Janesville, Wisconsin
2022
To promote unity and diversity in local Seventh Day Baptist congregations by gathering worship leaders to discern the transcultural, contextual, cross-cultural, and counter-culture nature of worship as they worship together in diverse ways.
Summarize your grant project and how it will address a need in your worshiping community.
To promote unity and diversity within local congregations as well as our network of churches as a whole by gathering worship leaders to discern the transcultural, contextual, cross-cultural, and counter-culture nature of worship as they worship together in diverse ways. We will build deep and wide interaction within and between our churches through corporate worship, intentionally acknowledging potential dividing lines of geography, rural/urban, age, and ethnicity.
What two questions might you ask about worship in the coming year that will generate theological reflection and shape your project?
- a) What are transcultural, contextual, cross-cultural, and counter-cultural elements of worship in participating local congregations and how are these elements reflected within our network of churches as a whole?
- b) How can our network of churches better facilitate deep and wide interaction within and between our churches through corporate worship that is fully engaging, community wide, and reflective of our distinctives?
How will your project impact the worship life and habits of the congregation?
As a network of churches, we will be able to name and celebrate the transcultural elements of our corporate worship while appreciating the diverse contextual, cross-cultural, and counter-cultural elements of our local
worship. As churches, we will begin the equipping process of intentional reflection on worship to move us deeper and wider. We will begin the process of full community building via worship. Our Conference of Churches will better equip individual churches to grow into a community in which all worshipers are active and engaged. The Conference will also be intentional to bridge the gap between churches that specifically (though largely unintentionally) flows from differences of geography, rural/urban, age, and ethnicity.
What might be your greatest challenges (or challenging opportunities)?
Logistics and time commitment of volunteers. There are 8 participating churches and a total of 16 participants from geographically distant churches. We will be gathering at 3 different locations throughout the country. For the purpose of the project, these components are necessary, but they create a significant challenge in regard to logistics of travel and consistently getting volunteers to participate across the year. This is the opportunity though--this has simply not happened organically.
What do you hope to learn from the Grants Event and other grant recipients?
How other project directors keep their teams motivated and on task in regard to grant execution. I hope to learn about worship through interaction and soaking in the other projects that are underway. Given that this project is focused on elements of diversity, the Grants Event and interaction with other grant recipients is a wonderful component to facilitate that.