For The Church Lab, the year 2020 means experimenting with being a full-time operation. It means continuing to deepen our dialogue community while also walking with other leaders as they learn how to try their own ministry experiments. It means new efforts in asking granting entities to partner with us to reach new experiments we haven't been able to try before. It means 4 new board members, a new chair and a new fundraising chair!

Most importantly is what remains the same for The Church Lab this year:

God's guidance comes first in our experiments, which seek to help folks spiritually grow.

Shrewd stewardship and resourceful strategy are points of pride in our operational culture.

Yet the filter for our decisions - stewardship, programmatic and otherwise- is the heart of our mission, and we seek to faithfully go wherever this mission takes us. Sometimes this means risk or sacrifice. Sometimes it means those of us serving The Church Lab doing our own spiritual work to be prepared for the uncertainties involved in non-traditional ministry.

The most central aspect of this experiment is the hypothesis that we are guided by God who is Love itself, that we are being directed toward wisdom and into the places and spaces which makes our world more fully alive, one relationship at a time.

I am grateful to all who are a part of TCL's community, and I am excited to see where God guides each and all of us this year!

The key words I'm excited to be using for faithful discernment processes this year are:

*Whole-hearted
*Mission-centric
*Action-oriented
*Creative!
*Spirit-led

With gratitude,

Rev. Carrie Graham