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| Woodmont UCC, Milford |
by Rev. Paige Besse-Rankin and Bruce Barrett
I remember my first “Ugly Tie Retreat.” Kent Siladi, renowned bold tie aficionado, had one clear theme: “Committee Meetings are the Life Blood of a Church; Thou Shalt Not Make Them Boring! Now, everybody dance.”
At Woodmont UCC, a seemingly mundane task of redecorating hallways and bathrooms became a model of creatively living out our mission. Our Good News Team - focused on church growth and evangelism - first impressions for visitors and community members. In our building, we have almost a dozen community groups coming in each week for meetings with around 200 folks coming through the building for non-church events. What was our facility saying to those folks about who we are and what we are about as a faith community?
Picture a dirty grey narrow hallway with florescent lights, a drop ceiling, and Sunday school classroom doors on either side. Our sanctuary is about 100 feet down this hallway. It wasn’t awful, but it didn’t exactly welcome or inspire the stranger. Nobody danced when they saw our hallway! And so the Good News committee wanted to change the hallway décor, and (this is the important part) the church saw our enthusiasm, and let us go for it!
As we talked about how to communicate our mission to people coming into our building, we looked to our church vision process for the priorities in our life together - the things that we center our mission about: joyful fellowship, meaningful worship, faith for our children and youth, helping adults grow in their discipleship, caring for those beyond our church through outreach and justice work, providing pastoral care, and being a welcoming community attracting new people. These things are at the heart of our sense of what God is calling to in our particular setting. This is our mission in the widest sense - supporting a faith life that journeys inward and outward.
As part of the redecorating of the halls, we asked an artist in our congregation to create images on each of these themes. These became the center of new displays in the halls - surrounded by photos and explanations of our programs and missions. But they did more than that, because even as they communicated to visitors what we are about, they also grounded us as a community on who it is God is calling us to be. These works of art have become central images in church publications and reinforced the lively energy and creativity around our purpose and mission.
For the Good News team, the halls symbolize the larger sense we have in our work with the Stillspeaking Initiative of joyfully proclaiming God’s good news out into our community - of claiming our sense that our church is a gift for each of us and that we want to share that gift with others. At the heart of that gift is not so much about patting ourselves on the backs, about saying “Look what a great church we are”, as naming and claiming the ways we see God working in our midst and through us in the world.
We had 10 new members join our church last month. We had 32 folks at our Family Retreat to Silver Lake. Not because of the hallways, but because a spirit of joyful creativity attracts and builds this church. The labyrinth committee is huge, a new Justice Team has started, we voted to be open and affirming, our newly designated „name tag lady‰ is a real hit, and the dance goes on. As Rev. Paige tells each new member, “we know that when you join us, we will change. And we welcome your ideas, your talent, and your membership in us.” With the Spirit of God in the lead, everybody dances!
Rev. Paige Besse-Rankin is Pastor of Woodmont UCC in Milford. Bruce Barrett is a member of the congregation.
