Old South
Church in Boston
Congregational Spiritual Discernment and Vision Process
Where there is no
vision, the people perish.—Proverbs 29: 18 (KJV)
The Discernment & Vision Process Steering Committee is
very busy with the events that follow the annual meeting. Our eye is towards the Lenten Sunday sessions
that will occur before and after the 11:00am church service on each Sunday in
Lent. During these sessions we will engage the OSC community in the
process of discerning God’s will and vision for
In preparation for the Sunday sessions the steering
committee will identify the themes, background information, and opening questions
as generative materials for the group discernment.
In between each Lenten Sunday, the steering committee will collect and summarize
the results. This step may inform the following week's sessions, if it
looks like further discernment on a theme, question, or direction is needed.
This is a highly adaptive process. Beforehand, we don't know where God is
leading us and don't know who the Holy Spirit will choose to be the prophetic
voices for our church. By listening prayerfully
to God and one another, we will seek to find out.
At the end of the four Sundays the steering committee will again create a synthesis of the work done to date and identify the emerging facets of the vision in preparation for the Congregational Summit meeting on the 25th of March. This meeting will include small group working sessions to allow for further discernment. It will end with a time of decision making as we formulate the resulting discerned direction statements.
The output of this congregational meeting will be then written up in a report for the OSC Council. The report may have two main components: 1) a section on the resulting vision for OSC in the form of directional statements, and 2) a section on potential implementation ideas. It may also include recommendations to the OSC council relating to the implementation phase of the vision process.
