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.