Dream Circles: Two Worlds, One Mission

Posted on Feb 6, 2012 in Community Development | 2 comments

This week, we will launch our first suburban “Dream Team” in Chesterfield County.  A Dream Team is a small group of individuals with a shared passion around a shared mission.  In this case the mission is to help strengthen families in Hillside Court.

We have been operating mission centered small groups in Hillside Court for the past year.  Our family support team, which is led by Hillside resident Patrice Shelton, began meeting regularly over the summer and has attracted a number of strong resident leaders who are helping to shape a strong community vision around family strengthening.

In the past few years, I have been approached by a growing number of churches who want to engage in community development but who simply don’t know how.  This is particularly true of suburban congregations who lack proximity to materially challenged communities.  However both urban and suburban congregations are often paralyzed by the overwhelming needs and recognize they lack the expertise in doing this kind of work.

Thus we have reached the appropriate season in our community development efforts to find ways of bringing these two worlds of the church and the neighborhoods together.  Over the past year, I have been traveling all over the country looking at best practices and studying different models that could help inform our work.  What we have discerned is that whatever we do, it will be done from a posture of mutuality. 

A posture of mutuality recognizes the gifts of both communities.  It is not a one-sided, church doing all the giving and the community just receiving.  Nor does a posture of mutuality see the community as needy and the church as the one with all the answers.  As Robert Lupton points out in his excellent book called “Toxic Charity”, these unhealthy ways of entering into relationships with our sisters and brothers who are experiencing poverty only erodes the dignity of people and destroys a communities sense of ownership and power.  I agree with Lupton that in some ways the church is unintentionally making things worse for under-resourced  individuals and I want to do everything in my power not to harm those I care about.

Below is a sketch of how we are seeking to move forward in integrating congregations into our future work.

• Twinning – Our first step will be to build “sister” teams in the congregational context that have a desire to support the work of the neighborhood leaders.  These “sister” teams will seek to unleash the gifts, talents and dreams of its own team members around the mission of the urban team.  It will become a fully functioning “Dream Team” and will mirror the structure of the urban expression.

 

• Grounding – Our next step will be to ground each team in the biblical foundations of Christian community development and in the vision, mission, values of Embrace as well as educating both teams about Embrace Richmond’s unique asset-based approach to community development.

 

• Friending – Before these teams can dream together, they have to trust one another.  So our early gatherings will be high in the fun and fellowship category and will be designed to breakdown fear on both sides of the relationship as we build a safe space for sharing life together.

 

• Visioning – After we develop a sense of shared community, our urban leaders will share their “preferred future” and “present reality” and the combined group will select one to four projects or initiatives to work on together for the coming season.  Only projects with neighborhood leadership will be considered.

 

• Circling Up – Once a month, members of each of the two teams will come together to celebrate what God is doing and to dream together about what God might be calling them to do together in the coming month.

 

• Dreaming – During these monthly circle meetings, the team will break into smaller project groups.  These sub-groups will help the neighborhood leader with any challenges they are facing and will provide support, encouragement and prayer for the neighborhood leader.

 

• Tasking – At the end of each monthly meeting, each of the sub-groups will present its goals for the month to the full circle and will invite others to join them in both prayer and if they feel led also in service.

 

• Celebrating – Quarterly we are hoping to bring all the teams from across the city together for a service of celebration giving credit to God and reminding us all that it is the spirit of Christ moving through our teams that gives us the power to do all God is calling us to do.

As with all things Embrace, we tend to build it as we go. So, I am sure this will morph and change over the next few months.  However, as of today, this is what I think this will look like.

If this sounds like something you would like to be a part of, let me know via email at wendy@embracerichmond.org.  We are launching the first team around Family Strengthening at Brandermill Church in Chesterfield this month.  We are hoping to launch our second team around food security at Salisbury Presbyterian Church next month. We anticipate a Vocational Development focused team sometime in April and are hoping to do that through Brandermill Church as well.  We are also in conversation with a number of other churches across the city who are also considering launching teams this year.

If you would like to get involved in one of our emerging teams or you want to know more about starting a team in your community or congregation, please email me at wendy@embracerichmond.org.