Developing Dialogue – Facilitating the Shift from Charity to Justice

Posted on Feb 19, 2012 in Community Development, Missional Church | 0 comments

You never are together [simply] to be together, you’re together because you have something you want to do, work that [needs to be done]. — Stanley Hauerwas

In my prior post, I shared Robert Lupton’s challenge to the church to move away from charity that breeds dependency and toward activities that create economic opportunities in distressed neighborhoods.  Christopher Smith, in his book “The Virtue of Dialogue”, tells the story of Englewood Christian Church, located in Englewood neighborhood on the near eastside of Indianapolis, who successfully made this transition.  Smith writes,

“Although Englewood was once a prestigious church, the pride of our fellowship of churches, and once a mega-church, we were now neither large nor influential. Rather, we were a church that had plunged toward destruction with the abandonment of our neighborhood. In this era, very few church members lived in our neighborhood, and in many ways we had become more like a center for urban ministry.

 

One of our first responses was to launch a number of “pantry” ministries typical of many urban churches and para-church groups: a food pantry, a clothing pantry, and even a furniture pantry. These pantries ran for about a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. As the years progressed, however, we found that we were helping to transfer a lot of goods—much of which came from our sister churches in suburbia – but were not connecting with the people to whom the goods were given.

 

This work was not only failing to nurture friendships with our neighbors, it was also creating destructive dynamics of need and dependency, and for these reasons, we eventually shut it down.   It was in this context that we came—or perhaps more accurately, stumbled—into the practice of conversation.

 

By sitting down together every Sunday night in that circle, we began the long, slow process of learning how to converse; we built trust, hammered out the foundations of a shared language, and deepened our commitments to one another. In these new conversations, we were called deeper into the transforming work that God is doing in our urban neighborhood.

 

Our journey toward becoming a conversational people has also drawn us deeply into conversations with our neighbors. Since early in the history of the Sunday night conversation, we have been actively involved in a number of neighborhood groups in our immediate Englewood neighborhood and across the larger Near Eastside neighborhood.

 

As our life together has become more deeply rooted in our Sunday night conversation, we have found ourselves being drawn into a conversational way of life that was not simply passive discussion but rather full of life and of careful activity that is one contributing factor in our neighborhood’s process of beginning to change and flourish. We believe that conversation is essential to the sort of abundant life together into which we have been called in Christ Jesus.

 

In the last verses of chapter 14, Paul instructs the Corinthians that when they gather, everyone should come prepared to share out of the gifts given to each member. If it is the Holy Spirit who unites us and gives particular gifts to each member of the church community (chap. 12), then as we gather together, we should make room for these gifts to interact.”

It was in the context of these conversations that God led Englewood into creating economic opportunities in the neighborhood.

“Our businesses allow us to initiate and sustain conversations with neighbors and others throughout the city about the efforts in which we all are collaborators. Not only does working together give our church an opportunity to know and converse with one another in a broader range of contexts, it also gives us the opportunity to reflect theologically together and make discernments about how we as a community that embodies Christ in our particular neighborhood, should do the work to which we are called. The work that we have chosen to do is real work that we believe God has called us into as God transforms our neighborhood and causes it to flourish.

 

One of our most successful businesses has focused on providing affordable housing in our neighborhood. The mass exodus from our neighborhood in the last decades of the twentieth century provided a prime opportunity for us to acquire homes cheaply, then fix them up and rent them.

 

We have had a number of other businesses that originated in the gifts and skills of church members and neighbors. We have a landscaping business that has provided summer work for many young men, and a handful of book-related businesses including a small bookstore. After the closing of the local grocery stores, our neighbors were increasingly interested in creating a cooperative grocery store that would provide good, local food, but also be sensitive to our lower income neighbors.”

Smith gives this advice to congregations who are seeking to rediscover a conversational way of being the church.

“First, our conversations must be Eucharistic, by which I mean not that they should be directly connected to our practice of this sacrament, but that we enter into conversation with the sort of radical self-denial that defined the life and death of Jesus and that we remember in the celebration of the Eucharist. It must be the Holy Spirit who speaks in our midst and guides our conversations. If we speak (or listen) out of our sinful nature, passions will be ignited and division will ensue. If we allow our selfish agendas to dominate our conversations (and particularly the “what’s in it for me?” mentality), we are setting ourselves up for power struggles and many other kinds of trouble.

 

Second, conversation should be open; anyone and everyone should be allowed to contribute. Open conversation in the church is rooted in the convictions that God has assembled us together in this place and that everyone that God has assembled is a gift given for the maturing of Christ’s body.

 

In nurturing public conversations that are open and that focus more on the common than on selfish desires, we have found that we participate in the healing, reconciling, and transforming work of Christ in our neighborhood.

 

Our job as churches is to learn to talk together again and to allow our conversation to spill out of our churches and into our neighborhoods, a stream of hope scented with the rich fragrance of the reconciliation, the shalom that God desires for all creation.   May we abide faithfully in this calling!”

While my short sketch here may make it sound like this transition from charity to justice based ministries and the conversations that led to this shift were easy, Smith is honest about the challenge of reclaiming conversation in our culture.  We are a nation driven by efficiency and effectiveness.  We have also put a tremendous amount of emphasis on building bigger church which makes dialogue more difficult.  We avoid conflict and the combination has led us to hierarchical structures that remove the need for conversation.

The transformation of Englewood church and the surrounding community spanned decades and required a level of perseverance that few congregations could sustain.  However, Englewood provides us with not only a success story but a vehicle that can carry any congregation toward a healthier relationship with those in need – the gift of dialogue.  In community development terms, we call these intentional conversations, “listening meetings”, because our goal is enter into the conversation with no agenda other than to discern where God is at work in our neighbors and our collective community.

I love Smith’s emphasis on how it is through dialogue that our gifts can be discovered, interact and then become manifest in our work together.  There are so many gifts, talents and abilities in our congregations and in our communities.  I have no doubt that if we create space for those gifts to be shared, we will find ways of sparking neighborhood based economic opportunities for our urban friends who so desperately desire dignity found only through work.

What from Englewood’s story resonated with you?

 

What experiences have you had to engage in the types of dialogue in the church that Smith describes?

 

Do you think these kinds of conversations are possible in your church?

 

What impact do you think we as a collective body of Christ could have if we engaged in more dialogue with our urban neighbors?