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Courageous Love: Here & Now

Designing ‘How’ Together

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Description

Over the past few months, our community has embarked on a journey to re-imagine itself. COVID upended our lives with no signs of relenting any time soon. Our church was quick to adapt: worship moved online, church groups and events went virtual or were put on hold, and many people came together to create community circles to enable our community to connect and care for each other.

Initially these shifts were thought to just be short term adaptations, but in the last few months as the ever changing reality has come into focus with more clarity, we’ve realized we need to broaden our scope. Moving from short term to longer term pivots in how we gather and ‘be’ and act as a Foothills community.

In the past few months we’ve been wondering what it would look like if we lean in to this reality instead of fighting it. Remembering that growth and courageous love have everything they need to exist here and now.

While the rapid and ongoing disorientation of so much of our lives continues, we see a powerful opportunity for us as a church to re-orient.

Re-orient to the way our lives work (or don’t) now.

Re-orient to what is most important.

Re-orient to long haul impact of COVID.

Re-orient to how our community can enable each and all of us for more courageous living.

Which is why we are launching Courageous Love: Here & Now - Designing How Together a communal discernment & design process where our community will wrestle together with the question:

What can our community learn during this time and disruption about how we can creatively and sustainably response to unleash deepening belonging, spiritual grounding and resilience, and deploying our people to be agents with courageous love?

Our community will not have just one answer to the question; we expect there to be many. Each growing out of a particular set of life circumstances: lifestage, history and involvement within the Foothills, how deeply COVID has impacted everyday life, and many others. We want to harness these diverse backgrounds, to design a future for our congregation that not only takes these realities into accounts, but also finds the unique way our mission calls us to serve and be in relationship with each other and our greater community.

To facilitate this undertaking we have partnered with

Agncy⁠

a nonprofit design organization whose mission is to use design to reduce structural inequity in America. A group of us us has been working closely with Agncy to craft a process where members of our community working in affinity groups with people of similar life realities will design a possible path forward and then be brought into conversation to see what emerges. We are not imagining we will come up with the answer, but the next stage for our development as a church, answering questions that have been around longer than covid about how we should operate if we truly lived up to our values.

Time Commitment & Expectations:

Project rollout date: Friday, September 11, 12-1:30 kick-off

Design team work (including training!) begins: Monday, September 14

Design team work estimated timeframe: September 14 - October 23 (6 weeks)

Design Team Leads: facilitating the work of the Design Teams and doing design activities

time commitment = 4-6 hours/wk

Mon & Fri afternoon 1 hour check in with Agncy

Design Team Members: carry out research activities (interviewing, data analysis, etc.), supervised by the Design Team Leads

time commitment = 2-3 hours/wk

From Agncy

Background:

Foothills congregation adapted swiftly to the requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic,

launching local circles run by volunteer leaders. These circles have served their purpose and

are now ready to be rethought and rebuilt.

Goals

Embody the church’s core objectives:

Center the goals of

1) spiritual grounding and resilience

2) deepening belonging and

3) unleashing agents of courageous love

Build a richer, community-driven articulation of each.

Enable basic needs to be identified and met: Provide a caring & support net throughout times of crisis.

Be structurally sustainable: Create a model that is executable and durable.

Build the mindset that this is a productive opportunity: Engage the community in the view that this new model is and will be an asset to the congregation.

Allow for localization and adaptation: Create structures that are equitable and shared, while enabling customization and contextualization.

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