Who Is Our Church?

Imagining Congregational Identity

Janet R. Cawley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781566997027
• Topic: Theology & Religion

After congregations have considered their history, added up all the statistics, and tried to be honest about their core values, the question still remains: "Who are we, really?" Author Janet Cawley offers a creative, engaging, and faithful way to answer just that question. Cawley demonstrates how to use a congregation's knowledge of itself to construct a metaphor of the congregation as a person and then draw on theat metaphor to generate options for future mission. Cawley makes the case that congregations with a clear, well-articulated identity-those that know, accept, and love who they are-can be flexible and respond to change and new initiatives from the Holy Spirit with boldness because their basic sense of themselves is affirmed rather than threatened. They can make faithful and appropriate choices about what they should do. Congregations will find this intuitive, imaginative approach is useful, accurate, and lots of fun!

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Which Is Church That?
• 1 A Case of Mistaken Identity
• 2 You Are the Body of Christ
• 3 Who Are We Really?
• 4 Exploring the Personal Identity Exercise
• 5 What Does “Someone Like Us” Do?
• Epilogue
• Appendix A Workshop Outline
• Appendix B Sample Worksheet
• Notes