by Pastor Erin Heidelberger
I’m excited to share with you a little bit about our participation in the Nebraska synod’s Vitality Initiative and to introduce you to our VI leadership team. Here’s how the synod describes the Vitality Initiative…
This is not a project to be created, or a follow-the-directions or how-to program to be completed. This is an organic intentional process to go deeper, to grow disciples and to lean into the culture shifts and changes that God is inviting so that a congregation may better lean into its identity and response to its larger community. Through this journey, congregations will dig into big questions, including:
- Who are we? Discerning congregational identity.
- Who are our neighbors? Discerning context and the surrounding community in which the congregation is a part.
- What is God inviting? Discerning the next most faithful step and lean into God’s invitation to come and see, follow, experiment and serve.
In a cohort of congregations together, the congregations participating in this initiative will discern answers and direction based on:
- Pondering and wrestling with many deep questions.
- Assessing the congregation’s vitality.
- Discerning vocation through spiritual, theological, biblical practices, contextual exploration and through becoming equipped and strengthened for embracing change.
This initiative is geared toward helping congregations discern their vocation and to thrive with an outward orientation. Congregations will be invited to dare to live into their vocation and reflect vitality by cultivating missional imagination.
Our First Lutheran Vitality Initiative Team includes Amy Harrison, Steve & Tiffany Henn, Cora Hoeft, Doug Lind-Olson, Ben & Leah Middendorf, Natalie Peters, Dara Troutman and myself. We’re in the second cohort that the synod has hosted and will be supported and encouraged along the way by a coach, Deacon Sunni Richardson, Synod Director for Leadership Development. Our cohort includes eight other churches, three of which are in Lincoln – First Lutheran, Grace Lutheran and Southwood.
We will have monthly cohort meetings on Zoom with the Synod staff and other congregation who are participating. Our first monthly meeting was in September and we met with our coach last Sunday.
Over the next few months, we will spend time immersed in the first question: Who are we? (not, What do we do? But, Who are we?) This phase is about discovering: What is the DNA of First Lutheran? When we look back at the history of this congregation, what is the thread or threads that have been a part of the congregation for a long time? Answering these questions involves the entire congregation so watch for upcoming opportunities for the VI team to talk with you and hear your stories and memories of where and how we’ve seen God at work through First Lutheran.
In the meantime, please pray for our team: “We pray for our Vitality Team as they lead us. We pray for the process of studying our congregation’s history that we may see how God draws a thread of connection between our past to our present.”
