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We're eager to hear your third lecture, Professor Wells. You've reminded us yesterday that the triune God is related in God's very own self. You've invited us to stand freshly and wonder that this relational God is with us. There's something you say about that in one of your books, and I like the way you put it.

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You say that this God who is so radically and relentlessly present is not only too much God for us, but even too much God for God this God you told us yesterday is with us not primarily to do things for us not primarily to rescue us and not even first and foremost to atone for our sins God's being with us you say is actually for the purpose of being with us and now you will speak about this profound presence this perfect participation in relation to our life together here Our being with one another is the title of your lecture, and we are ready to hear what you have to teach us. Please join me in welcoming for our third and final Curry Lecture, the Reverend Dr.

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Samuel Wells. Thank you for that kind, again, thoughtful introduction and for your generous welcome. What kind of discipleship does this description of being with assume and entail.

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I've explored with you what being with means in the life of the Trinity and the relation of God in Christ to humanity and the creation. So now we're going to look at human relations with one another. Again, you can, if you've still got the handout amongst your most treasured possessions, then you'll be able to follow the outline of what I'm saying. I'm going to start by

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a section called Seeking Nazareth. In the course of these lectures, I've explored summary statements of the commitments and dimensions of being with. My first lecture, we followed the pattern of the Trinity and elucidated eight dimensions of being with: presence, attention, mystery, delight, participation, partnership, enjoyment, and glory. At this point, at the start of my third lecture, I want to set out my own

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Nazareth Manifesto in ten points. So you get it all in one indigestible dollar. So here we go, one sentence for each, from one to ten, starting with number one. Number one, our calling is to imitate the way God is.

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Number two, our clue to how to imitate God is to follow the way God is with us in Christ. Number three, our first awareness is the abundance of God and our own scarcity, together with our gratitude that we've been given so many ways to transform our scarcity with God's abundance. Number four. It is a miracle of grace that God meets our scarcity through the abundance we discover in those apparently more exposed to scarcity than ourselves.

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Number five, a community seeking regeneration has already within it most of what it needs for its own transformation. Number six, we do not configure situations as problems needing solutions. Number 7, we cannot understand, listen to, be taught by, or receive grace from people unless we... inhabit their world which we see as valuable for its own sake.

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Number eight, there is no goal beyond restored relationship. Reconciliation is the Gospel. Number nine, the centre of ministry is worship, being with God, and the centre of mission is being with the disadvantaged and receiving abundance from them. Number ten, being with

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must be both the method and the goal of social engagement. So that was quite a short lecture. And I'm now going to add a 55-minute footnote. In this third lecture, I want to put those two lists together, the eight dimensions and the ten items of the manifesto, and examine what being with might entail when translated into a modest programme.

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for social renewal. I had two opportunities to embark on such a programme myself in very different contexts, so this is me. First, in 1998, while I was vicar of a Church of England parish on the western side of Norwich, East Anglia, the Labour government announced a programme called New Deal for Communities. In this scheme, 17 socially disadvantaged areas would be identified and $55 million would be made available to each one if its local residents could organize themselves into a board and committees to run their own regeneration.

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It turned out my neighborhood was identified as one of these 17 around the country. Quickly, I found myself taking on a new unpaid additional job as a community organizer and helping to lead a mass democratic regeneration movement. I continued to do so for another five years.

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We eventually formed the first development trust in the eastern region and set about doing community surveys and elections and hiring actuaries and solicitors and funding and overseeing all manner of initiatives. The challenge was to imagine what redemption might look like for such a neighborhood. long perceived as an underclass drain on the rest of the city. Should we strive to make it look as much like one of the more middle-class suburbs as possible?

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Was it distinctive only for what it was not? Or was there an elixir of life at the heart of the neighborhood around which could cluster a whole host of initiatives and green shoots of regeneration? I went to live in the neighborhood and I got involved in the regeneration process because I wanted to be with people in their sorrows and struggles and find beauty and abundance where some might see only shame and scarcity. But then I had to allow my imagination to be stretched to a vision of what it might mean for this community genuinely to flourish, to be happy, settled and at peace with itself and that was somehow harder.

