The National Executive Committee of the Military Chaplains Association will meet this coming week at Fort Jackson, SC. We will convene on Tuesday and conclude on Wednesday. Because of the importance of you, our members, in our organizational mission, I share our agenda with you as an attachment (
here).
Given what I have written about the past few weeks, I doubt that much of this will be "new news" for you - and if you are an NEC member and this is the first time you have seen the agenda please let us know! - and I will highlight a few points as well. Below are some "amplifications" of a couple of areas.
You can clearly see that we are filling out the content for our National Institute on 6 and 7 November. If any of you have any topics that you would like to present for consideration, please get those to me so that they can go in front of the NEC next week for review.
In the membership area you will see a topic that I wrote about a few weeks ago, and which generated some excellent feedback from quite a few of you, and we will be looking at types of chaplaincies that would seem to fall under the umbrella of MCA.
We will also be having a discussion about where we are at financially, and as looking at a new membership level, that of Sustaining membership.
Moving along, you will see that we are looking at "re-booting" of some of our chapters as noted, and absolutely need your input if you are stationed in and/or live in one of those metro areas.
From conversations with Jan McCormack, there are a number of you who are already in the process of meeting the requirements for the Professional Military Chaplain status that we have rolled out with the Association of Professional Chaplains, and that is heartening.
You will note that there will be an update on that status of our Military Chaplain Journal, and moving beyond the printed word, revamping our on-line presence with new opportunities for social media to get the word out about MCA and re-looking where things stand with Veteran/Military Friendly Congregations.
Last but not least is a look at our strategic plan, and with that, a look at who we might want to work with as our strategic partners, and NCMAF is a good start point for that conversation.
My questions for you: 1) Is there anything we are missing from your perspective and 2) As we begin to start rolling out/reviewing some of these, can you step up to the plate to actualize one or more of these which jump out at you and attract your attention? We may have great plans, but without the people to support them they remain as concepts until folks help to bring them to fruition.
Feel free to email or call me with anything you see- or don't see- which you would like discussed, and we'll certainly add those suggestions into the hopper. Also, please remember us in prayer as we seek to have wisdom going forward.
