The Center for Congregational Life

Our Vision: One Spirit, one body, many gifts”

What is the Center for Congregational Life?

The congregation is the center of life for the Anabaptist or historic peace churches. What we want to do with our Center for Congregational Life is help all congregations improve themselves by providing resources to include everyone, especially persons with disabilities. We will provide information, specific suggestions, and tools to use as you improve your congregation.

Key Operating Principle

Peaceful Living has been founded on the premise that belonging is the central axle upon which a life rotates. The four operating principles which allow belonging to grow and flourish are:

  1. Membership in a faith community
  2. Holistic living
  3. Enthusiasms appreciated
  4. Companionship.
    Our Center for Congregational Life emerges out of our comment to facilitating full and active membership in the faith community

What is Membership in a faith community?

Whenever believers have formed an ecclesia (assembly), healing has taken place. Congregational life is enhanced by using all gifts of all persons in the ecclesia as Paul defines it in I Corinthians 12 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=53&chapter=12&version=31 and Romans 12. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%2012%20;&version=31; This is the kind of congregational life we are seeking for everyone.

Getting Started now…overcoming the hesitancy to talk about a disability

In congregational surveys that we have completed in 1980 and 2000, we have discovered that the hesitancy to talk about the disability, by the family and by the rest of the congregation as led to the two parties to drift off….into the Milky Way. Families are often tired of battling all week in public school where education in now an entitlement. They come to church, not wanting to make more requests, but wanting acceptance for their family member with a disability. Congregational members, not quite knowing how to address what they see, every week, and not offend the family, say nothing. It has led one father to tell us…”my wife and I have had our child in tow with us whenever we went to church, even during the years my wife taught Sunday School, our child has to stay with her. For 25 years no one approached us, offering to help us care for our child, why should we say something now?”

Working through the hesitancy

We have designed a series of questionnaires which you can download to reduce the hesitancy and open up the communication in your congregation, and take the steps to make everyone full participating members of Christ’s body of believers:

Survey includes 4 different questionnaires:

  1. Congregation: to be completed by church administrator, elder or deacon, or pastor to establish a baseline and understand who and how many persons with disabilities are in your congregation.
  2. Family interview: to establish and determine the need
  3. Interview Person with a disability; to further define the need and honor the person with a disability
  4. Bulletin insert for congregation: once the need is defined, to offer specific opportunities for the congregation to respond

Congregational Life Conference Planned for September 2008

Peaceful Living is planning to host a conference at Salford Mennonite Church in Harleysville Pa, http://www.salfordmc.org for Saturday September 13, 2008 with the purpose stated as:

  1. This will be a faith building event
  2. We hope to portray how our faith in Jesus sustains us through life’s storms.
  3. We are doing this as a congregational improvement program…i.e. your congregation will be improved when all members are sharing their gifts, especially individuals who have been labeled “disabled”.

Confirmed speakers:

Richard Steele
Professor of Moral and Historical Theology and Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Special Events of the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. He wrote an article entitled “Unremitting Compassion, The Moral Psychology of Parenting Children with Genetic Disorders”, in Theology Today, July 2000.
Bill Gaventa, M.Div.
Associate Professor Director, Community and Congregational Supports The Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School P.O. Box 2688, 335 George Street New Brunswick, N.J. 08903
Phone: 732-235-9304
FAX: 732-235-9330
Web Page: http://rwjms.umdnj.edu/boggscenter
Editor, Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health Haworth Press: http://haworthpress.com

BELONGING

Peaceful Living has been founded on the premise that belonging as described in Jean Vanier’s, Becoming Human, (Paulist Press, 1998, p.35-68) is the central axle upon which a life rotates. As the deer longs for water, so pants the human soul for belonging. We understand life, not as a journey, which has an end and is over when one dies, but as a series of stages one progress through that can become more meaningful if we tap our spiritual roots as human beings. In this way, life becomes richer and deeper as one ages. Especially for persons with profound cognitive disabilities, seen as “useless”, looking into their eyes can be a very profound spiritual experience. They value “being with” and belonging to part of the spiritual body.

The habitat for belonging is membership in a faith community, holistic living, enthusiasms appreciated, and companionship.

A. MEMBERSHIP IN A FAITH COMMUNITY

Whenever believers have formed an ecclesia (assembly), healing has taken place. PL proposes to enhance congregational life by using all gifts of all persons in the ecclesia as Paul defines in I Corinthians 12 and Romans 12.

B. HOLISTIC LIFE

Living a balance life, of body mind and Spirit, in the context of a faith community and been proven to improve one’s health in dramatic ways, as shown in Koeing’s, The Healing Power of Faith; Science explores Medicines Last Great Frontier, (Koeing: Simon & Schuster, 1999) where he states the old adage “Mens sana in corpore sano” (A sound mind in a sound body) p. 41.

C. ENTHUSIASMS1 APPRECIATED

Identifying the gifts that have been given to each individual by God is important but it is not a simple task. They are best known by those who are around us the most. It is in this context we are complete human beings2

D. COMPANIONSHIP

Being at peace with yourself and others, that is, reconciling your self with yourself and others, is the heart of companionship. Companionship means, “to break bread with” it is communion. “Communion is mutual trust, mutual belonging; it is the to-and-fro movement of love between two people where each one gives and each one receives”3 …God is present in this liberating communion, this is why John the Evangelist writes in his first letter:

Dear friends, let us love one another,
        for love comes from God.
Everyone who loves
       has been born of God and knows God.  
                                  (1 John 4:7)
1Enthusiasm goes back to the Greek word enthousiasmos, which ultimately comes from the adjective entheos, “having the god within,” formed from en-, “in, within,” and theos, “god.”
2There is no real self outside the relationship of one human being to another
3Vanier, Becoming Human, p.28


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