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The second opportunity came in 2006 when I was dean of Duke Chapel in Durham, North Carolina. If the underclass neighborhood in Norwich was a symbol of powerlessness, Duke Chapel was a symbol of power. An elite research university like Duke is a place of immense power because it marks the intersection of knowledge, wealth, and social influence. None of these forces are decisively powerful on their own, but when all three are put together, they're dynamite.

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Duke Chapel was and remains unique for three reasons. Duke University lies on the longitude of the Ivy League and the latitude of the Bible Belt. Hence, religion remains a subject of legitimate public discussion, and the appetite for sophisticated presentations of Christianity among faculty, students, administrators, and townspeople is extensive. The university has an outstanding divinity school, and so Christianity remains a credit to the university, rather than an embarrassment.

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Meanwhile, the architecture, liturgy, music, and preaching of the chapel have a national reputation. Yet Durham is a town of 200,000 people, made-up of African-Americans, Caucasians, and Hispanics, with a complex and sometimes troubled history. The widespread assumption was that Duke Chapel was a place to escape from raw religion and chaotic community relations. Duke Chapel was accustomed to enhancing its social capital, but not to putting that social capital to work.

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So a year after becoming dean of the chapel, I set about facilitating ways in which the chapel and the poorer parts of Durham might become more visible to one another. through showcasing community initiatives, creating residential opportunities for students, hiring a community minister to be incarnationally resident in a disadvantaged neighborhood, and seeking to bring people into conversation, relationship and partnership across social divides. The plan was not to fix anything, more to display and to discover what was possible when one approached the disadvantaged other in expectation of discovering God's abundance in them. My experiences in Norwich and Durham, and the explorations of this lecture, are about the quotidian, the mundane, the local, the unremarkable.

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the everyday. In that sense, they're perhaps a very suitable subject for a discussion on the ethic of Nazareth. To help translate what I learned in these two rather different experiences of seeking to be with, I'll draw extensively on a recent study in the field of community regeneration to set the contours of the discussion. So my next section is called The Plight of the Contemporary Nazareth.

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In their book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and neighborhoods, published in 2010, John McKnight and Peter Block distill the wisdom of a lifetime of community development. Because their vision parallels my argument at many points, I'm going to describe it at some length. They begin with their own diagnosis of what is wrong with contemporary North Atlantic societies. They don't limit their account by economic categories.

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They go out of their way to point out that the malaise they describe transcends class and income. The tragedy that they perceive is that of ungiven gifts, unexpressed potential, imprisoned wisdom, unused talent, suppressed longing, and fundamentally unfulfilled freedom. They tell a story of how this tragedy has come about. What's happened is that what was once the province or function of the family and community has migrated to the marketplace.

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Following Jeffrey Kaplan, they see this as having arisen in the United States from a deliberate policy of the nation's business and political elite to diffuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called the gospel of consumption. the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn't enough. This is a story of the successful manufacture of dissatisfaction. McKnight and Block perceive two elements of the gospel of consumption.

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One is the systems and management that have emerged to cope with its scale, particularly in government, health, and the corporation. Such systems expand the message that Prosperity and peace of mind can and must be purchased. It's the aim of systems also to maintain control by taking uncertainty out of the future.

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The result is that all that is uncertain, organic, spontaneous and flowing in personal, family and neighborhood space is viewed as a problem to be solved. The trouble is that systems in offering answers are making a false promise. They dangle more than they can deliver. The more important dimensions of being human have no clear answer.

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The fundamental romantic illusion is that better management and better systems can essentially eliminate fallibility, that they can fix the human condition. Meanwhile, replicability has its costs. Personal lives, with their complications, are seen as a threat to the system. Systems make relationships instrumental and commercial.

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In short, systems are good for making automobiles and fighting wars. They're good for monetized commerce, but as soon as you create a world that ensures sameness and predictability, you've created conditions where the real humanity of citizens and employees is marginalized. Systems can deliver order, consistency and the cost value of scale, but nothing more, and they do so at great cost to the social fabric. The other element of consumerism is the professional industries that feed off it.

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Suffering is extracted from the family and neighborhood and subcontracted to the marketplace. Professionalization is the market replacement for a community that has lost or outsourced its capacity to care. What was a condition of being human becomes a problem to be solved. Care becomes commodified, then reduced into a curriculum so that it can be categorized, taught, and then certified.

