Re-humanization
Since Christ Church began the Vital+Thriving Congregations initiative almost a year and a half ago, members of our teams and those we’ve encountered in the wider community have talked a great deal about our unique context here in Silicon Valley. We’ve heard again and again that so much of our contemporary culture is dehumanizing: many people feel they are expected to work, or at least be available to work, constantly; parents feel pinched between responsibilities to their jobs and responsibilities to their children, while others are care-giving for partners or elders whose needs can become quickly overwhelming; there’s a constant sense that we should be more impressive, more successful, or simply more than we know we actually are. If nothing else, the pace of our lives, the complexity of our world, and the divisions in our society are a source of near-constant anxiety. COVID both exacerbated and intensified many preexisting sites of stress and suffering. In a popular 2021 piece for The New York Times, organizational psychologist Adam Grant describe the “joyless and aimless” feeling that plagued many during the pandemic as a chronic state of “languishing.”
In response to all we heard in that first year of deep listening, our Vital+Thriving teams came together in the spring of 2023 to identify the following Missional Challenge facing our congregation: “God has opened our eyes to a profound spiritual longing in Silicon Valley: many people are disconnected and exhausted, living without family support and struggling to find meaningful relationships. As an open-minded, intellectually curious community, how can we join our neighbors seeking authentic connection, asking real questions, exploring together what practices deepen their flourishing and that of their families?” Our Director of Music, Eric Tuan, explored both the challenges of our particular culture and the hope of our faith in this brilliant and beautiful sermon from last September.
Since articulating this challenge, both the Steering Team and Missional Innovation Team (MIT) have been praying, dreaming, and discerning together how we might be called by God to manifest the love and light of Christ in our particular time and place. The MIT has now identified four areas for experimentation, which we’ll be exploring with various events and programs in the year ahead: 1) interfaith collaboration, building on the Building Bridges Program and partnerships developed over the last two years; 2) Wednesday community dinners, open to all, and particularly inclusive of young families; 3) sacred hiking; and, 4) gatherings and support for people who have been harmed by religion. While the Vital+Thriving teams have begun planning some events related to these areas, we are eager for other parishioners and friends of the community to get involved. If one or more of these resonates for you, please let a V+T team member know, or contact me (claire@ccla.us). If you’re aware of others already doing similar work here in Los Altos or beyond that might intersect with or further these experiments, we would also love to hear about it.
If we live in a context that dehumanizes God’s children and disconnects us from the love that is our birthright, then the work of the Gospel here and now must be a kind of re-humanization. What are the practices, disciplines, and rituals that reconnect us to God, creation, neighbor and self? Where is the Spirit already at work in our communities, and how are we called to partner with God in reconciliation, joy, and the creation of more just and gentle world? We don’t yet have answers to these urgent and enlivening questions, but I’m excited for us to be exploring them together.