Thinking about Community: Applying Lessons from Language Revitalization to Faith Communities

I (Dale) spent the last two weeks recording Nuxalk in Bella Coola, while also working with language teachers towards understanding the steps to making the language a part of everyday life - making a community around the language.  The process brought to my mind many questions about community building in general.

Some communities are incredibly resilient in the face of outside pressure, while others melt away. Yes, you can blame the pressure, but when you look at a range of situations, the key factor seems to be not the amount of pressure on the community, but the stories that the community uses to hold itself together.  Kill the stories, and you destroy the ability to resist.  Take away the language, take away a voice, then teach a new language and a new voice--new stories--and recovery becomes very challenging.

This means that the strength of a community is in its mechanisms for passing on stories, for using them, for speaking--the strength lies in the community's ability to make those stories central to life.

In this podcast, we look at the idea of "church"--asking why and if church is working, assuming that the role of church is to build and strengthen a different kind of community rather than just be a window dressing for an already-existent community. I bring my experience working with language revitalization to bear on the question of the purpose of education, community, and what a recognition of this purpose means for how we regard gathering together.

   Listen to "Thinking about Community"

A question to get us started - what is the "work" that we do at church? what is it we accomplish, what are we trying to accomplish, how might we better pursue those goals?

Language Problems

Sometimes language just doesn't cut it, no matter how hard you try.  A few weeks ago David and I decided to talk about our experiences travelling, but what was supposed to be a series of observations on a really interesting part of the world very quickly broke down into something quite different.  It turned out that David didn't understand why I did what I did, and I didn't understand why he didn't understand, and language didn't seem up to the task of bridging the divide.

In this podcast we explore the gap between us and the limitations of language in the face of very different life experiences.

Here is the podcast: Language Problems

How about you guys, do you have any similar stories in your own life where language just wasn't up to the task?  What did you do?