Faithful Innovation is Underway!
Faithful Innovation is Underway!
Beloved in Christ,
On Saturday, July 23 the first in-person training for the Southern Minnesota Faithful Innovation process took place at the Inn at Shattuck-St. Mary's in Faribault. Thirty participants, most of them lay leaders, spent time dwelling in scripture, sharing stories of a time they felt spiritually energized, and thinking about the importance of asking God questions rather than church questions.
Christ Church, Red Wing, St. Paul’s, Winona, Calvary, Rochester, St. Luke’s, Rochester, and Christ Church, Woodbury all sent lay Guiding Teams to the training. In the next three months they will be inviting members of their faith communities to dwell regularly in Acts 16:6-15, share their spiritual stories, and to participate in prayer walks in which they pay attention to what the Holy Spirit might be up to in their church’s neighborhood and in other neighborhoods in southern Minnesota and the Cities. The Guiding Teams will develop a process for collecting what they and other church members hear when listening to God, members of their congregations, and neighbors.
In the second training, participants will be introduced to action learning, and will design small, low-cost experiments to learn more about what the Holy Spirit might be up to in their context. Experiments will be based on what they hear during the three-month listening phase.
Many powerful stories were shared, including one by Colleen Spillers, a member of Calvary, Rochester. Colleen told the group a story about participating in a peace walk after a difficult turn of events at the elementary school where she works as a first-grade teacher. You can read that story here.
Faithful Innovation processes in Duluth and Minneapolis begin in September. In 2023 I will run up to two processes a year, wherever two or more congregations want to go through it together. For more information, please contact me at blair.p@episcopalmn.org or go to episcopalmn.org/faithful-innovation.
Faithfully,
The Reverend Blair Pogue
Canon for Vitality & Innovation