Mission Statement

As you know, the "GPS" (God's People Serving) Committee has been meeting for some time now at crafting a mission statement. Working from the surveys we received, we attempted to gather all the different threads of what we are about as a congregation. Here's what we have:

Christ Church Waltham is a welcoming Episcopal community brought together in our common worship of God and united in our desire to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.
At the parish meeting on Sunday, June 6, about 25 people met after the service to review our draft and talk in small groups. What about the Holy Spirit? Why say "persons," and not "people?" Is it too self-congratulatory to say that we are welcoming? Is it redundant to say "brought together" in one clause and "united" in another? What's with all of those verbs? And shouldn't it be about Waltham, since that's where we are?

These ideas in hand, we returned to the drawing board.

In our group, we tended toward the old joke of four people and five opinions. For some of us, changing to "people" made sense. After all, "persons" sounds a little strange, and you want the reader's emphasis to be on "all," not on wondering about the word choice. For others, though, the emphasis of "persons" helped to stress that we seek and serve Christ in each individual soul; not some generalized mass of humanity. We all liked that "seek and serve Christ in all persons" is the phrasing in the baptismal covenant in the Book of Common Prayer, and we liked the emphasis on remembering our baptism. (loving your neighbor as yourself also follows in the BCP)

Could we make it shorter? We tried! We also wrote some versions with mention of the Holy Spirit. We have a reference to Christ, and to "God" (which isn't specific, but might be read as God the Father or God the Creator). Paradoxically, though, adding in the Holy Spirit could have the unintended result of making "God" mean only God the Father/Creator (since it would be juxtaposed with the other two parts of the Trinity). But our worship is about all three, so we were back to having God just be "God," to signify the Trinity as a whole. The notion of being brought together (from different places) and united (in our differences) really resonated with us, so ended up keeping all of the verbs, too. Initially, our draft just said "We are a welcoming Episcopal Community..." but then people at the Sunday meeting suggested adding "Waltham," so we changed the first sentence to "Christ Church Waltham is..."

Being part of this process has been both fascinating (in an intellectual way) and a spiritual gift. The openness of each person to the voice of the others in the group is so moving, and to be part of a process of dialogue where consensus takes shape is just plain cool. It's not so much that we convinced each other of our opinions, but that the result just emerged.

We had planned to have GPS and Vestry meet together this Saturday for a retreat to talk more about vision and strategic plans for the coming years, but that has been postponed so that more members have a chance to participate. We're hoping for late August, so you'll hear more about the work then. As always, please feel free to talk with me or any vestry or GPS member if you have further thoughts.

Blessings,
Sara+ writing for the GPS Committee:
Mike, Sarah, Gene, Jonathan, Christie, Kristin, Cindy, and Marcia