Planning

Once you have your Leadership Team in place, your next step is to work together to develop a purpose statement (theological reflection) and a considered, contextualized plan for your asset-based initiative.

First Meeting

Get started by calling your first team meeting. Determine who will lead the meeting – will it be the facilitator or another congregational or community leader? Your Rector or Vicar?

Use Gospel Based Discipleship and one of the guiding scriptures recommended in the section on Creating a Theological Grounding. This will help ground your conversation in the sacred and begin to create a bond among team members.

Establish Team ground rules and expectations and establish team leadership or committee roles. You may want to create a Covenant for expectations throughout the process. Brainstorm with the group and write it on something you can post every meeting. Items to include are expectations around:

• Honesty
• Authenticity
• Participation – meeting attendance and getting involved during meetings
• Sub-committee participation
• Timeliness
• Responsibilities
• Communication – transparency, no gossip
• Confidentiality (not secrecy…explain the difference between the two) We want to hold things in confidentiality when necessary, but we do not keep secrets. Secrets hold power, whereas confidentiality creates a safe space for people to explore and share.

Team Roles

At this first meeting you will want to consider leadership roles on the team and whether leadership will be elected by majority or consensus or whether they will be appointed. You may want to use one or two of the gifts assessments to facilitate a conversation based in the assets of team members and whose gifts may be best used in each capacity. Possible Team roles are:

Now you are ready to facilitate a conversation to determine what process you will use to create your theological statement and your plan.

• Can you accomplish everything via email (hint: probably not).
• Will a half-day or whole-day retreat work?
• How about an entire weekend?

Once you have decided upon format for planning, determine who will be in charge of planning and running the retreat or workshop.

• Will there be a subcommittee or one or two people be charged with this task?
• What is the timeframe for the meeting to take place? Within a couple of months?
• Discuss how you will introduce this asset-based approach to the community. Will you use case studies? A brief presentation? Videos?

Finally, you will need to put together a schedule for how you will organize your time during your retreat. This may be accomplished by the subcommittee apart from the wider team.