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ministry Highlights
Millenium Development Goals
Now here we are… America finds itself looking to its blues people again to provide vision to a nation with the blues. That is a source of hope. Yet hope is no guarantee. Real hope is grounded in a particularly messy struggle and it can be betrayed by naïve projections of a better future that ignore the necessity of doing the real work. So what we are talking about is hope on a tightrope. "Hope on a Tightrope" by Cornel West
Hope is belief in the “plausibility of the possible” as opposed to the “necessity of the probable.” (Moses Mamodines, 15th Century)
The Millenium Development Goals: Pilot Project (MDG) was born in late 2006 and was, at its inception, an effort to greet the messy struggle and real work of hope - to energize our diocesan household around the MDGs at an individual level. In the process, the MDG Leadership Team sought nothing less than spiritual transformation – the raising up and training of new parish leadership, the building up of relationships across congregational, geographic and generational divides, and the igniting of a sense of what’s possible if we act together as Christians in a broken world.
The model is simple: to train parish leadership teams to run successful campaigns of 0.7% individual giving (across the generations) in their congregation during Lent. The funds are collectively pooled within the congregation and together, through an intentional collective decision-making process the congregation decides where and how to invest the funds in the eradication of global poverty.
At the training the five-person leadership teams learn basic community organizing skills, project development (setting vision, goal, strategy, and tactics), a method for collaborative teamwork, decision-making and conflict management, and the essentials for developing relationships around common areas of interest in mission.
The central component of the project is the Public Narrative, a leadership art developed by Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an advisor to the MDG Pilot Project. Leadership team members learn the craft of giving an effective, motivating public narrative that invites parishioners to translate belief into action through participation in the MDGs, using a specific structure of expression: Story of Self (Why am I called to do something about global poverty), Story of Us (Why are we called as a faith community), Story of Now (What are we called to now)?
The first phase of the project had four participating congregations. Each congregation met its goal, raised up new leadership, and energized their parish around MDGs. Across four congregations 226 people pledged and over $52,000 was raised and invested in MDG initiatives. The next phase will run in Lent 2009. The early effort caught the attention of local and national Episcopal news venues, global poverty organizations, and was the instigator for the national Episcopal Public Narrative Project launched by the General Convention Office and the President of the House of Deputies.
