So this is my first foray into blogging. My intent for now is to create a place for members of Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbtyerian Church to engage in conversation about our six core values.
The list on which we will work comes from the day-long workshop with Denise Van Eck of Deep Shift on October 25, 2008, when about 30 members of the church attended.
You who were there will recall that by the end of the day we had whittled a fairly long list down to six. Then we took a bit of a running start at defining them. My understanding is that we want to come up with definitions that are clear, and simple.
Ideally we could summarize our definitions in two or three words. So that we will be able to say, "When BMWPC says 'love,' we mean X, Y, and Z." That kind of shorthand will help us stay focused.
While anyone is welcome to comment on the values, that intitial group will be invited explicitly to do so and share their thinking as we work toward agreed definitions of the six core values. It will be their agreement that will determine the final definitions.
A word about process. Our own Tesserae Project is meeting on Sunday, Nov. 23 to try to pick a date or two after Jan. 1, 2009, for a follow-up meeting. It's hard for me to imagine a great deal of time or energy during the holidays for such a meeting.
The purpose of the meeting will be to come up with our definitions. These on-line discussions will, I hope, help us begn to think through what we mean, and make our face-to-face time more productive.
If there are questions about any of this, please raise them. You can email me directly, but unless they're personal, I hope you'll post them on-line for all to see both questions and answers.
Thus the venture into cyberspace takes another step....
Grace and peace,
1 comment:
I guess that if I was asked to define learning (in 25 words or less) it'd be something like;
Opportunities to engaging information or experiences to extract meaning and relevancy that leaves behind change or growth.
Children go through a stage of development where they can rattle off the numbers between 1-25 in sequence (or the ten commandments in order) without attaching any value to a particular number. What makes 5 different from 6, or 4?
For me, knowing facts is not very satisfying. I need the experience of wrestling with 'it', throwing 'it' in the fire only to grab 'it' back and wrestle with 'it' some more. Only when I can finally attach some relevancy between the experience and whatever 'it' is, have I learned anything. And it generally leaves me with more questions than answers!
And so it goes....
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