By the time most of you read this article the Ridder Church Renewal (RCR) Team will have returned from our first workshop in Sioux Falls. We will have three more of these workshops in the next 18 months. Although I have briefly shared about the RCR process at the congregational meeting, I’d like to share a little bit more about it.
Since the Consistory consented to engage the RCR process, I have often referred to “God’s preferred future for American Reformed Church”—God’s preferred future and the abundant life are one in the same. According to the RCR process, God’s preferred future for us includes “faithful and fruitful missional living demonstrated personally and corporately.” So basically, working in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, the Ridder team will help implement a discipleship strategy that is focused on equipping us to experience more of the abundant life.
Establishing and building on four core values will provide a proper seedbed for the gospel to take root. The four core values are integrity, authenticity, courage, and love. Integrity is defined as keeping and honoring your word—doing what you say you will do, when you say you would do it, in the manner it was to be done. Authenticity is bringing all of what you know to all of what you know of God—authenticity is saying “what is so” regardless of fear or shame. Courage is the ability to engage in crucial conversations and then love is seeing, caring, and acting for the good of another.
In addition to living into those four core values, we will work to develop five skill sets. We will develop a culture of disciple-making that follows Jesus’ cycle of discipleship in that he first introduced his disciples to new truths about living in the kingdom of God, and then he sent them out to practice what they learned, which was followed by a time of reflection in community with one another of all they had seen and done.
We will help create an awareness of how chronic anxiety in our congregation hinders us from radically following Christ in mission and how we can do so in spite of the pressure to do otherwise.
Sharing a compelling vision of the abundant life Jesus came to bring, we will embrace the creative tension between conflict and progress.
High performance teams will seek to listen to the Holy Spirit and engage Christ’s kingdom mission for the purpose of bearing fruit.
And we will seek to understand the components of congregational system and how to distinguish operational from adaptive leadership.
While all of this may sound foreign and complicated, basically it’s what we see being lived out between Jesus and his Father, his family, his disciples, and those he encountered along his journey.
Members of the RCR Team are George A. Bonnema, Randy Sasker, Dave Sandbulte, Angie Fick, Tammy Johnson, Vicki Altena, Erin Jacobsma, Becky Ossefort, Cory Grimm and myself.
I am excited to see how God will use these new ways of thinking and being as they are lived out in our community. May it never be said that we would settle for less than what God has planned for us simply because we were ignorant of how we could experience more of the abundant life. If you would like to know more about the RCR process, feel free to visit with one of the team members, I’m sure they would be excited to share more of what they are discovering about God’s preferred future for ARC.
Thy kingdom come, Mike Altena