Western District Strategic Plan Update, November 2025

Siblings in Christ,

Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ whom we love and serve together!

We have now served as your elected Western District Executive Board for a year and a half. One of the mandates from our District Synod was to provide a strategic plan by October of 2025. On the following pages we offer a brief overview of our work over the last 18 months, a report on the joys and concerns we have heard from you, and our mission and vision for how we seek to offer servant leadership moving forward.

We believe that lay leadership development is the most important issue facing our church. Our strategic plan will focus on changes and training that are necessary to support what ministry leadership will look like in the future.

We would love to be in conversation with you about this. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to any member of the District Board to schedule a time for us to come meet with you.

On behalf of the Western District Executive Board,

Rev. Jason Andersen, President • Kerry Krauss, Vice President • Marian Boyle Rohloff • Steve Heroux • Jo Ann Keller • Linda Schaefer

What we have done:

• We met in regional locations (northeast WI, southern WI, central WI, the Twin Cities, and North Dakota). We also had at least two of our Board members make visits to our more geographically remote congregations (Berea and Our Savior’s MN, Unionville MI, Hope IN, West Salem IL, and Morongo CA) In each of those gatherings, we took time to meet with the Joint Boards and Pastors to hear about their concerns, joys, and questions, and to share what we were seeing from our District-wide perspective.
• We implemented changes to our call process. Through Provincial guidance, we now offer Joint Boards the opportunity to participate in Zoom interviews with potential pastoral candidates prior to extending them a call. We also took the initiative to ask pastors in advance if they would be open or interested in being presented for call at specific congregations. We have worked with Provincial leadership to update both the congregational and pastoral information on the call portal, and we would encourage both Joint Boards and Pastors to utilize this resource.
• We utilized the Provincial Racial Justice Team to provide racial sensitivity awareness training for our summer camp volunteers. We have also worked in conjunction with our District Camping Ministries Committee to offer encouragement and pathways for all our District pastors to attend a summer church camp.
• We have worked with the District Candidacy Review Committee for one candidate entering seminary and have shared candidacy materials, including information on the District “Try Ministry” Internship, with five other potential candidates.
• We have mediated ongoing conversations with the Joint Boards of some of our District congregations who share geographic proximity on what shared ministries may look like in the future.
• We created a grant program for lay members of District churches to take the Compass lay leadership courses through Moravian Seminary for free. We created a District loan policy to assist Western District congregations with capital improvements. If you are interested in learning how to utilize either of these resources, please let us know.

What we have seen and heard:

• Our congregations are faithfully providing many much-needed services to their surrounding communities. People are being fed, clothed, and cared for. Those on the outskirts of society are being advocated for. Fellowship and community are being nurtured and strengthened through how congregations live out their gifts.
• Our congregations are working to maintain the worship life and faith formation of their members. Across the District, congregation members remark about their appreciation of the family atmosphere and welcoming spirit that define Moravian churches.
• Our congregations are concerned with the challenges of congregational viability and ministry resources. As has been the case for many years now, congregations feel the stress and strain of maintaining ongoing services both within their church buildings and in their communities.
• The models of congregational leadership are changing. Statistics bear this to be true:
  • Of the 76 rostered clergy in the Northern Province, 38 are age 55 or older.
  • Of the 30 congregations in the Western District, 10 are being led by a full-time, called, ordained Moravian pastor. The rest are led by appointments, pastors from other denominations, licensed lay pastors, part-time pastors, or Joint Boards, or are in the call process.
  • The District Board offers this observation not from a perspective of lesser value but rather changed and evolving value. The 20 congregations in our District not being led by full-time Moravian clergy offer elements of the blueprint for moving forward.

Our strategic plan:

Recognizing the factors of changing church identity and diminishment of available clergy, rooted in our shared identity and theology as the Body of Christ, and reclaiming the importance of the leadership of our laity, we share our strategic plan:

1. We will work with congregations currently led by pastoral leadership (lay and ordained, full time and part time) to transition from a pastor-centered model to a lay-centered model. The focus will be on creating pastor-empowered, lay-led missional ministries in your surrounding community. This will involve a movement of our pastors away from a maintenance model (care for the flock through traditional pastoral care such as visitation, Bible study, preaching, etc) towards a mission model (involvement in the community, training of laity for pastoral care, and helping churches to leverage congregational gifts to meet community needs). This will be accomplished in multiple ways.
   1. We will work with our District clergy cohort to offer encouragement and training on this shift in congregational leadership.
   2. We will do individual check-ins with pastors and Joint Boards to offer that same encouragement and training on what this shift will look like for their unique context.
   3. We recognize that many of our pastors and Joint Boards have already begun doing some of this type of adaptive and transformational work, and we will share those stories on a District-wide level to offer best practices and examples to model.
2. We will create a District-wide lay leadership cohort of interested lay members from congregations. The cohort will meet for training and encouragement via Zoom, and then in person through regional groups for sharing ideas and progress. If you or someone you know may be interested in participating in a lay leadership cohort, please contact a member of the District Board.