growing deeper in our church communities - chris smith

8/14/2019 Growing Deeper In Our Church Communities - Chris Smith

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50I F

C D A

C. C S

GROWING

DEEPERin our

CHURCHCOMMUNITIES


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2010, C. Christopher Smith.All Rights Reserved.

Published in e-book format, January 2010.This work may not be distributed in any form, electronicor printed without the written permission of thepublisher.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design and tree painting by Brent Aldrich.Photos by Brent Aldrich, Chris Smith and Jeni Newswanger Smith.

The Englewood Review of Books is a free weekly review of books alongthemes related to Community, Mission and the many-sided wisdom of God.Sign up for a free email subscription at: http://englewoodreview.org/

Thanks to all who contributed to this book, especially my brothers and sistersat Englewood Christian Church. This book is rooted in our experience of lifetogether as a church community. Thanks also to all my friends who on suchshort notice read early drafts and provided thorough feedback.


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Introduction


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Superficiality is the curse of our age. The desperate needtoday is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or giftedpeople, but for deep people.

-- Richard Foster, Opening lines of Celebration of Discipline

Thanks be to Jesus, who rejecting the wisdom of this age came as the complete expression of the wisdom of God, whichwas revealed in the signs He performed and the nature Hedisplayed. May we embrace this wisdom and may weparticipate in His kingdom as we practice the continuing worksand nature of Christ today and every day. Lord, give ustherefore the strength to radically deny ourselves, prayerfully

trust in Your guidance and provision and to deeply lovefriends and enemies alike. Your kingdom come, Your will bedone on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.

-- from the Englewood Covenant Prayers


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Julie Clawson, author of Everyday Justice, recently lamented on

her blog that while the concern for justice seems to be growingin certain sectors of the church, she has found that people areoften at a loss when it comes to the practical issues of how weembody justice in our day-to-day lives. This little blog postresonated with me because I have had similar experiences inregard to community; I hear people in all sorts of churchesacross North America longing for a deeper experience ofcommunity in their church and neighborhoods, and yet many

are at a loss for practical ideas of how to start moving in thisdirection. Indeed, we have been formed by modern Westernculture to live primarily as isolated individuals pursuing ourown personal ends and ambitions. Although modernindividualism has been filtering its way into Western culturefor at least 400 years, its effects of breaking down communitieshave been felt most powerfully in recent decades. For over

twenty-five years, prominent sociologists have beendocumenting our increasing disconnectedness*; participation insocial groups is waning, and we know fewer and fewer of ourneighbors.

Our age is truly one of disconnectedness, but there are goodtheological reasons for the hope that the Holy Spirit, working

through our churches, can begin to reverse this pattern ofisolation. The scriptural story reminds us throughout thatGods mission in the world is primarily one of reconciliation,and we as followers of Jesus are called as ambassadors ofreconciliation (2 Cor. 5). If we are to be faithful to this calling,we cannot continue to live disconnected lives. Despite ourcalling and despite our deep longing for community, we have

been blinded by the individualism of our culture. We are

* Im thinking here especially of Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, et al (1985) andBowling Alone by Robert Putnam (2000).


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therefore unable to see the possibilities of connecting daily in

meaningful ways with the sisters and brothers of our churchcommunities and with our neighbors around us. In order toregain our sight, we must submit ourselves to the transformingwork of the Holy Spirit in the church, and allow God to moveus from the comforts of individualism toward a deeper andmore joyful life of connection.

The purpose of this little book is to spark our imaginationswith practical ideas of how we can become more deeplyconnected first with those that God has gathered in ourchurches and then with our neighbors as well. The ideas herefocus on three primary facets of connection that are essentialfor our churches: connecting with people, connecting withplace and connecting with Gods mission.

