Six clergy and two laity will help set the strategic plan for the Great Plains Conference staff operations into 2026 and beyond.
Selected for the task force are:
Conference executive director Scott Brewer, who is staffing the strategic planning work, said the purpose of the team is to gather ideas and opinions from clergy and laity across the Great Plains and develop propose a plan and priorities for the conference.
“Rather than putting together a group of existing leaders to develop a plan, we really wanted to do was to put our emphasis on collecting as broad a base of opinion from our constituents as possible,” Brewer said. “The responsibility of this group is to work with our consultant, Mark McCormack, to make sense of what we learn in listening to over a thousand persons in our mission field and to work on determining what our priorities are as a conference, what direction we want to head in, and what role the annual conference plays in supporting the health and vitality of local churches and our mission field.”
Brewer said the group includes divergent backgrounds, demographics, and opinions about the needs and future of the conference.
“This group has some people who are familiar with the system and some who are not as familiar so that we could get a balance between insider-outsider,” he said. “We do have a group of people with strong opinions and strong ideas, and we’re not going to, hopefully, fall down a path of succumbing to groupthink.”
Bishop Wilson said he was pleased with what he had seen from the individuals on the task force.
“I am very impressed with the engagement of all of the task force members,” the bishop said. “They have offered great insight to this process. It is good to hear the various perspectives that will aid us in this work.”
One of the first missions for the task force is to develop a broad survey that will be distributed to 1,000 clergy and laity leaders in the conference. The online survey, approximately 15 minutes long, is scheduled to be distributed in early 2026.
This is the first time the conference has done such an extensive survey of its clergy and lay leaders, Brewer said, rather than relying on the instinct of conference leaders.
“This is a good gut and reality check to whether those impressions are justified,” he said.
Although Brewer said plans are running slightly behind schedule, the goal remains to present the final recommendations of the task force to the annual conference session, May 27-30 in Kearney.
“We will not rush the work simply to meet a deadline,” Brewer said. “But if there is compelling information that indicates a direction, we will go forward.”
Contact David Burke, content specialist, at [email protected].