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Systems are designed to produce a cure. Even aging is medicalized such that death is considered no longer a mystery, but a failure of the medical system, the fixing system. Such an approach takes a human condition, describes it as a problem, and then sells a purported solution.

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Universities begin to control who can be certified as providers of such solutions. When the work becomes sufficiently extensive and complex, a manager is needed. The community is rendered incompetent. All deviancies from the norm are taken secretly away to the confidential oversight of strangers.

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People who deviate seriously from the norm are isolated and cut off from their communities. The aggregation of deficiencies makes personalized care impossible. Collecting people by their needs isolates them from the commerce and affection of everyday life. Put together, these two elements of the gospel of consumption infantilize, instrumentalize, and

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impoverish the informal relationships that are fostered in communities and families. I have organized a life of consumer purchasing as a substitute for my ability to grieve, relate, welcome, and share wealth and resources with others. Kindness, generosity, and civility disappear to be replaced by entitlement. Being with ourselves becomes impossible.

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We have no resources or competence to tolerate our own imperfections. As a result, we look to fill our hollowness with purchased experience and entertainment. The price we pay for living in a consumer world is living a dissatisfied life, an incomplete life, a life where the harder we try, the more hollow it becomes. Individuals become useless, families lose their function, neighborhoods lose their competence.

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we're then left to purchase what we might have chosen to produce. neighborhoods are thus left both hollow and dependent. These are the two summary statements that McKnight and Brock make. First, institutions fail to deliver on their promise to keep us healthy, safe, and prosperous, and thereby all of us, institutions and citizens alike, become more skeptical and cynical and keep calling for more control and accountability.

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We see this in our growing distrust of government, public schools, physicians, and institutional services of all shapes and sizes. Second, citizens grow rusty from failing to do what only they themselves can do. Their community skills are weak from lack of use. They succumb to isolation and being well serviced.

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They reduce their trust in their neighbors who live three dwellings away and farther. Their community vision is blurred from the dependency created by focusing on nothing but big systems. In the language of my argument, what has emerged is the pathology of working for. When working for becomes a default, not just for addressing crisis, but for engaging every challenge,

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Then mysteries become problems, attention is episodic and devolved to professionals, presence is unnecessary, participation is eradicated, partnership is eroded, and delight and enjoyment disappear. Being with is not just difficult, it is incomprehensible. What McKnight and Block describe is what I would call the pathos of working for, and they narrate how working for has practically become a religion. My experience in Norwich was different from but recognisable within this description.

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In Norwich, there had been 60 years of paternalistic local government. 90% of the residents lived in local authority-owned social housing. And almost inevitably, the local authority was seen as the only source of resources, support, and innovation. There was thus a long history of being on the receiving end of a working-for model.

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Not only was there a profound lack of expectation of breaking out of this cycle, even within the cycle, there was a tragic aura that things were unlikely to get any better. When working for is surrounded by expectation that problems can be fixed, it's deeply problematic. When there's little expectation that problems can be fixed, yet a working for culture still abides, the plight of all concerned is even worse. My next section is called the Capacities and Properties of Nazareth.

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How can people break out of the all-pervasiveness of a working-for mindset? How can relationship displace professionalized clienthood and the citizen emerge from out of the shell of the consumer? For McKnight and Brock, the key is a worldview shaped around abundance. What gives McKnight and Brock hope is that each person, in their idiosyncratic and unique configuration of characteristics, is a cornucopia of gifts.

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Gifts are inborn and not subject to management. Gifts don't need to be trained into us. They are inherent. They are who we are and they can't be taken away.

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They're also nearby, though often unseen. Since we can't manipulate the gifts of another, they're not subject to external management and therefore they're an antidote to system life. Such gifts simply await a nurturing context in order to emerge.

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A community's power resides in its ability to manifest and mobilize the gifts of its people and to exercise and express those gifts through the quality and extent of its associations. A gift is not a gift until it's given. Before that, it's a capacity held in exile. The tragedy of a dysfunctional family or neighborhood is that the potential gifts of its members are never given.

