Hi Elizabeth, sorry for this long delayed response. I can give you what is done in our classis. Our classical treasurer is part of our Finance Services Team, a classical committee. That team reviews with the treasurer monthly statement of accounts. One of its members is a retired controller in the private sector. That talent helps in simplifying the review of accounts. If I'm not mistaken, they meet once every two months. The Finance team then reports the latest review of accounts to our Classical Ministry Board (CMB) composed of leaders or reps form our various classical ministry teams. Overall, the Treasurer disburses classical funds strictly based on specific mandates by Classis or the CMB. I hope this helps!
Good idea. Might help readers to select areas of interest for them to post or respond to (other than about classis websites). Although they could always select the "New Forum Topic" button.
Hey Tim, thanks! Yes, I'm willing to break ground on this stated clerk-Network thing. With some hope and realizing that not all may have time to participate in this, let's see how this idea will pick up among the other 46 Stated Clerks and maybe a few others who may come as successors. (I will inform Dee Recker about this posting and ask her if she can inform the other SCs.)
So here goes my random thoughts and am open for comments/feedback, even help!...
- Classis Central CA decided last year to transition from a paper-based/snail-mail information sharing and communications setup to email and a functioning website. Classis saw the value of making classical records easily available, timely, and efficient. Being a pure DIY web-wannabe, I felt good about helping Classis on these. (Note: I have no formal tech training, just a patience in constructing stuff, sometimes inadvertently breaking them down!)
- Nothing fancy, but plainly functional and hopefully easy to navigate, we launched our new Classis website: www.classiscentralca.org. Almost free (if the many hours I spent on it are not monetized), this website got off the ground using FREE Google Sites. Even our domain name is free for one year which I registered months before at www.1and1.com.
- Right now though, I'm looking at our next generation website to use DRUPAL, an open source content management system. (My day job at UC Berkeley uses this.) For now, I think our website works and am still writing, tweaking some pages, and converting our classical records and posting them to the website. Our Classis was established in 1962. I have scanned and posted records from 1971 to date. Last batch to convert and post are those from 1962-1970. You can check these out at http://www.classiscentralca.org/classis_cmb/classis
- In the next 2 months, my goal is to complete our website. Functional, links established, information updated at least once a month, records kept up-to-date, and writing is accurate. In other words, a simple info sharing tool always available 24/7. Our other task alongside is to make Classis pastors, ministry associates, office-bearers, and church staff aware of it and to actually use it.
- Long term, my other goal is to make it one of the tools for community-building across our Classis. (Would meeting 2 -3 times per year in formal sessions strengthen community among 40+ organized and emerging churches, usually with almost the same attendees?) To this end, I've started encouraging our churches to contribute to our Stories of Grace (http://www.classiscentralca.org/stories-of-grace) and News & Photos (http://www.classiscentralca.org/news-photos). Will this catch on? I don't know. But we can certainly give it a try. Maybe we can come up with something else better. Before this, we didn't have any.
- One of the travails of email is to see your inbox being swamped by long email trails with spam sprinkled throughout! To prevent the Stated Clerk from adding to this nightmare, I've now started "eFriday SC" emails. If there are things to relay to our updated Classis email group list, they only go out every Friday. So everybody knows and can expect such to come on Fridays only.
- Two months after our website launched, I've sent out an online 'website user survey' using a free subscription on www.Zoomerang.com. Another quick and nearly-no-cost way to obtain people's experiences and critique about using the website. The plan is to be guided by their responses on how to move forward with the website. (After I close the survey on April 30, I'd share to whoever is interested that survey and results through a Zoomerang link.)
- Now, what you've read thus far are the nontraditional aspects of my duties as Stated Clerk. The other more traditional parts are writing Agendas/Minutes, safekeeping them, and maintaining communications with the Office of Synodical Services (Dee Recker).
- So far, it's been fun! Fellow SCs or future SCs, I look forward to hearing from your own experiences and perspectives. A key question I have for you: how have you been building 'community' across your Classis? Do you as Stated Clerk had something to do with that? Or somebody else? How exactly have you been doing it?
Hi Elizabeth, thanks again for your post here. SC (stated clerk) or not, you're most welcome since what you do in your Classis supplement well your SC's functioning.
In response to your questions... our current website launched last Feb 9 is the first one ever yet. Last year, my predecessor started a Yahoo Group as one way to transition from paper/snail-mail system to the web. Too early to say about degree of user-adoption but we're still on that stage when folks are just familiarizing themselves with the website as a communications tool. The important thing for now is that we have the website up, easily and publicly accessible. For the long term, the website could also serve as another community-building tool. For that, we've started the "Stories of Grace" and "News & Photos" pages. I'm thinking of another page that will regularly feature churches' newsletters as they're published. For these, I would solicit the help of church secretaries and/or whoever is doing their websites.
