Spanning the generational gap

I am excited at the idea of a new church start.....I am particularly excited to be trying to bring the Word and sacrament to populations that are currently not regularly in our UCC Churches.  Keeping infrastructure costs low and keeping the model simple should allow for easy startup and should keep the need to focus on finding funding sources as a smaller concern.

What does it look like....

An itinerant ministry that's infrastructure is a pickup truck and a tool trailer.  The population served is southern Maine campus'.  Sacramental ministry will be held at alternative times on different campus' (maybe USM Portland, Gorham, SMCC, Bowdoin, UNE, MCA)  Each  location will be grown as an indepedent group or congregation but will be tied to the larger "church"  through mission.  What is mission of the church?  Disaster response UCC style.  Which is disaster preparedness, long term recovery mission trips and participation on unmet needs committees and projects associated with those who fall through the cracks.  

Each location can decide what their specific missional focus will be, and the "church" will help facilitate plugging them in to that and creating a larger church community.  The larger church will mission together at least once a year but will try to do local, regional and national missioning.  We will also hold as a core objective ecumenical and interfaith mission opportunities in order to build greater understanding and respect for all of God's creation.  From each group on each campus, my objective would be to grow a leader/s and maybe even commission them to do worship as a way to help them find a ministerial voice and get them to have ownership.  If we provide a contextualized community of at each institution that suits our youth then they will stay attached through their college years and hopefully settle into a UCC church when they leave school.  Perhaps they will even transform a UCC church as a vocation or as a parishioner.

The Disaster Response Team for the Conference will act as sponsers to these locations and we may assign mentors from the team or sponsers or mentors for the students from the local UCC churches in order that we make additional connections for students to a community of faith.

I am not certain how this will be funded.  I think that the infrastructure will be obtained through grants.  I am envisioning that the funding for the operating funds may be obtained by pledges from the students or through the different institutions, maybe the local churches that are in the higher-ed towns and through grants.

I anticipate there will be ongoing ties between Grace, Street ministries and this Church.  I would like to have the school populations also interact with the folks served by Grace, but also maybe invite them to mission with us and find ways to have them work alongside one another.  

If the model is successful and takes off, there would opportunity to fine tune it and use it in other areas in Maine...Northern Maine, Eastern Maine etc.  I would also like to eventually tie it into the BTS community and draw students into it for mentorship so that they can contextualize what emerging church looks like.

I needed to get this down and out...please offer thoughts, comments,  prayers!!!!!