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| "Pacific Currents" by Rev. Dr. Mary Susan Gast,
Conference Minister, May, 2000 Paradigm Shift
Whenever I hear the phrase "paradigm shift" I brace myself for the screeching sound of grinding gears and for a chorus of voices saying, "Huh? What does that mean?" Nonetheless, I am ready today to stride courageously into the weedy fields of my imagination and use the phrase "paradigm shift" with regard to the Northern California Nevada Conference. We're going through a paradigm shift here. Whether we remember NCNC as it used to be, or whether we draw upon definitions from other Conferences, what we understand as "the Conference" and what we expect from the Conference are all shifting, shape-changing, and reassembling. The document "Reconceptualizing the Ministries of the Northern California Nevada Conference" has been in circulation and under discussion for the past couple of years. It will be addressed one more time-at the Annual Meeting-before we decide whether to move into it. Every delegate will receive a copy of it. "Reconceptualizing" talks about the ways we will do ministry and carry out God's mission as a Conference. It's a "how" document. But what is it that we do as a Conference? That's the question I get most frequently. To many congregations "The Conference" seems to be some abstract distant body with no accountability or relevance to church life, sometimes providing some needed service but mostly employing weird staff people who routinely push paper around their desks but who could at any moment take outlandish actions in public settings in the name of us all. So, maybe it's time for a paradigm shift. Once again, the modestly worded Conference Mission Statement from 1993 guides us. It envisions us as "a community of diverse congregations" and then invokes three active verbs -- nurture, support, and unite -- to say what this community of congregations is up to. If you want to make those three verbs memorable you can scramble them -- support, unite, and nurture -- so that we come up with a new anagram: SUN. SUPPORT, we might say, is there for the long haul. Support is about structures and foundations, baselines and basics upon which we build our life in community and covenant. Support includes processes of authorization for ministry, search and call procedures, standards of preparation and conduct for authorized ministers, encouragement, and presence in crisis. UNITE is all about connection with the wider church, historically, in the present, and into the future. We unite in ministry and mission ecumenically and in interfaith settings. We are part of a denomination, The United Church of Christ, which unites us in ministries of compassion and justice throughout the world and unites with us to bring into being new churches and new ministries in our midst. NURTURE makes us grow, inspires us, strengthens us as individual Christians, and as a church. Through nurture we become more than we now are, we grow into what God hopes we might become. Nurture develops the leaders of "all ages, tongues, and races" who will carry, urge, pester, and inspire the church into the future. And, yes, it's possible to align the entire spread of work done by the Conference into these three categories. So that we can easily keep them in mind, and in heart, and in prayer. At the Annual Meeting we will, God willing, report on the ministry and mission of the Conference both conceptually and financially through the SUN framework. We'll offer the theological base and the Biblical understandings of each of the SUN components. And perhaps we'll intensify our understanding of what it means to support, unite, and nurture one another "in faithful covenant in Christ." ~ Mary Susan |
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