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Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities - Chris Smith
Growing Deeper in Our Church Communities - Chris Smith
DEEPER
in our
CHURCH
COMMUNITIES
50
IDEAS FOR
CONNECTION IN A
DISCONNECTED AGE
C. CHRISTOPHER SMITH
GROWING
DEEPER in our
CHURCH
COMMUNITIES
50 ideas for Connection
in a Disconnected Age
C. Christopher Smith
EnglewoodReview.org
Indianapolis
© 2010, C. Christopher Smith.
All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, © 1989
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Thanks to all who contributed to this book, especially my brothers and sisters
at Englewood Christian Church. This book is rooted in our experience of life
together as a church community. Thanks also to all my friends who on such
short notice read early drafts and provided thorough feedback.
Introduction
Superficiality is the curse of our age. … The desperate need
today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted
people, but for deep people.
*I’m thinking here especially of Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, et al (1985) and
Bowling 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 church
communities and with our neighbors around us. In order to
regain our sight, we must submit ourselves to the transforming
work of the Holy Spirit in the church, and allow God to move
us from the comforts of individualism toward a deeper and
more joyful life of connection.
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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 and
connect with people goes to a deeper level, namely that God is
gathering a people whose life together reflects the intimate
communion of the three Persons of the Trinity and embodies
the love and reconciliation that God desires for all humanity
and all creation. This gathering of a people is essential to
God’s mission of reconciliation in the world; it began in the Old
Testament people of Israel, continued in Jesus’s gathering of a
community of disciples and continues to the present in the
church. Our churches, then, are local, context-specific
manifestations of the one people that God is gathering*.
Especially in the disconnectedness of the present age, our
churches are the hospitable environment in which we can learn
what it means to love and be loved in deeper, more holistic
ways, and as we learn to do so, our love will overflow to our
neighbors around us.
*For a deeper exploration of these ecclesiological ideas, see Gerhard Lohfink’s Jesus and
Community.
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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 of
the most destructive fruits of our individualism is our
transience. Jobs, relationships and other opportunities to
nurture our selfish ambitions drive us from one place to the
next, and all the while we yearn for deeper relationships. Our
proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ must be
contextual. We embody Christ together in a place, and the
shape of the life together that God has given us proclaims
God’s love and reconciliation in ways that can be understood
by our neighbors. The monastics have long had a name for
this connection to place: stability. We primarily need deeper
connection to other people, but in our age of overwhelming
transience, we need stability – connection not only to people,
but to people in a specific place.
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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 that
roasts and sells coffee, but if the farmers in the southern
hemisphere who grow the coffee we sell are not being paid fair,
livable wages, then we are forgetting the mission of God
through which we have been gathered together. Scripture as
the recorded story of God’s work in history is essential to our
connection with the Mission of God, as is our remembrance of
the faithfulness of brothers and sisters throughout history who
have gone before us.
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Additionally, as we seek to become deeper church
communities, we must grow deeper in our understanding of
the gifts that God pours out on the people of God. The gifts
that the Apostle Paul describes in I Corinthians 12 are not an
exhaustive list! You will see in the following pages ideas about
how the gifts of entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and even real
estate agents (again, this too is not an exhaustive list; God gives
all sorts of gifts to the church) can be essential to the work of
God in the church, if their gifts are understood in connection
with the redemptive mission of God and submitted to a
particular church community in a specific place.
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whose experience many of them are rooted – but maybe there
are a handful of ideas, or even one, that spark relevant
possibilities with which you might be prayerfully led to
experiment. And we need to feel free to experiment, to not fear
failure, to learn and grow from the mistakes that we make
together. If we allow fear to dominate our life together, we
have already lost sight of our mission, the embodying of the
love and reconciliation of God, which, we are told, casts out all
fear. I imagine that this work will be of interest to pastors,
particularly ones who have felt frustrated by the disconnection
in their congregations, but I should emphasize that it is not
intended as a work on pastoral leadership, but as one for the
whole of the church. Pastors, I hope you read this, but I also
hope you share it broadly within your congregations,
personally encouraging people to read it and reflect upon it.
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50
Ideas
for Connection in a
Disconnected Age
1. Create spaces for open
conversation. For us at Englewood
Christian Church, about fifteen years ago, we
eliminated our Sunday night service (which was
a “lite” version of the Sunday morning service)
and circled up chairs in a multi-purpose room.
The conversation that began then has essentially
continued every Sunday night to the present.
Once you gather people, there are thousands of
things that could be discussed: How could we
be more faithful together? Are there people in
our congregation who aren’t being taken care
of? Perhaps there is a book that could be read
and discussed. For us, the initial conversation
went in the direction of “What is scripture and
how should we read it?” We learned quickly
that we did not know how to talk to each other
and had to re-learn that skill, but as we did, we
found that conversation was essential to our
identity as a church community.
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Chris Smith is a member of the Englewood Christian
Church community on the near-eastside of Indianapolis. He is
also the editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He
regularly writes and speaks on topics related to church,
community and God’s reconciliation of all things.
Contact Chris:
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