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Bethany Briefs November 2007
Discerning the Spirit's Leading: Session Hard At Work
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 by
Dan Baumgartner The first day, the very first day I was in my office as Senior Pastor at Bethany back in 1999, someone asked the questions: “What’s your 5-year vision for Bethany, do you have a 10-year plan in hand?” My answers were unequivocably “I don’t know” and “No.” I knew I had to become familiar with the Bethany community. And I knew I had plenty of practice doing long-range planning in my business career, and maybe that’s why I was looking for something different in the church. With all due respect to the many church communities that have found those strategies helpful, to me they felt dangerously close to deciding what we want to do and asking God to rubber stamp our plans. So, what if? What if a faith community did it differently than a corporation? What if we spent time paying attention to God, looking for places that God’s Spirit is already at work and then figuring out how we can move in those directions? If we could do that, we could zero in on some specific areas of ministry focus, get some guidance in allocating resources and give our community some focus in following after Jesus. In 2003, Bethany’s Session engaged in exactly such a process. The culmination was our first Statement of Direction, approved in September of 2003. It gave us four areas of focus for ministry and growth:
The Statement proved to be very helpful in budget preparation, outreach policies and connecting areas like children’s and youth ministries with larger emphases of our church. Of course we followed through better in some categories than in others, but generally the Statement lent some good direction. This year, 2007, Session re-visited our Statement of Direction because, well, it was time. Our Session leaders engaged in seven different conversations. We started back in March by listing all of the ministries at Bethany, writing them on pieces of paper and posting them on the walls of the parlor. There were well over 200 things listed! The point was clear: we didn’t need to add new ministries or activities just for the sake of adding. We needed to carefully discern areas of special emphasis. Over the course of the next seven months, we again and again had to return to this realization: our Statement is not meant to be a comprehensive list. Many, many wonderful and amazing ministries go on at Bethany and will continue to go on that we aren’t including. We had to remind ourselves that we were looking and listening for growing edges where we sensed God’s Spirit nudging us to further invest. After good discussions at many meetings and our Session retreat, prayer times, reflection, elder conversations with other people, writing and re-writing, Session arrived at the final form. Three of the areas are mostly continuations from the 2003 version. Two new ones appear on the topics of sabbath living, and care for the environment. There is also added a very concise Bethany “Statement of Purpose” (see sidebar) which is the “umbrella” under which the Statement of Direction falls. It’s not a five-year plan, or a ten-year vision. But I’m very pleased that our leaders at Bethany are concerned with paying attention, and seeing where the Lord is moving us. I think they’ve listened well, and it will be exciting to see how things unfold. The Statement below is not an attempt to list all of Bethany’s ministries, nor should it be seen as marginalizing any of them. Rather, the Statement highlights five particular areas of life and ministry where we believe God is calling us to mature. Statement of Direction We believe that God is always leading us into deeper discipleship and community, nurturing us and teaching us through scripture, worship, small groups, classes and relationships of many kinds. As we try to follow Christ and share His love and His message of redemption and reconciliation in the world, we believe that God is specifically calling us at this time and in this place to:
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