As members of a local church we know that our communities need us, and we need them. Still, it can be hard to connect to new people, or even to find them. This workshop is a chance to explore what your congregation has to offer to the community, and how to let the community know who you are. 

Ideal for outreach committees, missions groups, and church leadership teams, this gathering will help you to explore new ways to create a traditional sense of belonging and consider how worship, education and formation, and outreach programs can show radical hospitality. Participants will leave with specific ideas they can implement to engage in mission and evangelism that communicates love and welcome to their immediate neighbors. Ideally, two or more members of a faith community will participate together.

Using large group discussion, personal reflection, and small group work, this workshop addresses these topics:

• What is Good News? 
• What communities need the good news your church as to offer?
• Connecting church to people who need church
• Sharing good news—the connection of mission and evangelism
• Church Marketing

Participants will develop an idea for a new outreach project or an expansion of an existing project early in the workshop. They will leave with a specific plan for how to engage the rest of the congregation in this work and how to begin their new approach.

On her blog, Writing on the Side, The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Mae Magill shares that her "fancy-pants name" comes with her "fancy-pants MDiv from Episcopal Divinity School ('02), the authority bestowed on her by ordination with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)  and her scholarly DMin coming any year now from Brite Divinity School--wait! I finished May '17." More often she is known simply as "Liz," which is her "everyday connection to neighbors and friends, street folk and colleagues, family and foreigners." Liz offers a wealth of wisdom (check out her workshop list) linking Elizabeth and Liz - academia, priesthood and ordinary life with the "persistent insistence that there is something divine in the intersection of world events, local communities, and personal life."