How can faith communities embody the spiritual technology of the Incarnation, mystery of Word made flesh?
At Street Psalms, we describe this embodiment as a Community in Mission. A Community in Mission (CiM) is sustained by three incarnational gifts: incarnational hermeneutic, incarnational method and incarnational design. Finally, the Incarnational Framework functions like a diagnostic tool that helps leaders of a Community in Mission assess their faithfulness to this vision and its impact.
This book synthesizes five reflections on what makes for a Community in Mission, based on 25 years of experience and collaboration. The content is designed to help faith communities cultivate human flourishing in their contexts, and comes with an open invitation to an ongoing conversation that can be joined at any time and engaged in any order. We have ordered the material in a sequence that creates a cohesive whole, but that can still be engaged from different angles by different learners with different concerns and questions.
Street Psalms is a community in mission that frees leaders from all walks of life to create cities of peace for all people.What began as a training initiative in Philadelphia in 1995 has become a global religious Order that has a Seminary and a Design Studio that serves a global Network of more than 40 partners.As a sodal community, we are called to nurture life-giving perspectives and practices guided by a common framework that sustains those who live and breathe good news in hard places. We seek peace and the underlying unity of all things. We do this within the rich and sometimes challenging diversity of our own community, as well as the diversity of our urban contexts. We are urban peacemakers who seek the peace of the cities we are called to serve. We welcome all who are called to this vocation regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, theological, denominational, ideological or political affiliation. There are no special privileges conferred to ordained members of the community except the responsibility to embody the gift and live out the call. As ordained, our vocation is to free others to love and serve according to the unique shape of our lives and context. We serve as professional clergy, organizational leaders, activists, spiritual directors, teachers, health care workers, and in other vocations from all walks of life. What's important is that we share a common call to develop incarnational leaders, empowered by our gift.