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This is a perfect summary of what I observed in Norwich, a community whose capacities were held in exile. Developing permission, confidence, encouragement and hope to release these potential gifts was a huge but worthy task. The abundant community believe. that what we have is enough.

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We have the capacity to provide what we need in the face of sorrow, aging, illness, celebration, fallibility, misfortune, and joy. We organize in a context of cooperation and satisfaction. We're responsible for one another in that if one is not free, valued, or flourishing, none of us can be. Such convictions and the practices that derive from them enable a community to avert much of the sense of dissatisfaction for which the marketplace offers answers, and to provide for itself much of what systems and consumerism would have us purchase.

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In such a setting, poverty is no longer considered to be fundamentally or even primarily about money, because abundance is about things that money can't buy. Well-being is about overcoming isolation and finding ways to make material limitation a source of mutual interdependence. One of the signal convictions of the abundant community is that adversity and hardship can become entry points into plenitude. In a conviction that resonates with God's pattern with Israel and Jesus, troubles and their sharing are seen as the seedbed of community and growth.

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The range and variety of the sorrows we bear gives us the fuel for community and connectedness. Sharing the personal is how the consumer cycle is broken. At this moment, the restoration of community competence has begun. This is a political act in the best sense, reclaiming power from professionals who are sworn to secrecy

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and putting it in the hands and hearts of citizens who choose to disclose, discuss, imagine, and act. The goods of the abundant community can be aggregated as properties and capacities. The three properties, or organizing principles, commended by McKnight and Brock are focusing on gifts, nurturing associational life, and offering hospitality by welcoming strangers. The six capacities include kindness, generosity, cooperation, forgiveness, acceptance of fallibility, and mystery.

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These are all aspects of the fostering of gifts. A community that sees troubles as potential gifts requires kindness, because kindness is a respectful awareness of the vulnerability and fragility of the troubled other. Generosity is the virtue of abundance. Unlike charity, which assumes scarcity and is really an unstable and false generosity because it's oriented around the needs and deficiencies of just one party in the transaction and is thus demeaning, generosity assumes abundance by investing in the still not fully disclosed gifts of the other.

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Cooperation is a fruit of abundance because it believes there are enough gifts for everyone Whereas competition is a fruit of scarcity because it assumes there are limited gifts which can only be acquired by winning. Forgiveness is the willingness to come to terms with having been wounded. It's vital for a community that seeks to accept fallibility and distinguish between fallibility and transgression.

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Again, the secret is the unleashing of gifts. Our unwillingness to forgive keeps us imprisoned and unable to either offer our gifts or receive the gifts of those around us who are most problematic. Not all fallibility is a transgression to be forgiven. Accepting fallibility, such as addiction or mental illness, the stuff we leave off our resume, and that systems try to eradicate, means seeing people beyond the label of their shortcomings,

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and ensuring that all get to contribute their gifts. One of the more humbling aspects of my experience in Norwich was to witness the community's ability to live with both fallibility and transgression. On one occasion, two members of the community who had been very actively and closely involved in the regeneration process became angry and went to the local newspaper with a complaint which, when published, embarrassed and exasperated many board members, including me. But in only a matter of weeks, the two had found their way back into the process.

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On another occasion, there was a stand-up fight in the office itself, with community members throwing files at one another. But again, in a few days, everyone realised we all needed each other and space and grace were rediscovered. I wish I could say I'd seen the such accommodation within the life of the local church. Unlike Alexis de Tocqueville, McKnight and Brock see the unique energy of the United States and their greatest potential as lying in affinity groups and associations, because associations are a primary place in community where individual capacities get expressed.

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But they're not responsible or charitable, and this is a significant way in which they avoid the pitfalls of working for. Few associations come together to do a social good. For people to do a real social good, they come together for some other reason and do a social good out of their peripheral vision.

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Otherwise, it's a system. Associations can be defined by location, by function, or by common interest. They provide the context and process through which gifts are exchanged. The power of associational life is that money is taken off the table.

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It's all about we do it, not we buy it. People are there because they want to be there and be together. No one is getting paid. There is thus exchange, but no commerce.

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It's not necessarily efficient. No one claims a community system is efficient, but the purpose of community is community. The notorious problem with associations, besides inefficiency, is their insularity in social conservatism, the exclusion of some and the subordination of others. That is why McKnight and Brock insist on the property or practice of hospitality.

