A Willingness to Change

A visit today to Caldwell Presbyterian Church, where Sympara's Charlotte cohort heard the story of the church’s conversion of a 1920s-era Christian education building into 21 permanent supportive housing apartments, prompted the following meditation. 

To seek the health of the city, a congregation must be willing to change. The prophetic call to care for the city (Jeremiah 29:7) means working toward the wholeness of a living, dynamic system. The city is always changing. So the congregation, if it is about wholeness, must adapt to the city’s reality. The congregation must evolve, which means finding itself in a continuous process of clarifying its identity in relation to the life of the city — its residents, neighborhoods, businesses, institutions, streets, sorrows, and joys. 

The fundamental issue for the congregation is to shift its focus from maintenance of its little life to mission for the greater life of the city. The call to the city is a call to the congregation to let go of life as it has known it. The prophetic summons is also a paradoxical promise: In letting go of its little life for the life of the city, the congregation will find more life. 

That shift leads to new self-understanding: The congregation now exists for the city. The city is the congregation’s reason for being. The city’s health is the congregation’s singular concern. With the shift in focus, the congregation’s structure, rituals, programs, and resources are in the service of the city. 

A word of caution: Every attempt to move outward for greater life will snap back to the concerns of the little life without the fundamental change. The congregation must de-center itself. Its life is no longer primary. It must come to see itself as one among many participants, many people and groups of goodwill, gathering and circling, building and rebuilding, loving and healing for the flourishing of all people, for the well-being of all institutions, for the common good that belongs to everyone: the health of the city.