Have you asked your liaison staff person if there will be any updates to the church's mission, vision, and core values? I asked our liaison two weeks ago. He emailed me the updated edition. He asked me not to share it with anyone until it is introduced to the church on August 1. So, I am preparing to meet with our Enrichment Center Team to rethink our Enrichment Center mission and vision statements as well as identifying ways the Enrichment Center will help the church carry out the mission and accomplish the vision for 2021-2022. We will use a chart worksheet as we plan our 2021-2022 actions. Our team meeting will take place after our pastor introduces our revised church mission and vision statements.
No matter the size of our churches, libraries, and teams, we all need to embrace this alignment action. All of our pastors and church staff members need to see our interest and willingness to participate in carrying out the mission and vision strategies of the church. Be creative and have fun with the ideas God gives you.
How do you lead the library team to plan the new church year? Most churches have a time in the Fall when the programs start a new year as well as a different time when the budget starts a new year. While other churches do both on the same date. My church starts the budget in January so budget planning takes place in August. That means the alignment plans to the revised mission and vision will also be budget planning. BTW, the ministry budget form we fill out for the Finance Committee requires us to show how our requested budget items will align with the mission and vision for the church.
How does your church's library team plan together? How are you planning to align with the church's vision and mission this year?
Replies
Thanks, Robbi! Something I learned last year in a conference that had a church library team plus their church staff liason person with them in the session. The library team leader expressed a lack of communication with the church staff. She was honest in saying to the liason person that she thought the church staff people did not want to work with the library even though she constantly offered to help. He responded in a way that stunned her and her team and me: "We don't know what to ask you to do in the way of help. We need your suggestions of ways the library team can help us." Must admit, lots of hugs followed that conversation.
That is why we had our planning session last week to help us put together ways that our team can assist the church staff. But, we are now processing these ideas on the chart which means we will run each idea through the question: How can the Enichment Center equip people to love, grow, serve go? Some of these ideas fall in the normal church library promotion category so we will be rearranging the ideas a bit. I'll follow up when we get this processing done.
Keep in mind your pastor and church staff have the mindset that the mission and vission belongs to everyone in the church. That has been made clear by our pastor and staff that each of us are to love, grow, serve, go. They see themselves as helping each church member love, grow, serve, go. Not us helping them love, grow, serve. go. How will your church's library team equip people to carry out the church's mission and vision? Think of what you already do such as book clubs, adding new items to the catalog, etc. that can align to the mission and vision. The toolkit idea might be a new thing to connect with the church staff.
This is a very good point, Morlee. And very relevant for my Resource Center. Our church just went through a major overhaul of staff and somewhat of an overhaul in the vision of the church.
I will definitely offer our leaders the opportunity to work with the Resource Center to fulfill this vision.
Thanks for bring this up.
This past Wednesday, August 4, 2021, our Enrichment Team met for the first time in more than a year due to COVID. A couple of us have kept things going, but the rest of our team is now ready to start serving together again. There are 9 of us on the team. Only 1 could not be with us due to a family trip.
We started our meeting with a review of a new team organization which we have not done before. I had them fill out a Google Form a couple of weeks ago to choose what types of things each of them would like to do during the current year. I used that to organize ourselves. See attached. I followed up the meeting with an email to each sub-team to discuss their assignments.
We spent the rest of our time creating our plans for 2021-2022. I had a handout for them that presented the updated church mission and vision which was launched on August 1. The second page had an updated edition of the Enrichment Center description in the context of the new church vision and mission. The third page was a worsheet with four columns for love, grow, serve, go. The eight of us paired off with each pair picking love, grow, serve, or go. They had 40 minutes to create actions we would consider to answer the question: How will we (the EC team) equip the church to love, grow, serve, and go? Each su -team found a place near our meeting room to think through our assignments. Then we returned to the room as each team wrote their suggestions on a large white board chart. Each sub-team led us in a discussion about their recommendations. Great first start! We closed our time together with a pray time asking God to guide us to what He wants us to do. We are now processing the actions through email.
See attachments. The ideation took place from 4:45 to 6:45 PM. As we met in pairs, we ate BBQ sandwiches. Standing in line for the sandwiches gave us a great time of fellowship.
EC Team Organization
FHBC Vision, Mission, Strategy 2021 2022 0521
The Enrichment Center Description 007292021
Idea Starters from Other Church Libraries
EC 2021 2022 Strategy working draft ONE