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The extent of hospitality becomes a measure of the belief that people have in their community. Hospitality is generated because people feel so good about themselves that they want others to share it, and they want to share the joy of others. Hospitality generates from trust and produces trust. A community forms when people have enough trust that they can combine their properties and capacities into gifts.

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Friendship and trust are the means through which something that was an individual quality now becomes a communal reality. In the abundant community, friendship and trust form a covenant that in the system is replaced by payment and contract. The reason why McKnight and Brock put so much store by associations is that they are settings where people develop trust in one another and generate cooperation, generosity, forgiveness, and hospitality. Associations produce properties and capacities and thus generate abundance, whereas systems produce services and products and thus generate scarcity.

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What I observed in the community-led regeneration program in Norwich was the way the money followed the association, but how hard it was for the money to generate the association. In most cases, the best the money could do was to give the association the chance to expand, For example, a modest school watch scheme became a more ambitious community warden project, but no amount of money could spark into life initiative without any existing association. At the end of some years, there was money left unspent because there were important development areas where no accountable, authentic associations had emerged to spend the money wisely.

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Underlying McKnight and Brock's account is a conviction about the power unearthed by releasing gifts through association and the consequent creation of a local marketplace in which capacities, resources, and talents either enrich the local economy or are exchanged without being monetized. The community's competence creates an integrity that released it from dependence on the system world. Communities ask what they are purchasing, where it comes from, and whether they could just as easily and with more enrichment supply it from within their own efforts and skills. You don't know what you need until you know what you have, then you know what you need to buy from the outside.

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So my next section is called the abundant community as Nazareth. It'll now be clear Why McKnight and Brock's treatment is so significant for distilling my account of being with. A survey of the eight dimensions of being with should make the connections transparent.

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So we're now going to do what we did yesterday with Jesus, and we're going to go through the eight dimensions of being with, starting again with number one. So the abundant community takes number one, presence, for granted. Presence, in the sense of shared location, is not the only form of association. There are also function and common interest.

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Without question, the rise of social media has altered the degree to which physical location is crucial to association. Nonetheless, presence names the incarnate material quality of human relationship and affirms that virtual communication is ancillary to physical interaction. Presence over time bestows authority, deepens trust, establishes credentials. Not long after I moved into the socially disadvantaged neighborhood in Norwich, I had lunch with the head of a local non-profit.

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She was one of the chief movers and shakers in the town, and she invited me to lunch. I was keen to show her I knew all the jargon of social regeneration, so Every time she used a phrase like capacity building, I made sure I replied with a term like community stakeholders. Every time she referred to social exclusion, I countered with leveraging private sector buy-in.

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I thought I was holding my own pretty well until we reached the end of the meal. Then she looked up over her napkin and held my gaze and said, Are you staying? It was a searching question about presence. She meant, Can I rely on you?

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Are you serious about this? I've given my life to this work. Is that what you're going to do? Or are you one of those people who waltzes in for a while, talks a good game, and then heads off in search of another transformative experience elsewhere?

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Are you truly going to allow this place to change you? Thus, Albert Schweitzer stayed at a little West African hospital on the Oguwe River at Lamberany and Gabon. There he treated countless thousands of local patients with conditions ranging from dysentery to sleeping sickness to leprosy to malaria to sand fly fever. He saw his work as an act of penance for the sins of European colonizers.

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While some critics felt he and his methods perpetuated some paternalistic qualities, few could doubt the courage and devotion he brought to his work. And some atonement it was. He spent the majority of the 52 years, from 1913 to his death in 1965, caring for and seeking to cure all who came to his hospital at Lamberini. He was probably a better theologian and musician than he was a doctor.

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But being a physician was where he stayed. He allowed Lamborrini to change him. When he was asked about what he'd learned, he said, Everyone can have their own Lamborrini. Albert Schweitzer's witness was that when we ask God, Where are you staying?

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God's answer is, I'm staying with you. This is the ministry of presence. It's the opposite of the frenzied, anxious motion sometimes to be found in the working-for approach. It's a visible, simple statement of confidence in the abundance of the neighborhood.

