News
It was great to have such a large gathering of different communities and people at our meeting on Monday. We had some good discussion and a few concrete changes to the way we’ll have Prayer and Share Gatherings came out. Here is what we came out with:
Dates: As much as possible, Prayer and Share will now be held on the 4th Tuesday each month (the next gathering will be January 26th)-Communities interested in hosting should try to keep it on this day each month.
Content: We decided that from now on, our gatherings will be 1 part community prayers and announcements (what we’ve been doing so far) and 1 part discussion/interaction/
teaching/sharing. This might look different each month, but the consensus was having some sort of topical discussion or sharing.
Our first discussion, next month, will be about giving relationally and money. We’ll be talking specifically about Relational Tithe, which is a relational sharing network, and perhaps also generally about what to do with money in community.
If there are other topics that you would find interesting and would like to hear from other people about, send me your ideas (ex. conflict, roommate discernment, sexuality, etc). We’re trying to create a “menu” of topics to make it easy each month to decide what to discuss. This also could open us up to the possibility of occasionally having outside speakers lead us in discussion or share with us.
Conspire Magazine: Currently, DC Community of Communities is a co-Conspirator for this magazine through the Simple Way. We decided not to renew our subscription after the 4th issue, as the cost seems too great. Instead, I will be trying to coordinate getting a handful of copies from Schools for Conversion each quarter to distribute at meetings and to communities. The cost will be $3/issue, so you or your community will be able to decide how many copies you’d like and just pay for them that way.
Retreat: We hope to have a retreat in the first couple weekends of March at St. Anselm’s Abbey in NE D.C. A brother there as graciously offered us, free of charge, space for a retreat where some folks could stay the night and others could stay nearby and we could have monks or others lead us in a range of topics: prayer, community life, the Enneagram (a tool often helpful in communities for learning to live with people very different from us)…Feel free to send in other ideas for the retreat, probably a Friday evening-Saturday afternoon. Stay tuned for possible dates.
Community Directory: Natalia Alger has volunteered to put together a directory of the different communities/community members in this area. This will not be a public document,but something distributed to communities to help us all do better at sharing our knowledge and connections that could help each other.
