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:

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)