THE CHURCH LAB
Annual Report 2020
THE CHURCH LAB Annual Report 2020 OUR MISSION Exploring innovative paths to spiritual maturity, helping the Church find her future.
OUR PANDEMIC-SPECIFIC MISSION We are harnessing our mission to meet the moment with convicted care, knowing this is how we all find our future together. With noise all around, we find the spiritual anchors needed to connect and ground us. From here, we move to meet our communities’ needs.
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“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear...”
1 JOHN 4:18
Let’s Connect! Website thechurchlab.org
Facebook: facebook.com/thechurchlab Instagram or twitter: @thechurchlab Email: Rev. Carrie Graham, founding pastor: carrie@thechurchlab.org
O
ne way we are able to help the Church find her future is to share what we’re learning with others, whether that be in our Lab or visiting other neighbors’ ministries. Here are some spaces where we were honored to share our ideas this year: Featured in Patheos and New Wine, New Wineskins: What Does The Future Hold? Being The Church In the Covid Aftermath in July 2020: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/uncommongodcommongood/2020/07/ what-does-the-future-hold-being-thechurch-in-the-covid-after-math/ The Ministry Collaborative’s webinar on Faithfully Stewarding Disruption in April 2020: https://mministry.org/webinar/faithfully-stewarding-disruption/ *Learn more from our participants at thechurchlab.org/blog *Sign up for weekly mailchimp updates and calls for dialogue RSVP’s by signing up at the bottom of our homepage. PAGE 3
This year, y’all. Mondays: People losing jobs. Tuesdays: Standing in food lines. Wednesdays: Masked marchers. Thursdays: Open faces crowded into rallies. Fridays: We’re ready to ditch the thick residue of Zoom. The echoes of bad or overdone versions of school and work lies thick on the skin. Saturdays: Thick skin cascades us into depression, paralysis, numbing.
Laced through our days on repeat: When do we stand up? When to rest? How to play? Do we remember laughter? Some of us want out of being stuck with people. Some of us wish we remembered what it felt like to be around people. Some of us are so fatigued, we try to pretend the pandemic dust has settled. For others of us, the pandemic has a hold on us we are not allowed to forget. Many of us pretend there is an old normal to which we will ever return. Though deep down, we know the awaiting reality is stranger than the fiction of a return to what once was.
Sundays: Sleepless. Yet cue the hurricanes and wildfires.
Our mission is to explore innovative paths to spiritual maturity, helping the Church find her future. PAGE 4
What does that
mean for the circus that is 2020? It means meeting the moment with convicted care so we can find our future together. We know steep division among us
now has alarms sounding across communities of all kinds. We have a desperate need for building bridges, and the need to equip people with the hard work it takes to build them. Traumatic injustices in our culture have been rendered unignorable to populations of all stripes. Some of our most vulnerable or disadvantaged populations are now even more invisible than before, suffering at staggering rates. Loneliness, isolation and disconnection from something greater than ourselves in the US has gone from bad to haunting. The American religious landscape was already changing at a rapid pace. Perceptions of, and participation in, religious institutions has gone from declining to a downhill avalanche.
Y
et, in this storm, we all have great need for anchoring. Spiritual groundedness as precisely that anchor has never been more urgent.
Need for connection and community, a need for something greater than ourselves, are core human needs which no pandemic can quiet. Out of that groundedness, we cut through the noise of the chaos.
We look up. We look around. We breathe.
Then we are free to care for our communities. We are free to experiment and risk for our future, together.
The Church Lab can help!
H
ow Do We Work? The Church Lab experiments with meeting spiritual needs in effective, meaningful ways. As we learn from our experiments, we walk with other leaders, helping them take meaningful experimental risks in line with their call to service. In all we do, we most highly value depth and nuance in one’s spiritual life. Our central experiment to pursue this is through sustained, small group interfaith dialogue facilitated by a pastoral facilitator. We meet biweekly for interfaith dialogue. Beyond this, we share opportunities for local and global service/ mission, creative worship experiments, and discipleship for participating Christians. Pastoral care is offered to anyone, no matter what one’s beliefs are, with no strings attached. There are folks who identify with many faiths, or no faith at all, or who are not sure what they believe, that find this informal, small community process as a PAGE 5
beautiful way to ask questions and explore one’s evolving convictions in a safe, encouraging dialogical space. Then we take all our leaps of faith, our failing up and our learning’s lessons, and we share them with others who want to try experiments with good lab partners. We do this by pastorally facilitating pastors’ cohorts, lay leaders’ cohorts, community discernment retreats, trainings, workshops and specialized consulting projects.
