Over the past year, members of our congregation have been taking part in activities to celebrate who we are and where we live, and to think about the congregation’s strengths and needs. The ‘Discovery’ process we are following is designed to help us go on to explore and understand better our roles and relationships as part of the local community, so that we can be active in reaching out to all our neighbors. In our first activity, we thought about what we valued about our congregation and what skills and talents we could contribute individually to our church community. Then, on maps of the parish, we identified the local places we visit often in our daily lives, and what we like or value about them. For our third activity we watched part of ‘It’s a Bug’s Life’, which is about how a colony of ants dominated by grasshoppers gradually works out how to take control of their own lives. We used ‘problem trees’ to observe how the ants and grasshoppers were behaving at the start (on the tree’s branches), and to work out what were the causes of the ants’ problems (on the tree’s roots). Then we noted how things had changed by the end of the story. This is a process we plan to use again in the future, in relation to our own community. Since then, we have established a small group of members to think how to gather the views of people in the local community. We would like to hear about how we can best connect with them, and support intergenerational, social activities they would find both helpful and supportive of their well-being and spiritual life. Join us on our journey of Discovery!

                                                                   

Discovery Team, Stockbridge Church

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