We are reading Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman. Sherman is also the author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, a book I first read in my “Calling, Vocation and Work” class at Covenant Seminary.
Every corner, every square inch of society can flourish as God intends, and Christians of any vocation can become agents of that flourishing. In this book, Sherman offers a multifaceted, biblically grounded framework for enacting God’s call to seek the shalom of our communities in six arenas of civilizational life (The Good, The True, The Beautiful, The Just, The Prosperous, and The Sustainable).
Here are a few helpful quotes from The Introduction:
- My hope in this book is to help pastors and Christian leaders live deeply and wisely into the call of Jeremiah 29:7: “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”
- In this book I try to bring together a vision of the church’s missional identity—including its rich, two-thousand-year legacy of advancing the common good—with a holistic, biblical, and sociological understanding of the dimensions of societal flourishing.
- I hope to offer a guide for congregational leaders willing and ready to live into God’s call to seek their neighbors’ thriving.
- This book focuses on local outreach, not overseas missions
- My purpose in this book is to encourage and equip congregations to seek the flourishing of their communities—based on a conviction that this is a central mission of the church in our time.
Chapter 1: All About Flourishing
- The problem isn’t that we want to flourish. God wants that for us too. The problem is our definitions of human flourishing fall short of God’s.
- Shalom signifies spiritual, psychological, social, and physical wholeness.
- God designed us for flourishing.
- True biblical flourishing involves the good of others as well as our own good. Flourishing is meant to be a shared experience.
- Throughout the Scriptures this vocation of flourishing others is described as the work of the royal priesthood.
- We were made for a purpose. Humans were created to image God in the world, offering up our worship to him alone, and to reflect his character in the world. We were made, in short, for worship and mission.
- We were made to be with God and to work in the world as his royal priests, bearing his image.
- What are we made for? Flourishing. How has God designed that to happen? By giving us the vocation of the royal priesthood.
- When we live in Christ as the priest-kings we were always meant to be, we experience flourishing ourselves and we contribute to the flourishing of others.
Chapter 2: The Good Flourishing in the Realm of Social Mores and Ethics
- God invites us to participate with him in his work in the world. This work is designed by God for men and women to undertake together cooperatively.
- There is a missional quality to ethical living: it is both a sign of God’s presence and a foretaste of his coming kingdom of righteousness.
Chapter 3: A Strategy for Cultivating the Good: Strengthen Marriage
- Preventing the harm of divorce on children is a moral good and provides sufficient motivation for churches to be engaged in marriage ministry.
- When marriages are strengthened, churches are strengthened.
- Christ-followers know that healthy relationships are at the center of human flourishing.
Chapter 4: The True Flourishing in the Realm of Human Knowledge and Learning
- Churches should be vigorously engaged in education, including via partnerships with public schools.
- Pursuing knowledge is one avenue for learning more about God, his multifaceted creation, and his present work in renewing all things.
- God’s vision for the world is shalom—universal flourishing. He has called us to join in his mission.
- In his graciousness God supplies common grace to humankind, enabling even those who have turned away from him to possess insight and creativity.
- God cares that all children are educated, not just the children of believers. It is not a stretch to assume that God cares about the state of our public schools.
- Supporting quality education of all children (believers and nonbelievers) is a matter of justice.
- Christianity’s history in the story of the spread of education is largely a positive one. Christ-followers have opportunities now to live into that legacy as well as to redemptively repair the harm that has been done in more recent decades.
Chapter 5: A Strategy for Cultivating the True Partner in Public Education
- Education matters deeply for human flourishing; not caring about it isn’t an option for Christ-followers.
- Developing friendships with non-English speakers can also be an avenue for more holistic ministry, including introducing those unfamiliar with Christianity to the love of Jesus.
- Of all people, Christ-followers should be passionately committed to and engaged in education. We serve a God who is the fount of all wisdom and knowledge.
- Christians’ support of high-quality education for all is also rooted in our mandate to create healthy communities.
Chapter 6: The Beautiful Flourishing in the Realm of Creativity, Aesthetics, and Design
- God is the Beautiful and the ultimate source of all beauty.
- We are made for God; thus, we are made for beauty. And we were designed to delight in, dwell upon, and meditate on that beauty.
