conversations with our Neighbors

Church Family,

Our journey of Lent this year will take us out into our neighborhood.  The goal of this is to get to know our neighbors, to identify what needs exist in our community, and to effectively organize as a parish community to work towards meeting those needs.  At the end of Lent, my hope is that we will have strengthened our friendships in and around our neighborhood and that we will have begun the work of making a positive impact on our neighborhood and on our City.

This Lent I am asking you to not give anything up.  God did not create you to have a relationship with chocolate or any other creature comfort.  God did create you to have a relationship with your neighbor.  So I am challenging each and every one of us to have a meaningful conversation with at least 5 of our neighbors.  I know that this might be uncomfortable at first, but from experience I can assure you that it's worth it.  In the past month I have had these conversations with at least 30 people and have found the conversation to be really helpful in getting to know people but also in identifying the needs that people have in our neighborhood.  These conversations have also been healing in the relationships that people have with our church.  It's worth it.

The main question to guide these conversations is "What do you need in your life today?"  Feel free to change the wording or the way that you ask this question, make it yours.  But at the end of the day we are looking to identify what the main needs are in our neighborhood and concrete ways that we as a parish community can work with our neighbors to help meet these needs.  After they give you an answer, like "child care" or "parking", for example, ask a couple of follow up questions to help better understand what that would look like and how we could help meet that need.  

Here is a reporting back form on which you can communicate in a succinct way what it is that you heard.  As you will see, at the bottom of the form is a line to indicate how many people were heard.  This is important as it gives us an idea of how many people identify any given need.  There is also a line to put down people's email addresses.  I promise, we will not add them to our Flocknote or ask them for money!  The reason for getting their contact information is so that we can follow up with them and invite them to join us in working to meet these needs.  It's important that we're clear-- in order for these conversations to be meaningful there has to be follow up and opportunity for us to work together with our neighbors.

Once you complete your conversations and fill out the forms, please send them back to us here in the office.  Our parish staff and parish council will then work on correlating all of the responses.  

I will also be reaching out to some of you to see if you would be able to host listening sessions with people who live on your block.  This group conversation will be helpful in building relationships and seeing if there is a natural consensus that forms in identifying our needs here on the peninsula.  

Finally we will also be providing opportunities for each of us to chime in as well and to have these meaningful conversations among ourselves as parishioners.  

This is important work, it's Gospel work.  And I hope that you will join me this Lent in journeying out into our neighborhood.  It's going to be awesome!

Peace, Fr. Josh