Massachusetts Conference United Church of Christ

Nurturing local church vitality and the covenant among our churches

Highlights of Board of Directors Meeting

March 23 - 24, 2007   Framingham, MA

The Listening Process

At our 2-day retreat on March 23-24, the Board was delighted to receive the final report of the Conference-wide data elicited from the Listening Process Steering Committee. The input was immensely helpful in the attempt to begin discerning the issues most vital to our restructuring – or “reforming,” as one member put it. The Board is indebted to all those serving on the Steering Committee for not only a job well done through countless hours of intense work, but for their incisive interpretation of the major concerns and hopes of the Conference as expressed through those who participated in the Listening Sessions. Please visit the Conference website at www.macucc.org/news/listening.htm to see the final report.

As the Board began its discussion and discernment, we scoured all the input taken from that report, and combined it with considerable input from Conference staff, information gathered from other Conferences and middle judicatories that have gone through similar processes, and the expertise of Gil Rendle from the Alban Institute and other authorities on restructure and reformative action within church visionary life and governance. The Board is actively attempting to take as broad a view as possible, in order to exercise leadership with both confidence and integrity, given the scope of impact and consequence on all the Conference. We spent most of weekend discussing what the core values and functions of the Conference are, and began prayerfully discerning how to most effectively address and be faithful to them.

Final recommendations will be presented and decisions discussed by the Board at our May 5 th meeting, with the intention of making our first-draft recommendation of restructure to the Conference at the Annual Meeting on June 22 in Hartford, CT.

…And a Bittersweet Note

It is with mixed emotions that we are bidding a congratulatory but sad good-bye to Mike Penn-Strah, with gratitude for five years of exemplary service to the Conference as Associate Conference Minister. As Minister and President Jim Antal says, “…Mike’s enormous gifts, his tireless commitment to the local churches, their pastors, the Associations, and the Conference… [his] boundless energy and enthusiasm for all kinds of ministry, has made him an exemplary Associate Conference Minister, as has his fearless resolve and commitment to God’s prophetic call to do new things…This, along with his strength and compassion, has made him a colleague we all treasure.”

Several options are being considered for serving the churches and clergy in the Northeast part of the state, as well as the other functions he carried out on Association boards and committees – not the least of which is his work with Interim ministers and churches in transition – in order to respond to Mike’s absence. Our response willl be developed in the context of the Conference-wide transition in which we’re engaged, and will be informed by the listening process just completed. 

Our prayers and bittersweet but enthusiastic support go with Mike.

A list of members of the Board of Directors and their local churches, with hyperlinks to their email addresses, may be found at http://www.macucc.org/contact/directors.htm.