UCME :: Clergy Education
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Session 5: Making an Urban Difference, cont.

V.  To Do:

Write out a list of the 10 most significant urban problems you can identify in the City. Prioritize them as to what you perceive are those that cause the worst calamities for the City as a whole and for the citizens individually.

Ask another person of your confidence and comfort to draw up a similar list. Individually, evaluate each problem as being one of three manifestations of evil, or perhaps a fourth as a neutral cause: Personal Evil (PE); Systemic Evil (SE); Cosmological Evil (CE) and Neutral (N). When each of you is done, compare your lists and then discuss the following questions with each other:

  1. What type of problem did you focus on? Was there a theme that combines several of your responses?
  2. How did your list differ from that of your partner? Why the differences (personal experience, media influence, different attitudes, etc)?
  3. Were some of your urban “problems” due to multiple dimensions of evil? Illustrate examples of such to your partner?
  4. How ought the Church address these issues? Can it?
  5. If not, is there a community, or can there be a “genuine” community that can respond effectively to the evil that causes the problem? If so, what would that response look like?
  6. In what ways have you felt shame within the Christian community? What held you to it despite the discomfort of shame? Share with your partner.
  7. As you picture the Church as you know it, what are the mechanisms of “shame” that might intimidate and push people away?
  8. What needs to be done to correct these mechanisms of “shame?”

VI.  To Think:

Where have you discovered “genuine community”, where personal accountability is tight, where you are ultimately accepted despite wrinkles and warts, where grace flows, and honesty reigns, a place which is both refuge and home? Some find this in family, others in small groups, others in peer relationships, and others in church.

Ultimately, these are the types of groups described by both John and James, yet they were not impervious to tragedy and abandonment in subsequent days, as in the case also of Jon Sharpe. Can genuine community be sustained? If so, how? If not, why?

Continue with Session 5