April 3rd, 2008 - RIC Meeting Notes

We started the meeting with updates on the March action items. Some were complete and others were no longer needed (creating Congregational list by Zip Code).

This is what was proposed:

Invite Christian to come as soon as possible to talk (late April, early May). We felt he could navigate the talk to focus on welcome and not make ordination central. If discussion moves to this we do not need to discourage it either.

Host RIC invitational event(s) where food and stories around GLBT, friends and family welcome are shared. Toni and Mary will contact people who could share their stories about Creator welcome either directly at the event or through us (the story would be told without the details that would link it to the individual). Targeting this for May. There are some great resources at LCNA on this as well who have experience telling their stories at these kind of events.

Kick off a collaborative effort to create our Affirmation of Welcome during an Adult Education hour (ask Pastor Dayle when would be a good Sunday for this). Target for event would be late April / May (after presentation to Creator council).

Invite congregation to participate in creating our Affirmation of Welcome. The invitation would be advertised in the narthex, put in the newsletter and bulletin and sent out by email. The idea is that everyone can know they are encouraged to contribute. Their contributions can be verbal, written, over the web, or brainstormed in meetings set up for that purpose.

Family "movie night" where we would show Babette's Feast. This would be in late June/early July just before kickoff of the summer BBQ/Bible study series.

Suggest the theme of this year’s Bible Study be Hospitality and that the format be in keeping with our themed Summer Bible Studies of the past few years. Focus individual events to the last part of Creator’s initial Charter / Mission statement about Tolerance, Inclusiveness and Unity. Ideally, hospitality to others who need to be explicitly welcomed would play a part in the discussion – immigrants, divorced – single, those in different social statuses, etc… Team suggests that this not be tied to RIC directly.

We went over our Year of Discernment plan. Besides what is outlined above the highlights for presentation to the council would be:

Completion of a draft Affirmation of Welcome in August.
Send out a survey, encouraging as much feedback as possible, on how Creator embraces the draft Affirmation. This gives us a preliminary indication of how the vote would go in January. If changes become necessary they will occur in October, November and December.