Corinth’s Leadership Retreat is always (for me, anyway) a great time of reflection and direction as we look forward to the year ahead.  This year, however, the feedback from participants was particularly encouraging.  “The best ever,” said one person, returning to Consistory after a multi-year absence.

Each year we lose and add about a third of our lay leadership, since most of them serve for three-year terms.  In order to bring the newcomers on board with our congregational culture, we spent some time discussing the “core principles” of our church – “Core-inth Values,” we titled them.

What would you say are the most important principles of our church family?  These are the ones we identified –

·         Discipleship as a process

·         Owning and spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ

·         The centrality of worship

·         The priority of love

·         The Bible as our guidebook

·         Service over self

·         Distinguishing essentials and non-essentials

·         Humility

·         Mutual submission

Because of the final “Core-inth Value,” we also chose a congregational priority for 2010: “Submitting to the Holy Spirit.”  Our culture values control, not submission.   The Bible values sensitivity to the leading of the Spirit – which includes hearing his voice through our sisters and brothers.  So during 2010 we will seek to know what it means to submit to one another and to the Lord.

We also spent a good bit of the day in small groups discussing “Rethinking Corinth,” a proposal to change Corinth’s bylaws so that our organization might better reflect biblical principles and our Reformed heritage.  You will be hearing more about this during 2010.