As for the website user survey, I'll email to you a copy. I'm closing it midnight tonight. So far, there's been a low turnout. But the few responses I received are substantial enough to guide our website's going forward.
P.S. I'll reply separately to your other post re privacy of agendas/minutes.
Rod, may our good Lord multiply your kind! Thanks for your seriously creative piece for such a great work to honor the best of God's servants in our midst. Upon reading your poem, am sure your counselor will give you a hefty discount!
Thanks and best wishes from a fellow ministry associate half your size,
fernando
In posting all of our classis agendas and minutes on our website, our overriding reason was to have them easily and publicly available for review, study, and general information. The other reason is to help reduce the consumption of paper. The two items not posted online are the detailed financial statements (but can be requested from the Treasurer and Classical Finance Ministry Team) and deliberations from executive sessions. Our records had been online since March 2010. Hope these help.
Hi Allen, good thing we're all under grace! No one with a more-than-half-year-delayed blog reply is late! Sorry for that long hyphenated compund word I just invented. I'm part of the Leadership Exchyange ministry working on renewing intentional disciplemaking to become a core part of our ministry culture in the CRC. Please expect to be contacted as I will be coming up with a list (and a network) of those who passionate practitioners of what you wrote on mentoring/disciplemaking. Next time though, can you reply a bit more swiftly? (smile)
Fernando del Rosario, a ministry associate and a disiciplemaking dude from Hayward CA
Hi Allen, it took me awhile to forgive your very late response to my posting. -:) Bottomline, I forgive you - and I hoipe you'd forgive me too for this equally late response. Good to know we're all under grace!
Allen, this is to alert you that I'll be sending you a separate email to request you to critique and contribute to a paper we at Leadership Exchange is currently drafting. It's a paper on Intentional Discipleship & Disciple-Making (IDDM) through a program we call 1:1 CHALLENGE. I will also be asking you and a few others with a passion for disciplemaking in the church to join a soon-to-be-formed advisory group for IDDM.
So as a "forgiven" Network Guide, Ihope to hear from you... sooner than later. Thanks!
Hi Allen, I can;'t remember for sure if I sent you the paper for which I requested your critique. You can read/download it here from Google Docs. Kindly confirm if you received this. Thanks! --fernando
Allen, actually let me have you read/critique draft #2 here. (You can disregard draft #1 I sent earlier.) On those highlighted sections, I would appreciate if you could help fill in with your own inputs. Thanks again.
Hi Sam (and Allen), in a few weeks, we will be completing one year of foundational gardening... hoping that a process of intentional discipleship/disciplemaking can take root in our suburban racially diverse garden/congregation. This process slowly took off with the full blessings and knowledge of the pastors and Council. (I replaced my previous contributor's photo/portrait with that of our first discipling group, aka DG-1.) Except for two, the group is composed of elders and deacons. To get started, we used Greg Ogden's Discipleship Essentials workbook. We slightly amended and wrote our own "My Discipleship Covenant" to which DG-1 members responded with increasing faithfulness, commitment and passion to help disciple others. Through the 8 months when we met Wednesday evenings, group members were convinced Biblical discipleship was not simply acquiring knowledge as important as it is BUT to more so obey and live out the essence of Matthew 28:18-20. In February, DG-1 members "graduated". To date, we have a second group of senior high schoolers plus two new adult members. DG-1 members were willing to help others in the discipleship process but only a few stepped up. With the few, we're trying to be faithful and diligent with what we need to do.
After almost a year of foundational work for our chruch's discipleship garden, I and my DG-1 friends had learned a lot. Most of these lessons are nothing fancy nor new. We simply returned to the elemental ways how Jesus made disciples. When we met as a small group or in our triads, we said we were at the feet of the Lord listening with intent and purpose. For my friends and myself, the 8-month process (which we firmly believe could have only been led and blessed by the Holy Spirit) brought us into a host of life and character changes, notably the passion to help others become disciples.
Having been myself discipled through the Navigators ministry in the Philippines, a heart and vision for intentional discipleship and disciplemaking had taken root, and had not been lost. For years, this was not the main thing for me. These days, may this be for me and for the others in our church. May the Master Dsiciplemaker be honored as we labor together!!
Sam, I'm looking forward to more in this forum. Thanks for your and Allen's work.
