So... I'm taking some time away from pastor work to do some reading. The overarching topic is community, working mostly from a list of books recommended by the organization Art of Hosting. Here's their reading list, and you can scout around for more info about what they're doing from there, if you're curious.
For this blog post, though, I'm going to do a review of Community in the Inventive Age by Doug Pagitt, which is a book I have read before. Pagitt, formerly a youth pastor, founded Solomon's Porch in 2003 with a group of 7 other people. The book is from 2011. Here are some pieces I'd like to highlight:
1. The Inventive Age: American society has gone through several cultural movements over the last century or so. Agrarian Age people lived on farms, used horses, etc., and so the best form for church was one based on being within walking distance of it. Community was reinforced by not going more than 100 miles from your home during your entire life. The industrial age meant standardization and churches started to look like factories. The information age is the age of Sunday school wings and the work of downloading information from the expert to the waiting minds of children and parishioners. Finally, the inventive age (Pagitt's term, I think) is a culmination of these other ages' accomplishments. Rather than seeking out information, or standardization, or focusing on survival, the inventive age is about creating new things and making individual contributions. Authority comes from relationships, rather than top-down.
2. Relational Set: So, I have been thinking a while about this concept of a center-set for a church. As in, we have some core beliefs and values that hold us together, but that some people are further out or closer to the center, depending on what it is. For Solomon's Church, whoever is there makes up the community. Another example of a relational set organization is a family. People get married or die, or are born or adopted in. Each person adds to the community in their own way. And, the community's capacity to do whatever is asked of it, and its call arise from the people who are there. This is helpful to me, although I still have a sense that there are core guiding values and beliefs operating in the community. They do have a covenant partner designation of some kind, if I remember right.
3. Children: They have kids at their regular gatherings and think about them as, similar to adults, having things to contribute to the community.
4. They meet in the round
5. They start Sunday night gatherings with conversation, and the sermons are dialogue-based. People learn from one another, not the authority figure. The pastor's role is to facilitate conversation, and not everything that gets said is something he would necessarily want or agree with. There's a Tuesday night group that plans the sermon for the congregation, reading the particular scripture and reflecting on it ahead of time.
6. They have a lot of candles.
7. Creativity is a participation in the creative life of God.
8. They eat together a lot. There's a weekly community meal that rotates between houses, plus eating together after the Sunday night gatherings and etc.
9. Sunday night gatherings are one part of the community, not the whole thing. Announcements, therefore, are pretty long.
(Update) 10. Our beliefs change not by receiving new information, but because they come with partners - dreams, desires and possibilities. This explains why no amount of information seems to change the views of my relatives who have a different political opinion from me about the current state of affairs. I'm interested to see how it will change the conversation to say something like, "what are your hopes for this country?" instead of "why don't you even read the article I sent you?"
Reading this book again after 6 years of church-start work, it is amazing to me how much more it makes sense and answers questions that I have been asking. I don't remember this "coming home" feeling the last time I read it. It's also really interesting how the book matches up with a community I've been working with over the last year. Given that the population of that other church is somewhat different from the Solomon's Porch crowd, I think Pagitt may be on to something here. Nice to have it summarized, with some of the practical and spiritual implications laid out.
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