Dear All,
This Sunday we will be talking a lot about values around the
theme: "Values: Common Ground or Source of Divisiveness?" We
will be discussing what values are and taking a look at our own personal
values and the beliefs and behaviors that support those values.
On Wednesday of this week, when the political news commentators were
analyzing the results of the Presidential election, Jeff Greenfield,
one of the senior political analysts for CNN, make this
statement: "The Democrats did not do a good job of paying
attention to the way people live their everyday lives and their values."
Nations, political parties, corporations, institutions, families,
marriages, individuals, churches, and even church school classes, are
all guided by their values. There are several questions that arise
for all of us: are those values conscious or unconscious? Do the
values we espouse match the way we behave, or the decisions we make?
Our speaker this Sunday will be one of our own class members,
Reverend Tom Daugherty. Tom and his wife, Jerilynn, have been
members of the Ordinary Life Class for several years and are well
known to many of us. Tom is a clergy member of the Texas Annual
Conference of the United Methodist Church, and until his retirement
in June of this year served as Vice President for Spiritual Care and
Values Integration for The Methodist Hospital System. During his
time with Methodist, Tom led the hospital system in a values
integration effort that resulted in that organization having the
highest degree of values alignment out of 800 corporate clients in 26
countries using the Corp Tools Cultural Assessment developed by
Richard Barrett and Associates.
Laura