The 2020 Vision Team is continuing its work, trying to prepare a final version of its vision statement for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) – one it will present to the 2020 General Assembly in Baltimore, along for tools for the church to use in engaging the statement.
The 2018 General Assembly approved the interim report from the Vision Team – one including the Vision Team’s draft guiding statement, which says that “God calls the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to be Prayerful, Courageous, United, Serving, Alive,” with the first letters of those words spelling out the PC(USA) acronym.
The assembly added a comment, which says “we desire to hear explicit examples of what this would look like in different contexts and how to get there,” and “we would like to hear more inclusion of grace, joy and the Great Ends of the Church.”
The comment also says “we encourage the 2020 Vision Team to make the guiding statement more succinct.”
Since the assembly met in June, the 2020 Vision Team has had some changes both in leadership and membership. Its new co-moderators are Sabrina Slater, a newly-ordained minister from New York, and Salvador Gavaldá Corchado, a ruling elder from the Presbytery of San Juan, both of whom were part of the team from the beginning and took on new roles when the former co-moderators, Bernadette Coffee and Lisa Juica Perkins, stepped aside.
The Vision Team plans to hold an in-person meeting in Louisville Feb. 15-18 where it will try to finalize the statement it will present to the assembly and work on developing some tools that could be used with the statement, including curriculum materials for all ages; material to help Committees on Ministry or other leadership bodies develop their own vision statements; and resources that could be used for a session retreat.
The team is playing with other ideas as well, including ways to use art to present the material or perhaps music.
During its next conference call before the in-person meeting, the team will discuss feedback it’s received to its draft statement. And Slater said the team has money in its budget for communication – so it will strategize on ways, once the final statement is agreed upon, to get the word out broadly to the church that “this is what we have to offer,” as Slater put it.
Team member Joshua Andrzejewski, a minister from the Presbytery of the James, reminded the team that the final decision will rest with the assembly. “I don’t know what could hold a Presbyterian back from an amendment” once the 2020 assembly convenes, he said.
Once the team agrees on a final product, “we offer the work and discernment humbly to the body,” Slater said, knowing that “God is in control and the Holy Spirit moves as it wants.”
The team will prayerfully do its best, offer its work to the church, “give that up, and see what will happen next,” she said.
