Summer 2023 Sunday Series: The Three Words
Our leadership teams are fleshing out our mission statement, helping us to claim who we are as a church in 2023. Our emerging vision is both rooted in the past of our church history, our current church community, and our shared hopes for the future.
Our elders, deacons, and staff met together on June 3rd. We worked together from the starting point of the three words that we’ve used the past years to paint a picture of who we strive to be today, as well as the values we seek to live into in the future :
SAFE | OPEN | REAL
I chose these three words years ago to use in our publications and online presence. To meet they encapsulated our best intentions and vision as a church. Today we’re at a place where we’re able as a community to name and claim who we are and want to be, not just depend upon me to put our shared experiences and hopes into words.
Throughout the next six weeks our Sunday gatherings will be shaped around these words. We’ll look at what they mean in terms of scripture, our history, in the context of our socio-political context of today, and through personal testimonies.
We’ll spend two weeks on each word. The goal of the series is to empower you to reflect on what these words means for you in terms of Christian Faith and the church community of CAPC Oakland. It’s a way both to help us grow as followers of Jesus, giving us vocabulary to name and talk about our faith. And it’s a concrete way for us to work together as a community in view of naming and claiming the ways in which we believe God is calling us to be the People of God in Christ rooted here in the East Bay.
We’re working our way backwards through the three words. This is because REAL Christian faith and real Church community is what we’re first and foremost about. It’s real faith that shapes and informs what we mean when we say that we are SAFE and OPEN.
Throughout the next weeks I’ll be regularly blogging about this conversation of values, suggesting current articles and readings that I find poignant and related to the conversation. It’ll be a space for dialogue in which you can respond and talk. I’ll also aim to do a similar sort of dialogue curation through art interactive art installations in our sanctuary space on Sundays. I’m excited to see how our conversation unfolds and what we’ll learn together. If you have other ideas or suggestions please email, text, or call me!
Monte
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