When your congregation is developing or revisiting "guiding documents" for leaders that are endorsed by the congregation as a whole (e.g. mission, vision, covenant, bylaws, strategic plan), you will want to have an effective and inclusive process that makes space for creative ideas to emerge.

In the Widening the Circle of Concern report from the Commission on Institutional Change, we are called to center voices that are on the margins. What does that look like in a strategic planning process, or when you are revisiting your covenant?

Paula Cole Jones offers the notion of a Community of Communities, where groups with common identities and interests meet and discern in caucus groups as part of any process that makes decisions for the congregation as a whole.

The following flow chart suggests that this happen early in the process. Once the working group is convened and has created an initial framing for the project, they can reach out to the various communities as part of the picture-forming process to get a more complex and inclusive understanding of the needs and desires of the different caucus groups. The working group then can synthesize the input and get feedback from the congregation using small, mixed cottage meetings or focus groups before making their first draft of the guiding document.