It is Friday afternoon and I am sitting in my wife’s hospital room where I have been for most of the daylight hours for the past three days. She just had her right knee replaced and is doing fine, well enough for me to begin to think about this week’s blog.

Last week I met with a bunch of guys from my church for a book study led by the Pastor. I wasn’t able to be with them last month so they brought me up to speed by explaining that they had decided that what a “win” would look like for us, the church leadership. It went something like a win is when there is transformation taking place in some or all of the lives of the congregation. This is pretty much in line with our vision statement that comes from Luke 4:18 and can be summarized by the initials PPBO, the Poor, the Prisoner, the Blind and the Oppressed. If you feed, bring release, give sight, and freedom to the people, transformation will happen. However, here is the question, “What is the best environment for this to happen?”

I am going to stop with this line of thought for a minute and go to another and hopefully they will come back together at the end. There is a web site called www.themoth.org. They publish a podcast that I follow fairly closely. This site is the web representation of an organization that started in Manhattan, New York. The founder started it by inviting some friends to his house for cocktails, then, someone would relate a true story from their life, told without notes. The third time he did this over one hundred people showed up and he had to move the next meeting to a larger facility on the island. I don’t know where the name, “The Moth” came from but that is how it got started. They now have several sites going in various major cities. They do road shows and most recently have produced a series of stories which got picked up by over 400 NPR stations across the country.

An evening at The Moth starts out with a cocktail hour followed by the story time. After the stories the people have dinner and swap other stories about their lives with each other. If you want to get an idea of what this feels like here is a link to one of the stories recorded live. Every time I listen to one of these stories I am struck by how engaged the audience is with the performer. Very often the material is funny or heart warming or heart wrenching and you can hear and even feel the audience reaction. I absolutely love listening to them. If you would like to listen to one go to http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/31396912 .

However, here is the point. What brought over 100 people together strictly by word-of-mouth to the founders’ home on that third meeting? What causes that kind of spontaneous response? What keeps the people around after the show? If you listened to the story did you feel a part of the group, maybe just a little?

I think the common denominator here is community. Even though this organization is completely secular, the response is the same. People are looking for a place to belong where they feel safe enough to be emotionally engaged. Both components are equally important. Safety must be integral to the environment. This is safety from exclusion and/or rejection. The other part is that the environment must provide a mechanism to engage the attendee emotionally.

So, I have come back to my original topic. If you want to provide an environment where transformation can happen it must be safe and emotionally engaging. This is true if you are theatre or a church. The temptation here is to launch into how we do or do not achieve this but I am going to resist. I would rather have you think about your church ministries and run it through the filter. Is it safe for everyone? Is it emotionally engaging?

Have a great week.

Ken