Highlights from the Dinner and Discussion Series Kickoff

On Monday we kicked off our Dinner and Discussion series with a panel on “Platitudes vs. Presence: Learning to Be With.” Ann Smith, Kate Bowler, and Dan Rhodes were our panelists. Here were a few highlights from the conversation:

“We have a lot of visions of what Christian hope should look like, and most of them sound like guarantees...these can crystallize into platitudes when they are abstracted from the overlying story of the Gospel.” - Kate Bowler

“We live between competing truths...the sense that God loves us and God is for us, and yet also that the world is not as it should be.” - Kate Bowler

“Hope, fundamentally, is a virtue, and as a virtue it means that hope is not something you can give...despite all our best our best efforts of going to the soup kitchen, of all these types of things where we think we’re going to give people hope, hope doesn’t work as a commodity...hope, as a virtue is something that has to be shared...hope is a virtue that emerges in community, that emerges in relationship.” - Dan Rhodes

“Real hope...strips us of that sense that we really don’t need each other.” - Dan Rhodes

“People need to be listened to...listening is following the thoughts and feelings of another person and understanding what the other person is saying and meaning from their  point of view. So we really have to put ourselves aside, don’t we?” - Ann Smith

“When we’re going out to get to know our neighbors, I think there are three things that are important: The first thing is to pray before you go...the next one is to be really committed to listening and focusing on the other person...the third thing is to accept the person where they are.” - Ann Smith

Click here to watch a video of the panel and discussion.

We will continue to have these Dinner and Discussions throughout the year. The theme for the next one, on March 27, will be hunger alleviation, food distribution, and nutritional health. We will learn about the food situation in Durham - who gets it and who doesn't, what kind of organizations are providing food, and and how our church can know our role in seeking a just distribution of food in our city.

-Reynolds