Connecting with People

I should not have to make much of a case for our calling toconnect with people. The whole of the Gospel of Jesus isrooted in Gods love for humanity (and all creation) and Gods

desire for the reconciliation of all creation. We cannot love andseek reconciliation while we remain disconnected. Even thedesert fathers and mothers of the early centuries of the church,who often lived isolated lives in the desert, had a deep sense ofconnection i.e., that their isolation was for the sake of allhumanity. Those who do not love a brother or sister whomthey have seen, says the Apostle John, cannot love God

whom they have not seen (I John 4:20). And if there is anyquestion about what it means to love, we could explorenumerous passages throughout the New Testament in whichlove is described as the deepest sort of connection: sacrificial,


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self-denying and preferring the other to oneself. However, it

might not be as readily obvious that our call to love andconnect with people goes to a deeper level, namely that God isgathering a people whose life together reflects the intimatecommunion of the three Persons of the Trinity and embodiesthe love and reconciliation that God desires for all humanityand all creation. This gathering of a people is essential toGods mission of reconciliation in the world; it began in the OldTestament people of Israel, continued in Jesuss gathering of a

community of disciples and continues to the present in thechurch. Our churches, then, are local, context-specificmanifestations of the one people that God is gathering*.Especially in the disconnectedness of the present age, ourchurches are the hospitable environment in which we can learnwhat it means to love and be loved in deeper, more holisticways, and as we learn to do so, our love will overflow to our

neighbors around us.

Connecting with Place

I suspect that my emphasis on connection to place might not be

as obvious to some readers as the call to be connected withpeople. Our connection with the place in which we exist is apowerful reminder of the physical nature of Gods work ofgathering. We have been gathered, not in some esoteric,spiritual sense, but in a real, tangible fashion within time andspace. God gathers us in specific places, and in these places weare called to be the Body of Christ together the physical,

tangible presence of Christ in this place. I, by myself, cannot be

* For a deeper exploration of these ecclesiological ideas, see Gerhard LohfinksJesus andCommunity.


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the Body of Christ; I can only be a part of that body, whose

existence is understood only in relation to the Whole. One ofthe most destructive fruits of our individualism is ourtransience. Jobs, relationships and other opportunities tonurture our selfish ambitions drive us from one place to thenext, and all the while we yearn for deeper relationships. Ourproclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ must becontextual. We embody Christ together in a place, and theshape of the life together that God has given us proclaims

Gods love and reconciliation in ways that can be understoodby our neighbors. The monastics have long had a name forthis connection to place: stability. We primarily need deeperconnection to other people, but in our age of overwhelmingtransience, we need stability connection not only to people,but to people in a specific place.

Connecting with the Mission of God

Finally, we need connection to the mission of God. Once werecognize the need for connection to people and place, there isa great temptation to swap our individualism for tribalism, in

which our end is to be concerned only with what benefits us asa community. Our connection with people and place must becoupled with faithfulness to Gods story of reconciling allcreation. We are called to be faithful together in a place, but allplaces are connected with other places, and we need to begin tounderstand these connections and how our life together affectspeople across town and around the world. Although to

paraphrase the prophet Jeremiah, we are called to seek theshalom (peace/reconciliation) of the place in which we havebeen called, we must understand that shalom as deeplyinterconnected with the shalom of other places and indeed the


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shalom that God desires for all creation. For instance, it might

be beneficial for our church community to run a business thatroasts and sells coffee, but if the farmers in the southernhemisphere who grow the coffee we sell are not being paid fair,livable wages, then we are forgetting the mission of Godthrough which we have been gathered together. Scripture asthe recorded story of Gods work in history is essential to ourconnection with the Mission of God, as is our remembrance ofthe faithfulness of brothers and sisters throughout history who

have gone before us.

Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities

A significant part of our connection to people, place and

mission is the realization that the life together of our churchcommunity must flow through every hour of every daythroughout the week, whether we are physically gatheredtogether or not. As a result of the individualism of our age,there is a great temptation to see our churches as religiouscommunities, whose work is primarily concerned withspiritual matters, and is in contrast to the physical world in

which we work and feed and cover ourselves. This dualistictemptation is one that we must resist with every fiber of ourbeing! Part of our growing deeper together as churchcommunities is the task of finding ways to embody the wisdomof God as the church in all facets of life. Thus, a church shouldcare about how its members and neighbors are fed and housedand employed. I believe that these fundamental economic

realities are the soil in which deeper connections with people,place and mission start to take root, and the ideas that followare aimed at spurring our imaginations in this direction.


