Homework for 2024 Annual Meeting

Your homework assignment has two parts.

(1) Respond to our elders’ belief that the LORD is leading us to meal-based hospitality.

This belief has been years-in-the-making. At our February 29, 2020 meeting (a lifetime ago!), meal-based hospitality was a recurring theme. (I remember Frank Guerra mentioning regularly making soup for his kids’ friends and Andrea excited about a “neighborhood living room.”) Our return to in-person worship after the pandemic made me (Zack) and others realize how central our “fellowship time” is to who we are as a church. We hosted a luncheon for our DSBI neighbors across the street. Our deepening involvement with NEAT (Neighbors Eating All Together), its growth, and its “opening up” Arlington for communal meals has been a central outreach in recent years—and has helped us, I think, learn a lot about publicizing and serving meals! Thus, we offered this vision at our churchwide meeting on February 25, 2023. More recently, Steph Morin’s testimony this summer about her church’s new weekly dinners inspired us, as did our recent lunch with St. Paul’s Ugandan church.

Behind the scenes, we have been researching various options, seeking to overcome various obstacles, and trying to find a concrete iteration of this hope for meal-based hospitality. (Zack will share many of these details at our annual meeting.)

In the meantime, it would be helpful for you to answer questions #1 and #2 below.

(2) Respond to the possibility that our building might house various projects that help advance God’s Kingdom in our neighborhood.

The day after our most recent elders’ meeting, Zack received an email from the Parish Collective (the group sponsoring the two conferences he attended in recent years, one with Henry and one with Rich). It detailed how a church that is similar in ours in uncanny ways has discovered their own next chapter in fashioning their empty building into a sort of “community center.”

As elders, we have struggled to think about this vision. On the one hand, we don’t want to become merely commercial landlords. On the other, allowing our space to be leased for Kingdom purposes could be important. What, exactly, would this look like?

Please read this article (link here) and, after prayerful reflection, answer questions #3 and #4 below.

Name

First Name

Last Name

1. Do you agree with this discernment by our elders that meal-based hospitality should be a/the focus for our church’s next chapter?

2. What thoughts do you have about this? Feel free to share your hopes for your own involvement, whom we could/should serve, where/how this would occur, etc.

3. Does something like what you read about Brooke Road UMC strike you as a future for Covenant Church?

4. If so, what do you envision in our context? Feel free to share the types of groups you envision leasing the space, how we could create a culture/partnerships, etc.