Purpose Changes

I'm back to blogging, after almost being gone a month. I was occupied with other matters.

(Yes, I now have a backlog of silly things to blog about. But this post is mostly serious. It's also about my ministry work: the math teaching has also been taking a lot of time as I improve my teaching by using the Starboard system and Moodle.)

During the past month P'nei Adonai has had a lot of internal change, which kept me very busy.

We were led by God to change our purpose statement items, which are also how we organize our congregation's ministries.

(If your purposes are "worship" and "prayer" but your committees are "building and grounds" and "finances", you'll wind up doing poorly at worship and prayer. Purposes and committees need to match.)

Now we have five purposes:

• Yirat Adonai (fear/awe of the Lord)
• Teshuvah (repentance)
• Ol Yeshua (discipling)
• Avodah (laboring for God)
• Mishpochah (family-like community)

It has been an interesting month. I do not know any other congregations with a "Fear of the Lord ministry" or a "Repentance ministry". We have had to prayerfully learn what those are, how to do them, and who should lead them.

Consider these questions:

• How does this ministry affect the weekly service?
• How does it affect special events? Which special events are centered on this purpose?
• How does this ministry help disciple congregants to be better at this purpose?
• What responsibilities resources does this ministry need to succeed?

Those questions have quite well-developed answers for those purposes/ministries which are common among congregations, such as "worship", "prayer" or "community service". How should we answer those questions for our five new purposes?

After a month, P'nei Adonai has some worthwhile answers. But I've been processing them for an entire month, quite thoroughly, and am not going to write about them here. For partial answers you can explore our new website.

(I also put together the new website. I had to learn some new CSS and Javascript, but am so far able to avoid Perl and other more complicated computer tricks.)