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One way in which I discovered presence in Durham, North Carolina, was in the learning the significance of the porch. The rocking chair, the idle time, the half-begun conversation in a climate of almost year-round outdoor interaction, This setting both offered the opportunity to be present to quite a number of people in the course of an afternoon, simply by walking along a street, and gave the timid and inhibited a chance to put a foot in the water simply by sitting on a porch together and initiating half-dialogues with passers-by. It was literally a liminal space.

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Number two, attention, once again, goes beyond but is dependent on presence. If the potential of a neighborhood lies first in its unlocked gifts, attention is the slow and purposeful listening to stories, abiding in silence, befriending time and acceptance of fallibility that leads to the discovery of gifts. It relies on qualities like vigilance and virtues like patience. In many ways, McKnight and Block's whole project is one of patient attention, willingness to notice detail, whether system perspective notices deficit,

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awareness of creativity where professionalized service sees bland inertia. In particular, that patient attention applies to what McKnight and Block call forgiveness, an acceptance of fallibility. Neither fragility nor transgression can be accommodated in a sweep of the hand. Both in different but overlapping ways require firm but gentle incorporation into a larger story.

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This is the process I elsewhere describe as over-accepting. Fallibility and transgression may be curious and unwelcome gifts, but the important thing is that they're still gifts. They can't be blocked.

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McKnight and Block describe how citizen, how difficult it is for systems to talk about failure, fallibility, imperfection, and transgression, and how a culture of silence grows up around such attributes because they are absurd within the institution. They are not problems that can simply be solved. The choice is whether simply to accept them and thereby allow their negative undertow to damage the culture of the community, requiring denial and compensatory action and evasion, or whether to over-accept them, to live into a story that would not have been possible without them, a story that is not destroyed by them, but which yet is the richer and more dynamic, for there having been obstacles and challenges to navigate and reintegrate.

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This is not a story that is imposed on a community, but a story that adapts to embrace a community in its new reality. To discover such a story requires loving attention. The dimension of number three, mystery, is one to which McKnight and Block themselves refer many times.

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Their use lacks a transcendent dimension, but it acknowledges and perceives the need to make space for what is unknowable about life. As they put it, realizing there is more than what you know is enlivening. Mystery is the source of all learning, the catalyst for creativity, and the freedom from the burden of answers that are just a restatement. of the past.

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Mystery is also a protest against the culture of planning, goals, blueprints, measurability and certainty. To enter mystery is to jettison the myth of safety for the adventure of discovery. Mystery is also the name for hidden connections. On the day of the dedication of the student residential house in Durham, a cluster of people gathered on the porch for a commissioning ceremony.

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A woman who was walking by lingered to watch and was invited to join. She disclosed that she'd been a resident of the house when it had been a notorious place for drug taking and low life. Her reflections became the center of the dedication service. Of all the dimensions of being with, perhaps the most apt to McKnight and Block's project is number four, Delight.

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This is the case on several levels. Most importantly, delight treats as a gift what others might regard as a burden. Of all the dimensions of being with, delight is most attuned to the expression and celebration of gifts. And the expression and celebration of gifts is the heart of the abundant community.

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McKnight and Block tend somewhat to regard gifts as self-explanatory, needing only release to become salutary for the community. They forget how much work there is, training the eye of the beholder. Delight is not simply a spontaneous reaction. It is, in significant ways, a learned behavior.

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It's an eschatological anticipation. That is to say, heaven is an experience of all our gifts being released and evoking delight, delight beyond our imagination and gifts beyond what we knew we had. McKnight and Block recognize the joy that resides in the expression of gifts, but they don't fully articulate the work involved in receiving these gifts with delight, or the degree to which that delight comes to exceed even the joy involved in giving. It's more challenging community building and ennobling to receive with delight than to give.

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McKnight and Block also underplay the reflexive character of delight, and thus of gift exchange more generally, working for is impoverished in part because of its resistance, reluctance, unwillingness, and finally, inability to make a genuine relationship. This hollows out the professional person as much as it does the client. The joy to be found in delighted reception of gifts is not just that it releases imprisoned talents, but also that it encourages the recipient to disclose and thus to discover hidden gifts in themselves.

