Celebrating Our Progress

News August 19, 2019

Our vision for the Missouri Annual Conference is to relentlessly lead our churches to become outwardly focused and spiritually centered Christ followers. The primary ways in which the Conference seeks to live out this vision is through our three conference priorities —developing new missional leaders, creating new places for new people and providing a pathway out of poverty through literacy. This year at Annual Conference we celebrated our progress on the three Conference priorities that are changing and impacting lives in our churches and communities. The teams leading the Conference priorities have established new goals to lead us through 2019 and 2020.

New Missional Leaders
The goal is to identify 600 more new missional leaders of all ages by December 31, 2020. A missional leader is one who moves from meeting God to an active, growing and authentic faith in Jesus Christ; identifies as a leader and is mentored by another leader; provides leadership in their local church and/or beyond. The critical aspect of a new missional leader is that the leader identifies and has begun mentoring a new leader. The team encourages leaders to use the 5 Cups of Coffee resource on the action plan webpage. In the coming year, the team plans to release mentoring educational tools to help local churches in this act of discipleship.

New Places for New People
The goal is to increase the number of new people in new places from 2,500 to 3,500 by the end of 2020. A new place includes a minimum of a one new person who has not been involved in church for at least one year.

There are five kinds of new places: small group, recovery ministry, missional community, new worship service, or a new church or multi-site. Through district innovations teams, training opportunities will be provided to assist local churches in the discernment process for multiplying the kingdom through new places.

Pathway Out of Poverty through Literacy
The goal is to place 100,000 books in the hands of 100,000 students. The team celebrates with local churches across the Conference as stories about new church-school partnerships and deepening church-school relationships have been shared. With these existing partnerships and through new partnerships, the team seeks to achieve this God-sized goal. The team is committed to offering resources to local churches to support building church-school partnerships and offering innovative ideas for connecting with students to share books.

Our Conference priorities are crafted in such a way that, no matter the size of your church, you can help be a part of this vision as we seek to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Learn more about each of the priorities and what your church can do to join our work at www.moumethodist.org/actionplan. On the Action Plan Resource Hub found on the website, you will discover resources such as videos, webinars, books and tools to support your work.

Resources are constantly being added to the Resource Hub so visit the page again and again! I invite you to pray about how you can engage in the Conference priorities. I invite you to encourage your church to engage in the Conference priorities. Together we can make a difference in the lives of individuals in the communities across our Conference and beyond.