The 4 Ds and My Congregation

               I’ve been casting a vision for quite a while now, blog posts pointing to a single premise:

I believe the most faithful way to be the Church these days is to take the 4Ds seriously by leaning into any ministry that: creates partnerships, encourages nimble action, reflects authentic diversity, and re-enchants the Church.

                  Okay, you say, visions are great, Chris, but give me some tools to take home to my congregation. How could a congregation catch this vision, actually and actively engage with it beyond reading blog posts on the internet?

A Bible Study:

A good way to internalize what I’m saying may be to listen to my vision next to the sacred vision of scripture. Here is a 5 session Bible Study that builds a bit of scriptural scaffolding for engaging with the world as it is.

Find Partners for your Space:

              In a disestablished world, where Boy Scouts and AA groups aren’t beating down your door to use your space and other do-gooders in the area don’t automatically think of the Church as a place where good might be done, how do you find partners. Here is a 12-step process to find partners for your space.

Cure your Lutheran Laryngitis:

                  As we minister in a society that aches for the God who is just beyond our peripheral vision, it is good to have God conversations. If the Acts of the Apostles is right, the Spirit is always working just beyond the Church’s furthest step. Listening to what our neighbors are seeing God doing is enlightening, can draw us into ongoing engaging conversations and dialogue, relationship, and can call us along the way, so we can more fully be people of the Way.

Discover your Congregational Wisdom:

                  One of the best things I’ve done at my congregation recently has been Listening Wisdom into Existence. Walking through the Wisdom books of the Bible and asking their questions of our own experience. Since then I offered the process as a five week Lenten study; two colleagues picked it up and ran with it, and I’m so impressed with what I’ve seen from it so far! I’m going to do another round of passing the study on to colleagues, and if it goes well, try to write something up share with the wider Church.

Smaller Actions and Questions:

-Have you done a Dinner Church? Are any of your Learning Opportunities done off site, to give them more porous borders and invite in the public?

-How are you using Social Media? Zoom? Filming the service? Is it to ensure your ministries are accessible, or done as an obligation? Is it duty or delight? We dove into all those things in the midst of an awful crisis, now that we can take a beat, how can we look at them critically?

-What are the physical bounds of your congregation? (If you are having a hard time conceptualizing this, here are two examples: Jesus’ bounds was a 13-mile by 7-mile area around the Sea of Galilee. Mine runs up and down US Route 31.) Who lives there? Does your congregation look like its neighbors? If so, how’d that happen? If not, why not? How can you be church to those in your bounds? What is the Spirit already doing within the bounds of your congregation?