Online Archives

Churches in Baltimore are developing a strategy that will lead them and their communities into a God-inspired future.

“As we look to our strategy, one of the things we believe is important is finding ways to evaluate, support and encourage congregations in the midst of these changes,” said the Rev. Karin Walker, superintendent of the Baltimore Metropolitan District.

One of the ways to accomplish this task is through Appreciative Inquiry, a process which provides a new way of seeing the world, a new way of thinking, acting and being. Appreciative Inquiry “asks us to pay special attention to the best of the past and present in order to ignite the collective imagination of what might be,” Walker said.

With Appreciative Inquiry, churches focus not on a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be seized.

The AI process has four pieces:

• Discovery – embracing history and memories that evoke passion
• Dream – Imagining an ideal church
• Design – Creating new structures and processes;
• Destiny – Delivering the dream.

In a problem-solving mode, “there is an assumption that an organization is a problem to be solved,” Walker said. “In AI, the basic assumption is that an organization is a mystery to be embraced.”

With Appreciative Inquiry, several basic assumptions include:

• What we focus on becomes our reality.
• The act of asking questions influences the group in some way.
• People have more confidence in moving into the future when they carry forward parts of the past.
• It is important to value differences.
• The language we use creates our reality.

“This is bigger than us,” Walker concluded, “and when something is bigger than us it’s about God-sized endeavors.”