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Annual Meeting update
Greetings, one and all: This is the first of several contacts you will receive from members of the Massachusetts Conference, United Church of Christ’s Annual Meeting Planning Committee, leading up to the Annual Meeting planned for November 1, 2008 in Worcester. The theme of this year’s Annual Meeting will be faithful behaviors, and particularly the art of discernment, its history, and its place and faithful practice in decision-making in UCC polity today. We want you to know in advance about this plan, and to alert you that reading material about discernment will be widely distributed in late August, allowing time for preparation in advance of the Annual Meeting. We hope that you will watch for this material and find it interesting and helpful as an orientation to the meeting. The program will open with a keynote presentation on discernment offered by the Rev. Mr. Martin Copenhaver, Senior Pastor of the Wellesley Congregational Church. We will then divide into small groups to practice the discernment process In order to be meaningful, this practice must be focused on a particular question. Although the precise question is still under discussion, the planning committee has chosen as our general topic the financial expression of covenant between our local congregations and the wider United Church of Christ, particularly as manifest in our congregations’ gifts to Our Churches Wider Mission Basic Support, and the distribution of those gifts between the Conference setting and the National UCC. Those of you who have been to Annual Meeting in the past will recall that the distribution question underlies the annual vote on the “retention rate” – the percentage of Basic Support to be retained for ministry in the Conference setting, with the remainder contributed to national and global ministries. But we face the same question in our personal household budgets and our local church budgets - how much of God’s resource entrusted to us are we to keep for our own needs, and how much are we to give to meet needs beyond our own? It is not the Planning Committee’s intention that this sample discernment process lead to any abrupt change in the financial practices of the Conference, though it might well lead to such changes in future years. Rather, we intend that all delegates and other participants experience the discernment process as it applies to an important matter in a faithful setting. We hope that delegates will take materials back to their home churches for further exploration, as the question of the financial expression of covenant is ongoing and affects the support, resources and relationships available to each of our churches. In the year following the Annual Meeting, Associations and local churches will be invited to duplicate the Annual Meeting experience - that is, to explore the practice of discernment in congregational decision-making - and to share with others in the Conference their experiences with this model of considering important decisions taken together. The hope of the Planning Committee is that the individuals and congregations of the Conference might become more faithful decision-makers, understanding the presence of the Spirit in our midst even as we do the work of the Spirit. Stay tuned! In faith and hope, Ms. Sybil Smith, Moderator |
July 17, 2008