Olympia and Community

August 10, 2009

Church and Community Consultation

This past Saturday, I had the honor and opportunity to work with members of the leadership time at Olympia Christian Reformed Church (Olympia, WA).

We worked through several conceptual frameworks that provided a basis for the church to consider how to better serve individuals and their community overall.

We first considered where current outreach ministries fit into the "Developmental Grid"...give a fish, teach to fish, rent the pond, own the pond...continuum.

Next we worked through Robert Linthicum's "In,To, With" framework, which asks to the church evaluate the nature and focus of the congregation's community involvement.


Both exercises stimulated much conversation, created many questions, poised a number of healthy options as "next steps" for OCRC.

We ended with 5 work "take aways"...these leaders agreed to follow up on.

All in all, a wonderful group of folk, who really do care about people and their community!

Oh yeah...they were confronted with the dreaded "helium stick" as well. They did get it to the floor eventually, but at first it almost floated into outerspace!