In March, 2012 Hilltop United
Methodist Church made a bold decision to move from three Sunday worship
services to a single service. That
decision was implemented on the first Sunday in May, 2012. It was seen as an integral element fostering
unity, where there was disunity: bring us together.
While worship has been a highly
visible element of the strategy, unity does not solely rest on one item. We have spoken of the unity objective as a
three legged stool. The unity objective has
three legs and they are: Worship, Christian
Education and Fellowship.
One of the stated commitments
within the unity decision was to examine where we were in December, 2012. That commitment was, and is, in the mind of
your key leaders. Regular reporting
within your Church Council has dealt with this topic as well as reporting in
the newsletter and occasional comments from the pulpit.
A template for how we might move
to a second service was developed and presented to church council which
discussed the recommendations and agreed to place before the congregation a
survey instrument designed to help Hilltop leaders understand what we know
about Hilltop as it relates to worship and education.
Said another way: The
objective of the June survey will be to help your leaders develop a better
appreciation of what we know about two elements of the unity strategy: worship and education.
While the core purpose will be to
help us better know what the congregation is thinking, it does not mean that
every opinion or option presented in this survey will be incorporated into a
future “New Hilltop”. Some thoughts, at
least in the short term, might be mutually exclusively i.e. cannot do
both.
We invite all at Hilltop to ask
how a particular element of ministry leads to an incremental expansion of the
Kingdom. Pastor Dennis has quoted the
church leadership consultant Reggie McNeal:
“God’s church doesn’t have a mission; God’s mission has a church.” We believe that kind of thinking changes the
nature of the discussion.
If you need more background than this article, be alert to a brief
podcast from Pastor Dennis that he will develop and circulate via an eNote
before the survey is released.
It is our plan to have the survey
ready for use on the internet or manual input by June 8th. Be alert to the communication vehicles where
we let you know how and where to access the instrument.
(This article appeared in the Hilltop Newsletter for June).
