The ministry call of a church changes from season to season.

While it is helpful to understand the realities of ministry today, there is more: each faith community needs to recognize the ways in which they are called to proclaim and share God’s grace and the redemptive power of Christ. These change from one ministry season to another, so it is critical to understand the call of your church, in your community context, today. That call is different than it was five years ago, and it will, quite likely, be different in another five years. The challenge is to maintain an active awareness of your church’s ministry tasks as time passes, and the local community changes.

There is good news, though: first and foremost, this is not about strategizing – it is about discerning.

Quite literally, “God knows” exactly what kind of ministry you need to be doing. In our Discovery step, we share information, stories, and data about church life – and the specific ministry context in which your church lives. In this step, we take that to the next level – but it’s not about tactics, it’s about discernment. We spend time exploring the core values of your ministry – the guiding principles that are being lived out by your church. We then work together to craft vision and mission statements which capture the values that your church is living out, with an eye toward the possibilities that lie ahead.

Our approach combines prayerful discernment (based on a model dating back to St. Ignatius of Loyola) with modern practices of Appreciative Inquiry. What we provide, then, is active, innovative, and ancient: a Spirit-based approach to discerning God’s very real, very present call to ministry for your organization.

This is an integral part of our Discover >> Discern >> Define >> Deploy​ approach to church vitality