One of the things that we have been trying to “do” here at The Well is think through and figure out how we can allow our entire community to inform the larger decisions and theological direction of our community. Going with the assumption that the Holy Spirit is actually at work in this community of people (which, by the way I think is a LOT harder to actually believe that it seems like it should be. its one of those things that is often easy to say but harder to live out) we want to be open and trusting to this reality.
While we don’t necessarily want to go back to a “congregational rule” kind of government that, in my experience, just turns into battles of power, politicing and childishness, we do not want to “sit in the ivory tower” as leaders and just make decisions for the whole community ourselves. At the same time we value a leadership team that does give direction to our community. We have often fallen into the trap as leadership of making decisions without really taking into account what everyone else’s feelings, thoughts and beliefs are about a certain issue.
With this in mind, we have taken up a practice we all “Community Midrash.” You can read more about why we do it and where we got this idea from on our Midrash section of our website. On this part of our site, we will be posting new meetings, notes from the meetings and also updates between meetings. We also have a section on the guidelines we use during these meetings. We currently have some stuff up from the first meeting we had where we were discussing denominations.
We are still new to the Midrash idea and i am sure we will learn and grow as we go along. But, if you read some of the stuff on the site, you will notice how great it is to sit as a family and openly and passionately discuss issues that are important to all of us.