Discussion guide for April 2023 issue

Willie Jennings conversation by Eric Barreto

Questions:

1. In what settings do you feel noticed, named, and known? Where do you feel seen?
2. Is gathering as a beloved community an adequate basis for belonging? Why? What else is required?
3.  Where have you experienced revolutionary belonging, the kind that transforms boundaries, borders, separations, and segregation?
4. How does Jennings’s conviction that Christians belong to people on the margins challenge or complement how you express your faith?
5. Does what happens in your community and the environment matter to you? How do you resist the individualism that settles for your happiness regardless of what’s happening to the ground?

Transition: Patrick Reyes bears witness to his grandmother’s role in fashioning in him a desire for revolutionary belonging.

Belonging to the cathedral of the future by Patrick Reyes

Questions:

1. What part of the material world (sand, trees, water) holds significant meaning for you and ties you to the earth and your spiritual ancestors?
2.  Who in your life was so connected to God’s love that they created a stained-glass window in a cathedral of love in you?
3. How can your community construct cathedrals where your descendants will come to dwell, imagine, and belong?

Transition: Erin Weber Johnson echoes Jennings’s call to embrace those at the margins, the working poor, the marginalized and the oppressed. We belong to all our neighbors and they to us.

Bodies and belonging by Erin Weber Johnson

Questions:

1. How can you reimagine belonging to avoid matters of control, owners and outcomes?
2. How does bias affect belonging?
3. When have you received or offered specific care practices and discovered deep belonging?
4. How could you shape your practices of belonging based on God’s deep love for the creation?

Transition: Mihee Kim Kort centers radical (fundamental) belonging in the belovedness we share through baptism.

The belovedness of community by Mihee Kim Kort

Questions:

1. Do you trust the baptismal message of your belovedness and belongingness? How is the message expressed in your faith community?
2. How does baptism inform your sense of identity and purpose? In what ways does baptism tell you who you are?
3. Do you agree that your belovedness in God is never separate from the belovedness of the whole human community in Christ? Why?
4. Who best exemplifies the holy and sacred task of holding space for one another in your life? Give thanks for them.

Transition: Mieke Vandersall’s testimony resonates with Jennings’s conviction that false belonging depends on people acquiescing to the status quo, thereby controlling who is in and out. On the other hand, Christian belonging issues from the prophetic witness condemn how we separate and exclude people.

Belonging by Mieke Vandersall

Questions:

1. Have you ever experienced not quite belonging? What were the circumstances?
2. How is gatekeeping embedded in your church’s welcome? Who decides who is in and who is out? How do you react when you hear Jesus is always with the outsiders?
3. What’s the difference between membership, welcoming, and belonging? Why do fewer people find belonging in the church?

Transition: Angela Williams Gorrell identifies grief’s way of separating people and losing our way of fitting into the world. She discovers seeds of hope, joy, and belonging in that same grief.

Grief and belonging by Angela Williams Gorrell

Questions:

1 . Have you ever lost someone or something that made you feel you belonged? Describe the experience.
2. In what ways has your grief helped you see people differently, with empathy and compassion?
3. How have loss and grief given birth to the renewal of belonging and joy?

Transition: Dustin Benac underscores values and shared practices that provide necessary boundaries and borders for communities of belonging.

Bonhoeffer and the structure of belonging by Dustin D. Benac

Questions:

1 . According to Benac, what is the difference between boundaries and borders? How do they promote trust, mutuality, and accountability in the church?
2. Does Benac’s call to attend to the structures of belonging contradict Willie Jennings’s call to revolutionary belonging that transforms boundaries and borders? Why?
3. Which boundaries does Christ call us to establish? What borders does Christ call us to cross? What transformations occur in both?