Renewing Our Mission
Renewing our Mission
A Fresh Vision for Fairmount’s Future
This fall, we mark the beginning of a journey we’re calling: Renewing Our Mission: A Fresh Vision for Fairmount’s Future. Over the next several months, we’ll be organizing a series of opportunities for our congregation, our staff, our neighbors, and our community partners to weigh in on a shared vision for our future. It’s a campaign that we hope will culminate next spring in a new statement of Fairmount’s mission, vision, and values.
To begin the visioning process, we have developed a survey. In this survey, you’ll find four sections–each with key questions for your prayerful reflection and feedback:
WHAT | What does Fairmount do? What are the core strategies/ministries we should use to help us achieve our mission?
WHY | Why does Fairmount exist? What is the purpose of our ministry?
WHO | Who do we want our ministries to serve? Who are the “beneficiaries” of our mission?
HOW | How do we live out our mission? What values do we want to embody in our ministry?
These are the very same questions that our congregation has been asking for more than 100 years, seeking to refine our vision with each new generation. This year’s campaign is simply the latest in a long history of efforts to renew our mission for this moment in our history.
Our current mission statement, created in 2016, reads:
Following Christ. Growing in faith. Serving together. Caring for all
While the end goal of this year’s campaign is to update our mission statement and create a fresh vision for Fairmount’s future, that vision will remain rooted in our past. As part of Fairmount’s 100th anniversary in 2016, the Session wrote a letter to the congregation, which read in part:
“We are thankful for all who have come before us. Even in our thankfulness for all our congregation has accomplished, however, we are mindful that the future will require more than solely what can be found in the past. Just as the tradition that grounds us as Presbyterians is reformed and always reforming, Fairmount must continue to be a living, breathing community of faith that is always evolving, growing, and moving towards something new…While the future of Fairmont will look very different than its past, much of what has defined us will continue.”
We approach this year’s campaign to renew our mission with the same respect for our historic foundations and the same openness to discerning the new thing God is doing in our midst.
In May, our pastoral staff created the “prototype” mission, vision, and values statements you’ll read and respond to in this survey. The prototype was created based upon Fairmount’s historical mission, the formal feedback received from the congregation during the mission study (with consultants during Pastor Jessie’s interim), surveys collected over the past 2+ years about our current ministry, and hundreds of conversations and pastoral interactions with our members.
In June, our Session had a half day retreat to review the prototypes and offer feedback, and in August our councils did the same. Now, we’re bringing the prototype to you!
A prototype is a preliminary model of something new. While the prototype we put forward is our most faithful effort to capture the evolving mission, vision, and values of Fairmount, a prototype is made to be poked, prodded, and tested. And so we eagerly await your ideas, questions, hopes, and dreams for our shared future.
