By Nick Tangen

Can I just share with you that I really love my job? One of the great benefits of working on a Lilly-funded project is the immense community of people who are engaging with similar questions, similar challenges, and similar opportunities in congregations and communities across the country. The Lilly Endowment launched the Thriving Congregations Initiative to “…equip congregations to”:

  • Explore and understand the rapidly changing contexts in which they minister
  • Gain clarity about their own values and missions
  • Draw on practices from their theological and ecclesial traditions to adapt their ministries to their changing contexts

There are 92 organizations in the United States that received grants to explore these questions and imagine how best to invite congregations into this work. And the Lilly Endowment, in partnership with Duke Divinity, has created a number of opportunities for these organizations to come together and learn from one another. This community is such a gift!

“One community’s faith practices and neighboring practices will not look the same as the congregation next door.”

Meeting with other directors and leaders wrestling with questions about community engagement and Christian practice has reminded me again of the great diversity of our communities’ experiences, and the existing giftedness within each and every faith community. It is clear in conversation with other grantees that congregations across the country, while facing some very similar challenges, are facing them with their own unique flavor and are increasingly discovering the strength and wisdom present in their experience.

 

I THINK IT’S INCREDIBLY important for us to remember this fact: Each of us, each of our communities, are experts in our own experience and possess an abundance of gifts and strengths which we can bring to our work as the people of God. This is the promise of our baptism, and the beauty of God’s cultivation of human community.

This means that our community’s faith practices and neighboring practices will not look the same as the congregation next door. What animates and connects at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church in East Bethel may be quite different from what animates and connects at Salem Evangelical Lutheran in North Minneapolis. Thanks be to God!

We need this diversity of experience and meaning making to flourish as the church in the world. This is exactly what the Apostle Paul was reminding us of in 1 Corinthians 12 when he said, “… the body does not consist of one member but of many.” Our uniqueness and our experiences as individual communities make up the whole of the Christian body.

“Each of us, each of our communities, are experts in our own experience and possess an abundance of gifts and strengths which we can bring to our work as the people of God.”

Over the next two years, Faith Practices & Neighboring Practices will hold space for congregations in the Minneapolis Area Synod to learn together and learn from one another’s experiences. God-willing we will find new ways to celebrate our gifts, to dig deep into our sense of baptismal vocation, and to challenge ourselves to confront the important and often difficult work ahead. The only way we can do so is by embracing our own experience and our own sense of call as a community of faith.

What are some of your congregation’s gifts and strengths?

What are some unique challenges that your congregation is facing?

How might you bring your congregation’s gifts and strengths to bear on the challenges you face as a community?