Theme Three: Back to Mutuality

The third theme brought us back to the importance of mutuality. This theme is where the bridge to community engagement becomes more sturdy and stark and the enacting of neighboring begins to take root. Our steps to build a program that grew out of our roots in embodied practical theology and social holiness, and that sought to fill the gaps that our own educations had left, landed us within a deeper and wider relationship net than we had even anticipated. It led to deeper relationships in our city with community partners, colleagues, and friends engaging in sometimes experimental, sometimes time-tested, lively ministries. The ability to offer payment through the grant to financially recognize the value of these relationships facilitated our feet through doors and introduced us to amazing partners who became our teachers and our friends. Our early stages also demonstrated how transactional partnerships often arc. In our critical and collaborative inquiries about our work, we listened to our partners critique the extractivist histories of “partnering” with higher education institutions. We dug deeper into the questions of what equal benefit and mutuality meant. Clearly our students were benefiting. So were we. In what ways, however, were our partners benefiting? This key question has been recurring and anchoring. It has birthed important ideas and practices that have reshaped how we do our work. It has also brought us into relationship with the complex histories of communities, particularly underresourced communities in our city, in an intimate way. It has landed us more often, although not always, at a table of neighbors as a neighbor, not as an “expert outsider” with narrow expertise and no shared stake.

However, this way of being and doing has not always been the reputation of higher education institutions. More than once, in our collaborative inquiry sessions, my faculty colleagues and I heard a community partner

What Does It Mean to Be a Neighbor? 173 proclaim, “I would have never thought a higher education institution would ask me my opinion.” What does this tell us about how institutions of higher education have sometimes operated in our communities in the past? To whom are we accessible? To whom do we listen? What expertise do we recognize? Why? These questions have a critical edge to them, and the process has asked us to get clearer in our responses to these questions and others. In which areas are we experts? In which areas are we learners? Which role(s) within the community do we play? Which do we not? We have learned that the work of longer-term vision and commitments is as much about expressing an apology for the ways we have dismissed or ignored each other in the past, as it is creating a present and future together.

In our listening and learning with and from our community partners, neighbors, and our students in this work, we also began to reframe the problem that we often heard from ministers and shared to various degrees in our own critiques. Ministers were and are feeling a sense of unpreparedness in many contexts. Their education did not prepare them for everything they need now. This quandry is not a problem of programming alone; it also points to the dramatic shifts occurring in ministry, in faith communities, in how we operate and orient ourselves in relationship to each other and the world, period. Many of us feel a gap between our preparation and the work we are called to do now because, quite simply, the world in which we are doing the work is no longer the same world. There is no spot of having “arrived” in this work. Our questions continue. Our quest continues to discover how things really work both in our city and in our own institution, both in the cultures of faith communities and in community organizing and development, and to hold space in the intersections of all of these axes to ask new questions and to design something collaboratively to try, to adjust our longer-term vision and commitments, and to try again, together, to do work that actually is effective and beneficial for both the university and for the broader community. What our work in community engagement reinforces is how vital it is to avoid trying to do this work alone.

This recognition has helped us live into our theological and physical locations for our moment. We know our job is both to respond to the needs and requests of the church and to also help it to see around the corner with us to the different lenses and opportunities needed now and in the ever-changing future. We are no longer receiving grant funding to support our community partners. We have had to prioritize the needed funding, yet recognize that this fiscal commitment is at risk each year in our always-tentative budget. And yet, the shifts that budget moment afforded us have become the culture markers of how we engage ministry education. We continue to position ourselves as listeners, learners, and accompaniers in real relationship with our community partners. They are critical voices in our process to continuously improve our work and the work of ministry in our city. They are at the table when we make decisions. They are in and with our courses as co-teachers, site supervisors, mentors, advisors. As faculty, we have worked to be the links and bridges for others so that they do not have to navigate the institutional systems that have not always been accessible or flexible enough for them. These commitments are part of our mutuality. We create our own flexibility in our courses and our programs in order to get others involved who carry expertise in knowledges and experiences hard-earned in other ways.