“Almost always I walk into congregations, and they say, ‘How do we bring young people into the congregation?'” says Meghan Sobocienski, a community organizer and project coordinator for the ELCA Organizing for Mission Cohort in Detroit. “The first thing I say is ‘Stop asking that question.'”
Instead, she tells people, “Suspend what you think this needs to look like. Picture if you didn’t have a building. What would you do if you didn’t have the four walls and the container that basically makes ‘the us and the them’?”
Meghan worked with her husband, mission developer John Cummings, to start Grace in Action, an ELCA congregation in the southwest neighborhood of Detroit, on exactly that principle. And they did so using one of the tenants of community organizing: the “one-to-one” conversation.
It starts with listening
One-to-ones are conversations community organizers are having in communities across the country. The idea is to listen intently to people’s hopes, needs and frustrations and to chart a mission plan or, in the case of Grace in Action, an entirely new congregation based on what people need.
“John did 200 one-to-ones in the community,” Meghan says. And by identifying what people in the neighborhood wanted in their lives, they grew a community. “John built relationships with teachers and counselors at local schools and found those people who are like gatekeepers to the community.”
Grace doesn’t even have a building yet, but they have 95 people they engage on a weekly basis around not just worship, but the arts and issues of importance to their community.
“That exercise for us has been really important,” Meghan continues. “So often those walls and those pews and that carpet become sacred over the mission and the ministry of bringing gospel hope into a broken world.”
A point of connection
When Melissa Reed began her pastoral internship at Redeemer Lutheran Church, an ELCA congregation in Portland, Ore., Redeemer was an aging congregation with a dwindling membership. “The writing was on the wall,” Melissa shares.
But through one-to-ones with members and the community, Redeemer began to discern a new path forward. What emerged was the Leaven Project, a new worshiping community focused on issues of social justice and sustainability that will begin when Redeemer officially closes its doors later this year.
“Rather than inviting people into a community that was pretty stuck in some ways, we said, ‘What if we invited people into a creative process to develop and build something?'” says Melissa.
“One-to-ones have just been kind of the base of our point of connection,” she says. “This wasn’t just about being a hip church but about what people were really experiencing, particularly the struggles and the pressures they were facing.”
One-to-ones in action
Both Meghan and Melissa agree that getting started in the process of engaging the community in conversation can be a bit intimidating.
“You have to be fearless,” Meghan says. “Just assume that people want to talk to you. For the most part, people want to share their stories.”
“It’s just about being human,” Melissa adds. “You sit down with another human being, and you are curious about them, and you invite them to be curious about you. You discover what’s really going in with this person and in the world around them and in the world that you’re sharing with them.”
The idea is that through listening and discerning, congregations can strengthen relationships and build community that is transformative for their specific context.
“It’s not just about finding out how we like to worship, although it can be used for this,” says Melissa. “It’s about transformation both of each person and of the community.”
“There’s value in our history, but if we get stuck in it we lose an entire generation of people,” Meghan says. “The gospel will not lose people. Jesus is going to show up no matter what, but the church is losing people. I don’t feel like it has to. There’s a lot of hope, but there needs to be space given for that to emerge.”
Interested in finding out more about one-to-ones?
Order “Hope at Work: First Steps in Congregation-based Community Organizing”.
Or for advice on how to use community organizing in your congregation, contact Susan Engh, director for community-based organizing of the ELCA at susan.engh@elca.org or Meghan Sobocienski, project coordinator for the ELCA Organizing for Mission Cohort, at msobocienski@gmail.com.
