Greece UMC Vision Team

Before SLI, Greece United Methodist Church had been in a slow, steady decline. While the church has faced many challenges that come with slow decline. The biggest challenge that the church faced was a lack of purpose and vision, and a void in leadership as many key leaders had either passed on or moved. When I was appointed as the pastor to Greece UMC, I immediately began to employ SLI principles, and eventually started the vision team, which later became the team that I worked with through the coach training process. In the year that we have been functioning as a team, we have reset the mission of the church, have identified and lifted up spiritual leaders, and have begun to shift the culture at Greece UMC. We are now moving into a time where ministry experiments are being planned with deployment of those experiments set for the fall of 2023. People in the church are beginning to feel new energy and hope that the church can grow and thrive. The church first began to encounter SLI as soon as I began my appointment, they didn’t know it at that time, but having been a part of a learning cohort in the previous year, I brought much of what I had learned into this new ministry. People seem to engage well with the L3 model, and loving, learning, and leading are a part of every meeting that I facilitate (and many that are facilitated by others). When the vision team was formed, the plan was to re-engage ministry for the sake of the Gospel – this is an ongoing plan, which has moved us through team building, coach training, and now into implementation. It is our hope to continue living into our calling as we adaptively work to create ministry experiments and reflect, adjust, and do with every experiment we try. As the vision team engages the entire congregation and community in these experiments, we hope and expect to see spiritual and numerical growth.