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The abundant community, as a genuine community, is evidently one that prizes number five participation. McKnight and Block like to use the word citizen and see themselves as part of a movement to renew American democracy as a participative rather than passive exercise. The energy of abundance comes about not just in the release of gifts, but more mundanely in the recognition that this is not a society where most have problems and just a select handful have the solutions, but instead that everyone has a part to play.

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This is the simple everyday dynamism of participation. Association is the great celebration of participation, as de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s. McKnight and Bloch enrich our notion of participation by distinguishing between two ways that a property can be generated. One is the simple doing of things together.

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The other is the way that a community can release the gifts of an individual. They give the example of two people getting together to cook a meal for a person across the street who's lost a loved one. This is collective kindness. Meanwhile, if one cooks the meal alone, yet within a culture where kindness is welcomed and valued, it may be on the surface of working for activity, but it's part of a being with narrative.

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The first way builds community among the community offering kindness. a mixture of working with and being with. The second way affirms the habits of kindness and is a mixture of working for and being with. Either way, the meal is an excuse to enter a conversation about bereavement with a vulnerable person and is at best a pretext and a preliminary for being with where the true participation takes place.

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When one says the purpose of community is community, one is talking about participation. The goal of the process is to create, number six, true partnership. McKnight and Block's vision is to create community inventories in which everything from babysitting and tree pruning to sowing and accounting is made visible in the with the aim of harnessing all such gifts in service of the community's core concerns for children, land, enterprise, food, health, the vulnerable, and safety.

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Then, a cross-generational sharing and cooperative culture can spring up, by which many help repair a neighbour's home, like a modern barn raising, or create a barter exchange of skills like haircutting, and minor electrical work, or create support groups for single parents or the recently bereaved. In the process, a community takes responsibility for one another, discovers new connections and relationships, understands the limits of money, develops a new kind of trust, feels powerful, and creates a shared history. In this, McKnight and Block are inspired by the pioneer families who together achieved things in the early part of the American story that no family could have accomplished on its own.

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They see associations as the agency through which passivity can be translated first into what we would call participation, and thence into the truly dynamic dimension of partnership. A different way to put this would be to see this as the point where being with genuinely becomes working with. Here, it's important to recognize that John McKnight is widely regarded as the founder of asset-based community development, an unequivocal model of working with. In his book, Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, published in 1997 with John Kretzmann, he sets out a working with approach

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to community development, rooted in the assets, skills, and capacities of residents, associations, and local institutions. The first two chapters seek to release individual and associational capacities, respectively, and cover in more detail, similar to what we've been considering, with particular attention to the associational power of churches and cultural organizations. The title of the third chapter, however, discloses the distinction between being with and working with. It's called Capturing Local Institutions for Community Building.

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Those institutions include parks, libraries, schools, community colleges, and hospitals. The term capturing has an instrumental character that distinguishes the process from being with. The reason for this becomes clear as the subsequent chapter explores how the resources of such local institutions can strengthen the local economy, how savings can be retained in the neighborhood through credit unions, and how abandoned space and waste materials can be reincorporated into the community's asset register. Once assets have been mapped, relationships built, information shared, and visions and plans developed,

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then outside resources can be introduced to support locally driven development. This was largely the pattern we followed in Norwich, though hardly any of us, me included, really knew what we were doing. Still less that there was a book just published that described what we were doing. There's a vital role for government so long as it supports local invention and does not simply seek to manage, replicate and proliferate local initiatives.

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Kretzmann and McKnight note that evidence from the developing world shows that if outside plans and resources dominate and overwhelm local initiatives and associations, massive social and economic disasters occur. If all the outside resources did suddenly begin to be available in low-income neighborhoods, without an effective and connected collaboration of local individuals, associations and institutions, the resources would only create more dependency and isolation before they were finally dissipated. In other words, there's a clear agenda of economic regeneration that goes well beyond the conviction that the purpose of community is community.

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Yet that regeneration is not limited to economic prosperity. There is genuine delight, mystery, and participation along the way, and human flourishing is principally evaluated in non-material and non-economic terms. The distinction between participation and partnership offers a vocabulary to articulate what I tried to do as Dean of Duke Chapel, and the ways it seemed strange to many observers. The community I perceived as abundant was Durham, as a whole, not simply its more disadvantaged or its more prosperous neighborhoods.

