Gather. Grow. Go.
The discipleship path of St. Francis in-the-Field
All are welcome. All means all.
This year
We are going deep.
By every measure, St. Francis is flourishing. The honest question before us now is not whether we are busy, but whether all of this good and faithful work is making us more like Jesus.
For several faithful years we have kept a great many things running, and running beautifully. A church can be full without being deep, though, busy without being formed, active without being transformed. So the question we have begun to ask ourselves is this: have we been forming disciples, or simply managing programs?
If we had to name where we are going in a single word, that word is depth. Not larger, but deeper: a church whose identity is clear enough for a child of five and a saint of eighty-five to carry in the heart.
None of this is change for its own sake, nor a vision handed down from above. When we listened to this parish, your deepest hopes were for worship and formation, the very things we are now reordering our common life around. We are not selling you a vision. We are giving shape to what the Spirit is already stirring among us.
Our whole purpose in three words, one syllable each, small enough for a seven-year-old to hold and deep enough for a lifetime.
Gather
in worship and welcome
Sunday is our anchor
We do not only gather to worship; we gather to welcome, and our welcome has no asterisk and no fine print. Sunday is given wholly to Word and Sacrament, undivided.
Grow
in prayer, faith and relationships
Wednesday is our depth
Wednesday is where we grow: around a table, in formation, and toward prayer, going deeper into the very theme that Sunday has set, at every age in the household.
Go
in love and service
Through the week
Go is not bounded to a day. It is the shape our discipleship takes in every weekday and every neighbourhood, in the work of mending what is broken.
Watch
A short film on how formation works at St. Francis, and why we have reordered our week around it.
The weekly rhythm
One church, one theme, many tables.
Depth is not one more program added to an already full week. It is the same truth, returned to again and again, until it travels from the head into the heart and at last into the hands.
A family should not hear one thing in church, another in formation, and a third at home. Sunday sets the theme. Wednesday goes deeper into it. The Daily Way carries it into your kitchen through the week, and our service carries it into the world. Children, youth and adults spend the same week with the same story, told in the way each of them can receive it, and carry it back into the same house.
Sunday
We gather
The whole parish together for worship, with Field Life Nursery and Field Life Kids for our youngest, and our young people serving in the liturgy itself.
Service timesWednesday
We grow
Dinner, then formation for every age at the same hour: adults, mothers of school-aged children, children from kindergarten through fifth grade, middle school and senior high.
Wednesday nightsEvery day
The Daily Way
A short daily companion tied to Sunday's readings: a reflection, the readings themselves, a simple prayer practice, and a question, in about ten minutes.
The Daily WayWhere might the Spirit be inviting you?
Be still, and reflect honestly on where your relationship with God most longs to grow. Listen for the place the Spirit is already stirring, and prepare to step toward it.
A prayer for this season
Gracious God, still our hearts in this season, show us where we long to grow, and ready us for the year ahead. Amen.
All are welcome here. All means all.