Diocesan Core Values

Our Core Purpose:  Be Jesus' Witnesses

Our Core Values:

• Faith:  We pattern our lives on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

• Scripture, prayer, and worship:  We are grounded in Scripture, prayer, and sacramental worship.

• Mission:  We reach beyond ourselves to serve all people in our communities and throughout the world.

• Reconciliation:  We are a community committed to living in reconciled relationship with God and all people.

• Evangelism:  We proclaim, by word and example, God's saving love revealed in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit.
   

Diocesan Core Values

During the spring meetings of both the Executive Board and the Standing Committee, the elected leadership of the diocese decided that it is very important to chart our course as a diocesan family. As Bishop Gary Lillibridge said, "We cannot wait for someone else to come in and take care of business for us. We must be about the active work of identifying and living into our vocation as a diocese faithful to our Lord."

Subsequent conversations led to the idea of a diocesan-wide effort to discover, or re-discover, the core values that will assist us in achieving a bright and Godly future as a diocese. This led to more discussion about core beliefs and our core purpose. For the first time in recent memory, the Executive Board and the Standing Committee were called together on August 30 by the bishop to seriously engage the question of diocesan core values.

Then, on October 27, about 350 vestry and bishop's committee members, as well as other congregational leadership, met in the seven convocations of the diocese. Using material from Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, the small groups at each meeting came up with several sets of core values.

These were sent forward to the Diocesan Executive Board and Standing Committee which, in mid-November, spent a day collating the results of the seven convocational meetings into one set of diocesan core values.

The authors of Built To Last define core values as the essential and timeless guiding principles of an organization. "How we express these values," Bishop Lillibridge says, "and the ministries we undertake or decide not to undertake because of these values may change, but the core values themselves are so basic as to be unchanging." Core values are not created, they are uncovered by carefully discerning the basic principles by which God is calling us to live.

In addition, healthy organizations are continually aware of their "core purpose" - their fundamental reason for being. For the Diocese of West Texas, that core purpose is "to be Jesus' witnesses." "This," says Lillibridge, "is our 'guiding star,' that never changes, although it should inspire change."

"Understanding and claiming both our core purpose and our core values are essential elements to our life together if we are to be 'salt and light' in our world," says Lillibridge. "Taking this seriously will strengthen our witness, and we are clearly called by Jesus, through the Scripture, to be witnesses to the glory of God in thought, word, and deed."

Now, says Lillibridge, "It is time to determine how we as a diocese, as congregations, and as individuals will live into our core purpose and core values in all that we do. We cannot simply put our core values on our letterhead and consider it done, or they will be meaningless."

The 104th Council will receive the core values discerned by the diocesan family in the past few months and then will explore ways in which these values will guide our future decisions and actions as we continue to be Jesus' witnesses in all that we do.

"Taken by themselves, there is nothing startling about our core values," says Lillibridge. "There is nothing unusual about saying that we are grounded in Scripture, prayer, and sacramental worship. The task before us is to be intentional about that, to see that everything we do is, in fact, grounded in Scripture, undergirded with prayer, and celebrated in sacramental worship. That is what we will turn our attention to at this Council."