Living the Word
An Ecumenical Experiment in the Rural Church

 

We’ve got a Caucasian farm woman whose e-mail tag is “goatmama.”  She goes to a charming hilltop United Methodist congregation with a part-time pastor.  We’ve got a 28-year-old white guy who was a 16-year-old, hard-living runaway on the streets, but who now has a conversion story that moves people to tears.  He’s on a long trail toward ordained ministry.  He credits his change to his rural Methodist church whose community garden is nationally acclaimed.  We’ve got an elderly preacher and his wife who have led their traditional black Missionary Baptist church for over thirty years.  They’re so well loved the congregation won’t let them retire.  And we’ve got the first African-American woman captain of the Hillsborough Police Department.

 

What is this group with such a wide sampling of fine rural folk?  It’s not a church.  It’s an Orange County circle called “Living the Word.”  It’s an experiment in crossing denominational, ethnic, and other lines in one local place, for a two-year stretch, to see what God might make from intentional abiding among those not normally crossing paths.

 

The Duke Endowment funded this experiment in rural church capacity building as a way to see how church folk might collaborate to creatively manifest the beloved community.  Designed to include the pastor and four others from each of four congregations, this group met one Saturday a month, excluding summers, during 2006 and 2007.  Two facilitators from the NC Conference of the United Methodist church and from the NC Council of Churches designed the sessions that included prayer and biblical animation, shared liturgical traditions, programmed discussions, personal sharing, and planning for joint presence in the community.

 

What binds the group across wildly differing theologies and practices and histories and styles is prayer.  In our prayer for one another, we become a gospel community.  We are sometimes baffled by each other’s ways, but we keep coming together because we know it is important to move out of comfort zones into the called life of kingdom.  The police captain will go to Haiti with one of the Methodist pastors.  Several of the group assisted with the Neighbor House homeless feeding ministry of one of the Missionary Baptist churches’participants.  In the summer, the group will come together with a community book bag giveaway for school children.  We will celebrate one’s birthday with a drumming circle and cookout open to the neighborhood.  And for our September meeting we will serve organic and local food to all who come to the community garden for a music festival.

 

There are deep topics we don’t analyze or touch.  It’s certainly not a perfect process.  A professional evaluator will glean what has been transformative, what was not well done, and what might be learned for future replications.  But we know something has been knit together in this place, and that God does bind us together in love, when we make space for it and come out of our usual domains.

 

BY BARBARA ZELTER, FACILITATOR, LIVING THE WORD