11 adults gathered together at Whyte Ridge Community Centre on Saturday, Nov 25th from 1 until 4pm for relationship building and visioing. We began by doing some icebreakers, the best of which was selecting a household object from a table full of random objects, and explaining why you are like the object. Everyone seemed to have a good time and there was a lot of chatting among the people, which was a good sign. Many of them had never met before, and we were off to a good start.

We moved from that to an explanation of how we got to this point. I outlined the process of what had been done so far by the Presbytery and the New Church Development committee (NCDC). This was review for some, but not for others. I then asked, “what next?” and gave the following simple outline.

1) Begin with God (in many ways the work of the Presbytery and the NCDC have been to discern God’s will in starting a new Presbyterian Church in South West Winnipeg). I also emphasized that everything we do will be grounded in prayer, always looking for what God is doing first, rather than asking for God’s blessing on what we are doing.
2) Then, work with a Core Group. This is where we are now – building up a group of believer who will provide a leadership base for the Church
3)Next – the wider Community. Only once we are ready, will we do a wider promotion in our community. The core group will work together for several months to figure out what kind of Church God wants and then implement that plan. When that’s ready, we will launch in a wider sense. We hope to do this by Easter 2007.

We then had some converstation around the following questions:
1) What do you value most about Church?
2) What do you value most about your relationship with Christ?
3) What, in your experience, are the values that are most important in a Church?

The group were then asked to come up with their “wishes” that they had for the Church

This was a great discusion, and exceedingly helpful in further defining our Core Values. We went over the values stated in the document “What Kind of Church Will it be?” and foudn that the ideas lent support and insight into many of the values outline there. The ideas generated were later organized according to the values outlined in the document “What Kind of Church Will it be?” and distributed at the gathering on Sunday.

We also had a breif conversation around Stewardship and finances and answered a few questions that people had.

The modd on Saturday was upbeat and hopefull. There was a lot of excitement as we talked about the possibilities for minsitry in the Church. One of the things that was said is that Church should be fun, and I think we had a little bit of fun on Saturday too.