Find Your People: Community as Sacred Practice in Ministry

This summer is drawing to a close. It’s time to start thinking about the fall. For a lot of us, that means ramping our programming up and returning to a more hectic pace of life. It may mean added responsibilities and pressures and maybe new commitments. You may be dreading adding one more thing to your already busy life. I am mindful that you have a lot of things competing for your time and attention and that if you are going to take on anything else, it needs to genuinely add value to your life and ministry. That’s why I am using this space to invite you to be a part of our next EcoPreacher cohort. I genuinely believe that we have something to offer that is unique, life-giving, and transformative for you personally and as someone who might dare to preach into the realities of our climate changed world. 

When I began at Creation Justice Ministries, EcoPreacher was in the middle of its pilot year. I mostly hung out as a listener and observer. What I saw and heard was a space being formed where people could be really honest about what it feels like to serve a Church that has often not had much to say about the many ecological crises that we face. It was a space where people were holding hope and despair in a delicate tension. It was a space where church leaders were trying to be both prophetic and pastoral in equal measure with the understanding that sometimes it is important to lean into one of those modalities more than the other. In short, what I was seeing was the groundwork for real community. 

Creation Justice Ministries, in partnership with our friends at The BTS Center in Portland, Maine and Lexington Theological Seminary through the excellent leadership of Leah Schade, were awarded a grant from the Lilly Foundation to build on that pilot program. I shifted into the role of the cohort’s co-facilitator along with The BTS Center’s Associate Director Nicole Diroff. In the planning for that first fully funded year, we made a couple of significant shifts from the pilot program. First, we shifted our kinship circles (small groups) from being watershed specific to being contextual. While we certainly recognize the value of local organizing, we’re also aware that a rural church may be having very different Creation justice conversations than an urban church just ten miles away and that having conversations with others who are facing similar challenges might be more beneficial. The other significant shift we made was investing in kinship circle facilitators. This team of folks, most of whom had been through the pilot program, would provide a stable presence for the small groups and communicate their observations to the program staff. We kept the general format of the pilot: a presentation given by some expert in the field followed by small group discussion before regrouping to debrief. What we discovered though was that investing more in the small group experience, there were more opportunities for genuine camaraderie and connection to form. One of the common refrains we heard from that year was participants saying that they “found their people”. 

We’re moving into our third year of the fully funded program and I am excited for what is to come. We continue to improve based on what we’ve heard from our former program participants and offer presentations on things like climate grief, preaching in politically divided times, and the intersections between environmental justice, racial justice, and economic justice. We continue to listen closely to western science while also recognizing the wisdom of indigenous ways of knowing. We continue to walk the tightrope between diving more deeply into the day’s topic and leaving space for people to discuss whatever they may be carrying into the space. It is a unique, life-giving space that is helping to form the leaders the church needs in these challenging times. 

So yes, I know that you have a lot of things vying for your time this fall and finding even 90 minutes once a month may feel like a huge commitment. Yet I think one of the biggest mistakes that we make in trying to be faithful leaders in a climate-changed world is trying to go it alone. Ministry is a lonely business. Add trying to minister in a world that often feels indifferent to fires and storms raging around us both literally and figuratively, and it gets even lonelier. If you’re feeling that isolation right now, this is an invitation to come and find your people. 

​Derrick Weston
Director of Theological Education & Formation​/Acting Executive Director through Oct 12
​Creation Justice Ministries