A Conversation that Led to the 2024-25 Program Year’s New Theme:
To Be a Compassionate and Engaged Community of Faith!
On a June day, our staff team—Mark, Margaret, Micia, Min-Goo, and myself—gathered for the theme planning meeting in the Chapel. As you can see, there are quite a few of us with names that start with 'M' at Broad View! (Shelagh was on sabbatical leave, and she received full updates when she returned.)
Here, I’ve creatively adapted our 6-hour discussion into a conversation among 6 people. Please take a moment to read it!
M1 started the conversation in earnest, asking,
“What is important to us right now? What voices have we been hearing?”
M2: “What did we understand from the Visioning Process we undertook with Allison Rennie and the entire congregation last spring?”
M3: “Many groups and individuals have shown a lot of interest in what ‘progressiveness’ means as one of BVU's core values.”
M4: “Progressiveness can mean a lot of things, but it might not be entirely clear what exactly it entails. While we embrace progressive ideals like moving away from a literal interpretation of the Bible and celebrating diversity and radical love of God in theology, there’s also a risk that claiming to be progressive could create an ‘us vs. them’ dynamic, implying ‘they are not.’”
M5:“That’s right. I’d like to share a surprising experience I had while in the Millennials and Gen-X generations group. After discussing what progressiveness really means and what kind of journey we at BVU genuinely want and need to experience, Allison asked us to choose just one word or phrase from the current vision statement that resonated with us, and write it on a post-it note. Like the others, I spent 2-3 minutes looking over the visioning statement, and my heart kept going to ‘Compassion.’ I felt a bit silly and even wondered if I was the only one choosing that word, but I wrote ‘compassion’ on my post-it. Do you know what happened next? Out of the roughly 15 people there, almost all of them wrote down ‘compassion,’ a word that hadn’t even been mentioned during the discussion.”
M6: “The fact that we are currently drawn to the warmth and gentleness of compassion suggests that we yearn for a society and community built on compassion.”
M2: “This expresses our desire to continue growing as a brave congregation that, based on compassion, can understand and embrace differences without becoming detached, but rather engaging with them. Even with difficult social issues, we want to create room for conversation.”
M3: “Wait, our current Visioning Statement has an excellent phrase: ‘To be a Compassionate and Engaged Community of Faith.’”
Just as our hearts planted seeds in the spring that now bear fruit in the fall, we introduce to you the new theme: To Be a Compassionate and Engaged Community of Faith. We hope this theme guides us through a year of becoming a gentler, more compassionate, yet brave and bold congregation—one that does not shy away from difficult conversations and grows closer to one another.
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