“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” --Victor Frankl
Cooperating with grace is much harder than making surface changes, yet this kind of deep change is key to transforming the culture of community. In order for a community to transform itself, it must de-structure to make room for the spirit and, simultaneously, create new, more flexible structures that are aligned with the future a community hopes to create.
Worldviews and mindsets create the paradigm that shapes meaning and purpose for members, along with their core ideology, values, and vows that support the paradigm. Transforming the soul of a community is a journey through the dark night where members confront the gap between who they say they are and how they live their lives. The deeper patterns, structures, worldviews and, indeed, the very culture and soul of a community must be transformed in order to bring forth greater wholeness and fullness of life.
Rhetoric that is not backed up with processes that clearly link the concrete changes to the personal interpersonal and organizational work of transformation has no last impact. A key to communal transformation is to continually integrate the inner work of transformation that engages the hearts and souls of members with the outer work of change that addresses the community’s concrete adaptations and plans for the future.
Dunn, Ted, Graced Crossroads: Pathways to Deep Change & Transformation, CSS Publications, 2020, pp. 219-260
