Below are Beliefs, Values, Vision and Mission discerned by our faith community in Oct. 2005. These discerned beliefs, values, etc., are not meant to supplant or update the fruits of the discernment process in 2001 but rather to represent a new sense of our community, now, and a new sense of who we are in God and where God is leading us as a community. These are not static lists but are meant to be always open for discussion, dreaming, prayerful questioning, and will likely change again in coming years.
These beliefs, values, vision and mission are somewhat more attractively arrayed in a PDF file.
Bath UCC exists to provide light for the journey. God's love shines through our community, creating a source for spiritual renewal, compassionate generosity, healing and authentic connection.
Below are the convictions that comfort us, strengthen us, encourage us, support us, motivate us, revive us, and give us hope and faith through the worst circumstances:
Core values are the positive preferences or choices that congregational participants make in daily life. Recognizing that we express our values in many different ways, two major areas of action are central to our faith community: Spiritual Growth and Openness. Below are the values expressed by our community presented in the context of the journey.
Spiritual Growth: Through prayer, reflection & worship experiences, we connect with God to seek inner wholeness and essential truth. God helps us to trust and accept ourselves. As we learn and grow in faith, we feel joy knowing we are of God and that we are loved.
Openness: We are open to the Christ within. Valuing trust over fear we let go in faith, willing to be transformed. As we learn and grow in faith, we are open to God's call.
Spiritual Growth: We learn and grow through sharing our experiences of God & Christ in Life Circles and Mission Teams. We have a passion for peace and justice, which includes advocacy and activism. We encourage everyone to appreciate and joyously celebrate God's creation.
Openness: We are open to all seekers and we live out our open and affirming covenant. We foster an environment that encourages creativity and celebration. We explore possibility, letting go in trust and faith, to expand our experience of community beyond these walls.
Spiritual Growth: We value spiritual friendships where we are accepted, respected, and supported. We encourage one another in a spirit of honesty, respect, and compassion. We help others and we are healed. We intentionally share the experience of our community in a way that others would want to become involved.
Openness: We honor the Christ in one another and together we honor the Christ in all creation. Fortitude to withstand difficult times comes from accepting the support of faith friends. Together, we live faithfully, full of hope and possibility.
Or, how we arrived at our values, beliefs, vision, and mission; and, 2001 discernment process and outcome.
At its best a congregation holds knowing and doing God's will as its highest value. That church subordinates all lesser values: economics, expediency, efficiency, ego domination, coveted tradition, politics, and so forth. It knows itself to be an extension of God's will upon the earth, and it acts that way. This church will be known as a Prayerful Discernment Church, because only through prayerful discernment can it be true to its calling. -- Danny Morris
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God -- what is good and acceptable and perfect. -- Romans 12:2, NRSV
In 2001, Bath UCC, seeking as a congregation to be transformed by God, began a process of discernment based on guidelines developed by Thomas Bandy and Bill Easum. In a period of 18 months, through many congregational exercises and conversations, and with regular prayer support, we came to understand and articulate our core values, which we work to model in daily living; our bedrock beliefs, those deeply held convictions we turn to in times of trouble; our motivating biblical vision, which challenges and motivates us to focus on God; and our key mission, which we hope captures the public's imagination and motivates true discipleship.
The beliefs, values, vision and mission we discerned as a community in 2001-2002 are below. The NEW beliefs, values, vision and mission -- discerned in Oct. 2005 -- are HERE (pdf file).
Thomas Bandy's essay 'Discerning the Spirit: Distinguishing Between Authentic Calls and Destructive Addictions' is a good starting point for thinking about discerning God's will for his disciples.
Thomas Bandy explains 'core value' this way: A core value is the positive preference or choice that your congregational participants make, both spontaneously and daringly, in daily living
For more on core values, see his article online titled 'What on Earth Is a Core Value ... and Why Do I Need One?'.
The values of Bath UCC are: Love, Creativity, Faith, Trust, Joy, Spirituality, Healing, and Inclusivity.
The faith community discerned these eight core values and associates the following values with them, to clarify our sense of each core value and to reflect the focusing and synthesizing process we went through:
In addition, in the process of discerning our core values, the faith community also came to recognise that we also have these self-defeating values that we tend to fall back into in times of stress:
Bedrock beliefs are those convictions that comfort us, strengthen us, encourage us, support us, motivate us, revive us, and give us hope and faith through the worst circumstances.
The bedrock beliefs of Bath UCC are:
Thomas Bandy's essay 'How To Be Caught By A Biblical Vision' describes the process of receiving a congregational vision. Key points are:
By far the most challenging step of the process, discerning our Motivating Vision occupied us from February through September 2002. The key movement was letting go of the habit of naming what we see as our vision for the community, and adopting instead the faithful, risky, and poetic process of seeking God’s vision for us. We sought this vision in worship, in our individual lives, and in prayer teams sent into the community to listen for yearnings and to pray for visions. Then, because visions come only to individuals, and survive only by being shared, we were challenged to synthesize a shared community vision from the approximately thirty visions that God revealed to individuals. At our Vision Party in September, we used music, visual art, conversation, sacred stories, and prayer to discern the following vision, which lives as an experience in our hearts: Connecting All, the Open Circle Shines with God's Love.
The final step came more quickly, as we integrated the Core Values, Bedrock Beliefs, and Motivating Vision, along with hundreds of responses to the question, "What is it about our experience of Jesus that our community cannot live without?" The mission of Bath UCC, which we expect to inspire people to radical discipleship, is:
To Reach Out to All People, Risking Everything, for the Experience of God's Love.