We LOVE the way risks toward bold faith locks horns with 2020.
We need YOU to keep up this vital work! We hope you’ll help us grow our capacity to stare down 2021 accordingly.
Amen.
WE EXIST BECAUSE OF YOU
While our affordable consulting
work helps us do ministry full-time, our operational budget is powered by your generosity exclusively. It is run entirely off donations! You can ALWAYS give online at thechurchlab.org. Our most impactful giving is through monthly pledging. To become a monthly or annual partner, visit thechurchlab.org and scroll to the giving section. It is easy to give online, and you can set up recurring donations there!
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We ask for 3-year pledge commitments where possible, as this helps us minimize ministry time used for continuous fundraising asks. We are thrilled for 1-year commitments, if donors are more comfortable with this or any other donor-chosen timeframe. Please email carrie@thechurchlab.org to let us know the timeframe of your commitment.
WE HAVE BEEN GROWING
T
his October, we celebrated our 7TH birthday of tinkering in the lab for the greater good! We have much to share and celebrate with you, because of you!
We held a weekend retreat for a church discerning who it would be in their next chapter.
As we’ve grown, we’ve harnessed our lessons from our central dialogue experiments to share our lessons with others.
We trained therapists to work with pastors.
In 2018, we began our 1st offered consulting project to help share gleanings from our experiments with other leaders. We want to help others who wish to take risks in bold faith for the future of spiritual growth.
We held a special Summit in Washington, D.C., with 4 separate learning or training events for community leaders. Then we faced a survival crisis when the pandemic set in.
In 2019, we had over 20 requests for consultations, trainings and workshops!
Incredibly, God has provided a way for us to use our mission to meet this crisis moment.
serve others full-time.
We helped folks through 2 Navigating Divisive Conversation workshops to cope with division.
In 2020, we took the leap to
We held our facilitators’ training to help leaders be at their best when helping groups, including digitally! PAGE 7
We engaged in our most significant consulting partnership yet, prototyping a church lay leaders’ cohort over an entire summer, which was the equivalent of about 10 smaller consulting projects rolled into one. This helped lay leaders in the pandemic to get spiritually anchored and meet community needs.
In
2021,
we are already slated to work with
10
church cohorts across the state of Texas, each an equivalent of about
10
smaller consulting projects!
#pandemicfun
As for our core spiritual growth ministry, our interfaith dialogue community: With about
145
dialogues under our belt, we cannot wait to get back in the Lab for more. 2020 care packages! #pandemiccommunity
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MILESTONES O
ver the last 7 years, TCL has celebrated learning from failure and successes both in ministry content and exploring operational structures that will sustain it. We have intentionally gleaned lessons in hopes of walking with others with effective support as they engage their own experiments in this age of religious change. From our Backward Bible Study and Dog Church to “Chortle” Discipleship + Karaoke, from our Family Portraits for Harvey victims who lost all their photos all the way to Pandemic Pen Pal community care, complete with surprise packages at community members’ doors, our experiments have offered lessons, evolutions and layers of “aha!” moments in how we can serve God and God’s people. We are excited to continue discovering ways that speak to changing dispositions - and growing needs - around connecting to God and to each other more deeply and securely.
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TCL OVER THE YEARS
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DIALOGUES “I love TCL because I believe that we are called by God to be in relationship with people, even our enemies. Dialogue is a place where my “others” become friends, where my walls are broken down.” Sarah Shannon-Wildt
E
very two weeks, a group of 6-10 people gather from the 4 corners. Among us may be mainline Protestant, Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Pagan, Ahmadiyya Muslim, Baha’i, Jewish, spiritual-but-not-religious, non-identifying/ seekers and humanist perspectives. Thanks to video chat, even preceding 2020, we have become a hybrid local and national community! We have TCL dialoguers, participants and supporters all over the US! This year, we’ve had digital dialoguers -or observers preparing for training- in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C. and California. It is vital for us to have conservative and liberal viewpoints in the room together. At first, dialogues are about education and awareness. As participants see each other again and again, and sincere community becomes possible, our time grows us in rich ways. We acknowledge one another’s dignity of experience, we laugh together, even as we approach issues where disagreement is inevitable. We are challenged in our own spiritual lives to reckon with the mutually exclusive angles of our friends’ beliefs with our own. Our prayer life may change, our perspectives may shift, our ability increases to hold neighbors in love that approach life so differently than us.
