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Endearing Our Community: Shepherd’s Journey to For The Valley

Jill Wurm | Caitlin Ronayne

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BRAIN�STORM

What are the strengths and challenges of your congregation?

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Do you know what the needs of your broader community are? If so, what are they?

How might your congregation be uniquely positioned to bless your community?

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Who is Shepherd?

Connect all people to a growing relationship with Jesus Christ through worship, small groups, and serving.

You’re here!

We’re here!

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How did we get here?

New Lead Pastor

Shocker…COVID!

Shift from in �to out

Self reflection

We had a lead pastor transition-- same pastor for 32 years, so we had someone new seeing the strengths and challenges of our congregation.

SHOCKER….COVID CHANGED EVERYTHING!

Our congregation was smaller

We felt like we were digging ourselves back out from a time of separation/ survival mode.

Before we launched our FTV vision, Pre-covid we attempted a “Love our schools initiative” we met with leadership from one of our districts and plans of things were going to implement. We knew we needed to do something with our school community but struggled to nail down true action items.

When all of this was happening, many of our staff attended a conference put on by a mega church in Atlanta, where many of their breakouts were talking about the idea of being a part of your community. Everyone left that conference knowing we needed to do something but didn’t know where to start. Our greatest ideas were to “rally the valley” or La Croix the St. Croix… it needed work.

Conducted a SWOT analysis

Different iterations of the SWOT analysis were done, lead staff, all staff, council

SWOT Analysis helped us to realize that we were inward focus, we had a strength in personal relationships, but that was mainly focused inward with the needs of our congregation, but were neglecting opportunities to reach our broader community.

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For The Valley was born

For the next three years, we want to leverage our strengths in personal relationships so that the community knows that we are here and are better off because we are here.

Minor In

Sports &

Schools

Major In

Parents & Neighborhoods

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How did we roll it out?

Sermons

Sermon and small group series

In-service announcements

Events

In-service prayers for �targeted populations

Story videos

Written communications�broad and department specific

Website

Vision videos

Every ministry was talking about it.

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For The Valley is the lens

Commitment from Lead Pastor to Facility Manager
FTV guides our YES and NO
Started with KNOW

Commitment from Lead Pastor to Facility Manager

We knew that in order for this vision to thrive, we needed everyone to be on board. We started with our staff. The whole staff worked together identifying ways that we could move our vision forward. It took many workshopping hours to get our whole staff opn board. We knew in order to be successful everyone from the lead pastor to the facility manager needed to be on board.�

Guided decision-making (what we said YES and NO to)

We have learned that in order to hold people’s attention and get them to pay attention to what we want them to, we have to be pretty narrow. That sometimes meant us saying no to things that were awesome opportunnities in order to keep our copngreagation moving on the vision.
Some hard no’s

No to an arrive good neighbor team
Getting involved in a foster care ministry

Some Hard yes’s

Microschool in our building
We were pushed to early morning/ evening obligations, that were outside of typical work hours.

Started with KNOW

Made video
Got merch
Gathered input from community leaders. We wanted to partner with them to identify ways that we could help. We wanted to meet them so that they knew who we were and then had to explicitly say we want you to reach out when you need something. This took time.

School leaders
Mayors
Coaches
Parents
Community Organizations

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How did we organize?

Divided the year �into seasons — trimesters

Assigned every staff member to a project — rocks

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Neighborhoods

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Parents

Surveys & focus groups to identify where parents want support
Parent resources
Parent small group with childcare
Parent moments

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Schools

Adopt an Educator
Supply drives
Use our church with red carpet treatment!
Food deliveries
Notes of encouragement
Teacher gifts

Adopt an Educator

Paired up a congregation member to “adopt” a teacher from our congregation and asked that teacher to invite one teacher from their building to be their partner teacher so that we were reaching outside the wall of our church.

We asked the teachers to fill out a survey about where and what they taught and foods and activities they liked to help adopters have an idea how to bless them.

We sent out reminders every month to adopters to do domething for their teachers and included some ideas of things they could do for their teacher.

These relationships ran the gammot from volunteering weekly in the classroom to sending texts and giftcards sporadically.

