The following is a posting of Laurelyn Foderaro’s article “Cultiviating a Relevant Community through Dialogue” for her Diaogue and Deliberation class at Goshen College. It introduces some of the topics that will be addressed further in the upcoming documentary.

Laurelyn Foderaro
November 25, 2006
Dialogue and Deliberation
Philip Thomas

BikeMovement: Cultivating a Relevant Community through Dialogue

The following is an adaptation of the text from the BikeMovement documentary trailer:

On July 10^th 2006, a group of young adults began a movement across the USA. They started a conversation about church, about faith, and about God.[1]

BikeMovement was envisioned to be more than just a trip across the United States. It was to be a physical movement bringing persons together, but more importantly, it was to be a movement without end; one driven by the creation of a community through dialogue.

The stated purpose for BikeMovement was “cultivating a relevant community through conversation.”[2] They created a community amongst themselves by biking together, sharing together, worshiping together, questioning together, and living intentionally with one another. They hoped to get a sense of who Mennonites were and what questions and issues members from different congregations were dealing with across the country. BikeMovement members cultivated community amongst themselves and in the churches with which they visited by deconstructing social realities, by creating a vulnerable and comfortable space, and by collaborating in an effort to transform their realities together.

BikeMovement was conceptualized by Eastern Mennonite University graduate David Landis as a project aimed to incorporate his love for biking as well as his interest in understanding Mennonite youth and their role in the church. One of the project’s goals, he says, was to “listen to young adults and to give them a space to share and a platform to talk to the broader church community.”[3] The movement evolved, however, and the purpose for the project expanded to include— one, creating a space for dialogue amongst all generations in the communities visited. And two, raising money to send youth from the Global South to Mennonite World Conference Paraguay in 2009 so that they too can dialogue with fellow Mennonites from around the world.

A group of seven riders and three support crew began the trip with their wheels in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Oregon in the early morning of July 10^th, 2006. Each member of this core group completed most, or all, of the trip to Ocean City, New Jersey. Many persons from host congregations and the surrounding communities also biked with the core group anywhere from one day to a few weeks along the way. Since the majority of Mennonite congregations are located in the mid-west or eastern half of the country, the core group of bikers and support crew had a few weeks of traveling by themselves through the Western portion of the country.[4] During this time period, the members spent time building community amongst themselves and developing the questions that each of them had about the church and their relationship to it.

Each member came to the group with different opinions of and experiences with the church, so their questions covered a wide range of ideas. Naming the questions that each of them had, helped to form the “direction” that the dialogue took as the journey moved forward. Some of the questions included: “What does it mean to welcome new people into our group, how do we go about doing that?”[5] “Are people ready…to listen to the experiences of a generation which is a lot more global, a lot more post-modern?”[6] “Who is God? Why do we believe in God?”[7] “Is Jesus the Son of God?” and “How does this relate to my life?”[8]

Revealing their own questions and understanding to the other members created a sense of inclusiveness and joint ownership among the group, two aspects of what Democratic Dialogue: A Handbook for Practitioners labels “the defining characteristics of dialogue processes.”[9] Members considered the questions that each member brought to the group as important and relevant to their journey. All of the questions and ideas that the members brought to the group helped to shape the course and purpose of the journey. This is important to note, as one of the fundamental aspects of dialogue is that members embrace one another’s beliefs and ideas rather than seeking to suppress them. This idea is explained in the Handbook for Practitioner as “the intention…not to advocate but to inquire; not to argue but to explore; not to convince but to discover.” [10]

The Handbook names the third and fourth characteristics of the dialogue process as “learning” and “humanity.”[11] BikeMovement members created a space for learning and recognized each other’s humanity through listening to each other’s stories and recognizing the truth in each one. In working to build a community that intentionally builds relationships and creates a safe space where one can be comfortable, the core members began by each telling their life story. Each member had a separate evening or period of time to speak to the group about their life and their relationship to the church. This not only informed the other members about the things that have shaped each member, it also helped each member to “deconstruct” their own realities. It created a space in which each member became vulnerable to the other members, yet felt safe in the understanding that the others were not judging but listening and wanting to learn. An opportunity for empathy was then created when members responded with similar experience, views, or even just an understanding gesture. These kinds of responses are perfect examples of what the Handbook refers to as recognitions of humanity.[12]

BikeMovement members emphasized the importance of creating a space of comfort and vulnerability in the church communities they visited as well. The majority of days, the bikers would bike anywhere from 80-120 miles. During the second half of the trip, this distance usually brought the bikers to another Mennonite church or community of churches. After arriving, the bikers would clean up, eat, and then prepare for a discussion from members of the church community. In each discussion, the BikeMovement members would usually lead the group in an “ice-breaker” exercise to create a more comfortable climate. Then, to further encourage participation and increase comfort, they generally broke the larger group into smaller discussion groups focusing on specific questions. One of the most prevalent questions discussed was “what is church?” This question really made people think critically about their own belief system and question assumptions that many times go unquestioned.

