what if god is asking the church to learn something new?

The Thriving Initiative acknowledges the cultural changes around us have impacted what it means to be church today but also recognizes that God indeed may be calling the church to not only a new way of being but also to learn something new. About ourselves. About the church. About the community. About God.

In 2021, Seattle Presbytery received an initial Lilly Grant to explore what it means to be a thriving congregation and what it might take to become one. 23 of Seattle presbytery’s 40  congregations  have participated in this learning journey and through cohort learning, individual consultations, leadership retreats, and targeted accompaniment, we have arrived 5 years later to the Thriving Initiative 2.0.

In this phase of the discovery, we work primarily church sessions and pastoral leaders as well as community partners. We facilitate session retreats that engage participants to identify both identity and values and then discern where and how God may be leading the congregation to engage in the wider community.

We’ve also developed various resources to support our churches’ work in this area.

What We’ve Learned

• Congregations learn at different rates. We developed some readiness factors to help assess congregational capacity as well as areas that need focused support and development

• Learning how to thrive in community is not a program; It’s about culture change. It’s about understanding the congregation’s place as a learning organization alongside community and developing practices and structures to support ongoing learning along with community.

• Leadership of learning and the culture change involved must be situated in the pastoral leader and governing board of the local congregation. Leaders must develop the capacity to show up as “host not hero”.

• Learning from and with community cannot happen without proximity to community. Discernment must happen about the community to whom the congregation is called - it isn’t always geographic. Activities and practices developed or reframed to bring the congregation proximate to community.

• Learning congregations exhibit common markers: Identity and values are understood, constantly assessed and clarified/transformed as community is engaged; leaderships takes ownership and knows how to facilitate the learning process, transformative community connection is apparent throughout congregational life; and a culture of learning and experimentation, and a willingness to fail is apparent.

What is an initiative?

A thriving initiative is…

• development of a community-based learning about the cultural, social challenges faced by the community 

• serves and impacts the community outside the congregation and nurtures an ongoing partnership between the church and the community.