Drives for Supplies

Got snacks, school supplies, and personal care items for schools nearby to have onhand for kids who needed them.

Building Usage- red carpet treatment

In addition to the microschool, we offered up our building for schools to use for student and staff retreats and trainings.

Tried to be hospitable with things like coffee, snacks, set up and tear down.

Food Deliveries

We have found that food wins. Teachers were always so thankful for a treat. We were not able to hit every school in our districts, but we narrowed in where we could and brought things like doughnuts, bagels, snacks and treats set up in teachers lounge. We called and asked when would be convenient and helpful they identified PD days and conference days as some times that it could be helpful

Were able to get kids involved by writing notes of encouragement to their teachers.

This is the area where we feel like we were able to make the biggest impact. We truly had schools reaching out and asking for things when they needed them. If they asked, we wanted to deliver, we did what we could to make it happen.

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Sports

Stop competing and start cheering!
Gatorade giveaway
Gift card drop-offs
FCA partnership & clinics

Shift from “competing” with sports → “cheering them on”

We know that so much good can come from sports and knew that competing with them or making parents feel guilty about sports was not the answer so we looked to see how we could lean in.

- Gatorade giveaways, gift card drop-offs

- Provided materials to congregations members to giveaway to teams and coaches as an encouragement to connect with them. We had hoped to take more ground here knowing how many families are involved in sports, but reality is that families are busy. Families responded when we made a specific ask. But there did not seem to be much motivation for change in this area.

- FCA partnerships & clinics

- We leaned in on FCA. We had a prior relationship with the FCA director in our area. He was super on board to help in any way he could and also saw our vision to make sports a place to make a positive impact.

- We did a coaches clinic led by FCA to encouage coaches to make a positive impact for their team, and help the coaches understand what a influence they can have on their players, parents,and other teams. First round of trying this, we intentionally kept it free of faith based material inroder for it to feel accessible to a broader audience. Our second iteration of the clinics we attempted to do a faith based clinic, a non faith based clinic and a parent clinic. We had little interest in this round of clinics. It solidified our hunch that adding more to people’s schedule despite quaility content was not the answer. We needed to go where people already were.

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Benevolence Gifts

10 % of our overall church budget leaves our building
Allotted a portion of our benevolence budget for FTV
Sponsored Community Events

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WE MADE AN IMPACT!

One example of something we were able to do was “Church Partner of the year” We made it our mission to be there for UGM. We increased our serving shifts, CR was asked to be part of their volunteer advisory council, we gave money to special projects, brought pizza to serve in their meals to the homeless. As much as we were able to, we said yes!

Overall relationships were deepened. Many community leaders had positive views on Shepherd of the Valley.

We found that schools really did reach out when they needed help. School has asked Shepherd to be a faith representation on two of their boards.

The For the Valley vision helped us establish consistent serving opportunities with our mission partners that were a result of wanting to be for our mission partners and they are continuing on as we change to our next vision

We don’t say this to gloat, but to share that having a narrowed vision helped us see results.

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Lessons Learned

Started with our strengths
In the beginning we bit off more than we could chew
Learning process felt slow
Stories are powerful

One of the things that people consistently say about what they love about Shepherd is that it feels like family, we knew that this was our secret sauce to propel us forward.
We were really excited about our vision in the beginning, lots of ideas and directions we wanted to go with our vision. We learned that if we are pulled in too many directions, less actually gets accomplished, as we moved through our trimesters we learned to narrow our focus for deeper impact.
Learning process was slow and felt like we weren’t “doing” as much, but it was really important for us to take that time to learn so that we were more able to make strides in our goals. We stumbled sometimes, but we really tried to let the community lead and learned that we had better success when they were the drivers and we were the supporters

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Where are we headed?

Vision is shifting but community presence remains core
FTV principles are in our DNA

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PANEL�DISCUSSION

Jill Wurm, Director

Caitlin Ronayne, Associate Director

Michael Faust, Executive Director

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Thanks!

Let us know if we can help you!

Jill | jwurm@sov.church�Caitlin | cronayne@sov.church

Resources available at linktr.ee/ftv_resources