It was wonderful to celebrate MCC Churches' and MCC Austin's anniversary with you on Sunday. As we considered our past, present, and future together in the context of "A Place at the Table," I spent a majority of our time laying out what MCC Austin's ministry into the future might be like.

I drew largely upon the book Letting Go: Transforming Congregations for Ministry by Roy Phillips. In the foreword of the book, Michael Cowan distills Phillips's ideas into four "shifts" that must happen in churches before they are truly transformed for ministry. I'm offering those four shifts to you again in the hope that you will take them to heart, and that over the next few months we will embrace the language and vision of these shifts in a way that opens us to God's continuing transformation. Oh, what God can do with a faithful, humble, loving congregation!

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• For all who have lost their homes or had damage to their homes from the wildfires in our area. 
• Gratefulness for the generosity of God and God's people.    
• For all affected by the famine in Somalia.
• For our GLBT brothers and sisters around the world who live in fear of violence and discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.   
• For our church as we discern next steps for our building and/or building search process.
• MCC staff and governing board as they continue to lead us.   

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Congregations that desire to be transformed will need to make the shift...

1. From membership, in which congregants understand themselves as recipients of spiritual care from professional providers, to ministry, in which they carefully discern their gifts and the responsibilities to which these gifts correspond; 
2. From entitlement, in which congregants remain members because they are given standing influence over some piece of the congregation's life, to mission, in which they become mindful of calls to service both inside and outside the congregation;
3. From education, in which congregants are consumers of a curriculum designed and delivered by others, to spiritual development, in which they interrupt the frenetic "doing" of contemporary life in order to attend to the movement of the spirit in their lives and the response the spirit asks of them;
4. From tolerating, in which congregants politely allow otherness but keep it at arm's length, to engagement, in which they embrace diversity as a source of ongoing spiritual transformation.

I invite you to print these shifts out, learn the vocabulary, consider them in light of our particular congregation, and help us to implement them. There is no "magic" about these four; they might not even be the best four. But if we commit ourselves to their pursuit, shore up our efforts in prayer, and humbly give God thanks and praise for the growth we experience, we will surely be blessed and be a blessing to others.

Always in Hope, 

Rev. Karen Thompson

Senior Pastor                                                                     

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