Welcome to the Faith & Deliberation Initiative!
What this looks like in our world today is a beatitude-shaped life of peacemaking by building civic capacity within our communities and becoming hubs of civil discourse and deliberation within a world of conflict, divisiveness, and fragmentation.
Our world teaches us to weaponize our words and go to war with our communication. In contrast, both Jesus and Paul teach us to build bridges of peace by disarming our weaponized words of war.
How do we change the world? One conversation at a time.
The Church is the proclamation of the good news of God. It is the bearer and the witness of the transforming message of Jesus that we all belong, we all are inter-connected, and we can all practice resurrection together. We are all called to come alive, to build bridges, and to become peacemakers.
But what if the church does not proclaim its good news?
“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”
Luke 19:40
If we are silent, then God will raise up others outside of the Church to proclaim God’s good news of peacemaking, belonging, connection, community, inter-relationship, transformation, and reconciliation.
When we are silent, God will raise up voices around us to cry out, and that is precisely what God is doing.
In cities around the country, there are non-profits and community organizations who are providing people with what the church is failing to offer…belonging, connection, and transformation. They are the bridge builders that we are supposed to be.
How do we change our approach?
The goal of the Faith & Deliberation Initiative is to explore innovative and strategic ways to approach discipleship in more deliberative, dialogical, conversational, and relational ways through trustworthy processes. Because discipleship is a process.
And if we need some trusted processes for our discipleship, then we should ask process focused questions. One process questions might be this: “How do we love our neighbors if we don’t know how to get to know our neighbors?” Or another one might be this: “How do we and our communities learn to come alive together?”
How do we transform our churches into bridge building communities and hubs and civic engagement?
How do we transform our churches into Living and Learning Communities as we live and learn into the shape of Jesus’s life and teachings…together?
This is a question of how we approach our neighbors, and how we approach our neighbors was something Jesus cared about very deeply. We do not often frame Jesus’s teachings in this way, but we could summarize his core teachings as learning to love all that we dislike and despise – especially “those people over there” – through the ways we approach our neighbors with love and compassion. It’s a difficult teaching, but it is what we are called to do as disciples of Jesus.
As Paul often reminds us, “We belong to each other” (Rom 12:5).
Formation 