Our first Town Hall of 2010 will take place on Sunday, February 21, in the Gathering Place immediately following worship. Discussion of hospitality at Southminster will follow lunch. Lunch will consist of lasagna, salad and garlic bread, with the Fellowship Committee providing desserts.

Session has designated hospitality one of Southminster's top priorities for 2010. Please mark your calendars and plan to bring your best ideas about how to improve hospitality to this important meeting.

NOTE: As with all Town Hall meetings, opportunity will be provided for Q&A with Pastor Greg and members of Session about our life together. All questions are welcome and will be addressed to the best of our ability.

To better explore hospitality at Southminster, we will use a resource that was discovered and recommended by Roger Walter and Rev. Katherine Rieder when they were participating in a workshop for the Life Together program run by the Indianapolis Center for Congregations. The resource is called "Visual Explorer" (see the Center for Creative Leadership) and it provides an opportunity through the use of more than 200 8X10-inch pictures to exercise another style of human thought (nonverbal, intuitive) than the one usually called upon in strategic planning meetings (verbal, analytical).

Since hospitality is a component of every aspect of life at Southminster, it is necessarily a complex topic. We will use these pictures to help us better explore the full range of our hospitality and to help us see hospitality more creatively and more clearly. The photos will help us have an open conversation and build up a fund of shared meaning. This conversation by the whole congregation will lay a foundation for additional planning, resulting ultimately in our becoming a more hospitable people.

The Questions. You will be asked to consider the following questions while choosing three photos that best represent your response:

• Choose a picture that represents hospitality at Southminster.
• Choose a picture that represents a time when you were at your best and offered great hospitality to someone (as an church member, a partner, a spouse, a parent, a friend, etc.).
• Choose a picture that represents the one thing that most stands in the way of hospitality at Southminster.