Ministry Lab 2024 | Invitation to churches from Innovation & Engagement Missional Team

Originally in the Coconut Wireless, October 23, 2024

Our Associate Conference Minister, Jonathan Roach, shares:

In confirmation classes, I challenge youth to imagine "church" as a verb instead of a noun. To church, churching, we churched today! Because if you give a person a piece of paper and ask them to draw a picture of church, most of them will draw a picture of a building with a steeple on top of it and a cross somewhere on it. For them, church is a passive place, a building where people gather, mainly on Sunday mornings, to sit in pews and worship God. For most people, a church is a static, unchanging building that just sits there and is used every Sunday for a couple of hours.

But I challenge everyone to think of church as a verb, not as a noun or a building but as loving actions through which we live out our faith in this world. Verbs are action words. Verbs make things happen. Verbs embody motion, energy, action. Verbs never just sit around. What happens when we think of church as action, as relationships, as following the example of Jesus in the gospels of healing, comforting, supporting, loving, teaching, and praying? Throughout the history of Christianity, the reality of church has always been changing as the followers of Christ respond to the wild creativity of the Spirit in different times and places. And now, I have an opportunity for you!

The Innovation and Engagement Missional Team invites people from our biggest congregations to our smallest congregations to Ministry Lab 2024. On Tuesday, November 12 and 19, the team will present multiple model experiments to spark and excite you and your congregation to try doing something new. They hope that by the end these sessions, you will identify an experimental "lab" that you can try with support and help from the Missional Team. I will be there! Will you?

Zoom info to come!