We inevitably discover a more nuanced faith, and a capacity to extend love in a deeply meaningful way in our current political, cultural, social climate. This year we’ve engaged the following topics and more: 2020 TOPICS Potluck Kick-Off: Why Dialogue? Being Politically Correct Marianne flies in for practice dialogue: Science and Religion Pam facilitates: Obligations and Guilt Anger Authority Virtual Cruise+Corona Chat Spotlight: Jordan (deconstruction and reconstruction) Institution or No Institution? Spotlight: Baha’i Tradition (3 onenesses) Destiny and Free Will Church and State Risk & Sacrifice Grief Show-N-Tell: If My Faith Were… Kids and Religion/Faith Suffering and Inequity (with board) Eternity Campaigns and Rhetoric Cultural Appropriation and Colonialism Intellect and Faith Slavery & Trafficking Politics & Polarization Deconstruction, Reconstruction WILDCARD end-of-year dialogue PAGE 11
COMMUNITY INVESTMENT HIGHLIGHTS Spiritual Groundedness Leads to Love-In-Action Our 2020 Special Events Have Included: Hurricane Laura Response: We organized an on-the-ground trip to Southeast Texas, giving money, gift cards, food distribution, and pastoral care to a family who fell through assistance cracks and lost much of their home. Advent Conspiracy event, where we celebrate and donate the TCL mission fund to causes that have benefited lives we care about, both locally and globally. Digital Iftar dinner with Round Rock’s Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
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Maundy Thursday virtual worship experiment: reflections and bathtub foot washing.
OUR COVID RESPONSE: Slacking Together: Early on, we quickly created a Clergy Covid Response Slack Channel, which 51 pastors from across the country joined. Leaps of Levity: A digital “Virtual Cruise” commemorated our interfaith dialogue community being in on the pandemic together as lockdown began. Introduced TCL Education: We provided Corona MoneyAid digital guide and coaching opps to help people make tough financial decisions within their values. Burst Your Bubble! Videos: We created a youtube channel to interview each other, preventing staying in like-minded bubbles by asking how each of us is navigating the pandemic with our faith. Going Analog in a Digital World: We have sent surprise snail mail packages to Lab Partner Pastors and board members alike, whose contents coincide with Zoom activities we do together online. Pandemic Pen Pals: We shared recipes and poetry with each other across the country, snail mail style! Facebook Dialogue Connect: We created online avenues to connect between dialogues. Ollie made recipes posted by dialoguers, then surprised many with the results by leaving gifts of yummy food at local participants’ doorsteps.
Pandemic Spreads Wider? Let’s Make Sure
Love Grows Deeper Digital Co-creation: Our community co-created blogs with art gallery and interfaith prayers to share with each other. Handwritten Thank You’s and Digital Prayers: Carrie, Ollie and our board have been praying for and alongside our donor community, sending them snail mail letters of gratitude. Ready to Respond: Ollie created a Virtual Vigil Template, so we are ready to gather digitally on an urgent basis in a stormy season. Texas Impact Partnership: We created and led a Reimagining Service lay leader cohort prototype with members of University Presbyterian Church of Austin. Look for more about this ultra special project on page 14!
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TEXAS IMPACT PARTNERSHIP I
n summer 2020, Texas Impact a non-profit who connects people of faith to public policy- invited The Church Lab to prototype a special cohort in response to covid-19’s effects on our state. A brave group of lay leaders from University Presbyterian Church of Austin agreed to be our prototype cohort. TCL worked with them to cross section their own dormant or shifting church resources with strategies to meet rising community needs due to the coronavirus and other seemingly infinite 2020 challenges. Now at the end of their experience, they are playing out a process of incorporating the rest of their church family into the process.
