Cultivating a Stewarding Community offers a way for the judicatory to link arms with congregations to transform vision, and equip leaders, teams, and congregations for lives of overflowing gratitude and generosity. The church has been given the unique, redemptive vision of the "household of God." This is a powerful and needed alternative to the prevailing, toxic world views based on fear, accumulation, and greed.

CULTIVATING A STEWARDING COMMUNITY WILL –

• Equip leaders with biblical, theological, and practical resources for preaching, teaching, and cultivating their church.
• Facilitate congregational formation for lives of gratitude and generosity.
• Provide local planning support for the long-term stewardship cultivation in the congregation

• This pivotal seminar is intended for the judicatory: Judicatory staff, leaders, and teams join with pastors and key lay leaders. Groundwork is laid for a re-orientation in ways of thinking, perceiving, and behaving as a stewarding community in congregation and judicatory. The rich biblical understanding of stewardship is discovered afresh and its practical implications are explored. A range of resources are provided for pastors - for preaching, teaching, and cultivating the congregation. Assistance is given for forming a stewardship cultivation team to guide the re-orientation back home.
  
  
• Congregations are enlisted to enter into a stewardship cultivation process over the coming year.
  
  
• Each congregation sends a team with the pastor for two focused training events (described below).

• In this workshop congregation teams are introduced to a Bible study process for cultivating the congregation as a community of gratitude and generosity - a stewarding community. Teams receive practical help in planning for a congregation-wide formation process in the biblical understanding and practice of stewardship.

• In this workshop, congregation teams are equipped with concepts and tools for creating a 3-year stewardship cultivation strategy for their church. Their strategy will embed stewarding community vision and practices throughout the congregation.

• It is possible to promote participation in all three events as a whole. While these can be stand-alone events, the re-enforcement of learnings over time, and multiple congregation groups being engaged is key to congregational learning and renewal. The theological foundations logically flow into a process of cultivating not just the pastors, but the congregations. A local church stewardship team would benefit from the third event but would be even better equipped and supported if their pastor and congregation had engaged in the first two, and had already guided their congregation in the foundational bible study, in which they had also participated.
  
  
• Though an invitation to participate is to all pastors/churches across a judicatory, you might think in terms of a first “wave” or group of pastors/churches that actually say yes now. There may be many who wait to see if others engage in an innovation before they will consider participating. Keeping this dynamic in mind, suggests a basic strategy of asking some in the first “wave” to be coaches and resource persons to run the workshops for a second and even third “wave” or group of pastors/churches. This is a proven way of multiplying the payoff of a judicatory’s investment in training.
  
  
• Talk with your neighboring judicatory or ecumenical partners. Cultivating a Stewarding Community is a way to collaborate, foster partnership, and sharing costs.
  
  
• Contact with the Center’s staff – Ray Schulte, Dale Ziemer, Marianne Rhebergen. We are very interested to hear your interests and needs, and will be happy to explore scenarios of how to make this support work for you, and to answer your questions about costs.

The mission of the Center for Parish Development is to provide counsel and resources to facilitate the transformation of judicatory and congregations alike toward a stewarding community - a community of overflowing gratitude and generosity. The Center staff is eager to share its resources and experience honed over 40 years with churches across North America.

As you seek to support congregations through the renewal of vision and stewarding practices in your judicatory, let us be a partner with you.