Hi Randy, your statement "Instead of casting a vision of how the CRC is going to make disciples..." caught my attention - and am very grateful you wrote it. I'm also thankful for the issues already raised here about the report before Synod 2011 for diversity in the CRC leadership. I agree with you that instead of us struggling over a quota and various ways of monitoring/achieving/administering such, I believe it would be more God-honoring and church-edifying if we focused our passion, unity, and resources towards intentionally making disciples of Jesus Christ in both majority- and minority-culture congregations and communities. In a nutshell, if we had more maturing and reproducing disciples of Jesus Christ in the CRC, we would have a large pool of Christlike servant leaders who could ably and humbly fill leadership roles in the CRC. For about three years, our Lord used His limited time on earth and worked out the strategy for building His Church: teach, train, motivate, rebuke, challenge, and assure a small group of very ordinary people turned disciples/servant-leaders. When those men and women got to intimately know the Lord's heart and purpose, they followed and committed to serve Him and His Church. The Lord made sure that they were first transformed and shaped in His likeness before the systems and procedures of governance and administration were set up for a growing number of 1st century believers.
I won't be surprised if any 'person of color' including those who already had served in classical and denominational tasks would feel uneasy (perhaps even negatively) to know they're selected to a leadership role ONLY because a quota needs to be filled - and not because of his/her heart, knowledge, and competencies. If we had droves of discipled servant-leaders of all colors, gender, and ages in the CRC family, a quota or any other well-meaninged and well-thought ways of institutionalizing diversity in leadership positions would be unnecessary. I pray that Synod 2011 and all of us in our beloved CRC will be enabled by the Holy Spirit to agree and follow how the Lord Jesus discipled and commissioned His start-up servant-leaders. They were a small start-up ragtag group, clearly imperfect and rejects in the world's standards. We know this now: Jesus discipled them. Their spiritual and leadership depth, maturity, unity, sacrifice, and pure commitment to Christ's purpose should jolt all of us from ideas and processes that tend to move us away from the Lord's simple yet powerful command: "Go and make disciples of all nations..."
Posted in: How do you provide oversight/supervision for your classis treasurer?
Hi Elizabeth, sorry for this long delayed response. I can give you what is done in our classis. Our classical treasurer is part of our Finance Services Team, a classical committee. That team reviews with the treasurer monthly statement of accounts. One of its members is a retired controller in the private sector. That talent helps in simplifying the review of accounts. If I'm not mistaken, they meet once every two months. The Finance team then reports the latest review of accounts to our Classical Ministry Board (CMB) composed of leaders or reps form our various classical ministry teams. Overall, the Treasurer disburses classical funds strictly based on specific mandates by Classis or the CMB. I hope this helps!
Posted in: Should We Create a Sub-Forum for Each Classis?
Good idea. Might help readers to select areas of interest for them to post or respond to (other than about classis websites). Although they could always select the "New Forum Topic" button.
Posted in: Calling All Stated Clerks
Hey Tim, thanks! Yes, I'm willing to break ground on this stated clerk-Network thing. With some hope and realizing that not all may have time to participate in this, let's see how this idea will pick up among the other 46 Stated Clerks and maybe a few others who may come as successors. (I will inform Dee Recker about this posting and ask her if she can inform the other SCs.)
So here goes my random thoughts and am open for comments/feedback, even help!...
- Classis Central CA decided last year to transition from a paper-based/snail-mail information sharing and communications setup to email and a functioning website. Classis saw the value of making classical records easily available, timely, and efficient. Being a pure DIY web-wannabe, I felt good about helping Classis on these. (Note: I have no formal tech training, just a patience in constructing stuff, sometimes inadvertently breaking them down!)
- Nothing fancy, but plainly functional and hopefully easy to navigate, we launched our new Classis website: www.classiscentralca.org. Almost free (if the many hours I spent on it are not monetized), this website got off the ground using FREE Google Sites. Even our domain name is free for one year which I registered months before at www.1and1.com.
- Right now though, I'm looking at our next generation website to use DRUPAL, an open source content management system. (My day job at UC Berkeley uses this.) For now, I think our website works and am still writing, tweaking some pages, and converting our classical records and posting them to the website. Our Classis was established in 1962. I have scanned and posted records from 1971 to date. Last batch to convert and post are those from 1962-1970. You can check these out at http://www.classiscentralca.org/classis_cmb/classis
- In the next 2 months, my goal is to complete our website. Functional, links established, information updated at least once a month, records kept up-to-date, and writing is accurate. In other words, a simple info sharing tool always available 24/7. Our other task alongside is to make Classis pastors, ministry associates, office-bearers, and church staff aware of it and to actually use it.