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What I sought to facilitate was participation, people being present to, attending to, and enjoying one another, and finding mystery and delight in doing so. While I anticipated that partnerships on a micro-interpersonal or macro-institutional scale might ensue, those partnerships were not the purpose of the participation. I trusted that people would come to relish participation for its own sake. The process was challenging to the working-for assumption that engagement means the rich helping the poor.

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But it was also challenging to the working-with assumption that partnership is the dimension of with that really matters. To me, all of it mattered. The danger of partnership, particularly if it did not emerge organically and naturally, was that might come to seem that all the other dimensions of being with had merely been instrumental, whereas I saw them as good in their own right and trusted others would come to see them as such too.

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This brings us to number seven, enjoyment. While community organizing, perhaps the most visible and outspoken manifestation of working with, has tremendous qualities of bringing vitality and energy and partnership and hope, As well as an impressive track record of achievement, its weakness is its tendency to use that which perhaps should be enjoyed. Not only is it inclined to instrumentalize relationships, but it thrives on the identification of problems and the energy released by solving them.

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In this sense, it requires and exploits deficit, rather than discovering and celebrating abundance. McKnight and Block make a similar point as they both affirm and distance themselves from community organizing. They recognize the shared aspiration to create change based on the gifts of all, the neighbor, the deviant, the care filled, the troubled, the elected official, and the formal leader. However, community organizing relies on the identification of a common, if impermanent, enemy to create common cause.

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Bringing people together against a common enemy is the opposite of hospitality. Community competence based on abundance is about bringing people together around possibility, not disappointment. Thus emerges the subtle but significant distinction between asset-based community development and community organizing. McKnight and Block see their work as relationship-based organizing, a kind of halfway point between being with and working with.

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Another subtle point that arises out of enjoyment is the practice of hospitality. The concern of McKnight and Block to avoid the pitfalls of the exclusion of the outsider or newcomer, marginalization of the deviant or merely different, and subordination of the vulnerable or simply female, is commendable. They're right to describe hospitality as a sign of a community or a family's confidence, yet hospitality retains a territorial connotation that's not quite in the full spirit of what it means to enjoy.

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Hospitality requires one to have premises, resources, and to some degree, skills, not to mention the cooperation of one's own household. In my own experience of religious association in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, such a combination of assets, particularly the last, was rare. Im indoors. The language of enjoyment.

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opens out a vocabulary of cherishing the other, especially the different, new, and challenging other, that doesn't assume one has any significant material resources, nor that one's own territory is the best setting for an initial encounter. Finally, glory. McKnight and Bloch's account has a healthy and encouraging respect for religious association, but their perception of the church is almost inevitably a largely instrumental one. Yet in the notion of abundance, the description of the joy to be found in the release of gifts, and the sense of overflowing community as an end in itself, there's a profound secular analogy of glory that in impressive ways crystallizes the notion of being with.

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Perhaps the most telling common theme comes in relation to the widespread assumption in church and beyond that one can only reach the glory by pursuing the power. The devotion to discovering and affirming individual and collective gifts, not at least initially as levers of economic development, but for the sheer joy and energy to be found in releasing them, is a wonderful picture of what it means to seek the glory, and only thereby to find the power. By devoting this lecture to expounding, evaluating, and making comparisons and connections with the work of McKnight, Brock, and Kretzmann, I've sought an appropriate way to render my own experience of leading and facilitating community development from the inside and engagement from the outside within a critical framework.

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I've also sought to explore what being with entails when translated into the concrete, complex, and often conflictual world of social deprivation on the scale of a neighborhood. In the process, we've amplified and tested some of the constructive commitments of being with so as to encounter a few of them more demanding and distinctive characteristics. What we've found is a set of behaviors and perspectives that assume and celebrate the abundance of God.

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So that's it. Together, I trust that the three Currie lectures have expounded the notion of being with through the lens of the Trinity, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, otherwise known as God being with God, God being with us, and our being with one another. I hope I've said enough to intrigue you as to whether there are any limits to being with. I don't believe there are.

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That's the gift and the achievement of forgiveness and eternal life on which our faith depends. Thank you for being with me and allowing me to be with you.