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Additionally, as we seek to become deeper church

communities, we must grow deeper in our understanding ofthe gifts that God pours out on the people of God. The giftsthat the Apostle Paul describes in I Corinthians 12 are not anexhaustive list! You will see in the following pages ideas abouthow the gifts of entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and even realestate agents (again, this too is not an exhaustive list; God givesall sorts of gifts to the church) can be essential to the work ofGod in the church, if their gifts are understood in connection

with the redemptive mission of God and submitted to aparticular church community in a specific place.

This book has its roots in the experience of our churchcommunity, Englewood Christian Church

, on the urban near-eastside of Indianapolis, and in a little essay on celebratingInter-dependence Day that my fellow Englewood member

Brent Aldrich and I wrote with our friend Ragan Sutterfield(which was ultimately introduced by Shane Claiborne in theweb version of SOJOURNERS magazine). Readers who readthat piece will see many vestiges of that work here. Many ofthese ideas were stirred up again in my mind at the recentMissional Learning Commons a brainchild of David Fitch the theme of which was Deeper Churches: Churches as Whole

Communities.

As I have reiterated above, the goal of this project is to stir all ofour imaginations about what we could become as churchcommunities. Thus, I have been hesitant to flesh out any ofthese ideas in too much detail. I pray that you will hear themand reflect on them with others in your church communities,

and that maybe, just maybe, the Holy Spirit might inspire us allto deeper connections within our church communities and withour neighbors. No church community should try to pursue allof these ideas not even Englewood Christian Church, in


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whose experience many of them are rooted but maybe there

are a handful of ideas, or even one, that spark relevantpossibilities with which you might be prayerfully led toexperiment. And we need to feel free to experiment, to not fearfailure, to learn and grow from the mistakes that we maketogether. If we allow fear to dominate our life together, wehave already lost sight of our mission, the embodying of thelove and reconciliation of God, which, we are told, casts out allfear. I imagine that this work will be of interest to pastors,

particularly ones who have felt frustrated by the disconnectionin their congregations, but I should emphasize that it is notintended as a work on pastoral leadership, but as one for thewhole of the church. Pastors, I hope you read this, but I alsohope you share it broadly within your congregations,personally encouraging people to read it and reflect upon it.

Lord, give us ears to hear, and imaginations to envision thepossibilities of your reconciling and transforming work in our specific

locations, and may your Holy Spirit shape us more fully as acommunity into the image of your Son Jesus Christ!


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50Ideas

for Connection in a

Disconnected Age


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1. Create spaces for openconversation. For us at EnglewoodChristian Church, about fifteen years ago, weeliminated our Sunday night service (which wasa lite version of the Sunday morning service)

and circled up chairs in a multi-purpose room.The conversation that began then has essentiallycontinued every Sunday night to the present.Once you gather people, there are thousands ofthings that could be discussed: How could webe more faithful together? Are there people inour congregation who arent being taken careof? Perhaps there is a book that could be readand discussed. For us, the initial conversationwent in the direction of What is scripture andhow should we read it? We learned quicklythat we did not know how to talk to each otherand had to re-learn that skill, but as we did, we

found that conversation was essential to ouridentity as a church community.


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Chris Smith is a member of the Englewood ChristianChurch community on the near-eastside of Indianapolis. He isalso the editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He

regularly writes and speaks on topics related to church,community and Gods reconciliation of all things.

His previous books include:

Water, Faith and Wood: Stories of the Early ChurchsWitness for Today. Doulos Christou Press, 2003.

(Get a free e-book version of this work from the ERB.)

Introductory Bibliography of the New Monasticism.Doulos Christou Press, 2007.

Contact Chris:

editor @ englewoodreview . org

growing deeper in our church communities - chris smith

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