Action or Inspiration; Part Two

Well, Sunday afternoon I was challenged. After church on Sunday we had a break and then at 2 pm we were set to have a joint workshop for all the congregations. It was a small crowd, but that is what you can expect during prime napping time on a Sunday afternoon. Folks have put in their God hours for the week and it's hard to make time for more. We started the workshop talking about who we are and what we're doing and all shared a bit about why we're excited and why we're traveling around for 3 months with little to no pay to talk about the God's Shalom vision and Jesus' teachings of peace.

During the session I reflected on something we've noticed in ourselves and our churches, that we Mennonites have struggled to be able to talk about and link the peace position (rather our Shalom understanding) to our faith. Because we don't know how to talk about peace, we often don't. As a result our understanding of peace is not passed on, or there is a misunderstanding of what peace is; our understanding of peace becomes limited solely to the absence of war. I question why we can't talk peace as well as we talk about our favorite foods or our favorite sports teams. Is it because we have not been taught the right words to express such an understanding? Have we as a church community fallen short in our responsibility to tell the Jesus story in such a way that show how radical his message is? Have we failed, as Willis Busenitz put it, to "put the cookies on the bottom shelf" and left the study of peace to our theologians and not embraced God's vision of Shalom for our own lives? (okay, I didn't even mention that last sentence on Sunday, but that is an interesting one to think about...)

In any case this reflection led into group discussion and then the last few minutes we attempted to focus people's thoughts on the following two questions: (1) What do you need to better talk about your faith? (2) How can we (collectively in your congregation or as a denomination or as individuals) do this [articulation] better?

The hope was that these questions might lead into a bit more of a brainstorming session. It was not as much as I had hoped, I need to rework my questions. But after we got back together and shared collectively what we talked about, I started to close and asked if there were any final comments. Well, the question came: now what?! Where is the action section? Good question. I didn't have a good answer, I guess I didn't see myself or our group as the ones providing an action, the next thing to do. Maybe we could have but my hope is that we could inspire others to act and do. But what does that mean?

I don't know. And this gets me back to my original question, who is this summer for? If its just for me and improving my own abilities in articulation and leadership, well, I'm pretty sure it will be successful. If its for me to inspire others, I can only hope that my excitement and enthusiasm and continued improvement in the area of articulation will do just that. But what do we need to do to inspire action? What is our role? What do folks need to be inspired to act and to work together at a congregational level to explore God's Shalom vision and to learn together how to talk about it and live into that vision? At this point I am without answers, I'm still pondering the questions.
~Elizabeth