During St. Thomas' recent Church Assessment Tool (CAT) work from Holy Cow Consulting our congregation had 210 responses which is about 2/3 of our average attendance. Holy Cow considered this to be a very strong response. One of the assessments is how members see their commitment and energy through a number of questions. St. Thomas came out as a High Energy/ High Satisfaction congregation with our scores compared to other churches rating us in the upper right hand quadrant. So what does this mean? (see followup below the image...)

     This makes us a transformational system- in other words we are leading people into a transformational relationship with Christ. From Russel Crabtree's book Owl Sight; "Transformational systems have very different strategic and leadership needs. There positive morale and organizational capacities place a stewardship responsibility upon their shoulders: "From everyone who has been given much, much more will be asked" (Luke 12:48). As member satisfaction reaches 70 percent and energy reaches 85 percent, these churches cross a transformational threshold where strategic initiatives for mentoring, church planting, cataloguing of best practices and succession planning must be considered. I call this leadership style the fieldmarshal, because it requires optimizing a large array of strategic resources. while recovery churches are often seeking expertise, the expertise in transformational churches is often unconscious with in the system and leaders will need to bring their (the congregation) competence to consciousness before it can be shared. 

“Love as a redemptive impulse is primary to the gospel and is irreplaceable as motivation. Clearly without love, our spiritual pockets are empty no matter how smart we are. But Paul sees knowledge and insight as the necessary conditions required if love is to abound.” J. Russell Crabtree

Thanks to all who participated in the recent survey work from Holy Cow. This important tool called a “Congregational Assessment Tool” or CAT is one way for our leadership and all of us to assess how we are doing as a congregation. This tool is based on something called “organizational intelligence” or OI. The idea is that the more we know the “why” and the “who,” the better we can go about the ministry we are called to be doing. We used the same tool about four years ago after we had finished our capital project and were ready for the next steps.

What was said? To sum up in a very short sentence, “I (we) love St. Thomas.” We again came out in the high energy and high commitment quadrant. What that means is that we have continued to maintain our ministry and leadership edge over the last four years. Now let me be clear—this is not a “Pollyanna-ish” look in the mirror! When we said we love St. Thomas, we as a body meant that while we like and take part in many aspects of the church, we really want this church to thrive and keep doing that same hard work. We also identified as a progressive and flexible church. What this means is that we see ourselves as willing to move out into new and different ways of doing church. We like to try new adventures and take some risks in what we are doing for ministry.

Our community identified several paths we desire to walk down:
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Ministry towards those broken by life circumstances;
Outreach to those on the margins of society;
Continued efforts and work on welcoming and incorporating new members;
Creating more opportunities to form meaningful relationships; and,
Strengthen our process where members are called and equipped for ministry.

All of these will require some discernment, and many people to help us walk down the road. However, they are exciting and aspirational goals. The best thing coming out of the survey is that we want and see these as very high priorities. Basically, we want to share the Gospel message of love of God and neighbor in real and tangible ways.

There will be a number of opportunities to have some discussions around the survey results in the coming weeks and months. We will also take some time to do good discernment around our next steps. I find it hard to believe that I will celebrate my 12th anniversary as your rector this week. I can’t think of a better congregation or ministry to be part of right now. Let’s go about doing the hard work we are called to do with vigor and gusto. God is asking a lot. And we can respond with a yes!