A Message to all Clergy and Wardens in the Diocese

We write to you as members of your diocesan Executive Board, who have been charged with implementing the mission, vision, and guiding principles for our diocese accepted at Council in January of 2012. We are excited about the possibilities for our life together in this new vision, and we would like to ask for your help in developing this vision among us.

The vision statement accepted by Council as part of the Sustainability Report reads:

In order to join in God’s mission in this time and place, the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia will be a household of congregations in which each parish will make known its blessings and challenges and desires of the heart, and diocesan leaders will respond tangibly through direct consultative services and building bridges between parishes and resources.

This vision invites conversation and exploration, as we unpack its ideas in terms that make sense on the ground in our congregations and circumstances. What would a “household of congregations” look like? Can you name a quality, or characteristic function of that household that you would like to see? How would our own parishes identify our “blessings and challenges and desires of the heart”? Can you name some specific examples? What barriers to communicating blessings and challenges and desires might we have to overcome? Is there parochialism or territorialism or mistrust among us that needs to be healed? How could diocesan leaders like the Bishop or a Canon Missioner facilitate this sharing? What sorts of “direct consultative services” and “building bridges” would really benefit our congregations? What new models of ministry or strategies for mission might emerge from our congregations? What local assets, partnerships, collaborations and resources do we presently share and how are they benefiting our common life? What are some of our best experiences of doing local/ regional ministry together? These are the kinds of questions we want to bring to conversation in the congregations — we want your help in developing this vision.

We will pursue this conversation in two ways: in person, and on the internet. In person, members of our Mission Strategy Working Group will visit with clericus groups around the diocese in early summer to explore these questions. We will then look ahead to broader conversations with clergy and lay leaders of congregations in September. On the internet, this letter will be posted in a blog (diocesanvision.blogspot.com), where further blog entries and online replies can continue to share observations and insights and questions and new ideas. Through these channels, we hope to build the vision by embodying the vision: to develop our networking by networking.

This is an important time for our diocese, as we embrace the results of the Sustainability Report accepted at our 93rd Diocesan Council, and prepare together for the election and ministry of our sixth Bishop. The visioning we share together will shape our common life for many years to come. We hope you and your congregation will be actively involved in these ongoing conversations.

Yours in Christ,

The Executive Board Working Group on Mission StrategyHelen Beasley, Chris Mason, Amy Nordberg, Paul Nancarrow, Stephen Stanley, Barkley Thompson

Mission, Vision, Guiding Principles, and Objective

Mission, Vision, Guiding Principles, and Objective for the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia

Adopted by the 93rd Diocesan Council

January 28, 2012

The mission of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia is to challenge and support the creativity of our congregations in Christian growth and global responsibility.

Vision

With this articulated mission, the Diocese casts the following vision for our shared life, as a picture of the horizon toward which we journey together in the coming years:

In order to join in God’s mission in this time and place, the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia will be a household of congregations in which each parish will make known its blessings and challenges and desires of the heart, and diocesan leaders will respond tangibly through direct consultative services and building bridges between parishes and resources.

Guiding Principles

In order to enact this vision, the Diocese embraces a set of guiding principles for diocesan planning, decision-making, and life together:

• Effectiveness, fruitfulness, practicality. We will strive to take actions toward each other that will lead to real effects, actions that are fruitful as well as faithful, not merely empty rhetoric nor pointless complaining.
• Transparency. We will be open enough to say to one another when help is needed, and open to receive it.
• Value-exchange. We will recognize that people give their wealth, work, and wisdom to the church, and that they deserve to receive real value in exchange.
• Mutuality. We will model these values at all levels, from the diocese to the convocation to the congregation to relationships within congregations.
• Accountability. We will do what we say we will do, from the diocesan leadership to the congregations and from the congregations to the diocesan leadership, and we will agree to appropriate consequences for not following through.
• Interrelatedness. We will recognize that “the diocese” is all of us together, diocesan leadership and structures, congregations, and individuals, and that this interrelatedness is part of our very diocesan identity.
• Proactivity. We will be actively generous to each other, coming forward with offers of our gifts, resources, and best practices even before we are asked.
• Support. We will covenant with each other to be genuinely supportive, to hold each other up, to bear one another’s burdens, in the living-out of our mutual vision.

Objective

In view of the mission, vision, and guiding principles of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, we set the following objective for our life as a diocese in the years to come:

In order to sustain our participation in God’s mission in our time and place and circumstances, the Diocese of Southwestern Vir- ginia will align our revenues, expenses, and staffing in such a way as to provide direct consultative services and networked sharing of resources to our congregations, in order to support and challenge them toward congregational vitality and numerical growth, within the parameters of a faithful yet realistic projection of available resources.