Introducing Cultivating Communities

Helping congregations deepen their life together, in their place.

This post marks the start of a new brief series that introduces Cultivating Communities, but before I dive in any further, I wanted to share some exciting, related news!

For almost five years now, I’ve split my time between editing The Englewood Review of Books and working with local churches across North America for Cultivating Communities. It’s not much of a stretch, because both initiatives are part of the work of Englewood Community Development Corporation (which is based at Englewood Christian Church on the Near Eastside of Indianapolis).

I’m excited to share that beginning this month, The Englewood Review is now part of the Cultivating Communities initiative! This shift is primarily an organizational one, which we anticipate will be of the most benefit to both initiatives in the long run. We don’t anticipate that our book-related coverage at the ERB will change at all as a result of this shift, but we did want to give a thorough introduction to Cultivating Communities, because (1) its work has been deeply intertwined with that of The ERB, and (2) as a result of this new organizational shift, you will be hearing more about Cultivating Communities here on Substack in the coming months.

So, What is Cultivating Communities?

The work of Cultivating Communities is to walk alongside local churches across North America, and in the process, we help them deepen their life together in their congregations and deepen their roots in their particular place. The name Cultivating Communities borrows language from my book Slow Church, which I co-wrote with John Pattison, and which was published by IVP Books back in 2014. The subtitle of that book was, “Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus.” At one point, John and I were considering using the sub-title “Building Community in the Patient Way of Jesus,” but that wording seemed to us to put too much emphasis on human effort. And so, we eventually settled on the verb cultivating, because not only did it fit the agricultural themes of the book, it also reflected the sort of attention and collaboration between humanity and God that happens in both agriculture and church. Deeply rooted and sustainable communities (churches or places, for instance) do not emerge solely from human effort or from divine initiative, but rather from a healthy intermixing of the two.

Our tagline explains what we hope to build and create with God’s help: “Rooted Churches Embodying the Way of Jesus.” In an age when superficiality reigns supreme, we desire to see churches that, in contrast, are rooted in:

• a meaningful life together,

• following Jesus,

• taking scripture seriously, and

• deep love for their neighbors.

We believe these desires give shape to who we are as churches. Any community is going to have a shape that displays who they are, and it should be the shape of Jesus. But it is, and always has been, easy for churches to fall prey to temptations like exclusion (consider all the New Testament stories about Jewish Christians who wanted to keep out Gentiles), greed, hate, and violence—which all look very little like Jesus as we encounter him in the Gospels. It becomes very easy to justify why our church doesn’t look or act like Jesus, but a different way is possible. Trying to understand who Jesus is, and to lean wholeheartedly into being a community whose identity is a demonstration of who we understand Jesus to be, is the vision that we are living into at Englewood Christian Church. It is this vision we want to share through Cultivating Communities with other churches who have ears to hear and eyes to see.

For the past five years, Cultivating Communities’ work has unfolded on a small and largely experimental scale with cohorts of churches in three very different U.S. locations (Indianapolis, East Tennessee, and Chicago). We are now, however, entering a new phase in which a broader range of congregations can be connected with our work. (More details about how that can happen will be available here in the near future!)

Cultivating Communities partners with quite a few organizations, but our most vital partners are Missio Alliance, Lawndale Christian Community Church (on the west side of Chicago), and The Ekklesia Project. We are grateful for all our partners and for The Lilly Endowment, who has generously supported our work from the outset through grants from their Thriving Congregations Initiative.

How are Cultivating Communities and The ERB intertwined?

Although a broad range of people read and appreciate the ERB’s reviews and other coverage, we have always understood the heart of our work to be equipping Christians to participate more fully and more knowledgeably in their churches and neighborhoods. (If you want to learn more about this mission, I encourage to download a free copy of my book Reading for the Common Good.)

Belonging to a community in healthy ways requires attention: attention to who is part of the community and to where and why and how it exists, for instance. And attention must be trained over time. This training of attention, of course, happens in many ways, but reading can play a crucial role in this process. Learning the stories of a people and/or a place can happen in conversation, but also can happen through reading. And in the Christian tradition, our roots can be traced back to the stories contained in our scriptures, which we are constantly reading, interpreting, and embodying in our life together. This work is central to our life together, and it requires not just reading the scriptural text itself. Many other resources help us understand scripture’s meaning and imagine what living faithfully to the contours of scripture might mean in our own time and place.

So, reading broadly in a way that extends out from scripture and is also attentive to the particularities of our time and place is one habit that we recommend to churches as part of Cultivating Communities.

Four Dimensions of Cultivating Communities

Cultivating Communities has four inextricably connected dimensions:

1. Congregational Formation

2. Conversation

3. Scripture

4. Place

(These dimensions are the themes of the first four books in the Cultivating Communities series from Englewood Press.) The remaining four posts in this series will each explore one of these dimensions, but I’ll briefly define each one here:

1. Congregational Formation resists the prevailing individualism of the modern age and insists that our faith is primarily about being formed into a community that embodies the life and teachings of Jesus.

2. Conversation is the way we come to know and be known by others, and thus it is the way we become more deeply connected with those in our congregation and in our place. Conversation is also a vital and healthy way in which discern how we will live and embody Jesus together.

3. Scripture is the essential means by which we know who Jesus is, and it is our guide as we talk together and discern how we will embody Jesus as a community.

4. Place is the soil in which we are rooted. Our life and flourishing as a church is not merely for our own sake, but for the sake of our place and, through it, the world. Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer-poet, has written that one’s place “lights invariably the need for care / toward other people, other creatures, in other places / as you would ask them for care toward your place and you.”

Why does all this matter?

If you are reading this, I don’t need to tell you the statistics about church decline. I doubt I need to tell you about the malformation of the American evangelical church (in particular) and the impact of her idolatry of nationalism, racism, capitalism, consumerism, and individualism.

But here at Cultivating Communities, we still have hope for the church and hope for the work of God in and through local congregations. We believe that patient cultivation of and conversation about these four dimensions can help us more faithfully embody the way of Jesus. We hope you’ll join us in these conversations!

Stay tuned for the coming posts in this series in which we dig deeper into what Cultivating Communities is about.

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In Case You Missed it…

The ERB is hosting a month-long book conversation in October on Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel. Learn more: