Some of you may have heard this already, but The Englewood Review of Books is getting back into book publishing!!! For about a decade (2005ish-2015ish) the ERB published a number of books, but for a variety of reasons, that work went dormant almost ten years ago. We have hired
as our Managing Editor, and are diving back into book publishing. Our focus for the next year or so, will be a series of books on congregational formation, published with Cultivating Communities and their partners Missio Alliance and the Ekklesia Project. We intend to publish other titles outside this series eventually, but our efforts are focused for now on this initial series.(The ERB will still continue its primary work in covering new books, but are adding this new publishing endeavor to our portfolio.)
I’ve just drafted a foreword for the Cultivating Communities series of books, and am delighted to share it here, as it introduces not only the series, but also the first two volumes in the series.
Cultivating Communities
Series Foreword
Our human bodies bear witness to the truth of our lives: to the many sorts of care we have given them or to joys and traumas that they have survived. Similarly, social bodies also bear witness. They take the shape of their members’ desires, convictions, and stories. And our churches are no exception. Ideally, our congregations will take a shape that bears witness to the life, death, resurrection, and teachings of Jesus. But all too often that witness is distorted by other loves and other desires in the midst of church communities that don’t look a whole lot like Jesus of Nazareth. Nationalism and greed are two such loves that dilute and distort the Christian witness of churches.
In an age dominated by deep social divides – between the political right and left; between rich and poor; between various racial and ethnic identities, between generations; and between educational backgrounds, to name just a few – how is it even possible that a church might have any shape at all beyond the nearly amorphous form taken by the loose network of her individual members?
Beyond these deep divides and the existential threat they pose to our congregations, I am hopeful churches can still mature into the full stature of a body that bears a striking resemblance to Jesus. This maturing is a slow process that will not only take time but also hard work and intentionality. What shape will our individual bodies take if we neglect to care for their physical and mental well-being? Similarly, our churches must be attentive to tending and cultivating our life together, seeking day-by-day, month-by-month, and year-by-year to more fully embody Jesus together in our particular place. This work of patient cultivation lies at the heart of congregational formation.
In many ways the contours of congregational formation parallel those of personal spiritual formation. Both congregational and personal formation are driven by the desire to more fully know and embody Jesus, and both take the shape of intentional practices that serve to form us into Christlikeness. However, congregational formation can be particularly messy because it requires the alignment of the desires of multiple people, not just one person. Efforts to align desires by emotional manipulation, or by more authoritarian tactics, will undoubtedly fail with time because their means are decidedly not those of the patient love and compassion of Jesus. In these cases, formation does happen, but the shape that is emerging looks little like Jesus.
Indeed, congregational formation occurs as we learn to be attentive to God’s presence in us and among us in the Holy Spirit. We learn through a multitude of practices, especially conversation, to share our convictions, our hopes, and our stories together. And we learn to receive one another with gratitude as a vital means of God’s provision for shaping and sustaining our life together. Just as our personal bodies constantly adapt, discern, mature, and move through the world as an intricate network of conversations, so also conversation becomes the way that our churches discern together who our members are, how we will care for our collective body, and how we strive to embody Christ together in ways that our neighbors see and become curious about the way of Jesus.
This new Cultivating Communities Series of books serves to offer churches tools for the long journey of congregational formation. These books are intended as field guides to help orient your congregation through essential conversations on this journey. This series is the fruit of a collaborative effort between Cultivating Communities (an initiative designed to assist churches in the work of congregational formation, based at Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis), Missio Alliance, and the Ekklesia Project. Cultivating Communities is funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment’s Thriving Congregations Initiative, and a portion of this generous funding has been used to launch this new series of books.
The first book in this series, The Shape of Our Lives, is a revised and updated edition of a resource originally produced in 2008 by the Ekklesia Project, which introduces the key elements and dynamics of congregational formation. Written by a team of pastors and theological/biblical scholars, including Phil Kenneson, Debra Dean Murphy, Jenny Williams, Stephen Fowl, and James Lewis, The Shape of Our Lives will serve not only as a primer on congregational formation, but also a theological backdrop for the subsequent books in this series. Look for this first book to be available in October 2024.
Building upon our conviction that conversation is the central practice of congregational formation, the second book in this series (The Virtue of Dialogue) recounts the earliest years of Englewood Christian Church’s journey of learning to grow together in conversation. We hope this story will provide imagination for many churches about how they might learn to talk and grow together within their own particular contexts.
Subsequent volumes in the series will address specific key facets of congregational formation, including how to read scripture together, how to think and talk about money in our congregations, and more. Each volume will incorporate discussion questions intended to spark conversation. Although each book can be read and reflected on by individual church leaders, this series is primarily intended to be read, prayed over, and discussed by groups within a congregation, including perhaps in some settings, the congregation as a whole. We hope the very form of these books is consistent with and serves to cultivate vital congregational conversations.
Subscribe to stay tuned for more about this book series, including details about the release of the first two volumes later this year!
Great! But you can anticipate me saying that I hope they will be available through ordinary supply chain sources for real bookstores, and not just through the outfit that will not be named. Good, wholesale prices and terms make it possible for ordinary stores to carry them, and you can promote each by saying "wherever fine books are sold" or "order them from your local bookstore." RIGHT? Hooray for this. I trust your writing and insight and judgement a lot.
Huzzah! I love Dean Murphy’s work. Will she be putting out a new volume?