Monday, March 2, 2011

I have been considering the jigsaw puzzle of Evergreen Association that the people attending our recent Leaders Retreat worked on. We have the outline almost finished because we have the four corners of the puzzle, our core values: unity, cultural diversity, acceptance and shifting perspectives. We’ve also looked at three of the four “edges”, our mission priorities: Building Bridges, Equipping Congregations and Reaching Beyond our Borders. Today I’d like to reflect a bit on the fourth edge, mission priority, “Sharing the Evergreen Way.” This is not only an edge, it may become a motto or tag line for us.

Sharing the Evergreen way, is simple and complex. Our consensus and caucus work makes us unique in a lot of cultures. Our determination to work toward making every voice count means we are doing things differently. Our business and our play/work times have a different flavor and sense than whatever was before. We don’t want to say in any way that we have arrived, but we are on a collective journey that is interesting and fun and has the sense of God’s blessing. So we’ve begun to call it “the Evergreen Way.” I’ve written before in these blogs about the “call of God” to do this work, a significant part of that call is the sense that we need to share what we are doing as widely as possible, outside the Evergreen constituents, in particular with the wider American Baptist family, but also in the wider Christian world and because we believe God calls all Christians to witness to the wider world, too. So “sharing the Evergreen way” is an expression of our calling. Please let me be clear, it is one way of witnessing and sharing Christ.  We do this because of God’s call, not because of pride or an arrogance that we think we are doing everything right (we know better than that). So we don’t call it “God’s way” although we believe that God is guiding us, but we call it the Evergreen Way, in the hopes that by sharing what we do and who we are, we can make a positive difference for the world.  Won’t you join us?

Please share your thinking about this growing puzzle. Either through the contact us on this web site or directly to me at Marcia@ea-abc.org

Marcia