2021 Goals

​In June of 2020 we the council sat down to do our visioning for the year to come. We listened for God’s word in our midst and discerned the gifts and challenges of our community. We remembered our mission to Proclaim God’s word, Welcome all people, and Serve one another and the world. Then we set goals for 2021. These goals would then inform the work of our Finance Team, committee leaders, and staff people when they made their budget projections for 2021.
 
Goal 1: To increase our technological capacity to meet the needs of our congregation.
This means making live streaming a priority for worship in the pandemic adjustments and after we return to in-person worship. We’ve already upgraded and tested our new equipment as well as prioritized our staff to use it. This project continues to evolve in the next year. We also still intend to identify the ability and needs of our community for other ministries in our congregation.
 
Goal 2: Become an anti-racist congregation
Our council heard the call to develop a specific plan to become an anti-racist congregation. This means reaching out to communities of color as we did to communities of LGBT people in our history. It means educating ourselves and changing our practices to explicitly welcome and proclaim God’s favor for people of color. Our work has begun well and we still have so much more ahead of us.
 
Goal 3: Improve the property to make it reliably useful
Our needs have changed with the pandemic. So we know that we need to make changes to our spaces in order to prepare them for public gatherings in new ways. In the meantime, we have the opportunity to make the bathrooms and kitchen hospitable (as has been our plan for years) while we’re not using them. One of our goals in this vein was to move the pastor into the parsonage and we’ve already accomplished that!
 
Goal 4: Do service to/for/with our community
This goal is our commitment to continue to serve one another and the world even as our world is changed. We are committed to supporting our shelter cooks, hosting the safe car park, doing something for God’s Work our Hands, and lifting up whatever service God might put on your heart this year.
 
At the beginning of our 2021 fiscal year, we are grateful for the progress already made on these goals. Still, there is much road ahead of us and it is clear that God is calling us not to sit down and be done, but to keep walking. So we wonder now, and want to hear from you – how is it that you want to be involved in the ministry and mission of CGS this year?