In response to the dialogue with the churches, Alicia Horst concluded that “having places where people feel comfortable to talk about their true experience of faith and what it means to live that out within a church context…has been something that both people that are young and people that are old have deeply, deeply desired.”[13] This opinion was echoed by the other core group members in their interviews as well. For many congregations and church community members, having BikeMovement come and create a space which they could feel safe in expressing their views and questions about faith and the church community was inspiring. Both young and old commented on their desire for continued dialogue on faith questions, intergenerational relations, etc. which are not normally “Sunday-morning” topics. The hope is that the desire for further dialogue will continue to be acted upon by those in the communities that BikeMovement visited.

The final characteristic that the Handbook cites as critical to the dialogic process is participants having a “Long-Term Prospective.”[14] This characteristic does not require that a solution be defined; rather, it means that participants work in a collaborative effort to shape perspective for the future. In an effort to build this common perspective among participants, BikeMovement members, upon conclusion of the trip, recorded and transcribed their thoughts about the common concerns and ideas that they heard from congregations across the country. The two major themes that stuck out as important topic for dialogue were the issues of differing language between generations and the shifting mentality among some in the church from a modern to post-modern system of thinking. Upon conclusion of the journey, BikeMovement members jointly recognized and emphasized the importance of dialogue on these topics that many times lead to misunderstanding among those in the church community.

In an article entitled, Towards an Ethic of Curiosity, Philip Thomas writes about the confusing role language can play when people interact. Although we know what we mean when we speak, the person or persons to whom we are speaking can interpret what we said differently due to unique social and/or personal contexts. [15] Dialogue, which emphasizes the deconstruction of realities, therefore, can be a useful tool for clearing up ambiguous language. BikeMovement members noticed the need for dialogue on this issue as they saw a large disconnect between the language used by youth to describe their relationship to the church and the language used by adults on the same topic.

The most prevalent example of the difference in language that the BikeMovement members noticed was that adults made many references to Jesus and salvation when speaking about their beliefs while youth’s language rarely, if ever, used these words. When asked why she thinks this is the case Alicia Horst explained that she does not use words like Jesus and salvation many times because they can come across as insinuating exclusiveness and exclusion.[16] This viewpoint was expressed by many youth on the trip and, although they recognize that it is just a difference of language, many noted that this difference made it difficult for them to relate to adults who used different terms and expressions to describe their faith. Many times the difficulty of deciphering the language of adults left youth feeling unconnected to other church members and as a result, less connected to the church in general.

Differences in the languages spoken by youth and adults in the church is partly a result of differing context which they were brought up, but another aspect of this dichotomy may also be due to differing world-views. Philip Thomas’ article “Systems Thinking: A Way of Seeing the World,” and various writings on the theory of spiral dynamics note the differences between what is known as “modern” and “post-modern” world-views. Thomas writes that “the main concern underlying modernism can be characterized as the ‘search for Truth.’”[17] The key factor here is the capital “T” truth, or an understanding of an ultimate or absolute truth. He follows with an explanation of an alternative system of thinking which centers around the idea that an individual’s understanding of truth is socially constructed through ones own experiences, narratives, logic, and rules.[18]

This latter system is at the core of the “post-modern” world-view, a world-view that has become increasingly popular amongst church members, especially those with higher education and/or those who have had significant world-travel experience. The adoption of this world-view by many church members has posed a problem for the traditional, largely modernist church. David Landis commented that “the church structure as it is set up is not really fitting a post-modern worldview.”[19] He talks, in his interview, about the general feeling of frustration that many youth, who leave their home communities for college or travel for an extended period of time, have with reconnecting to their home congregation’s structure and worship style. Many youth return home with questions and doubts about the modernist system of thinking that they were brought up in. As a result they, many times, end up distancing themselves from their church communities because they feel like their questions are not heard or understood by those who stayed.

So, how can the church continue to be a relevant factor in the lives of its members, even when its members hold differing world views and use different language to communicate? How can we make church a place that people feel safe enough to voice their questions and ideas? How can we incorporate church into our everyday lives? These are the questions BikeMovement members posed to themselves and to congregations across the country. Although they did not discover ultimate answers to these questions, BikeMovement cultivated community amongst themselves and in the churches with which they visited through the use of dialogue. They did this by deconstructing social realities, by creating a vulnerable and comfortable space, and by collaborating in an effort to transform their realities together.

In conclusion, it is only fitting to end with the rest of the quote I began the paper with. It is a challenge from the BikeMovement members that appears at the end of the BikeMovement documentary trailer. It concludes:

As a community they pedaled. They shared. They listened. They hurt. Yet even though they reached the Atlantic, the journey continues when you and I help to cultivate a relevant community through conversation.[20]