Thriving Communities

This posting is to point you to "Faith & Leadership" a resource of Duke Divinity School. You may recall that they took over much of the work of Alban Institute. The links below are from "Thriving Communities." 

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What is Christian about Christian leadership? »
Theologian L. Gregory Jones, the dean of Duke Divinity School, says it is our purpose, our telos. And that is to cultivate thriving communities that bear witness to the inbreaking reign of God that Jesus announces and embodies in all that we do and are. This should shape the way we think about our lives, our institutions and the way we lead our institutions.

The pattern of life in thriving communities »
In a seven-part series, New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe writes that the Acts of the Apostles pressures us to see six features that are the essence of the church.

Networking: Early Christians built communities where resources were plentiful »
The early Christians used the advantages of such places to develop communities that could have easy contact with one another and could become, by means of their communication and interconnection, “brothers and sisters” in Christ, Rowe writes.

Visibility: Early Christians did not separate their public and private lives »
Rowe writes that in Acts being Christian is by its very nature a public confession and identity. Contrary to what we might normally think, “Christian” was not first used as an internal self-designation. It was instead a term coined by outsiders, by those who could see a thriving community and needed a word with which to describe them.

Thriving includes provision for and inclusion of the weak and the downtrodden »
Making room for the weak is not a kind of “add-on” to the central mission of the church but is something integral and internal to its identity, Rowe writes. Acts displays what becomes a central feature of the thinking of the church’s leaders: they look beyond the need to “fix” a problem (of which there are several in Acts) and instead think about thriving in a much longer-term perspective.

Incorporating conflict and disagreement into a community »
Rowe writes that such work entails the intertwining of the powerful work of the Holy Spirit, the prefiguring and confirming role of Scripture, and the discerning work of the community’s leaders.

Learning to articulate why your community exists »
A thriving community is one that knows why it exists at all -- the content of its being as a community -- and is able to articulate to others this reason for its existence, Rowe writes. It has developed ways of teaching this articulacy to the new people who join the community so that there is a transmission of and continuity in community identity and mission.

Suffering is part of thriving »
The Book of Acts portrays Christian communities that thrive despite suffering -- not because of an affirmation of the meaningfulness of all difficulty but because of the hope they know from the pattern of Jesus’ life, Rowe writes.