Community Conversation

Over the summer I read the book Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus by Christopher Smith and John Pattison. The book draws on insights learned from the Slow Food Movement, asset based community developers, poets, and social entrepreneurs to help cast a vision for a more patient way of doing church. The last chapter of the book, which is entitled "Dinner Table Conversation as a Way of Being Church", helped me see that genuine honest conversation was something that was missing at our church. We were already eating together every Wednesday night as a congregation, but we weren't having a church wide conversation. So we brainstormed as a staff and worked with the Discipleship Ministry to develop our new Community Meal and Conversation. We are extremely excited about the potential that this conversation will have for building community in our congregation. Here is the write-up we put together about it for the bulletin:

Community Conversation

The kingdom of God is not found in the wisdom of the world, nor in eloquence, but in the faith of the cross and in the virtue of dialogue. – St. Cyprian

With the rise in popularity of text messaging and social media many people feel that we are losing the ability to talk to one another face-to-face, or to have deep and meaningful conversations. This lack is making it increasingly difficult to develop rich and intimate relationships with our family, friends, neighbors, and fellow church members. Some scholars have even argued that our lack of opportunities for deep and meaningful face-to-face conversations have caused us to become unable to relate to one another appropriately and is a problem at the heart of the increasing level of political incivility and conflict in our society and in our churches. 

In an effort to engage in healthy dialog as a church and help each another to cultivate the art of conversation we will begin talking together in an intentional way every Wednesday night after dinner from 6-7 pm in the Fellowship Hall. We will sing together, pray together, talk about our worship services, dive into the biblical texts of the current sermon series, discuss what is going on in our church and our community, and engage in respectful conversation and dialogue about the issues and challenges that are facing our congregation and our world. The aim of this new initiative is to build deep relationships between us as Christians so that we can work together even more efficiently in ministry and mission to the world.

All are welcome and strongly encouraged to come and join us for our Community Conversation on Wednesday nights after dinner starting this fall.

Rev. Benjamin Boswell, Pastor