Feedback and Observations Winter 2019

This winter we heard God calling and UCC Medfield answered the call. Your Board and Staff love being on this journey with you!

As we go, we will foster a healthy cycle of communication. We promised to hear your experiences, receive your feedback, and set a clear direction. The observations below are our first opportunity to meet that commitment.

To set a context for this conversation, here are some church-wide trends we have observed through the early part of 2019…

• Attendance remains consistent, with spikes that exceeded historical trends on several Sunday mornings.
• We welcomed 16 new members, which represents an 11 person increase from last year.
• Total pledges for 2019 surpassed 2018 numbers by approximately $5,000.

This leads to our observations on your feedback related to several areas of church life…

Our worship life has been infused with fresh elements and new sounds. Undoubtedly, worship is the focal point of the majority of your feedback.

The most prominent sentiment that emerged throughout your comments, emails, and conversations is excitement that UCC Medfield is worshiping in one place as one family. People have expressed feeling “sincerely happy to be and worship together” and “elated to worship God in a full sanctuary.” This remark may capture the experience most vividly: “I love coming to God surrounded by my entire church family…There was no us and them, just we. Worship has never felt like that before.”

Coupled with the excitement, we also hear a genuine feeling of loss. The adoption of a single-service prompted the need to design our worship experiences with purpose and intent. Each week, as the worship service is planned and crafted, some elements are included and some elements are omitted. Several of you are grieving the absence of components that became beloved fixtures of our worship experience. This comment reflects this feeling for all of us: “Sometimes I just want to hear a song the way I’ve always heard it.” The folks on the Board and Staff, regardless of which worship service they normally attended, are personally attached to many of these pieces and are processing the loss right along with you.

The final significant trend across the collection of feedback is curiosity about worship service structure and flow. This includes questions on projection quality, liturgy selection, sermon topics, microphone management, music style, stage layout, and bulletin content, among many other things. The design of our worship services will always be evolving and our production always improving. To give these topics the attention they deserve, we have created a page on the UCC Medfield website dedicated to discussing specific elements of our worship services. This is a “living” page that allows those who are most involved in worship planning (our pastors, director of worships arts, and members of the worship design team) to engage in deeper ongoing dialogue with you around this subject.

Our community life remains the vibrant center of our UCC Medfield family. The reconfigured Sunday morning schedule is creating opportunities to deepen connections - many of you expressed that you “love that our time together does not end with the worship service, but continues into a meal, like a real family.” Others appreciate the occasion to “chat with Pastor Karen and Pastor Phil after the service without them having to run to another service.” We completely agree and look eagerly toward the relational possibilities ahead.

Your feedback over these past months has been invaluable and we want to continue hearing from you! This first letter sets the stage for a healthy cycle of communication - watch for quarterly rounds of observations from the Board and Staff.

Our new Congregational Feedback Form is the best vehicle to share your questions, concerns, and hopes for our church. You can access a digital version here or find a print version in the church Lobby.

Thank you for sharing with us!