Recently the OSC Board of Elders met and unanimously agreed to extend our current Mission Commitment through December 2025.
For those who may not know, the Mission Commitment is our guiding set of values and priorities at OSC. You can click here to see our current version. It is created by a strategic planning process involving the whole congregation, staff, and Board as well as key community partners (you can click here to see how that process unfolded in our current Mission Commitment). This approach began in 2016 when our church decided to embark on an in-depth re-envisioning process that resulted in our first Mission Commitment at the end of 2017. At that time, we decided to re-engage with the process again in three years. As a result, our current Mission Commitment was finalized in January, 2021 and is set to expire December, 2023.
However, the OSC Board agreed that this current Mission Commitment should be extended to 2025 for two reasons. First, the current three-year period included the COVID Pandemic, which significantly disrupted our church gatherings and programs for two years! While we feel we’ve made good progress on several priorities as a church, we also feel we need more time to effectively lean into the priorities set forth in the current strategic plan.
Second, there is a strong sense on the Board and Staff that our church has outgrown the need for a strategic planing process every three years. The first Mission Commitment, which covered from January 2018 to December 2020, resulted in really big changes to our church, including re-writing the bylaws, re-designing our governance structure and Board make-up, and adopting entirely new core values, mission, and vision. We even changed the name of our church from First Christian Church to the Oceanside Sanctuary to better reflect those values-changes. Out of these big shifts grew new commitments to become openly LGBTQ affirming, to pursue anti-racism work, and adopt a faith-based community organizing approach to justice work. As these big shifts have taken root over the past three-to-five years, our church has grown significantly and become more stable in the process. The consensus is that we have grown enough in our identity, membership, and stability to extend the strategic planning process to once every five years. Extending the current Mission Commitment to 2025 essentially makes it a five-year plan.
There is one more fun consequence of this decision: 2025 will be the 150th year of our church! That means the next time we are engaging with big questions about our core values, mission, vision, and priorities, we will be doing it while celebrating our 150th anniversary year. We are excited to celebrate this amazing milestone while also dreaming together about the continuing future of this impactful congregation.
Blessings,
Jason Coker
Co-Lead Minister