- Beauty is neither frivolous nor an optional add-on in the Christian life and witness.
- God created art as a means of communicating his truth.
- Art is designed to be a vehicle for expressing human creativity and imagination, but it is also meant to be more than that. It is designed to point (ultimately) to truths about the world and to offer something to the viewer.
- It must be acknowledged that contemporary Christians have sometimes ignored or even disdained the realm of aesthetics and design.
- We are creation and new creation people, and we are called by a beautiful God to create and extend beauty in God’s world. We can do so both inside and outside the four walls of our churches.
- Engagement with the arts is needed because the church must show the alluring beauty of Jesus Christ alongside his goodness and truth.
Chapter 7: A Strategy for Cultivating the Beautiful: Invest in the Arts
- For Christ-followers uninitiated in the arts, the gallery shows and artist talks nurture thoughtful engagement about the realm of aesthetics and the role it plays in human flourishing.
- CC-Downtown’s investment in the arts has also created a context for nonbelievers in the arts community to consider the claims of Christianity.
Chapter 8: The Just and Well-Ordered Flourishing in the Realm of Political and Civic Life
- Injustice is fundamentally about the abuse of power.
- God’s will is that his people deal with one another and with others in justice.
- Justice is a central, irreplaceable component of a flourishing community.
- There is no shortage of arenas today where the Christian church can seek to encourage needed reformations in the sphere of politics and civic life.
Chapter 9: A Strategy for Cultivating the Just Advance Restorative Justice
- In west Michigan a coalition of churches and nonprofit organizations are vigorously seeking to bring reform. They are advocates of “restorative justice,” a paradigm rooted in biblical reflection.
- The first is engaging in holistic ministry among prison inmates. This includes putting resources into their hands and helping their loved ones.
- PinC’s second focus is on ministry outside the prison. Its CONTACT initiative (Celebrating Our Network of Trust, Accountability, Collaboration and Training) facilitates returning citizens’ reentry into the life of the community.
- PinC’s third main focus is on advocacy.
- The Bible urges us to remember those in prison.
- One in three Americans has an arrest record.
Chapter 10: A Strategy for Cultivating the Just Be a Reconciling Community
- Since 2008, EEF has sought to be a reconciling community, a racially diverse congregation reflecting the unity in diversity of the kingdom of God.
- Deliberately located in the Church Hill neighborhood of east Richmond, three words are at its center: shalom, reconciliation, and justice. The principal way it pursues shalom is through racial reconciliation and efforts to address the injustices rooted in racism.
- Repentance circles were one of the most powerful, embodied, spiritual practices they deployed in the pursuit of healing.
- Reconciliation is God’s great work, but it’s a work he invites humans into. To be a disciple of Jesus, EEF leaders believe, is to be a reconciler who has joined him in his work of advancing shalom. This will inevitably involve the pursuit of justice.
- The work is hard and long. EEF leaders understand reconciliation as spiritual formation.
- EEF’s covenant community—which today numbers around 125 people—has committed to ensuring that no member lacks sufficient food and shelter.
Chapter 11: The Prosperous Flourishing in the Realm of Economic Life
- Work is an avenue for our enjoyment and a means by which we bring flourishing to others.
- Everything we possess is a gift, and we are trustees.
- Created in God’s image, human beings are ingenious creators who can cooperatively bring out, develop, and multiply the world of possibilities that God made.
- Christian individuals, organizations, and denominations have long invested in the work of what we now call “relief” and “development.”
Chapter 12: A Strategy for Cultivating the Prosperous
- Biznistries, Proudfit explains, see profit as a means to other ends. They seek to faithfully serve four main stakeholders: customers, employees, the disadvantaged, and the community.
- The vision is that Biznistries will provide a valuable product or service with excellence.
- Wherever possible these ventures will seek to address a social need in the locality, such as job creation for people needing a second chance.
- Biznistries will become living laboratories where Christian entrepreneurs can “work out their faith” by designing and managing the enterprises in ways that honor and build on such kingdom virtues as honesty, service, generosity, community, and sabbath rest.
- Entrepreneurs must embrace the truth that their companies are not their own but God’s—and that they exist to advance God’s purposes.