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For 2021: Texas Impact has released an application process statewide for all sorts of Texas worshipping communities to participate in this experience themselves! TCL will have the honor of working with 10 selected worshipping communities throughout 2021. We are giddy to realize our dream to hire and train our first official team of TCL facilitators to fulfill this project’s mission.
LEADERS AS LAB PARTNERS W
e adore taking what we’ve gleaned from experimental ministry and walking with other leaders as they try their own. We emphasize taking bold, faithful risks which perpetuate mission and uphold integrity. Here are our 2020 highlights from doing so:
Lab Partner Pastors One of our most significant experiments of 2020 was a small group of 3 pastors who volunteered to be part of our first subscribing cohort of leaders. We met: • 4 times throughout the year, at first in-person and then digitally. • Held optional check-ins between meetings, including “drive-up” in-person meetings during the pandemic. • 1 all-day retreat for pastors. • 1 all-day retreat for pastors and their leadership teams, including a meeting of the minds for all leadership teams combined. • Special surprise snail mail and digital packages with supplemental leadership ideas and activities to use themselves and potentially with their leadership and congregations.
Consultations, Trainings, Workshops • DC Summit: Pre-pandemic in-person Facilitators’ Training, Lunch-andLearn about TCL, 2 Navigating Divisive Conversations workshops! • Multi-Faith Matters Gathering: forum planning for event whose date is TBD for when it is safe • Discernment retreat weekend for Dripping Springs UPC’s leadership team • Treating Pastors: A Training for Mental Health Professionals Whose Clients Are Pastors • TCL Facilitators’ Training • Navigating Divisive Conversations Workshop
Interested in working with us? We offer a menu of possibilities, including what it listed above and here below. Learn more at: thechurchlab.org/leadership-development
• • • •
Secret Shopping Insights Church in the 21st Century Pastoral Skills for the 21st Century Financial Consulting and Coaching for Systems and Individuals: • Match your Theology to Your Budget • Discernment Process: Who Will We Be Next? • Projects Contextualized To Your Curiosities!
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PASTORAL CARE AND DISCIPLESHIP Pastoral Care
B
ecause The Church lab runs off donations, rather than members that pay fees, those donations free us up to offer care to all. The Church Lab then becomes a community-invested system more and more deeply over time. We offer care to anyone that needs a listening ear, or has big questions about spiritual life, no matter their background or beliefs. This is a vital practice as another structural experiment that keeps pastoral care from being restricted in any capacity, since increasingly those that need care do not have a spiritual home.
Our weekly question is “...and where is God in all this?!” Many folks who participate in TCL’s community have their own worshipping communities, whether Christian or not. Some claim TCL as their primary church family. Discipleship is a particularly great place to be if TCL is both your primary
Discipleship
For Christians in TCL’s community, we offer a small monthly gathering for Christian discipleship. We find our dialogue community can healthily sharpen the specificities and roots of our faith, so we get together and talk about how we’re growing into a deeper relationship with God from a Christian perspective. We consider how our reflections intersect with daily decisions and behaviors.
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Pastoral Care Packages
REACH TCL’s community comes from the 4 corners.
Ongoing projects • We continue to slowly but surely chip away at written materials that can help others with lessons we’ve learned. • We continue to share our neighbors’ voices through our blog, which can be found at thechurchlab.org/blog. This year, we expanded this to include a youtube channel!
• We continue to keep an eye on opportunities to help Burkina Faso, with hopes that we can work toward building a school there one day. • We continue to explore ways to strengthen our ability to raise money for operations and to differentiate our funding sources for specific dreams to evolve our mission’s effectiveness, primarily including grant applications.
