Habitations of Healing
I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
–John 15: 5
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
–1 Corinthians 12:27
Habitation: cultivating and abiding in a community of shared life in which others are invited into a healing journey.
This is the final post in a series on the B.R.E.A.T.H. pathway. The final movement is the embodiment of communal life in Jesus. Habitation describes both the state or process of living in a particular place, and it can describe the place, a home, a refuge, a sanctuary, itself. This is a fitting word to describe the goal of discipleship. We become a habitat in which Christ dwells. We cultivate a habitat where others can encounter him.
Habitation involves three dimensions of mutual indwelling, Christ is inhabiting us (“Christian”), we are inhabiting Christ (“in Christ”), and a community of disciples indwelled by the Risen Jesus (“the church”).
The final indwelling has often been neglected in the practice of discipleship. Every disciple is invited to cultivate a habitat of healing for others. This is a habitation of God’s love. Here we invite others into the grace of the community that we have found.
Imagine the community where you live as an ecosystem. It is a web of relationships. These relationships include people, matter, and place, and are a mixture of built, digital, and natural environments. Every created thing contributes to the living, breathing, system that is your place. The space is also a web of social relationships. You could think of these social spaces as habitats that exist within the larger ecosystem.
As a follower of Jesus, we have the capacity to cultivate trauma-informed healthy habitats where people can experience healing. Perhaps we just need a couple of key ingredients for these habitats, a healing community needs to be accessible, safe, and real.
● Accessible: a community that is close, in our neighborhood, gathers in an appropriate rhythm, and speaks a common language that we can understand, just as Jesus did when he came and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14).
● Safe: a place of healing, not harm, an environment of grace, an inclusive space where all are welcome and where the “good news” is made available to all (Luke 4:18–19).
● Real: where people can be honest and unfiltered about their real wounds. They can process their pain in uncensored language, with prayer that brings real healing (James 5:16).
One of the key ideas in this pathway has been that practical love has to be organized. Just consider all the tasks a parent must do daily. Wake up the kids, dress, feed, and prepare them. Pack their lunches. Get them on the bus on time or drive them to school. Pick them up. Prepare a meal. Read a story, say your prayers, and tuck them in. This is a LOT of organized love!
Have you ever considered that everything we experience as reality, is an expression of God’s organized love? God hung the stars in the sky, set the planets in their course, God guides and sustains creation. Millions of variables take place every minute just to give us the gift of a single day. The universe itself is a manifestation of God’s organized love! And then God gives us a role in being stewards of it all (Psalm 8).
The first Christians were faced with a big challenge very early in the formation of the Church. As they attempted to organize God’s love, to meet the practical needs of the community, some felt they were missing out (Acts 6: 1). They responded to this challenge by sharing the load among the community, giving people different roles in organizing God’s love (Acts 6: 2-6). By organizing in this way, the church flourished (Acts 6:7).
Creating a habitation of God’s love does not have to be complicated. Here’s a simple way that every believer can organize God’s love in habitats of healing:
o find a friend (or more)
o prayerfully discover a simple way to love the people around you
o deepen relationships with them over time
o share your feelings about Christ as part of a fuller life, and
o encourage those finding faith to form a small Christian community where they are and connect to the wider church
It’s that simple, and if we’ve made it too complicated that every single follower of Jesus can’t do it, we are doing something unfaithful to the practice of Jesus.
The first step is to get a friend or a few who are committed to go on this journey with you. You can think of them as your team.
I have written much about these habitations elsewhere as “fresh expressions of church.” These are forms of church for people that don’t “go to church” and likely never will. If communal life in Jesus is the one unique gift we can offer for the healing of the world, then it is the responsibility of every disciple to cultivate these little habitats in the communal ecosystems where we live.
What do these little communities look like? Consider just a snapshot of the congregations Jill (my wife and co-pastor) and I lead together. On Saturday mornings, Connect gathers kids and families in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center of Wildwood, for pancakes, arts and crafts, Jesus stories, and play. Across town, a group circles up in Bark Park to share in a spiritual devotion as their dogs run and play at Paws of Praise. On Sunday afternoon, Tattoo Church gathers in Beauty in a Canvas parlor for tattoo talks, fresh ink, and Holy Communion.
Monday nights, around fifty residents gather in the chemical dependency unit of the local rehab for Higher Power Hour, which includes prayer, worship, and an open share discussion. Following that a group gathers in Tijuana Flats for Burritos and Bibles. Tuesdays, a group of senior saints called Shenanigans gathers in the Brookdale Assisted Living Community. On Wednesday’s folks show up with matts and foam blocks to engage in a spiritual conversation followed by a yoga flow. One Saturday evening a month, EV enthusiasts gather at the Tesla Supercharger to prayerfully discuss ecotheology and creation care.
St Marks, a congregation that was almost closed in 2020, now has a Wednesday night community dinner called Family Table, in which around one hundred folks gather for a shared meal, art, and testimony. Eat. Pray. Play. is a gathering for children and families who need childcare during 12 step meetings. On Sunday, another hundred people gather for three worship experiences, Fresh Worship (in between a fresh expression and contemporary worship), Recovery Church (an experience that features a Jesus story and 12 step discussion), and Vintage Worship (a traditional service). Living Room Church VR gathers in the Metaverse to worship as avatars in headsets.
This is just a single cooperative parish, imagine if every Christian committed to cultivate just one new expression of church for people who don’t do church. That is in fact what mature disciples have done from the early church until now. These little habitations springing up in every nook and cranny of life, spread across the seven-day week, can create small communal pockets of healing, amid an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
I hope B.R.E.A.T.H. reminds the church that mission flows from the loving heart of God. Its origin is the compassion of God. The Passional Church movement is anchored in the passionate love of Jesus for the world. The purpose is to connect, empower, support, and resource 21st Century Christians to embody the compassion of Christ in the every day spaces and rhythms of life.
I hope we can hear afresh Jesus’s commission to “go” and through baptism invite people into the Trinitarian life. To go, with our lungs filled with the healing breath of the Holy Spirit and be a breath of fresh air that transforms the world.