 Welcome to this edition of Vantage Point. I am very pleased to have as guests with me today Diane Montecatenia, who is the pastor of the Salisbury Congregational Church and the Reverend Sarah Smith, who is the pastor of the United Congregational Church in Bridgeport. We are pleased you're with us today. Thank you. Welcome. We are doing a series on interdependence and how it is being incarnated in the churches of the Connecticut Conference and so we're going to talk in depth with Sarah and with Diane today and so I'd like to start out with a question of how did the cooperation, the interdependence between your two congregations start. Tell us the Genesis story of this relationship. Okay. Sarah and I were in a clergy covenant group together and so as new clergy in Connecticut, we were both new to our roles. We were talking about the different challenges that our churches faced and it seemed that it was a natural fit for us to work together. I was working to help the Salisbury Congregational Church turn outward and look for mission that we could do close to home and Sarah, I'll let Sarah talk about it, but Sarah was looking for churches to do that. Well, we wanted to become a mission magnet. We're in a very desperate neighborhood. It's a very old urban church and we were trying to figure out what our next chapter was and so we threw the doors open and said, okay, neighbor's what you need and so we developed 12 outreach programs and a not-for-profit to contain that work and support that work and so I was looking for mission partners and I wanted to be a mission magnet where her neighborhood might not need help but her folks want to do the right thing. There are faithful people out in the hinterlands that want to do the right thing. So where I was like, surely we can make this work and it's just, it's more than worked. It's been transformative. And what we started, our first project was to help with a Thanksgiving dinner. I think it was three years ago and people were so enthusiastic. We went down on a Tuesday and we did all the prep work, chopping and getting everything ready and then a couple of families went down actually on Thanksgiving to help serve. We feed about 500 turkey dinners on Thanksgiving and the whole church sort of smells like turkey but other than that it's a really wonderful thing and they brought coats and food but they bought spirit and what we gave to them was a chance to roll up their sleeves put their faith in their interaction and be Christ to people and in that what we're supposed to do. So it's a good really base off but we're going to give back and go up there and teach them a few things too. So it'll be alright. So I wonder if you could share a little bit about what you've learned about this by being in this relationship because this wasn't a relationship that you woke up one morning and said well, we can be in relationship with a congregation in Bridgeport and Bridgeport said let's go to Salisbury and have a relationship. So what have you learned in this partnership, this relationship? I think the most important thing that I've seen is the development of the relationship of people caring for one another recognizing that every life can affect another life. I just want to talk briefly about our blanket project. So last summer or last winter we were down in Bridgeport and the staff mentioned that they would like to become a warming center but in order to do that they had to have a blanket for every person who would come to be warmed. So one of our women in the church heard this conversation and she took it upon herself to organize a group of women in the church. They spent their spring and summer they made a hundred blankets and each one had they're warm and soft and then each one has a pocket for people to keep their personal items in and a little prayer sewn into the lining. And so it was an extension of our prayer shawl ministry. So these women met every week they brought their sewing machines and they worked on these blankets and they were thinking about who those blankets would go to. And what's neat about it is when they came to Brazil and we were up at Silver Lake on women's retreats they came the women in my church because the members of my church come from all the joining towns not very few of the folks we serve are members of the church and so they're there and they're like why didn't we think of that it like inspired us to go to the next step and then they heard these stories of these women saying we prayed for all the people that might use this and it just sort of upped the ante on what my folks who you know you get used to it oh yeah we feed 200 people every week and we give out groceries to 400 families and we just sort of like yeah no big deal and I think they were like this is a big deal and we could do something like that so we've inspired each and then I love the pulpit swap because we thought we got to get because we love each other so we got to you know and my church seeing me have this friend in ministry and then we had her come preach and then I went up there and those were the two best Sundays we had that year it was just rich rich rich and now we're planning this big retreat with up at Silver Lake and we're going to go up there because we're really good at music and global music because we're very diverse people every color and so we'll stretch the little white folks of the village a little bit but more importantly they're going to host us and we're going to eat together and we're going to youth together and it's just it's going to extend the work so it sounds like lots of positive great things have happened what challenges are there in a relationship like this what are the things the obstacles that you have to overcome to start something like this hour and a half drive so distance I think the first one was distance I think the challenge that we face most often is people wanting to do something that feels important but not being sure what that is and our enthusiasm the challenge of translating our enthusiasm to the congregation so this retreat that we're planning we tried to plan it last summer and we delegated the organizing of it to folks who weren't as energetic about it as we were and it didn't happen and so getting everybody on board I think has been the challenge well and you asked where we started we went back to our roots I remember Diane sitting there saying covenant, covenant so of course we had to do it over a meal and everything we do at Unites about food and we talked about covenant and we went back to our historical covenants and we pulled out mine that we've had for 320 years and we only tweaked it slightly throughout some of these and those but other than that it's pretty much the same and we went back to hers and we've then created this new one and the challenge on that is we've got to get us all in one room and sign it but other than that we both approved it and we're all behind it so it's mostly logistic so you're sealing this agreement between your two congregations in a covenantal way which definitely is part of our tradition part of our heritage that's a really wonderful thing and I'm new to Connecticut so I guess I can be more prophetic but I want to show some of the die-hard congregationalists I've served an E in our church there are other folks out there but also that the covenant can work so if we have to rewrite it or lift it up or make it even just starting with two of us our youth group is in covenant with Reading and Norfield and we have the triune youth and we do stuff all at once a month so we were trying to take this example and use it for others we cannot do by ourselves there's so much work that Christ is asking us to do and calls us to serve we need all hands on deck and we need to be hands together so what's your hope as you look forward to signing the covenant sealing this relationship in some new ways what's your hope what do you think you're going to be able to accomplish in the future together my hope is that we have put in place a partnership a relationship that will last well into the future you know we joked about our covenant ceremony that it was like we were having a wedding for the two churches and we were coming together and we were saying to these two churches okay you're taking responsibility for each other now so we're going to care about you we're going to pray about you we're going to think about you and we're going to work together so that's my hope is that it carries on into the future and creates a new model of church great we want to make sure in 320 years somebody said thank God they did something new and different and they learned how to do it together so we are so grateful for your sharing your story with us today on this version of Vantage Point we are grateful for your ministries and for the enthusiasm that you carry into cooperating with each other so we wish you God's deepest blessings as this journey continues and maybe even a year from now we'll do a little check in to see where things are with your partnership and your interdependence so blessings to you thank you so we're grateful that you've joined us for this episode of Vantage Point we look forward to you joining us for our next Vantage Point which will again be on interdependence blessings to each of you