addition we can begin establishing some groups or task forces to act on these areas of excitement. In fact the session is calling a first meeting of a worship task force for anyone interested in brainstorming about creative worship on Sunday March 22 at noon.  Rev.Gail Cullerton has agreed to be a resource person to this group.

The session retreat was a more free flowing investigation of our concerns for the future.  Very quickly we arrived at the question of regeneration and how we have a great core of enthusiastic people, but that not all generations are sufficiently represented. Granted most churches have this problem and that there is no panacea for this. Nevertheless we concluded that the session needs to think further about the need for, the obstacles to and new ideas to address ‘deliberate generational inclusion.’ It is my expectation that the excitement-orientation of the exploration group and the concern-orientation of the session will converge at one point.   However, we don’t want the exploration group to focus on problems, but rather follow its excitement to its logical conclusion.  We sustain an organization through enthusiasm and energy while managing it from day to day through problem solving.  At this point we shouldn’t confuse the two. May The Creator Guide us, the Christ be our example and the Holy Spirit inspire us. Thank you for your participation. Aart.

P.S. our historic minutes book was re(dis)covered!