This post on Strategic Redevelopment is written by Steve Matthews, Senior Consultant for the FaithX Project.
“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.”
I have invested a lot of enjoyable time and energy working with churches in redevelopment over the past 10 years. Even so, sometimes I still find myself scratching my head asking, “What is redevelopment?,” and “What does it mean to go about it strategically?” Honestly, both words sound like a pretty mechanistic description for the vital work of nurturing beloved community and daring to be vulnerable enough to share ourselves and our experience of God’s love with our neighbors (which is the core of redevelopment for me).
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