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Following Jesus in nonviolent struggle for justice and peace, we love our neighbors and enemies as God loves us all, becoming a peace church to share in God’s work to save the world.

Stages of Commmunity-Making

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Reflections on A Sacred Season of Peace-Making
Part 3 of 4 by Joan Haan

Conversations: Stages of Community –Making[2]
After hearing the religious speakers we spent time in dialogue. Small groups were facilitated www.conversationcafe.org from a central question, “What most moved or challenged you?”

Comments expressed gratitude, hope and new learning. They also expressed desire for and frustration about the lack of going deeper and the unwillingness to express conflict.

M. Scott Peck describes this desire for Community-Making in four stages:
1.   Pseudo Community—“faking it,” pleasant conversations, avoiding disagreement at all costs
2.   Chaos—problems out in the open but unproductive and unpleasant, members attempt to heal and convert
3.   Emptiness—members empty themselves of barriers to communication; abandon expectations and preconceptions; prejudices; ideologies and theologies; the need to fix, heal, convert or solve; and the need to control
4.   Community—a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to [he quotes John Winthrop] “rejoice together, mourn together,” and to “delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own”
Our interfaith series of six consecutive Monday evenings invited participants to experience some aspects of the four stages—with conflict occurring as participants experienced the stages differently. Some stayed at Pseudo Community; others acutely felt Chaos and Emptiness. Many glimpsed Community or the possibility of Community in their small groups or in the inquiry of the final session.

Community is a long term investment and not clearly sequential in its staging—all four stages can be present at once!

Where do you notice this kind of Community-Making happening? Where is it missing?

Joan Haan, M.A. CPCC
ECAPC Board Member

[2] M. Scott Peck stages of community -making, are articulated in his book, The Different Drum. “Stages of Community –Making” is summarized by Janet Chisholm in the Facilitator Manual, Creating a Culture of Peace: from Violence to Wholeness p. 79

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