Online School Of Pastoral Ministry
Intro to Missional Hospitality:
Building Community to Awaken Desire
A course with Andrew Whaley of Calix and 5 Cups Consulting in using hospitality to create a new form of missional community for a new era in the Church.
First Class: August 01, 2023, 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada). Every week on Tuesday, until September 05, 2023, 6 occurrence(s)
What would a Catholic community look like if the people least likely to enter a church felt completely at home there on a daily basis? What kind of relationships would that make possible? How would that change how you do evangelization and discipleship? What form could this community possibly take and what could anchor these relationships?
About The Course
Intro to Missional Hospitality:
Building Community to Awaken Desire
In our modern post-Christendom era, the divide between the Church and the culture around it is growing exponentially, as is the rate of people leaving the Church. Classical attempts to draw people are less and less effective and one could not blame a modern Catholic for becoming frustrated or tempted to wall themselves off from an increasingly hostile world. What are we to do when the people we long to reach are not drawn to our communities, seem to be operating from a completely different vision or narrative of reality, and our attempts to go to them are seen as hostile, partisan, or just antiquated and laughable?
For over 30 years, Andrew Whaley has been pondering this question and developing one answer to it- “missional hospitality”. For the last 11 years, Andrew has been helping churches, academic institutions, campus ministries, and independent non-profits use hospitality to create a new form of community in which real relationship with the deeply unchurched, post-faith, and pagan is possible. In these communities, relationships form a context for a real organic awakening of desire for the fullness of reality, including the infinite, and a path to a full embrace of the object of that new desire- the Divine.
08/01/2023 – Session One
What time is it, where are we, and what should we do about it?
In this first session we will look at our modern context in light of the early Church and its transition into Christendom in order to get a feel for “what time it is?”. We will then look at the twin concepts of mission and hospitality and introduce a proposal for a new way of approaching community for the modern world.
08/08/2023 – Session Two
What do you want and what would that look like?
In our second session, we will begin to look at what it would look like if we build a community that those we are trying to reach would actually be drawn to and feel at home in, what that has to do with love, and why that might look very different from what we as Catholics normally build, even defying some very basic instincts and presuppositions we have developed.
08/15/2023 – Session Three – CLASS CANCELLED – topic combined with following classes.
Belonging- this is my place, and these are my people.
In this section we will begin to dig into how it is possible to anchor relationship and foster real community in a way that persons, who may in some ways be deeply opposed to the Catholic vision of reality, can feel welcome and belong. We will explore how to draw encounter and anchor relationship with shared goods, along with some insights on how to identify and incarnate those goods.
*Class sessions are being pushed back one week because class was cancelled on 8/15/23, and another class session will be added 9/12/23.
08/22/2023 – Session Four
The Awakening of Desire
In this session we will delve deep into the heartbeat of the Calix charism and the mode of encounter that sits at the center of our vision of community and mission, looking at how real relationship over time in this form of community can begin to thaw hearts and stoke the desire for a fuller scope of reality; one that includes the infinite and the Divine. We will also explore how this process relates to the impartation of information, the answering of questions, and the recovery of our own heart.
08/29/2023 – Session Five
Living the tension of missional community.
In this session we will take a hard look at what it looks like to have a real living community of people deeply in relationship with each other that includes Christians in various stages of spiritual growth and search, along with people who do not believe or behave in a way congruent with the Catholic faith, but who yet belong and dwell in this community.
09/05/2022 – Session Six
The 5 Cups- a pattern of relationship and mission.
In this final section, we will pull back and take a bird’s eye view on the practical application of this whole process and look at a 5-step pattern of how someone goes from stranger to full communion, with real practical examples of the process that will flesh out the more conceptual schema we have been exploring.