“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
I found those words written by poet John Donne some 300 years ago rolling around in my mind as I was editing this issue.
As Melvin Worthington points out in his President's Message on page 9, RCMA staff, board, and members are coming together as never before to write the new future for the association.
On page 10, Dean Jones, RCMA's new director of conferences and events, talks about building community as an essential function of associations and of meetings — a power and responsibility with which faith-based organizations in particular are charged.
Check out the photo gallery on page 14, where you'll find highlights of the association's historic 40th convention. You'll see images of a multifaceted meeting that required the skills, creativity, passion, and cooperation of a huge network of people working together to bring to life a conference that started out simply as ideas, plans, and scripts.
If you were actually at the meeting, I guarantee that at least at one point during that time you felt the power of the RCMA community — maybe it was networking with colleagues, participating in one of the many educational sessions, walking the aisles of the exposition hall, or hearing Executive Director Harry Schmidt at the concluding business session, when he spoke passionately about “the great movement that we call RCMA.”
No man or woman is an island entire of itself, especially when he or she connects with the power of community that associations like RCMA can bring to life.