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Brian Frick is the Associate for Camp and Conferences Ministries with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He has been involved in camp and conference ministry since high school. For the past ten years, Brian has served as program director of Johnsonburg Center in New Jersey, Westminster Woods in California, and Heartland Center in Missouri.

Camp and conference ministry compliments and partners with other ministry aspects of our church to foster faith development and reflection. As our communities and our church changes, our ministries need to grow and adapt with creative and emergent programming and leadership to meet new realities.

These blogs entries, though varied, are intended to spur thought and conversation around the opportunities and challenges before us.

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April 12, 2011

Incorporating Change as the “new reality” (For a Time Such as This - Part 3 )

Francois VI Duc de La Rochefoucauld  “The only thing constant in life is change,” Francois VI Duc de La Rochefoucauld

 

 

 

 

“Be the change you want to see in the

world, GhandiMahatma Gandhi.

 

 

 

So we’ve talked about and I hope you have thought about the changes you are experiencing.  More will come!  But looking at what you know and what you have experienced, which of these changes have you accepted, and now – what do you do with them?  How does your world view, your actions, your vocation, you calling, and your living respond to and incorporate the changes around you?

I think one of the most healthy things we can do personally, is to go through a process of assessing and then incorporating changing perceptions into our being.  Most recently, I took a personal journey to revisit the childhood trauma of my father dying when I was seven.  After guided and careful reflection of the experience and how it has shaped my world view and personality, I have come to accept it and come to embrace the changes in my life since then.  Up until this deep introspection, my father's sudden death was the framework from which I related to the world.  After revealing to myself the changes I had ignored and fought, I can now relate to the world in a different way.  It took an intentional action on my part, and now takes an intentional incorporation of what I have learned, named, and accepted into a new way of being.  It has helped me become more fully engaged.

On a calling, ministry level – I feel passionately that we are or need to be involved in incorporating who we have been, into who we are becoming.  As a friend of mine, Warren Cooper told me recently, “we need to find a way to honor the past as ‘good’ and take that into forming an new and different future that is alive.  If we live in and try to recreate the past, we are living in something that is gone, that is dead.”

How are you honoring and accepting who you are and where you have been in your ministry?  How is that ‘good?’  How does that inform our future?  Are you struggling to regain the past?  How does forming a new future in a ‘new normal’ bring new life to your ministry?  Can you do that in a way that does not abandon your rich past?