Middlesex United Methodist Church
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Making Disciples - Transforming the World

Source Collaborative

In the Spring of 2020, Middlesex UMC was nominated by our Susquehanna Annual Conference leadership and invited by Wesley Theological Seminary to be part of a pilot cohort of Wesley Seminary’s Source Collaborative Initiative. This initiative is a collective effort among churches, coaches, and the seminary to connect more deeply with God, our own stories, and our neighbors that we might drink more deeply of and become conduits of God’s love, justice, and mercy.

We’ve gathered a team of seven people who will lead this effort over the next two years through prayer, study, research, and conversations to identify our own markers for thriving based on the Middlesex community around us and our own MUMC context. The team will meet frequently with one another, with a coach, and with a cohort of four other churches from Maryland and Delaware doing the same thing we are, so we can learn from each other. By the end of 2020, we hope to create some strategic plans for congregational chance that will allow us to move towards these markers for thriving. And then in 2021, we’ll implement the plan with the help of a coach.

Even though so much is uncertain in our future and the world, we strongly feel that right now is the time to focus on remaining connected to God and to neighbor and search for the ways that God might be calling us to be a thriving church in this time and place.

We hope you’ll join us by helping us lay a spiritual foundation through spiritual practices that we can take part in as a congregation. MUMC is definitely a praying church, and so we invite you to be in prayer in a few ways. First, we invite you to join the Facebook group: “Source Collaborative Prayer Group.” It’s a group you can find on MUMC’s Facebook page. In the group we will post specific ways that you can pray for the team and for our church as we journey through the next two years. Second, we invite you to commit to the following brief daily prayer at noon every day:

Gracious and Loving God, thank you for the opportunity you have given us to be part of Source Collaborative. We pray for the team, that you would guide them with your discerning Spirit. We pray for our community, that you would help us to see and hear the things that you desire. Give us, your church, open hearts and open minds as we face the changes ahead and seek to be the body of Christ together. Give us courage to move forward in the steps that you would have us take. We pray for the 5 churches in our cohort, that they would be led by your Spirit and protected from any forces that would stand in their way. Help us be the conduits for your love, justice, and mercy. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Thank you for your support! The best is yet to be, and we cannot wait to see all that God will do in the next two years.