Previous Post – Disciples, Not Volunteers

Earlier this years, a few of us from Winnipeg’s West End felt the need to bring together Christians from the community for a regular time of relationship and connection.  Since then, this group of people who live and/or worship in our neighbourhood have been gathering once a month, taking on the name the West End Christian Collective.  Made up of pastors & lay people from many denominations and traditions, we’ve been working together to building God’s Kingdom in our community.

One of the initiative that we decided to pursue not too long ago was to bring in Dr. Glenn Smith of Christian Direction, a gifted urbanologist & missiologist from Quebec, to spend a day with a small group of Christians in our city.  As an informal group with no money or defined leadership, we were able to pull it together remarkably well and yesterday spent an amazing day with Glenn & each other (about 65 people) exploring what it means to live faithfully as Christians in our Canadian urban context.  And we did the whole thing without charging participants a penny.

For those interested, we recorded the sessions and put them online.  They are unedited and in 6 part of varying lengths, but the quality is good and the content is amazing.  While focused on the Canadian context, it is widely applicable to almost any urban setting.  You can find the audio here.  Please feel free to pass on word of the sessions to anyone you think might benefit.

There is so much to share about what Glenn explored with us (such as the powerful way he guided us through exegesis of both Scripture and our communities, bringing those two things together), but one of the most encouraging things for me was the response we received from the West End Christian Collective at the end of the day.  We all agreed that we would do the work of exegeting our community together.  Again, remember that this is an informal group made of Christians of all ages, experiences, etc.  We are identified by our neighbourhood, not our denominations or even by our formal leadership positions.  I am hopeful that this model of collective, grass-roots leadership could be an amazing model for other neighbourhoods (in fact, several other representatives at the meetings plan to visit our Collective to see what it is about and possibly replicate it in their context).

Again, please take the take to check out the audio of Glenn’s teaching.  I hope it blesses you and your community as much as it did ours.