Preacher: Phil Swain Luke 13:6-9 & 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Vision Sunday 2025 is an important day in our church year as we cast a Vision of where God is leading us as a church for the next 12 months. This year will be a critical year as we continue on our journey in discerning what it might look like to be a 2030 church?
Our ministry team will be sharing some of the preparation that our church has been doing over the past four months as well as inviting the whole church to join us on this discernment journey. Our pastor Phil will use a couple of great analogies as well as some bible passages in sharing a Vision for 2025 and beyond. We hope this time of worship, reflection and insight might stir within us a passion and energy to work with God to bring this vision to life!
Information about out 2025 Vision can be found at our VISION 2025 page.
Click here to go to the VISION 2025 page.
Sermon Text
Last Sunday, I preached about the future of the church to help give some context to this Vision Sunday sermon. If you missed it, let me recap briefly…
We looked at a bluey video where Jack’s dad was on his way to pick up Jack from school when his GPS ran out of batteries – and Jack’s dad realised that without the GPS he had no idea how to get there. We wondered whether this was a helpful analogy to how many churches are currently feeling. As the world and society and people change – it is like the programs and ideas and outreach activities that have worked effectively for the church over the past 70 years just aren’t working as well anymore. It is like the GPS that has served us so well has stopped and now we have no idea what to do next. How do we continue to be a church that is spiritually helpful, effective and sustainable as things keep changing around us? I suggested last week that many churches are feeling a little disorientated and … lost … about what to do next.
Here at Turramurra Uniting, we wanted to wrestle with some of these questions and have some honest conversations and prayerful discernment about what God might be saying to us and where God might be leading us as we head towards 2030.
In June last year, Church Council backed an idea called “future directions” – a process of prayer, strategic thinking and ultimately mission planning where we would be put everything on the table as we strive to hear God’s leading and guidance for us as a church. We invited Dave Cornford to help us in this process.
Towards the back end of last year, Dave (and his friend Dave), gathered a small group of people together and shared with us a framework on how we might go about this as a church …
SCOPE / GENERATE / BUILD
In simple terms … when wrestling with something like the future direction of TUC we first need to take a step back and look at the big picture. Often in mission planning we want to rush to the solutions – but there is wisdom in just sitting for a moment and taking in the wider scope.
Dave and Dave encouraged us to consider:
What are the questions that we might need to ask of ourselves? What are the critical challenges that might impact our future? What are the important things that we need to notice or acknowledge?
It is when we start to work out these that we can move onto the other steps of Generating ideas or creative solutions and then the practical step of bringing those ideas to life and building God’s kingdom.
Ean – our Church Council chairperson – shared with me another model which I though was helpful in all of this. It was called the double diamond. In a similar concept to the SCOPE/GENERATE/BUILD, the double diamond suggests that the first stage in discerning our future direction would be to ponder what are the questions we need to ask or the challenges that we face. And to do this we need to go wide … talk to people, do our research, invite conversations, listen to as many diverse voices as possible, write everything down.
But then we need to narrow this down because we don’t have the capacity to work through everything. So how do we narrow the diamond down to the most important questions or the most critical challenges. Then we can move onto brainstorming or creative ideas or innovative solutions … and again, we go wide. Church wide gatherings, encourage all voices, write down all ideas. It will be amazing but again, we will need to narrow things down because we don’t have the capacity to do every idea, or the resources to implement every solution. So, what might be the ideas that give us the best outcomes. What solutions have we have the resources to support?
Both these models are helpful as we strive to discern where God might be leading us as we head towards 2030. However, I just want to pause this for a moment and share another analogy, another image that I believe God gave me in the middle of one of the Dave and Dave sessions. We were asked to write down some of the questions we hand about the future of the church on sticky notes and stick them to the whiteboard. As the whiteboard filled up and I was reading through the scope of these questions I was doodling and began to draw several concentric circles. I began to reflect as I drew another circle …
Here at TUC we do a model of church really well, but that model was shaped in the 2000’s (or even in the 1990’s). This model has served us well but might not be as effective as it was. Just as Steve Everist helped TUC shape a new model of church in the late 90’s … So, what might a 2030 church look like? What sort of model of ministry, mission, worship, and outreach would work in our context now and into the future?
Another circle … the Uniting Church has a goal of growth … but what does growth mean here at TUC? Is what we are doing helpful for people’s spiritual growth? Their personal growth? Emotional growth? Are we going in our sense of community?
Another circle … and what does it mean to be a lighthouse church? Are we just focused on those who are connected within the TUC community? What is our mission to those beyond? Where does St Andrews fit into this? How do we find the right balance our limited resources between TUC & beyond
Another circle … speaking of resourcing … how do we make sure our church is viable and sustainable into the future. Amid a continuing cost of living crisis and the changing understanding of volunteerism … how do we make sure we have the resources we need to continue to be church? Do we need to think outside the box to find a sustainable way forward?
I looked down at my circles and thought … just addressing one of these would be a huge undertaking … how do we even start to address all of them? And there are probably more circles than the one I have drawn!
The image that came to mind was of the NASA gyroscope. Do you know what I am taking about? Part of the NASA training program is strapping the astronauts into a gyroscope – three circles that spins on three different axes. The astronauts hate it because they say that when they are spinning, it is so hard to work out what is up or down. And yet using nitrogen boosters, they need work out how to re-orientate themselves so that they stop spinning and are facing forward.
This is how I was feeling sitting in that session with Dave and Dave. I felt like there were too many issues spinning, too many challenges before us … how can we possibly work out a way forward with everything spinning.
Can you relate this this?
