The Words of the Edgerly Family
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The Words of the Edgerly Family |
The leadership from New England returned from the recent National Leadership Conference in New York wound up and ready to go. After doing a exhausting "Two City Tour" to disseminate the contents of the conference, Rev. Richard Buessing (District Director), Rev. James Edgerly (Massachusetts State Director) and Masao Okano (Director of Youth Ministry) quickly organized an planning meeting on Friday evening (February 5) to kick off the Action Planning process.
The meeting started at 4:00 PM at the Edgerly residence in Lexington, Massachusetts. The invitation made clear the big incentive to get our experienced "action planners" to show up on such short notice: "5:00 - 6:00 Dinner". To our young adults, this meant two things: 1) a free meal, and 2) Mrs. Edgerly's delicious cooking. Needless to say, we had a good turnout: eleven hungry young adults, plus nine not-so-young adults.
Our Director of Youth Ministry, Masao Okano, kicked off the session with one of his trademark icebreakers: "What was the best Christmas present you have ever received?" It was in response to that inquiry that we learned Mike Myers once received The Great Garloo from Santa Claus. Once the mystery over The Great Garloo was cleared up, the action planning commenced with the compilation of a list of nine areas of focus. These areas were:
"Stage 1"
Programs
Witnessing Methods
Sunday Service
Membership
Class
Budget
DP Workshop
Young Adult Small
Groups
Facilities
STF Care
Using his masterful facilitating skills, Masao moderated a brief period of mild mudslinging and heckling to reduce our mandate down to three primary areas: Sunday Service, Sunday Service and Sunday Service. To this priority list, we added Stage 1 Programs, Young Adult Small Groups, and DP Workshops.
As expected, the planning process took a huge leap forward when Mrs. Edgerly announced that dinner was ready. Masao barely escaped injury as twenty people quickly evacuated the planning session and headed for the dining room. It was not until the cheesecake covered brownies were consumed that our planning specialists were willing to get back on the job.
After dinner, we broke into four groups to begin planning in our four focus areas: Sunday Service, Small Groups, State 1 Programs, and DP Workshops. After 45 minutes of brainstorming in smaller meetings, the group of twenty reconvened and continued debate about Sunday Service! By 8:30, we had settled on about three action areas in each of our four primary topics.
A few key points emerging from our discussions were:
The importance of maintaining a local music ministry while still participating in broadcast Sunday Service
Our need to prepare and practice standard answers to challenging questions about our faith
The importance of finding out other features of churches that have successfully grown based upon broadcast sermons
How to build local content and fellowship into the Sunday experience
How to support the challenges of small group leaders so that more are willing to volunteer.
The meeting concluded at 9:30 PM with a general sense of enthusiasm and willingness by all present to continue their involvement in the next phases of the action planning process.