BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! 

Following a year-long process of careful listening and deep discernment, MCC’s Board of Directors adopted new mission, vision, values and strategy statements on June 22, 2023, enthusiastically committing to moving boldly forward into the organization’s future while treasuring its 85-year history of faithful ecumenical witness and work in Maine.

The mission of the Maine Council of Churches is
to speak with a prophetic voice of faith,
connecting people within, through, and beyond the church
to create a more just, compassionate, and peaceful world.
 
The core value that guides us as we carry out our mission is
LOVE OF NEIGHBOR.
 
This value is expressed in five guiding principles:
Seek wisdom
Journey with humility
Derive strength from community
Build trust
Demonstrate courage
 
To accomplish our mission, we:
 
Connect people…
across denominations, faith and wisdom traditions, organizations, races, ages, classes, national origins, abilities, sexual orientations, and gender identities,
 
Equip them to take action…
so that our collective impact can be more powerful,
 
Provide educational opportunities…
where we can teach and learn from one another,
 
Advocate…
for statewide public policies that create

a more just, equitable, compassionate, sustainable, and inclusive community in Maine

Over the next few weeks, stay tuned to this blog series as we “unpack” these new statements so you can try them on, break them in, and get comfortable with them.

In today’s installment, we’ll unpack our mission and vision.

To speak with a prophetic voice of faith
As we listened to dozens of clergy, lay people, denomination leaders, and staff from secular partner organizations, we heard them say that speaking with a collective voice of faith in the public square was one of the most important things MCC does, especially when it counters the version of faith espoused by right-wing fundamentalists and white “Christian” nationalists who too often monopolize the media and culture spotlight. 
 
Why did we add the word “prophetic”? Not because we’re going into the business of predicting the future!  Rather, it’s because of the role of prophets in the bible (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, et al.) and in contemporary society (Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Greta Thunberg, et al.). Prophets challenge and inspire the community to do justice and treat the vulnerable and marginalized with dignity and fairness.  The great scholar of Hebrew scripture, Walter Brueggemann, explains that prophetic imagination in every age helps us to connect the dots between the world as it is and the world as it might be, and to recognize that our own well-being is inextricably bound up with the well-being of others.
 
Connecting people within, through, and beyond the church
From its beginnings in 1938, MCC has connected people within the churches of Maine, across denominational boundaries, and that remains an important part of the work we will continue to do, as will our efforts to inspire those within the church to serve the larger community through the church.
 
But this isn’t the only kind of connecting we do.  Our stakeholders told us MCC plays a unique and valuable role by functioning like a “hub” that brings people together across all kinds of other boundaries that lay outside church walls, enabling them to support one another, study together, and take action, based on values we all share.
 
And at this tumultuous time in the life of the institutional church, we also feel called to connect with people not just within, but “beyond” the church—the nones, the dones, the church adjacent, and those of other faiths or no faith at all—so that our message and work engages both the “churched” and the “unchurched.”
 
To create a more just, compassionate and peaceful world
It was important to state that our mission isn’t just to be, but to do, to take action—building, inspiring, equipping, connecting, all for the purpose of bringing to fruition God’s vision of a just, compassionate and peaceful world.  Because that’s God’s vision, it is our vision, too.
 
Next time in this series … we’ll explore our core value and guiding principles….stay tuned!