It has been a long week already, and the big stuff is just about to begin. Sunday was Poetry Sunday at Christ Church Norwich. I read a poem I had written in response the readings and had a good time talking with fellow poets from around Connecticut.

In the afternoon, I received a phone call from daughter in Boston. We had a nice talk about many things, but a key reason for the call was for her to let me know that my ex-wife’s brother had died in a car accident. This came on top of my wife’s uncle’s death and the death of a long loved canine companion of a friend.

Monday was the funeral for Kim’s uncle, Joe. I was surprised to see a couple friends from other contexts there, a friend from church that used to work with Joe and a friend from town politics who is Joe’s widow’s first cousin.

Tuesday and Wednesday were days trying to catch back up at work together with preparing for and attending a board meeting about NIMAA, a medical assistant training program I am working with. It was also spent preparing for the South Central Region Convocation.

I am really excited about the convocation. The spring convocation was great and my journey to this convocation has been interesting. Years ago, I was active in the Stamford Deanery. It was a good group trying to do some good stuff, but the meetings weren’t particularly engaging.

The regions are part of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut’s new effort to promote inter-parish collaboration and could easily be called Deanery 2.0, but so far, they feel different, or at least the South Central Region does. Some of that may be what is going on in the Diocese’ life, some of it may be what is going on in my own life. Hopefully, all of it is Spirit filled.

A year and a half ago, I began the discernment process to get a better sense at what God is calling me to, which I believe may include ordination to the priesthood. My eldest daughter likes me to refer to this as my priestly journey. I’ve spoken with my priest, the bishops, a discernment committee, and things continue to move forward. This weekend, I will go on retreat with the bishops, members of the Commission on Ministry and others walking a similar journey. As I read about the areas I should be versed in for this journey, I stumbled across Missiology.

While, I’ve been in plenty of discussions about mission, the idea of missiology was new to me. As I sought to find out more about it, I went to the Missional Voices conference at Virginia Theological Seminary. It was a wonderful conference which I came away from hoping we could do something similar to in Connecticut. To me, the regional convocations are a step in this direction and I’ve been glad to have an opportunity to help nudge them along in that direction.

When we started planning our fall convocation, we spoke about it in terms of preparing for the annual convention that comes up in November. It sounded a lot like those meeting from vestry, to deanery, to convention, that get bogged down in talking about budgets and resolutions and too often lose sight of the underlying mission.

As a communications professional, I like to focus on the mission statement of an organization, so focusing on mission makes a lot of sense for me when thinking about convocations and conventions. Here’s what the catechism says about the mission of the Church

The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.

How does the convocation help restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ? How do the resolutions and budget to be considered at do this? I think by focusing on the Ministry Networks and asking how the resolutions and budge enable and empower such ministries is a good starting point.

One of the things that I really liked about the Missional Voices conference was the use of a deconstructed Eucharist. The whole conference took place in the framework of a weekend long Eucharist. Could we do something similar for convocation?

One person suggested Table on the Green as a model for doing this, so I’ve started going to Table on the Green and thought it did provide a great approach.

So the South Central Region Convocation this coming Sunday will be seeking to restore each of us to unity with God and each other in our shared ministries from different parishes by celebrating these ministries in the framework of a Eucharist and as a means of sharing ideas with one another and especially our delegates to convention about how we can work more closely together in our region and in the work of convention.

I’m pretty excited about this and I hope others are as well. If you are from the South Central Region of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, please consider coming. If you can’t come, please pray for the convocation and also pray for all of us seeking discernment with the bishops and the Commission on Ministry this weekend.