- Long term, my other goal is to make it one of the tools for community-building across our Classis. (Would meeting 2 -3 times per year in formal sessions strengthen community among 40+ organized and emerging churches, usually with almost the same attendees?) To this end, I've started encouraging our churches to contribute to our Stories of Grace (http://www.classiscentralca.org/stories-of-grace) and News & Photos (http://www.classiscentralca.org/news-photos). Will this catch on? I don't know. But we can certainly give it a try. Maybe we can come up with something else better. Before this, we didn't have any.
- One of the travails of email is to see your inbox being swamped by long email trails with spam sprinkled throughout! To prevent the Stated Clerk from adding to this nightmare, I've now started "eFriday SC" emails. If there are things to relay to our updated Classis email group list, they only go out every Friday. So everybody knows and can expect such to come on Fridays only.
- Two months after our website launched, I've sent out an online 'website user survey' using a free subscription on www.Zoomerang.com. Another quick and nearly-no-cost way to obtain people's experiences and critique about using the website. The plan is to be guided by their responses on how to move forward with the website. (After I close the survey on April 30, I'd share to whoever is interested that survey and results through a Zoomerang link.)
- Now, what you've read thus far are the nontraditional aspects of my duties as Stated Clerk. The other more traditional parts are writing Agendas/Minutes, safekeeping them, and maintaining communications with the Office of Synodical Services (Dee Recker).
- So far, it's been fun! Fellow SCs or future SCs, I look forward to hearing from your own experiences and perspectives. A key question I have for you: how have you been building 'community' across your Classis? Do you as Stated Clerk had something to do with that? Or somebody else? How exactly have you been doing it?
Posted in: Calling All Stated Clerks
Hi Elizabeth, thanks again for your post here. SC (stated clerk) or not, you're most welcome since what you do in your Classis supplement well your SC's functioning.
In response to your questions... our current website launched last Feb 9 is the first one ever yet. Last year, my predecessor started a Yahoo Group as one way to transition from paper/snail-mail system to the web. Too early to say about degree of user-adoption but we're still on that stage when folks are just familiarizing themselves with the website as a communications tool. The important thing for now is that we have the website up, easily and publicly accessible. For the long term, the website could also serve as another community-building tool. For that, we've started the "Stories of Grace" and "News & Photos" pages. I'm thinking of another page that will regularly feature churches' newsletters as they're published. For these, I would solicit the help of church secretaries and/or whoever is doing their websites.
As for the website user survey, I'll email to you a copy. I'm closing it midnight tonight. So far, there's been a low turnout. But the few responses I received are substantial enough to guide our website's going forward.
P.S. I'll reply separately to your other post re privacy of agendas/minutes.
Posted in: A Poet's View of Synod 2010
Rod, may our good Lord multiply your kind! Thanks for your seriously creative piece for such a great work to honor the best of God's servants in our midst. Upon reading your poem, am sure your counselor will give you a hefty discount!
Thanks and best wishes from a fellow ministry associate half your size,
fernando
Posted in: Calling All Stated Clerks
In posting all of our classis agendas and minutes on our website, our overriding reason was to have them easily and publicly available for review, study, and general information. The other reason is to help reduce the consumption of paper. The two items not posted online are the detailed financial statements (but can be requested from the Treasurer and Classical Finance Ministry Team) and deliberations from executive sessions. Our records had been online since March 2010. Hope these help.
Posted in: Discipleship Small Group
Hi Allen, good thing we're all under grace! No one with a more-than-half-year-delayed blog reply is late! Sorry for that long hyphenated compund word I just invented. I'm part of the Leadership Exchyange ministry working on renewing intentional disciplemaking to become a core part of our ministry culture in the CRC. Please expect to be contacted as I will be coming up with a list (and a network) of those who passionate practitioners of what you wrote on mentoring/disciplemaking. Next time though, can you reply a bit more swiftly? (smile)
Fernando del Rosario, a ministry associate and a disiciplemaking dude from Hayward CA
Posted in: Discipleship Small Group
Hi Allen, it took me awhile to forgive your very late response to my posting. -:) Bottomline, I forgive you - and I hoipe you'd forgive me too for this equally late response. Good to know we're all under grace!
Allen, this is to alert you that I'll be sending you a separate email to request you to critique and contribute to a paper we at Leadership Exchange is currently drafting. It's a paper on Intentional Discipleship & Disciple-Making (IDDM) through a program we call 1:1 CHALLENGE. I will also be asking you and a few others with a passion for disciplemaking in the church to join a soon-to-be-formed advisory group for IDDM.
