34
The 2011 Moses Lectures: Instructions for Body & Soul
interwoven with the other two? Can worship maintain its vitality without nurturing and caring small groups within the congregation? Can nurturing and caring small groups maintain humility without the greater corporate experience? How can the choir system provide a model for Christian community in the 21st century? How can a church that lived together and shared every aspect of life together inform a 21st century Moravian congregation? Many congregants today live miles and miles away from their church building. We’ve moved beyond the fences and boundaries of that earlier communal life and the circle is ever expanding. And yet, some of us yearn for the piety and idealism of it. Since we no longer live in community, might we consider various ways in which to journey in community? I work with the spiritual formation program Gemeinschaft which has been available to Moravians since 1991 and is modeled after the small groups of the renewed church. Gemeinschaft groups commit to journey together in community for forty weeks. In these weeks we experience prayer, silence, sharing of stories, journal writing, and scripture study in tandem with the Moravian Covenant for Christian Living. When we come together each week, we sit in a circle remembering that Christ is with us, present in the center of our lives, loving us and caring for us, challenging us, helping us to love and care for each other. We continue to model after our ancestors in that earlier community who modeled after the early church that shared everything in common. Will our next challenge be to enter into the stream of small group spiritual formation through social networking? 1. Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (New York: Scribners’, 1964).
2. Douglas H. Shantz, “A Church Ahead of Its Time: The 18th Century Moravian Community on Gender, Worship & Ecumenism, “ The Hinge, Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 9.
Judy M. Knopf is pastor of Good Shepherd Moravian in Kernersville, N.C., and is serving as volunteer coordinator of Gemeinschaft under the Board of Cooperative Ministries, Southern Province.
Jane Williams I had not thought much about why Moravian Theological Seminary is the location of one of the very few master’s degree pastoral counseling programs in the U.S. Nor did I grasp the significance of our Formative Spirituality/Spiritual Direction programs being housed in a Moravian seminary. In Katherine Faull’s Moses Lectures, however, I see how very congruent both programs are with Moravian tradition and theology. The praxis and intent of the 18th century speakings foreshadow in surprising ways the process and healing intent of 21st century pastoral counseling and spiritual direction. Common threads include the character and quality of the helping relationship, the foundational sense of the sacredness of all human experience, and the relational process employed to facilitate growth and maturation.