What Does Your Church Embody?

On Congregational Formation (Part Two of Our Intro to Cultivating Communities)

This is the second post in our series introducing Cultivating Communities.

If you missed it, you can read the first post here:

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Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

The strains of Christianity in which I was raised put a heavy emphasis on individual faith—e.g., “accepting Jesus into your heart as your personal savior.” The church had a role to play in this version of Christianity, but it took a backseat to the faith of the individual. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become convinced that the church is primary and personal faith secondary, as we each make sense of who Christ created us to be and how he created us to function within our particular congregation. Amidst the rampant individualism of our times, one of the most vital convictions shaping our work as Cultivating Communities is, “Church matters!”

And because church matters and because a local church is an embodiment of Christ in its place, one of the most important roles a church plays is paying attention to its formation and what it embodies to its neighbors.

Any group of people who are intentionally gathered together—whether a city, neighborhood, nonprofit, school, business, or even a church—is a social body. And a social body (like any of our personal, flesh-and-blood bodies) has a shape and moves through the world in particular ways. What do we desire? What do we believe to be true about ourselves and the world? How do we act and react within the specific challenges of our time and place? All these questions, and more, reveal facets of who we are as a social body. (For further reflection on embodiment, read this recent post: Embodying the Way of Jesus )

When we do not pay attention to the shape of our church’s social body, we end up looking like many of the other communities around us and the larger communities within which we are embedded. Thus, many churches—because they have not attended to the shape of their life together—reflect characteristics of the broader culture such as consumerism, white supremacy, patriarchy, greed, and more.

In his important new book, The Anti-Greed Gospel (which is the October focus of The Englewood Review’s monthly book conversation), Malcolm Foley articulates the crucial role a church plays:

You may ask … “How can I resist the exploitation that continues in my state, my nation, or the world at large?” [This is a good question.] What I offer here is an answer… : the church, as Christ has constructed and called it, is meant to be an answer to [this question] from the bottom up. People will know alternatives only if they see them. The best way forward is to focus on those who can do what I am suggesting, and those people are specifically those who have been indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Some assume that the Christian cultural mandate is to embed oneself in the world and to weave the threads of Christian influence, individually, into the major sectors of secular life. But the Sermon on the Mount suggests a different approach. Addressing communities of faith, Jesus calls the people of God to be a light to the world and the salt of the earth collectively, bearing witness as communities to alternative ways of living and being in the world. When the first church began that work, one of its first and most distinctive elements was its Spirit-empowered economic solidarity. That economic solidarity is the first line of defense against the talons and tendrils of racialized capitalism.

Congregational formation is the term we, at Cultivating Communities, use to refer to a local church’s work of paying attention to the shape of its life together. Indeed, the first book in our Cultivating Communities book series is The Shape of Our Lives: A Field Guide for Congregational Formation (which we published about exactly a year ago, in collaboration with our friends at the Ekklesia Project). If you haven’t read this book yet, I encourage you to listen to the recent podcast conversation I recorded with three of the book’s authors: Phil Kenneson, Debra Dean Murphy, and Steve Fowl.

The authors of The Shape of Our Lives describe six fundamental elements of congregational formation (which also ring true for the formation of other communities, not only churches):

Every [social body] nourishes a certain way of life, a certain way of looking at and living in the world. This way of life has several interlocking elements including:

1. A set of desires or longings. What do we want out of life? What should we most desire?

2. A set of convictions or core beliefs regarding such things as the purpose of life, how the world works and one’s place within it, and the proper means for evaluating success or failure in life.

3. A set of dispositions or inclinations to act in certain ways that, taken together, we call character.

Furthermore, every [social body] nourishes and instills these desires, convictions, and dispositions by several means, including the following:

4. Telling certain stories.

5. Engaging in certain practices.

6. Building and sustaining certain institutions.

Being able to name, with as much grace and honesty as we can muster, these six elements within our church’s life together, and to imagine and work toward aligning all these elements more closely with who we understand Jesus to be, is the primary thrust of congregational formation.

As Malcolm Foley indicates in the passage above, if churches want to see transformation in our neighborhoods, cities, and world, our work begins with being a different kind of community—one that stands in contrast to the world’s prevailing injustices and in solidarity with those being crushed by these injustices. If we attend to the shape of our life together, intentionally tell stories, and commit ourselves to practices that form us deeply, as a community, into the way of Jesus, then we will undoubtedly stand in contrast to the mainstream of society.

This creates a sort of dual focus for local churches:

1. A focus on being formed into a contrasting community that bears witness to Jesus, AND

2. A focus on being with and working alongside our neighbors in transformative ways that flow from who our community is in Christ

These two elements, working in concert, are foundational to all our work as Cultivating Communities. It’s very easy to lean into one of these directions over the other (especially the latter), but we believe that moving slowly and holding both together is what fidelity to the incarnational way of Jesus requires.

In the remaining three posts in this series, I will take a deeper look at Cultivating Communities’ understanding of how congregational formation happens by addressing each of these three questions:

1. How exactly does a church pay attention to its formation?
   (Short answer: CONVERSATION)

2. What is the role of scripture in congregational formation?

   AND

3. Why does place matter for congregational formation?

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Stay tuned for these coming posts!