Chapter 13: A Strategy for Cultivating the Prosperous
- Congregational leaders need a robust and creative vision of the positive ways their investments can bring healing, empowerment, and new wealth creation for the flourishing of their communities.
- We cannot steward well that which we fail to recognize we possess.
- The people power of congregations is their most important asset.
- The real value lies in congregants’ vocational power and passions: their wide-ranging skills, expertise, experience, and networks.
- A 360-degree inventory helps leaders identify latent assets that—with some creativity and planning—can be activated for community good.
- For churches to make a meaningful, sustainable contribution to the economic lives of neighbors in their community, three movements are needed. The first is a movement from relief to longer-term, relational, and holistic investment in the lives of those struggling economically. The second is a shift from a needs-based approach to ministry to an asset-based one. The third shift is one from focusing solely on supplementing people’s income to helping them build assets.
Chapter 14: The Sustainable Flourishing in the Realm of Natural and Physical Health
- Scientists are telling us that people health and planet health are inextricably connected. Sociologists with the Thriving Cities Group agree.
- God desires his creation and his children to flourish.
- God loves and delights in his creation. This reality shines through the Scriptures in many ways.
- God designed us to need the physical and spiritual ceasing of the sabbath.
- God designed us to be in a mutually dependent relationship with the physical world. We need the earth’s waters and crops, and creation needs us to achieve its full potential.
- For nature to flourish, it needs help from God (to send rain) and from humans (to work the ground).
- People are charged with ruling creation, but this dominion is to be servant-hearted.
Chapter 15: A Strategy for Cultivating the Sustainable
- One hears plenty about shalom, God’s kingdom, and justice—and public health and safety—at Church of the Redeemer.
- The poor and minorities face greater exposure to pollutants and suffer worse health outcomes. This is the larger context of the environmental injustice that Church of the Redeemer took on in its small neighborhood.
- Leaders at Church of the Redeemer see the social problems confronting their neighborhood as intertwined with spiritual dynamics. Fighting them necessarily involves spiritual power.
Chapter 16: Cultivating the Sustainable Address Food Deserts
- Brown began sharing his vision with other African American pastors in the city affected by food apartheid. He encouraged churches to reimagine their assets, turning their land into gardens, their kitchens into healthy cooking demonstration centers, and their parking lots into farmers’ markets.
- By 2016 Brown had recruited ten churches to the BCFSN. The network helps congregations to establish community gardens on their land, operate pop-up farm stands, and recruit volunteers.
- By 2020 the BCFSN had expanded to involve about fifty congregations, mostly but not exclusively in the mid-Atlantic region.
- The BCFSN project has created new opportunities for congregants at participating churches to deploy their talents.
- The BCFSN also honors the DNA of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, where social justice and self-sufficiency are core values.
Chapter 17 Next Steps: A Roadmap for the Work of Flourishing Your Community
- It’s worth noting, though, two critical commonalities among the churches I have profiled in depth. The first is strong leadership. The second is a passion for the kingdom of God and the desire to foretaste that kingdom come in their cities.
- There are also at least three foundational principles of community ministry that cannot be ignored if that ministry is to be both faithful and effective.
- The first is that our ministry among our neighbors must imitate Jesus’ way of serving—through relational, holistic ministry.
- The second nonnegotiable involves embracing an asset-based approach to community ministry.
- A third key principle concerns the way we deploy our power.
- We are called to do ministry with, not for or to people. This requires embracing both our authority and our vulnerability.
- The body of Christ is a royal priesthood. Pastors and congregational leaders begin the work of flourishing the community outside the four walls of the church by first helping Christ-followers to understand and practice this identity within those walls.
- Each believer has opportunities within their spheres of influence to apply the healing, restorative work of priests and the culture-making work of kings.
- We are agents of flourishing. We’re to practice reigning—deploying our gifts in loving, sacrificial ways that bring flourishing to others.
- Prayer is vital to every missional journey. It is how we express our reliance on the Holy Spirit’s equipping grace.
- Asset-based ministry starts with a comprehensive inventory of the resources God has placed in your hands.
- Genuine commitment to seeking the peace and prosperity of one’s local community involves hard work and substantial time.
- Although difficult, pursuing ministry that genuinely makes a difference is completely plausible and doable.