"…the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are."

"My husband and I are the co-pastors of a church, and Covid has ushered in a new chapter for our ministry. It had been five years from the moment we started as a church to the last Sunday we were allowed to worship in person. As we went online, we watched people slowly leave our church as we kept trying different things to make it work. It became clear that our ministry could not proceed as it once had. We could sense in our spirit that a new vision was emerging, but we couldn’t see where we were going. We weren’t even sure where we were, or where our people were.

Based on the recommendation of an advisor, we decided to bring Attune in to help our core leadership team gain more clarity on the path ahead. The biggest theme that came forward was this idea of “withness.” It came up during the very first meeting, stuck with us throughout the discernment process and we continue to step into it more fully even now – several months later.

We’ve now defined withness in two dimensions: 1) People coming alongside you, where people are in your stuff with you; and 2) We’re leading together – with a flattened sense of leadership. Along the first dimension, we’ve realized just how central this theme of withness is to our church culture, and our desire is to help all of our people understand and intentionally lean into this. Along the second dimension, my husband and I have realized that, while we had intentionally equipped and empowered our first set of leaders – we had stopped there. As a result, we had found ourselves doing more of the work, and then feeling a little grumbly about it. It was working against this sense of withness.With these themes of withness now surfaced, we’ve been able to pursue both dimensions more intentionally. For example, in a couple of months, we’ll be kicking off a series of dinners to create space for all of us to better understand this idea of withness – by reflecting on what we are doing well in coming alongside each other, and where we have missed the mark. To add to this, the effort will be led by one of a couple of new powerhouse leaders we are intentionally pouring into, who were involved only at the margins before.

And even beyond this theme of withness, the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are. We can now much more clearly communicate this to people and empower others to join in with the work of our church. Because of this, we are now planning to officially relaunch the church in just a couple of months. We’re also redefining, clarifying and igniting our discipleship process. And we’re building a new website. And we’ve developed some intentional ways to grow a more missional outpost identity. There are still so many challenges we’re facing, and so much work to do, but we know God has already gone before us. We know he is calling us and others further into this work. We know he is showing us what withness looks like first hand, as he is with us in our stuff, and in our leadership."