It was neat to see each of us participate and contribute to the discussion. And while our backgrounds are quite diverse, we span a range of ages and our approach to ministry sometimes differ, we were uniquely unified throughout the meeting. It was an exercise I thoroughly enjoyed.
As I write this, eight months later, it's been fun to recollect to that first meeting and especially to look at our original worksheets.
With prayer interspersed in the interim, we reconvened several times after that initial meeting to see if we were comfortable with our work and the direction we were headed. Pastor Scott then shared it with the staff for comment and reaction and then the Elders. Having received very constructive feedback, but limited negative reaction, we started preparing for the February message series.
The irony of that first meeting is that it wasn't until I started composing this post that I realized that in addition to the bottled water, soda and pretzels that we were munching on during the all day meeting, there were also M&M's on the table. None of us realized it at the time that M&M's would come to the forefront several months later.