Why do people from all backgrounds choose to come together and work side by side for three years on a course? What is it that holds them together, for most of the time at least? While we knew we had a common purpose we had never stopped to look at what it might be. We had never worked out the finer points of it so that it took the form of a group vision statement. We were given chance to take responsibility for our own learning, and we realised that the vision was lacking, so we took the opportunity to work it out. The process took many weeks of work, and a lot of thought went into it. In the end, we came up with a statement.
The three stages we went through to produce our vision was to think where we were, i.e. a group with no common sense of direction, where we wanted to be, i.e. a group with a sense of purpose owned by all, and finally to work out how we were going to get to where we wanted to be. This last step led to our work on vision. Ground rules for use within the group were one way of achieving this.
Our statement deals with three main areas: God, individual, and group or community. All three areas are recognised as being important, as without God none of us would be there, we all come from different traditions, church backgrounds, and areas, and together we form the CM group. It was felt that the finished vision statement covered all areas of our group life and gave us something to work towards too.
So the vision statement we worked towards was:
To recognise that through God’s free gift of love He calls us, through choice, to respond to work towards seeing and witnessing His glory being realised and fulfilled through a growing acceptance that we:
are who God made us as individuals with diversity and different strengths and weaknesses
recognise that we come to the group with different experiences, expectations and assumptions so that we can work together as a community
support and encourage each other on our academic, emotional, and spiritual journeys with Christ through the using and sharing of the gifts God has given to us.
