Modes of Belonging: Many Ways to Belong to UDLC
By Pastor Keith Anderson
One of the blessings of our experience during the pandemic has been our ability to connect with so many people online—folks who have attended, connected, joined, and donated to our church. This experience has expanded our understanding of our ministry, how we connect, and who belongs to our community.
In his research on church belonging, Bishop David Walker of the Diocese of Manchester in England has identified four modes of church belonging that unfold through activities, events, relationships, and place. He describes them roughly this way:
Activities belonging is what we would associate with our traditional notion of church membership—like attendance at worship and Bible studies, or participation in church groups and committees.
Event belonging is where people come to church for one-off occasions, baptisms, weddings, or special events. Walker has found that these people “are genuinely seeking spiritual refreshment and closeness to God, not just a cultural experience.”
Relational belonging is having a sense of connection through the people—staff or lay—who are involved at the congregation.
Place belonging is when people feel a draw or connection to a particular place, be it a church, cathedral, or holy site. These “particular locations heighten our awareness of God.”
Walker says:
“What seven years of studying belonging has taught me is that a preference for events, people, or places above activity is not a proof of nominal or weak faith, at least no more than is a preference for evangelical or catholic styles of worship. It reflects a different way of engaging with God. To the extent that it can be shallow, then the same is true for regular churchgoing. Whichever dimension of belonging motivates it, the engagement with God can be real and profound.”
We might add a fifth mode of belonging to Walker’s model— digital belonging. After all, as we have seen, people can feel connected and have a sense of belonging to a congregation or ministry because of their online connection to the church through its website, social media platforms—or digital connections with the pastor, staff, or parishioners. As my friend and colleague, Rector Tim Schenk of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hingham, MA reflects, “Parishes that are going to grow and thrive in the future are the ones that see value in ministry to those they’ll never meet in person. It’s this globalization of church and it’s welcoming the stranger, but it is the stranger that they probably won’t ever meet.”
Even now, we are already thinking about how we will continue to connect with people beyond our walls and beyond our state through digital technology and media.
For example, we want to outfit the Lounge so that people can attend our Adult Forums on Zoom. We want to do the same thing in our offices for meetings. We will continue to live stream our services even when we are back in person. We are building a library of spiritual resources on our website that supports anyone who finds us, so they don’t have to walk through the doors to grow in faith and know who we are. And we will create ways for those joining us online to connect, participate, and join UDLC.
Finally, one initiative you’ll notice in Sunday morning worship is that we will be pointing people to a new webpage, udlc.org/hello, which is designed with a special greeting and information for folks worshipping with us from afar. It also includes what we think of as a Digital Friendship Tablet, which allows people to say hello, let us know who they are, how they are connecting, and how we can support and pray for them. This was inspired by our experience at Ashes to Go, when we met people in person who have been worshipping with us online for some months. We’ll see how it develops.
UDLC is a welcome place, and welcoming people to our community is one of our core values. I’m excited to see us extend this welcome into these digital spaces.