Dave and Dave had to pause the conversations because December/January came but I didn’t stop reflecting … and everything sort of clicked in a moment of inspiration (probably divine inspiration) while holidaying in Harvey Bay. I was thinking about the gyroscope and realised that the same three axis technology used in a gyroscope is the exact same 3 axis technology that a gimel uses. Do you know what a gimel is? It is a device for cameras or phones to help them keep stable.
I have one here and you can see that whereas the gyroscope spins the person in the middle – the gimel aims to keep whatever is in the middle (ie the phone) stable while everything else moves around it. It is the same technology … just different sides of the same coin.
But it got me thinking. I could see these circles or questions or challenges as the axis that are spinning me around – or I could flip it around and ponder … what things are in the middle that I want to make sure are stable amid all these other issues that are in motion.
Or specifically in relation to TUC – what are the things that we need to keep stable, that are in the core of our church – because if we can work out that then as things keep moving around us, we can adapt with them to keep our vision forward focused.
The obvious answer to this is Jesus. We are a Jesus-centric church. We are all about helping people to know Jesus and to grow in Jesus. Jesus is the core, the foundation of all who we are and all that we do. So yes … Jesus.
But what else would we put into the core? We could argue things like a caring community; our heart for children, youth and young adults; connecting and caring for our seniors; our desire to make a difference in the world. Sure – but I think also we need to think more broader than that … which is why I chose the reading from 1 Corithians 13.
In this beautiful well-known passage, Paul highlights the eternal nature of love. In verse 8 Paul acknowledges that things change, prophecies will cease, tongues will be stilled, knowledge will pass away. In verse 11 Paul admits that he has changed … he once thought like a child, reasoned like a child, but not anymore. Then Paul says, trying to work out what this might mean for the future is like looking in a dull mirror – we might be able to discern some things, but it is hard to have certainty. And yet, there is three things Paul is certain of, three things that are not affected by the other changes … faith, hope and love … and the greatest of these is love.
For Paul – love is in the middle of the gimel. When it is not in the centre – nothing else makes sense. Verse 1 – when I speak in the tongues of angels but have no love, I am only resounding gong or a clanging symbol. But when love is in the centre – then we find kindness, protection, hope, perseverance.
Maybe … by discerning what God suggests should be at the centre of our church we can be less disoriented with everything else that is spinning.
So … where do we go from here? What is the vision for 2025?
If you are hoping for some concrete solutions and innovative plans today … sorry – we are not quite there yet. But we wish to invite you to join us on this journey as we together discern our future direction. In the middle of our fancy brochure, you will see a proposed three step plan for 2025 that the ministry team and Church Council have been working on.
Stage #1 is in this period leading up to Easter. Dave and Dave has been helping us put everything on the table and explore the scope of what is before us. The double diamond model has been encouraging us to identify any questions or critical issues or challenges that might impact us moving forward. From the conversations so far, we have already got a list of these … but now it is your turn to be part of this. Over the next month or so we will have some small group discussion on this that you might like to be a part of … or you can jump online right now (or over the next week) and have your say. We would love to hear your insights the questions or challenges you discern … but also how you would distil or narrow all these questions or issues down to the five most critical one. Not to say they all aren’t important … they probably are … but we believe we only have the capacity to start with five. So, what are the five most critical issues or questions or challenges that we need to work on. By Easter we hope to as a church community have some consensus on this – which will lead us in to stage 2.
Stage 2 will take place in May and June and will be a church wide mission planning process where we take these five issues and through research, brainstorming and prayerful discernment see what creative or innovative ideas or programs or solutions emerge.
We will be pushing the diamond wide here and be open to writing down everything. I also have a feeling that we are not talking about tinkering at the edges here but could be as radical as new models for ministry and mission. Using the analogy of last week – new ideas might need new wineskins or a new model or approach to ministry and mission here at TUC – which is both expecting and unsettling.
I also think that part of this might be to have some honest conversations about sustainability. That parable we had from Luke 13 is an interesting one as Jesus seems to suggest that if we are investing in a fig tree, we should consider how fruitful it is. In an era of limited resources, limited time and volunteers and finances etc … how do we do some honest reflection on the fruitfulness of what we are doing. I am not talking about jumping in and blindly cutting programs that are unfruitful – but like the gardener in our Luke reading … striving to make sure that we are producing fruit in all that we do. Part of this process is not just adding more ideas into the church but also how we might best assess what we are doing to be most fruitful.
I am imagining that in stage 2 we may come up with loads of ideas … but the reality is that we just don’t have the capacity to follow up or explore every solution or idea. The plan is that by July we can narrow this down to a handful or so of clear, realistic, sustainable (and hopefully innovative) things that we can try.
Which leads us into the third stage. In August and September we hope to run the third of the “Imagining Hope” programs … called “Growing Generosity”. This program will not only help cast a clearer picture of what might mean to be a 2030 church but explore how we can resource this Vision.
The first two imagining hope programs have been instrumental in driving our church forward and we hope that God will bless and guide us through all these 3 stages so that Growing Generosity might also be significant in helping us move towards a 2030 church.
I am excited about this vision for 2025 here at TUC. It is not dissimilar to the process that EVOLVE went through 18 months ago and we are continuing to see the blessing that came from that hard work. I am excited to see where God might lead us as a church.
While I am excited – I am a little unsettled. I am a strategic person who is always thinking ahead, and trying to work out how things might pan out so that I can plan and prepare. But I am struggling to see the end point on this. I can see bits like through a dull mirror – but not completely. And I guess that is the point. God is inviting us to journey together in this year of discernment and mission planning – and we are not sure where God might lead us by the end of the year. But that is ok, but God will be leading us.
And while at times it might feel like too many things are spinning around us … we hold onto Jesus who is at the centre of all we do. We place love at the centre of our lives.
Remember God wants the best for us and our church and God is here to help us. Let’s see where this journey takes us.
Amen.