Design for Belonging

Design for Belonging: What a Holy Joining Life Looks Like

In my previous blog, I introduced the LiVE Project’s 2023-2024 theme, “Becoming Communities of Belonging”. Belonging is a way of being and practicing life together in God’s world as communities of faith. Willie James Jennings, we said, helps us wonder in two significant ways about belonging: (1) as ‘a holy joining of life’ and, (2) where the root of discipleship is practiced in concrete ways through a willingness to expose existing social structures that perpetuate oppression and violence. These are the two keys for understanding and practicing the central program of the Holy Spirit’s ministry and leadership among us as people of Christian faith.  

This year, the LiVE Project is using a companion guide to practice belonging with greater intention. Given that belonging is a concrete way of life to practice we are drawing on the book, Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities by Dr. Susie Wise. She is an educator, and a contributor to the Stanford School of Innovation. Design, for her, means creating with an intention. That is, as communities practicing belonging, we have to imagine it through an intentional design that creates the conditions for its possibility to emerge. Design for belonging involves experimenting with intention and purposeful reflection.  

 Through practical exercises she invites folks to reflect together on belonging and its opposite, what she calls “othering”. Through mapping moments rooted in feeling, seeing, and shaping she helps persons in communities to better explore and understand how to cultivate places of belonging. Two corresponding assessments of belonging and othering emerge when communities starting paying attention to (1) how persons contribute to belonging, and (2) where there is a need for repair in their effort to create places of belonging.  

Design leadership approaches to belonging, Dr. Wise says, is most robust when it is rooted in a complexity and equity lens. What she means by this is that design by nature is complex because there are a variety of social interactive variables that are often unseen, and unknown to communities. As such, complexity design is more than a technical process in that it becomes a process of discovery. Design, as a complex process, works to come to terms with the unknowns of how our social interactions are actually working in our life together, in both our places of belonging and othering, contributing and repair.  

In addition to the complexity of belonging, she notes the importance of the equity lens. That is, our ways of belonging often functions in our communities from places of unintentional power imbalance, and a lack of awareness for how those various normative power dynamics distort belonging in our communities. Again, the way into greater awareness of these social distortions, and where power imbalance exists in our modes of belonging together, is necessitated by a need to better listen to the voices and perspectives of dissent from the margins.  

So why does any of this matter? Because as I hear the longing of communities of faith losing a foot hold of faith security in today’s world, I hear the Holy Spirit calling us into a new way of being with one another. This matters because this is our Christ-calling, and not only our immediate crisis-concern.  

Because the life of faith isn’t only explored at the site of participation and contribution, but also at places of repair and reconciliation. If we are called to a ministry of reconciliation, we are called to take off the blinders of our own privilege and self-interests that may keep us from the public ministry of deeper reconciliation and repair as people in this world. We, as the church, are called to this deeper challenge, not by virtue of comfort, but by virtue of our calling in Christ. Christ’s calling sets the terms for our belonging, and how we practice belonging together as communities of faith.  

Why does any of this matter? Because it gives the opportunity to come to hear voices and perspectives that may not feel fully alive to belong in their fullest and most free, recognized selves as persons.  

The root of belonging is learning together to explore at the root of our social interactions by paying attention to and bringing forward our unique experiences in order to understand at the place of our feelings and sensing what belong and othering looks like. This kind of slow and deep reflection is precisely what it means to listen to God in our midst. This kind of practice is spiritual leadership in so far as it makes room for the Holy Spirit to speak to us and move us into and through our places of repair and renewed places of mutual belonging. Only here, at the site of practicing our belonging in this way, will we learn to understand how it is that we belong to a God who unlocks the possibilities of becoming communities of belonging in Christ and to one another.  

All our courses, and cohorts are rooted in this practice and situated in our belonging belief. I invite you to check out this book by Susie Wise, and to consider using it with your leadership teams. I invite you to slow down and take a deeper breath with your people to explore the powerful and profound work that attending to our belonging makes for our communities of faith. 

Rev. David Christian Hahn, PhD (he/his)

David serves as the Director of Formation and Learning and NWWA Synod LiVE Project Director, (Living into Vocational Engagement) Email David HERE