Writing at the Alban Institute’s Roundtable blog, Claudia Greer, offers a helpful introduction to an essay by Carol Howard Merritt:
Drawing on the biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, Carol Howard Merritt invites readers to envision the living waters that can renew their congregations and make possible the missions and ministries to which God has called them.
Merritt’s Alban Weekly article of August 23 (“A Well in the Distance“) explains how old congregational and denominational frameworks no longer serve within the social and cultural contexts in which people find themselves. Nuclear families—with housewives who could offer abundant volunteer labor to a church—no longer characterize the demographics that define congregational reality today. But Merritt points out that there is cause for hope: “New opportunities, tools, movements, missions, and passions cascade through our wilderness landscape bringing vital ways of organizing faithful communities, communicating prayerful longings, and seeking social justice.”
What resources can support these “prayerful longings”?