At the Table: Christian Community for the Common Good
While the world becomes increasingly complex, professionalized, and disconnected, the church is experiencing a crisis of identity. Do we follow suit and strive to out-program, out-professionalize, and out-attract the rest of the world? Or do gather at the table and focus on the small and simple community-based practices that have been our strength across the generations?
At the Table is a Podcast for church leaders interested in community-based ministry that contributes to the common good via mutual relationships, spiritual practice, simplicity, and an awareness of God’s activity in our communities. Each month, we will have conversations with leaders and practitioners of community-based ministry to reflect on and learn about the core practices, theological underpinnings, and immediate invitations of this important work. We believe that something miraculous happens when Christian community gathers with neighbors at the table.
You can learn more about the work of place-based ministry and the common good by visiting www.nicholastangen.com and subscribing to Nicholas Tangen's Newsletter.
At the Table: Christian Community for the Common Good
Church for Ordinary People with Darryl & Stephanie Answer
Today’s episode is a conversation with Stephanie and Darryl Answer, who are faculty members at the Asset Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University, and founders of New Community Church in Kansas City, Missouri. New Community is a church that takes seriously the call to be the neighbor by highlighting and animating gifts, reimagining how the church thinks about money and power, and tending to their neighborhood’s relational capital.
Darryl and Stephanie truly practice what they preach and offer a vision for church rooted in place and profoundly aware of the presence of Jesus among neighbors. These two are such an inspiration to me and offer the church so much wisdom, and more importantly, permission to be the church in the particular places where God has called us to live and worship. I pray this is just the first of many conversations with Darryl and Stephanie Answer.
Music by Aleksey Chistilin from Pixabay