Community Conversations

Dear Lydians,

As we continue to grow, I’m finding that I need a place to be in conversation with you, the congregation.  We have dialogue in the sermon, reflect after worship, and have our Community Meetings, but I feel a need for time to discern and speak together about what we’re experiencing as a congregation and the identity we’re forming.  So I’d like to introduce a monthly Community Conversation.  These conversations will take place on a weeknight evening near Union Square.  The conversations will revolve around a specific topic that is timely for our community, and there will usually be a short reading that I’ll send out ahead of time to help guide our conversation.

I’d like to focus our first conversation around the balance between radical hospitality and the boundaries that keep our congregation healthy.  Each week we open our doors to whoever walks through them.  This is experience can be surprising, delightful, unnerving. Is there such thing as a community that welcomes all, and what support can we responsibly offer to those who come through our doors who are in great need?

-Emily