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To believe is to care, to care is to do. This former UCC motto calls us out of the church and into the community to share in the concerns of our neighbors, work together to alleviate suffering and bring about God’s justice. How does that look in your neighborhood?
Just after a tragic ICE raid in Minneapolis, we heard from friends there who participated in building community by acting as observers to warn of ICE approaching. This was done on behalf of and alongside other members of their congregation and neighborhood to meet community needs. Despite the tragic situation, real community was enhanced in working side-by-side in common cause.
While this is probably not the dire situation in your neighborhood, ALL neighborhoods have pain, injustice, hunger, loneliness and other concerns that we can care about and do in response. By working together to make God visible, we create community within our congregation and with the neighbors around us. It’s all ministry.
In November, our Becoming the Beloved Community article by the Rev. Dr. Sandra Graham outlined steps to conduct a neighborhood inventory to understand needs, resources and potential partners. She also listed examples of how congregations might serve and connect with community. Then in December, the Rev. Dr. Tim Perkins wrote on how to understand your congregation, the social context, and the talents of congregants in order to build a community ministry. Now we look at why this work is important and practical ways to connect and build community.
Benefits of Service
We often think of community-based ministries as serving and solving problems for others. However, the effort to be involved in our neighborhood can bring rewards to individuals and your congregation as well. When we serve, we benefit.
Parker Palmer, in the Active Life, connects doing with being alive, “I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences will have resonance with our inner-most being and reality.” To be fully alive is to act, and he identifies three forms of the active life: work, creativity and caring. All can be found in service to community – both individually and collectively as a congregation.
Palmer then notes that action is intertwined with contemplation, which he defines as “any way we can unveil the illusions that masquerade as reality and reveal the reality behind the masks.” The function of contemplation being to penetrate illusion and help us touch reality. This applies to service in the community as we learn more about the lives of our neighbors and address our own biases, illusions and judgements; allowing us to be fully alive.
Research by the Center on Faith in Communities showed that while faith motivates service, service magnifies faith. Your congregation’s service to and connection with the neighborhood can create a way for congregants to put their faith into action, and have it grow.
I hope that these benefits of engagement will outweigh the concerns some pastors have about encouraging congregants to volunteer outside the congregation, when their main concern is filling roles and committees inside the congregation. Carl Dudley notes that community ministry can actually build commitment to faith and to the congregation, which may increase “inside” volunteering as well.
Create, Connect, Celebrate and Encourage
Dudley’s Alban Institute publications and John McKnight’s Asset Based Community Development both outline the process for creating new community ministries to serve the people and meet community needs. This may sound like something for larger, wealthier congregations; however, it can be scaled for any size congregation, and there are other ways to be involved that don’t require the same resources.
The first step is to see how the needs in the neighborhood and the concerns/passions of the congregants align. An inventory of the neighborhood (see the November article) and a survey of congregants’ skills and interests will help this process. Do you have hungry neighbors and congregants who like to cook? Your meal ministry could start small, monitor progress and take larger steps as you learn and gain momentum and commitment.
Some congregations have the energy and resources to create these ministries to serve in and with the community. Other models include connecting with another congregation or nonprofit, using the neighborhood inventory as a place to start. Are there existing programs that you can support with donations or volunteers? Do you have a school nearby and retired teachers who would love to tutor? To follow through on these connections could lead to a long-term, weekly connection, or an annual donation event.
Several years ago at Bethel-Bethany UCC in Milwaukee we partnered with a literacy program. I wanted to tutor in an ESL program but couldn’t make a weekly commitment, so I found others with a similar interest and we created a tag-team, filling 3-4 regular tutor slots every week with 8 people. We included some community building in the team as we contemplated our service, examined our biases, and discussed how the experience was of mutual benefit.
Beyond creating and connecting, you can celebrate congregants who are already serving in your neighborhood. People may be serving at meal programs, collecting donations, tutoring, or serving on boards and others can be encouraged to support and join in these efforts. You could host a “Service Sharing” event, where congregants share their service efforts and welcome others to participate. Online worshipers could easily be included in this effort. This could lead to building community within the congregation and improved lives for people in the neighborhood.
Then, notice and encourage people to use their unique skills on behalf of people in the neighborhood and connect them with opportunities. Most people begin with a specific invitation to serve, not with a broad appeal for help. In Life Worth Living, based on Yale’s popular class, the authors report that life is a series of small, seemingly insignificant decisions and nondecisions. The shape of who we are is made over time, brick-by-brick to make a life worth living. Lives can be transformed by these decisions.
During our Supportive Ministries Zoom conversation on January 8 to discuss the December article, each person answering the question about how they begin ministry or service reported that it was by someone affirming their skill and empowering them to move forward. Others reported that someone had connected them with an opportunity to service or ministry.
Begin with humility, not as one who will “save” the neighborhood. Again Parker Palmer has some wisdom for us: “Action that distances us from ‘the other’ can never be right; we cannot do good by standing back and pulling levers that drop bounty on people who need it. Right action can be only an immersion of ourselves in reality, an immersion that involves us in relationship, that takes us to our place in the organic nature of things.” May it be so.
Questions:
- Have you conducted a neighborhood inventory? What did you learn? If not, how could you begin?
- How does service impact your congregation? Your neighborhood?
- What partnerships for service are possible?
- Do you know how congregants are already serving you neighborhood? How could you build on these connections?
- How is contemplation, as described by Parker Palmer earlier, a part of your community ministry?
Resources:
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Dudley, Carl S. Basic Steps Toward Community Ministry, The Alban Institute, 1991
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Next Steps in Community Ministry, The Alban Institute, 1996
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McKnight, John L. and Kretzmann, John P. Building Community from the Inside Out, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, 1993
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Nouwen, Henri. Community, Orbis Books, 2021
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Palmer, Parker. The Active Life, Jossey-Bass, 1990
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Volf, Miroslav, et al. Life Worth Living, Penguin Random House, 2023
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