The Vision Team, composed of the session plus a Table representative, had our second meeting last Saturday, August 12th. We spent the day thinking about and discussing our unique circumstances.

We started with our Local Predicament. We analyzed all sorts of things that will be relevant to how we go about reaching the lost people of Mooresville: traffic hindrances, financial struggles, marriage strains, COVID-created childcare and educational shortfalls, hunger, homelessness, and even things like the many new apartment complexes that have been built footsteps away from our property. (This is only a partial list.)

After we looked externally, we shifted our focus internally to the Collective Potential of our church community. We analyzed our spiritual giftedness and many things that are notable about the people God has collected to Centre Church. We are a congregation of faith – that’s the gift that was most prevalent among us. We will all certainly need to capitalize on that faith as we move forward because preserving and strengthening our unity is a major priority, and that’s a God-sized job. The way Centre Church relies on the Bible and consistently seeks God through prayer were community-wide strengths that we know will continue to serve us well.

Next, we considered our Apostolic Esprit (which is the missional passions of our leaders.) Leaders expressed a strong drive to boldly share the Good News of Christ in ways that will be received. We allowed our imaginations to run off for a while and dreamed of community gardens, vegetable canning, youth sports leagues, a bathroom/shower facility to serve the homeless, a series of lunch and learn lectures covering the felt needs of the surrounding neighborhoods, and even dog obedience training. (This is only a partial list.) The point of the exercise was to acknowledge how we could uniquely make a difference for God. (These aren’t plans – just random ideas).

Finally, we thought through the areas of overlap to derive a sense of our foundational Kingdom Concept. We whittled down the vast collection of important points we’d spent the day generating, and considered a variety of words we thought could characterize what we came to understand. We settled on “Renewal.”

Throughout the day, there was incredible agreement across our wide-range of perspectives – we were pleasantly surprised by how much common ground already existed. We had honest and frank conversations where we engaged authentically without animus or defensiveness. We worked together graciously and listened well. There were moments where we were overwhelmed, but those moments were outweighed by our shared laughter and our group desire to get this right.

We intend the results of our work to support and inspire a thriving, healthy, gospel community in our future of renewal.