So as a "forgiven" Network Guide, Ihope to hear from you... sooner than later. Thanks!
Fernando del Rosario (aka, livingcrc)
Posted in: Discipleship Small Group
Hi Allen, I can;'t remember for sure if I sent you the paper for which I requested your critique. You can read/download it here from Google Docs. Kindly confirm if you received this. Thanks! --fernando
Posted in: Discipleship Small Group
Allen, actually let me have you read/critique draft #2 here. (You can disregard draft #1 I sent earlier.) On those highlighted sections, I would appreciate if you could help fill in with your own inputs. Thanks again.
Posted in: Growing a Garden of Jesus Followers
Hi Sam (and Allen), in a few weeks, we will be completing one year of foundational gardening... hoping that a process of intentional discipleship/disciplemaking can take root in our suburban racially diverse garden/congregation. This process slowly took off with the full blessings and knowledge of the pastors and Council. (I replaced my previous contributor's photo/portrait with that of our first discipling group, aka DG-1.) Except for two, the group is composed of elders and deacons. To get started, we used Greg Ogden's Discipleship Essentials workbook. We slightly amended and wrote our own "My Discipleship Covenant" to which DG-1 members responded with increasing faithfulness, commitment and passion to help disciple others. Through the 8 months when we met Wednesday evenings, group members were convinced Biblical discipleship was not simply acquiring knowledge as important as it is BUT to more so obey and live out the essence of Matthew 28:18-20. In February, DG-1 members "graduated". To date, we have a second group of senior high schoolers plus two new adult members. DG-1 members were willing to help others in the discipleship process but only a few stepped up. With the few, we're trying to be faithful and diligent with what we need to do.
After almost a year of foundational work for our chruch's discipleship garden, I and my DG-1 friends had learned a lot. Most of these lessons are nothing fancy nor new. We simply returned to the elemental ways how Jesus made disciples. When we met as a small group or in our triads, we said we were at the feet of the Lord listening with intent and purpose. For my friends and myself, the 8-month process (which we firmly believe could have only been led and blessed by the Holy Spirit) brought us into a host of life and character changes, notably the passion to help others become disciples.
Having been myself discipled through the Navigators ministry in the Philippines, a heart and vision for intentional discipleship and disciplemaking had taken root, and had not been lost. For years, this was not the main thing for me. These days, may this be for me and for the others in our church. May the Master Dsiciplemaker be honored as we labor together!!
Sam, I'm looking forward to more in this forum. Thanks for your and Allen's work.
Posted in: People of Color in Leadership Positions
Hi Randy, your statement "Instead of casting a vision of how the CRC is going to make disciples..." caught my attention - and am very grateful you wrote it. I'm also thankful for the issues already raised here about the report before Synod 2011 for diversity in the CRC leadership. I agree with you that instead of us struggling over a quota and various ways of monitoring/achieving/administering such, I believe it would be more God-honoring and church-edifying if we focused our passion, unity, and resources towards intentionally making disciples of Jesus Christ in both majority- and minority-culture congregations and communities. In a nutshell, if we had more maturing and reproducing disciples of Jesus Christ in the CRC, we would have a large pool of Christlike servant leaders who could ably and humbly fill leadership roles in the CRC. For about three years, our Lord used His limited time on earth and worked out the strategy for building His Church: teach, train, motivate, rebuke, challenge, and assure a small group of very ordinary people turned disciples/servant-leaders. When those men and women got to intimately know the Lord's heart and purpose, they followed and committed to serve Him and His Church. The Lord made sure that they were first transformed and shaped in His likeness before the systems and procedures of governance and administration were set up for a growing number of 1st century believers.
I won't be surprised if any 'person of color' including those who already had served in classical and denominational tasks would feel uneasy (perhaps even negatively) to know they're selected to a leadership role ONLY because a quota needs to be filled - and not because of his/her heart, knowledge, and competencies. If we had droves of discipled servant-leaders of all colors, gender, and ages in the CRC family, a quota or any other well-meaninged and well-thought ways of institutionalizing diversity in leadership positions would be unnecessary. I pray that Synod 2011 and all of us in our beloved CRC will be enabled by the Holy Spirit to agree and follow how the Lord Jesus discipled and commissioned His start-up servant-leaders. They were a small start-up ragtag group, clearly imperfect and rejects in the world's standards. We know this now: Jesus discipled them. Their spiritual and leadership depth, maturity, unity, sacrifice, and pure commitment to Christ's purpose should jolt all of us from ideas and processes that tend to move us away from the Lord's simple yet powerful command: "Go and make disciples of all nations..."