As the meeting was happening I made a few notes. Here they are with some bracketed comments:

1. In some statements I heard, "MCC"/"the MCC family" functionally replaces "the church" as the community of affilation. [Is this what we want to happen? Do we want the church to be diminished for some reason? I think we shouldn't expect MCC to be something it isn't and actually can't be. The church still needs to be the church, and MCC from that context.]
2. [I think we need to keep our thinking biblical in a concrete (not abstract) way.] Rather than speaking about "reconcilation" generically, how about "Reconciliation with God, with neighbor, and with creation."
3. I also heard "we need to reunite the gospel with social concerns." [Back up a minute. Who said the gospel was not concerned about social health? It always was - at least the way the New Testament shows it and speaks about it in the Gospel narratives and in Paul's writings. We are called to embody the gospel of Jesus Christ in concrete, visible, audible ways. We tend to forget that we care about peacemaking because Jesus said "Blessed are the peacemakers" (and many other pertinent things). It's already an integral part of the gospel.]
4. A question: Does a person need to "lean left" politically to appreciate and be excited about MCC? [How will MCC strive to connect with and speak to (or even convince) potential supporters who might not be excited about Obama or Democratic or progressive political stances? I think this question is directly connected to how we frame MCC's core purpose. Do we frame it biblically/theologically/Christologically? Or do we frame it as - at it's root - a response to human needs? If the latter, then MCC definitely will be different in 20 years (ie, "a little violence might help bring some justice if the situation calls for it" - not very different from how the US claimed to bring women's rights to Afghanistan in the last 8 years).