If practicing Incarnational Design as outlined in this resource is something you would like to live into more fully, we recommend you find ways to share and discuss these ideas with your community using the discussion questions provided. If, after engaging the vision presented in this resource, there is a shared hunger to explore this more fully, we encourage you to reach out to Street Psalms for support and additional resources. For example, we encourage you to consider partnering with our Design Studio as you come together to create new models of social innovation that leads to human flourishing in your specific context.

A Community in Mission (CiM) is a living, breathing paradox of creative tension. The things that sustain community may at times seem at odds with the things that sustain the mission. This creative tension is not a flaw, but one of its essential features. It’s what generates momentum and makes it work. Throughout this resource we will explore this creative tension and offer a series of questions that call it forth and sustain it.

Sustaining the creative tension requires courage, compassion and a growing capacity to forgive and then forgive again. Why? Because a Community in Mission is always a work in progress made up of people who are a work in progress, in a world that is a work in progress, all of which evolve by undergoing being loved and forgiven by One who is not scandalized by our imperfections. This requires a spirituality of imperfection that can hold and heal our imperfections. This is how creation unfolds and gives glory to God.

For now we want to emphasize that when modeled after the life of Christ, CiMs imagine themselves not as the provider of religious goods and services to passive consumers, but as the gathering of those who are actively undergoing a gospel that frees them to love and serve. In doing so, this shifts the identity of its members from passive consumers to active participants, undergoing a huge, open-ended adventure in which we are true co-creators helping design the adventure itself. It re-energizes, re-members, and re-centers the faith community to become a living example that models the very reason it exists. It does so by freeing its members to love and serve, not in the shape of a closed system, but in ways that honor the vocation and call of its members and seek the common good of all and participate in the ongoing act of Creation itself. CiM’s are not private clubs that promote their own cause. They are public gifts that widen the circle of human concern and call forth a shared humanity so that everyone belongs. This resource is designed for faith communities, churches and other types of faith-based communities alike, who are responding to that call.