December 1, 2011

Partnership in the Round

Monday night we completed the nine-week design process to launch the Church in the Round. It has resulted in a concept of partnership that will invite in three new ministries or programs to join our existing groups and launch five more brand new efforts. Here is the list of the groups that will make up the Partnership that will form the Church in the Round Community Center:

These groups working together will from day one provide enough support for the Center to pay its bills and create a small fund to launch the five new ministries that St. Andrew’s plans to start at the new center.

The choice of five new efforts grew out of the over 100 interviews with people and programs in the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle. Based on what we learned we are planning to:

  1. Create a Coffee House/Meeting and Performance Space.
  2. Convene a new worshipping community focusing on young adults
  3. Offer sponsorship to Pro-use Produce, a agriculture and nutrition project that will use the small orchard on our property along with fresh fruit gleaned from stores and feeding programs to create a dried fruit operation for sale and donation
  4. Train Episcopalians from around the diocese to engage people who are homeless and mentally ill on the streets of Lake City using the model created by Craig Rennebohm of Seattle’s Mental Health Chaplaincy. We are affectionately calling this new ministry “Episcopal Street Walkers.”
  5. Set up an after-school computer lab for neighborhood students, primarily the large East African community in the neighborhood.

Next week I will go into detail about these new efforts.

Everything we have done had grown out of concepts of base community organizing derived from the principles of Liberation Theology. My own mentor in this area, Professor Letty Russell of Yale Divinity School (now deceased), provided important philosophical underpinnings to our work. In both our final design document and in the proposed Partnership Agreement, her statement from the book The Future of Partnership sums up what we seek:

We can identify the basic qualities of partnership. They would seem to include 1) commitment that involves responsibility, vulnerability, equality and trust among persons or groups who share a variety of gifts or resources; 2) common struggle and work involving risk, continued growth, and hopefulness in moving toward a goal or purpose transcending the group itself; 3) contextuality in interacting with a wider community of persons, social structures, values and beliefs that may provide support, correctives, or feedback. There is never a complete equality in a dynamic relationship, but a pattern of equal regard and mutual acceptance among partners is essential. When such a relationship is alive and growing we usually find the gifts of synergy, serendipity and sharing. That is, partners produce an overspill of energy that is greater than the sum of the parts, and that displays unexpected or serendipitous gifts and the impulses to share that energy with others. (Letty Russell, The Future of Partnership, p. 18-19.)