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TCL OPERATIONAL AND LEADERS’ HIGHLIGHTS F
or 2020, we raised $42,157 for our operational budget, a more than $12,000 jump from the previous year. This was a major milestone for us! We went full-time in January, with the addition of our half-time consulting work and budget! We got to try a new experiment for pastors’ cohorts: Lab Partner Pastors! We now celebrate Ollie being our pastoral assistant for 2.5 years! Having him on the TCL team is an invaluable gift. Ollie’s role significantly evolved this year such that we could benefit from his pastoral gifts, especially to meet the covid needs moment: • Introducing and curating content for the social justice block in our weekly mailchimp • Representing TCL at a digital Iftar event, thanks to Qamar and Bushra Zafar • Creating the Facebook Dialogue Connect group as a way to virtually connect between dialogues • Coordinating the cross-country covid pen pal program to share recipes and poetry • Sharing recipes and food at people’s doors! • Curating blogs, including co-created blog content through the pandemic We invited 4 new people to the TCL Team for various roles! • Carlos Quinones, budget and donation processing and support • Deb Darnell, logistics support PAGE 18
• Rev. Laura Murray, 2021 Reimagining Service Team Pastoral Facilitator • Jenelle D’Alessandro, 2021 Reimagining Service Team Pastoral Facilitator We welcomed our 2nd intern, David Dashifen Kees of Alexandria, Virginia, who attends Iliff School of Theology! We continue to evolve the roles and culture of our Board of Directors, as we experience a growth phase, including: Celebrating 4 new board members! • Wendy Cooper of Houston, Texas • Stephanie Cooper of Austin, Texas • Quashane Chambers of Atlanta, Georgia • Julie Hagen of Washington, D.C. We commemorate our original board members, who have now all officially rotated off into new ways of supporting TCL graciously. We ran a major 3-day virtual retreat for our board! We introduced an orientation day component for new board members We completed our first 3 grant applications, continuing to build relationships with foundations! Carrie has invested time and energy into growing as a leader as TCL grows: • Working with an executive coach throughout pandemic. • Even more established work/life boundaries, honoring the culture our original board entrusted Carrie with setting.
2021 PREVIEW • Offer 10 Reimagining Service cohorts across the state of Texas to help worshipping communities use their shifting resources to meet rising community needs due to the pandemic, thanks to the partnership of Texas Impact! • Utilize our building “consulting budget tithe” to empower others’ experiments through minigrants and scholarships! • Develop, evolve and expand our pastors’ cohort offerings, including for innovation through and in the aftermath of the pandemic. • Develop an experimental dialoguers’ cohort for bridge building. • Offering new events altogether!
• Offering at least 2 facilitators’ training days. • Coaching 2-4 emerging facilitators through practice facilitation sessions. • Offering 1 training to train existing facilitators in training other facilitators. • Continued core ministries of dialogues, discipleship, pastoral care for all, worship experiments and service. • Continued and expanded pursuit of consultation with other churches and leaders. • Continued efforts to offer helpful blog content, sustain meaningful partnerships with support partners, maintain a healthy system for experimentation and ministry, and evolving the role of our board and leadership. • We are actively seeking resources to expand our mission’s reach and capacity.
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SENDING LOVE
Pastor Carrie
Pastoral Assistant Ollie Jarvis
Pastor Carrie and intern Marianne Garvey PAGE 20
DC Summit Facilitators’ Training
FROM TCL
Digital Dialogue
Dialogue With Board Special Guests PAGE 21
2021 PROPOSED TCL BUDGET Mission
$6,640.00
Pastor
$28,484.36
Assistants
$4,870.52
Squarespace
$200.00
Domain Name
$20.00
LGL monthly purchase (donation tracking)
$600.00
Taxes
$700.00
Misc Fees (tax & LGL indiv)
$200.00
Google Suite
$109.00
Zoom Subscription
$165.00
Increase Assistants' Hours
$343.12
General Liability Insurance
$350.00
Errors and Omissions Insurance
$675.00
General Supplies
$0.00
Logistics help
$3,600.00
Mission Capital membership
$250.00
Teachable subscription
$350.00
Misc
$1,000.00
Discretionary
$2,000.00
BOD Retreat (space, travel help as needed, food)
$2,000.00
Marketing
$2,000.00
Grant writing
$5,000.00
Fundraising officer
$5,000.00
TOTAL: $64,557.00
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2020 TCL BUDGET Mission
$4,240.00
Pastor
$28,484.36
Assistant
$4,870.52
Grant Writing
