St. Barnabas, we need your help!!
For St. Barnabas to be effective, we need a clear statement of our mission, and a vision of what success for St. Barnabas looks like over the next few years. With these two tools, we get very specific and objective in planning how to achieve. We have started by asking everyone, including our adult kids who don’t presently attend regularly, to complete our Parish Survey.
Now we need to prayerfully restate our missin and vision. We may just re-iterate the mission and vision we have had for the past few years. Or, the Holy Spirit may open us up to something God has in mind. This is our opportunity to “inquire of Yahweh” together.
Mission and vision statements are very powerful. As part of our search for a new Rector, the Office of Formation and Transition Minisitry requires to include them in our Church Profile that publishes to clergy candidates, and to the world, who St. Barnabas Parish is, and how we plan to participate in Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation.
This isn’t a process just for the church leaders. All of us have to own the vision and mission, so all of us need to contribute our Spirit-led insights.
This video, while very secular, explains the key points of mission and vision statements:
For the full article, describing how to develop the statements, click here.
Let’s keep this simple!
Getting a lot of people to agree on mission and vision can be hard, especially when we aren’t together in the same room. To make it easier, we want to break this into 3 simple steps:
- Vote for existing Core Values, and for Church Vision and Mission statements. Several Internet sources provide examples of church vision and mission statements. If you like the prospect of working smarter, not harder, please vote for up to three of these statements. A vote for a statement says that some part of this statement strongly states a part of St. Barnabas’ mission, values, and/or vision for the future.
- (Optional) Submit your own values or statements. Submit as many times as you like.
- All submitted statements, plus the top five statements from step 1, will appear on a new ballot. We will continue to vote until we have 3-5 statement candidates and 5-10 core values. Unless of course, we all vote for the same values and statements.