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Reconciliation Mission Sees A Bright New Future

April 13 , 2007 - Disciples News Service

The Reconciliation Mission Commission will bring a proposal to the upcoming Administrative Committee and General Board with new vision for a regionally based, more effectively networked ministry of reconciliation in the Christian Church (DOC). The proposal comes out of the work of a broad-based Evaluation Committee that has spent the last year understanding the history, interviewing key lay and clergy leaders at the local, regional and general levels, and preparing a report on their findings for the Commission.

People throughout the denomination have expressed a mixture of expectancy and anxiety about the future of Reconciliation Mission ever since last January when it became apparent that Reconciliation did not have the funding to sustain staff.  Last spring, the Reconciliation Mission Commission called into being an Evaluation Committee to observe where Reconciliation Mission is working and where it isn’t, as well as to seriously evaluate the funding crisis that had emerged from the denominationally mandated ministry’s exclusive reliance on its yearly offering.

Some of the recommendations that came out of the Evaluation Committee’s report included the following:

• Strengthening connections between regions so that Reconciliation Mission could function in a “cluster” model, allowing teams to work with each other and possibly even hire “cluster reconciliation staff” if they see that as a means of forwarding their ministry.
• Instituting a new practice of Reconciliation Mission distributing grants for general and institutional reconciliation projects while regions continue to distribute grants for congregational and regional reconciliation projects.
• Continuing the anti-racism trainings that so many have found helpful, but identifying multiple models for addressing systemic racism, recognizing that no one model will meet all needs.

Written by:  Sandhya Jha, Reconciliation Mission Commission, Co-Chair