Dear Friends,
We will be gathering on Sunday, June 30 for lunch and a discussion of the first summer reading book, Part-Time Is Plenty: Thriving Without Full-Time Clergy by G. Jeffrey MacDonald, a religion writer who also serves as a part-time pastor. We’ll get together in the private meeting room at Dickey’s right after the morning service that day
The second summer book addresses a different subject that is nonetheless of interest to many churches in these challenging days. That title is “Gone for Good? Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition,” a volume of essays edited by Mark Elsdon. Like MacDonald, Elsdon is a minister, in his case in the PC(USA), and also works in another field (nonprofit management).
This book is a collection of essays by different authors, and some of those essays will be more relevant to our situation than others. No one essay offers the “perfect” answer, and some of them would not be practical in this setting. Furthermore, some of the essays are about what is done with church buildings after the church is closed, which is not where this church is yet.
Nonetheless, sifting through these responses to varying situations is an opportunity to see how different ideas have worked in different settings, and possibly to get a spark of inspiration about how this church might consider how our property – a magnificent one, but quite expensive to maintain – might be used differently as an instrument of mission and service in this changing time.
Since it’s a longer book, we’ll allow more time for reading. As with our first book, we’ll gather over a meal and discuss it, but that won’t happen until the end of August. In the meantime, you can let Alberta know if you would like a copy of the book so she can get them ordered.
Charles