Renovaré Weekly · May 31, 2024

The Long Game

LETTER BY GRACE POUCH

One of the sweetest tastes of the heavenly community I’ve ever known was my time in residence with my Renovaré Institute cohort.

Here were people desperate to know Jesus, to worship and follow him, and to become like him. Being with people who shared that focus was balm for my soul. I wanted to linger there…

But alas, one-week residencies flew by. So did the two-year cohort experience.

It was hard for me to return from those gatherings to my regular church — where it felt like a jumble of truly hungry disciples and folks who came just for the music, or to keep up appearances, or because Grandpa was a founder.

Descending from a mountaintop experience to regular church can be jarring. Sometimes you hit the ground so fast you’re bruised.

But there’s something beautiful that only forms through day-to-day (or at least Sunday-to-Sunday) life together. Short-lived or virtual community experiences don’t stretch us in the same way that steady belonging does. Deep relationships take time.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls out our tendency to seek an illusory form of community where problems don’t exist. Instead, he encourages Christians to persevere in deep, settled, local fellowship where illusions are crucified.

Rooted in a particular place and a particular group of Christ-followers, we can be deeply formed. (Formation by, alongside, and for the sake of other people is something we explore in our newest booklet, IN).

Renovaré gatherings, retreats, cohorts, and groups aren’t church. They are important in their own way. They graft us together as the capital‑C Church that spans time, place, and denomination. Especially for those who’ve had a hurtful church experience — who’ve been excluded, mistreated, or let down by a local body of believers — gathering with Christ-followers in para-church settings can be healing. For all of us, it can restore vision and hope. And it can even help prepare us to return to the nitty gritty of church life.

We love offering tastes of Christian community through Renovaré events and cohorts. But even more fundamentally, we want to support churches in being the kinds of communities where disciples can put down roots.

Many of you will remember that we have been conducting a search for a new senior staff role, the Director of Church Engagement. We were able to add this role and shape a church-centered initiative with the help of a grant from the Lilly Endowment. (The grant gets us about halfway there… so we still need your support!).

After an exhaustive (and thrilling!) process involving more than 240 candidates, we are delighted to welcome Brandan Spencer to our team. We hope you’ll get a chance to meet him at one of our upcoming events. And we hope you’ll let us know how we can support you in tasting sweet times of fellowship at Renovaré gatherings … and in finding places to root down deep in local community.

Grace Pouch
Content Manager

PS — In a few days, our staff and ministry team will gather for an annual retreat together. We will not send a Renovaré Weekly newsletter next week, but will see you back here on June 14!

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Introducing Renovaré’s new Director of Church Engagement, Brandan Spencer

Brandan comes to Renovaré after spending nine years on senior staff at Fellowship Church in Monrovia, CA. During his time there, Brandan served in multiple roles including Campus Pastor for one of Fellowship’s three campuses and Pastor of Formation & Leadership. He oversaw the rapid growth of Fellowship’s volunteer-powered small group ministry and pioneered a formation program in partnership with Fuller. Crucially for our team’s strategy, Brandan has long demonstrated a natural ability to cultivate intergenerational, multiethnic, and denominationally diverse community.

Before serving at Fellowship, Brandan worked in youth ministry in both church and Christian camp settings. He played a wide variety of creative/musical and HR roles in these settings.

Brandan will start with Renovaré on June 3, and we look forward to how he will help Renovaré connect and strengthen churches as places of deep formation and discipleship.

LET’S DIVE IN...

CURATED BY GRACE POUCH

1.

Deep relationships take time. On this week’s episode of Life with God, Margaret Campbell (Renovaré board and ministry team member) shares with Nate what she’s learned through the years about the slow and beautiful unfolding of true friendship — with people and with God.
2.

In this part of her autobiography, Thérèse of Lisieux tells how God taught her to embrace a challenging woman in the fellowship by praying for her, serving her as she would serve Jesus, and, when all else failed, running away from conflict. Little steps, but powerful!
3.

Why do we need to move beyond an idealistic view of church? Dietrich Bonhoeffer explains in this excerpt from Life Together, shared on pastor and author Matt Erickson’s noteworthy blog, Renovate.
4.

Christianity isn’t a solo venture. Marva Dawn explains why “we need the whole Body of the people of God.”
5.

So many people have been wounded in church. We see you and we ache for you. When church hurt involves spiritual abuse, there is a need for deep healing work. One small step in that process might be to share your tears, your groans with God, as Trevor Hudson writes here. Other times our church experience involves smaller hurts that occur between people who are learning to love better. This article by Richard Foster is about those small, ordinary hurts and how to forgive and to seek forgiveness.
6.

You might enjoy looking through the variety of grant recipients for Lilly’s 2023 initiative to help congregations flourish. Renovaré is grateful to be one of those recipients, and we’re deeply encouraged by the work that these other organizations are doing as well.

WORTH QUOTING

He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Life Together (source)

TO PONDER

Is there a hope or a sorrow related to community that you are holding in your heart? Consider forming that into a prayer — with words, or simply by picturing yourself handing over the burden or deep longing to the Lord.