$1,800.00
Squarespace
$200.00
Domain Name
$20.00
LGL monthly purchase (donation tracking)
$600.00
Taxes
$100.00
Misc Fees (tax & LGL indiv)
$200.00
Google Suite
$109.00
Zoom Subscription
$165.00
Pay back capacity building
$343.12
General Liability Insurance
$350.00
Errors and Omissions Insurance
$675.00
General Supplies
$0.00
TOTAL $42,157.00
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SHOUT OUTS The Church Lab is a cooperative endeavor! There are stellar people to thank for making this ministry not just possible, but thriving! Mega thanks to:
• Our donating partners directly make TCL possible, and we are thankful for the ways God weaves our friends’ generosity together to make this endeavor a reality. Thanks be to God for you! • Our beloved dialogue community, who is the heartbeat of The Church Lab. • Our amazingly fun Lab Partner Pastors and their PCUSA churches, who graciously experimented with this format alongside us this year: Rev. Amy “Amos” Meyer of First Presbyterian Church of Elgin, Rev. Rob Mueller of Church of the Divine Redeemer in San Antonio and Rev. Bart Roush of Madison Square Presbyterian Church in San Antonio. • Anyone who participated in the Lab this year, whether in a worship experiment or a training or workshop! We are lucky to get to cross paths with the coolest people on the planet. We are so glad you joined us in the Lab this year. • Ollie Jarvis, our pastoral assistant: We are deeply grateful for Ollie’s hard work, creativity, competence and passion. His integrity and devotion to The Church Lab’s mission, not to mention to being a great team member, is an invaluable gift to our community. • Andrea Carroll, our fundraising chair and “can-do commander,” is providing the support our board needs to meet our collective fundraising goals! • Our wonderful board members: Trey Haddon, Julie Hagen, Andrea Ballard Carroll, Wendy Cooper, Quashane Chambers, Kelly Dunlap, Sara Burback and Stephanie Cooper! • Our original board members from 2013 have officially all rotated off and moved forward in the ways they express TCL support. They are deeply valued, and their contributions’ legacy will be felt for years to come: Aaron Karr, Rev. Sabrina Chan, Jenelle D’Alessandro, Stacey Schwenker, Dr. Jen Rosner, Rev. Justin Fung. PAGE 24
• Carlos Quinones, our new resident expert in processing all things numbers for TCL, and Deb Darnell, our new logistics support extraordinaire. We are so happy to welcome y’all on board! • Stacey Schwenker for coordinating the entire DC Summit! Wow, what a gift!!! • Christ City Church of D.C. and Rev. Justin Fung for hosting us at the DC Summit! • Our first year of Advisory Council: Rev. Matt Gaventa, Rev. Elizabeth Mclean, Dr. Jen Rosner. Your questions, insights, confidence in our capacity and enthusiastic support for our mission means the world. • Our new support team for Carrie to receive insights, encouragement and prayer for her work in steering TCL’s ship: Laura Jacob, Jana Sarnowski of Recovery Revolution, rotating board members, TCL board vice chair Julie Hagen! • Ashten Wickham (https://www.ashtenwickhamdesigns.com/) of #whatthefaith designed this annual report, an increasingly vital project for our operations! Big thanks to Ashten for sharing his gifts with TCL! • Allison Del Fium of #whatthefaith (https://www.whatthefaith. space) for being a kindred spirit in ministry. Here’s to future collaborative projects! • Bushra and Qamar Zafar, who more-than-kindly welcomed us at their community’s digital Iftar this year! • Kelley Russell-DuVarney, who generously donated time as Carrie’s incredibly helpful executive coach to help TCL’s future. • Mission Capital, an organization who continues to offer us stellar resources and support throughout the year. • Pastor Carrie has a support system that makes her experimental work possible from behind the scenes, whether by mentors, friends, folks that help her process leadership decisions or simply help her get some rest or play in. She is immensely grateful for those that help her become a better pastor by making sure she is a whole human. Thank God for y’all. PAGE 25
PLEASE PLEDGE! WE NEED
YOU.
We absolutely need your generosity to be able to keep up this good work! If you’d like to give a one time donation, we would be so grateful! You may do so right now, with great ease, at thechurchlab.org. Monthly pledgers are our most impactful donating partners. To become a pledger, you can also set it up online at thechurchlab.org. Please email carrie@thechurchlab.org to let us know if you’re able to commit to a 3-year recurring donation or another timeframe of your choosing. We are immensely grateful for your generosity, both in resources, prayers and participation.
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