GNE Facilitator Gathering Takes Us to Orlando!
Every time our faith-based facilitators gather, I find myself pausing at some point to quietly marvel at how blessed I am to be surrounded by the most incredible group of people. Over the years of leading the Good Neighbor Experiment (GNE), we have gathered together some truly wonderful human beings who live and breathe neighboring, ABCD, and the life of faith. They all arrived in our network through a myriad of different pathways, but this eclectic mix of pastors, conference staff, organizers of outside-the-box ways of doing church, and/or neighboring enthusiasts makes all of The Neighboring Movement’s faith-based work possible. This April, 2024, GNE facilitators met in Orlando, Florida for a 3-day retreat and celebration. Megan, a longtime facilitator who recently became a part-time addition to the TNM staff, was the best host we could ask for. She taught us all to love Orlando and its rich diversity of cultures, neighborhoods, and food!
It is no easy task to explain what a facilitator gathering is like. In 2021, we started training cohorts of people who could take our GNE curriculum, recruit regional cohorts of churches, facilitate workshops around our key ingredients of neighboring (joy, relationship, and abundance- not originally in that order), and coach churches around the country on making a shift from program provider to community connector. We had two initial cohorts to train facilitators, and scheduled an in-person gathering with each that would be part-training, part-celebration. Over the years, we cemented a core group of facilitators from places like Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Oklahoma, the Pacific Northwest, Kansas City, California, and Wisconsin. As our facilitators finished their trainings, the gatherings evolved into a chance for host facilitators to showcase the places they lived and were passionate about, where they were doing their neighboring, what other groups of faith were doing amazing things in the neighborhood, and best of all, the local cuisine! We even started leaning heavily into our “gifts garden”- the unique passions, interests, skills, hobbies, and stories that each person brings to our network. Recently, the bulk of our gatherings has been each of us switching off sharing something we are passionate about with each other: a summary of the latest book we are reading, an icebreaker, a TED talk, a craft or game, a new way of thinking about the church, what neighboring looks like in other parts of the world, a conflict resolution tool, or a facilitation exercise, to name a few. And no gathering would be complete without Fork ‘N Folk, a late-night sing-along complete with whatever instruments we can bring with us.
This year we added 6 new facilitators (4 who could attend), all from Arkansas! They proved to be excellent additions to the team, contributing their gifts and perspectives that will help us continue to grow more connected and more hospitable.
We started the gathering last Monday with a pizza dinner, everyone’s favorite game of "head, hands, heart”, a National Geographic cutout-based icebreaker, a discussion about The Art of Asking, and a powerful participatory song to close.
We gathered bright and early Tuesday morning for breakfast, and then dove right into facilitator-led offerings. Every hour on both days was filled with activities contributed by our facilitators from their hearts. We each shared about our culture through the mutual invitation discussion format, learned about the best tips for hosting a gathering through an activity based on Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering (which we got to apply in real-time, of course), and had a discussion about “decolonizing evangelism.” Just before lunch, we toured Christ The King Episcopal Church and learned about the radical presence they have in so many crucial aspects of community life- health, education, food, refugee support, multilingual worship, and so much more. We picked back up with presentations on new ways of doing church and how neighboring relates to small group spiritual formation. After a long day of learning from each other, we were all ready for Fork N’ Folk! We managed to get a guitar, 2 ukuleles, and just enough song books through airport security, and we had all we needed to jam until late, covering songs as varied as The Band’s “The Weight,” Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” and Semisonic’s “Closing Time.”
By Wednesday morning, everybody was checked out of hotels and back at Megan’s for all the leftovers we could scrounge up and one final visioning session to shape the future of our faith-based programs for 2025 and beyond! We will wait just a bit to reveal some exciting new directions, but we can say for now that we had an amazing discussion in which each person was able to contribute some key pieces of the puzzle that we are all very excited about going forward. In our last round of reflection, we were certainly tired, but there was a general sense of being at peace, well-connected, energized for the future, and thankful for each other’s gifts. We welcomed loving feedback about what we could have done better for next time, while celebrating new and deepening friendships that will help us continue to grow. It’s worth closing with a few quotes from this check-out round that sum up exactly the kind of energy around our faith-based programs that makes me so incredibly grateful for the supportive community we have built and ecstatic about what the future holds!
“I didn’t know I was missing this connection!!”
“I love that we have a culture that values celebration and lives into ABCD (Asset-Based Community Development) […] I was so moved by The Art of Asking and so many of these other gifts I would have never come across.”
“[This felt like] an Acts 2 situation- we all poured out and took what we needed.”
