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Leadership:
One Congregation's Experience with the Walk to Emmaus Dick Chadwick Hawaii Walk to Emmaus # 1 |
First United Methodist Church of Honolulu |
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One of the principal purposes of the Walk to Emmaus is to facilitate education and support of leadership in participating congregations. (For those of you who have been on the "Walk," you'll recall talks on priorities, Christian action, and "4th day" that opened doors to insights about the nature of the body of Christ on Earth.) What has been the experience of my congregation with the Walk to Emmaus? It's hard to make the argument for cause and effect, but it seems to me that participation on the Walk has been very helpful and supportive of the leadership education goal. Leadership takes many forms in a congregation. On the internal, organizational side, our congregation's Emmaus participants have come to include the chairs of all our major units (administrative council, preschool, finance, trustees, education, and others), our office staff and most volunteers. This was neither planned nor promoted as such, or even observed. Nor are there special meetings of congregation members who are Emmaus participants, nor is there a strong sense of "Emmaus identity" as such (turnout at statewide quarterly Board meetings and community gatherings is very sparse, for instance; perhaps a dozen of about 80-90 on our mailing list actually show up, and these are mostly Board members). To the contrary, the Walk experience was the most deepening experience I have had on my own faith journey. That's a very individual, personal matter, of course. It was not a new community identity that was formed or encouraged, but rather a deepening of my Christian commitment to support my congregation's collective faith journey. For me, a lot was clarified about what it meant to experience God's grace and the nature of Christian commitment to changing my little part of the world. I'm pretty sure that this sense of commitment is what has been deepened and the effect has been to radically increase the application of time and talent to identify and pursue our congregation's mission in the world. On the mission side, one way of exercising leadership is to donate time, talents and financial support to helping feed the poor and homeless. Our congregation has undertaken three ministries which today have wide-ranging support both in our own congregation and in the local community. All three benefit from grants-in-aid from the Hawaii Foodbank, the California-Pacific Conference of the UMC; and two of the three are led and staffed by Emmaus participants and others who have been inspired by their service (the third is led by a teen-ager). The Foodbank ministry and H-5 ministry, are now "advance specials" in the UMC system, which means they can solicit funds from UMC congregations nationwide this year and next. Of the three, the H-5 is the newest and most in need of help (see their new initiative to raise money to start a program to house a few homeless persons). Other ways that some of us help is to donate our time to providing organization support for such things as the HUMU District Britt Lecture series, or to other spiritual support agencies such as the Spiritual Life Center.
I created this page August 6, 2004 and last updated it January 4, 2005. Send feedback to me at DickC@hawaii.rr.com. Dick Chadwick.
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