The Power of Community: Healing, Congregations, and Everyday Connections
In this thought-provoking episode of the To Be and Do podcast, host Phillip Amerson dives deep into the concept of community—particularly interdependence over individualism—and explores how our institutions and everyday practices can better promote collective well-being. Drawing from personal reflections, stories from the healthcare field, and insights from theologians and sociologists, Phil challenges us to rethink how we invest our resources, relate to one another, and nurture both self and neighbor.
Three Key Takeaways from the Episode:
1. Building Community Starts at the Grassroots Level
Phil reflects on a recent group chat about building a new hospital and how the conversation quickly centered on competition, costs, and staffing. Instead of merely expanding infrastructure and professions, he invites us to consider: What if investment focused on building community rather than just buildings or professional expertise? He shares the wisdom of Dr. John Rich, who urges communities to identify their "natural healers" and empower local community health workers. This grassroots approach leverages existing relationships and neighborhood strengths to boost health outcomes and creates environments where people support each other beyond professional roles.
2. Congregations (and Other Institutions) Must Reclaim Their Communal Role
Drawing from sociologist Brian Wilson, Phil discusses how American churches have shifted over time, emphasizing individualized experiences instead of facilitating true community. He notes that institutions like churches and hospitals often become "objects" for self-fulfillment or professional service, losing sight of their broader communal purpose. The healthiest congregations help people wrestle with important questions—“Who is my neighbor?” and “Who am I?”—while embracing the value of confession, self-awareness, and shared frailty. Real transformation, he argues, happens not through programs and expertise alone, but through meaningful presence and authentic connection.
3. Self-Care Begins With Self-Awareness—And Is Rooted in Community
Phil cautions against the current emphasis on self-care without first practicing self-awareness. Recognizing our limitations, frailties, and blind spots isn’t just an individual exercise but one that flourishes within supportive, honest communities. By engaging with others—asking questions, offering small acts of kindness, or simply giving a word of encouragement—we weave stronger bonds that benefit everyone. In both spiritual and secular spaces, being part of a community where people notice, listen, and genuinely care is essential for individual and collective health.
In Closing:
Phillip encourages listeners to "create good trouble" by reaching out, being more present, and valuing relationships over professionalism. Whether through a simple greeting at the hospital or by participating in a congregation, we can all foster spaces of belonging and healing. As he beautifully reminds us, "the love of God is the basis for everything"—and it is realized most deeply whenever we intentionally build up the communities we inhabit.
Thank you for listening to the To Be and Do podcast. May you be inspired to nurture both yourself and the world around you.
Phillip Amerson [00:00:02]:
Greetings, everyone. This is Phil Amersonwith the To Be and Do podcast where we focus ourselves on the question of how do we live in community? How do we experience a kind of interdependence and not just individual freedom or individual identity or independence. Think about interdependence. I recently was part of a group text chat, you know, about those. And it was talking about a new facility that was going to be built somewhere in the Midwest. And the questions all surrounded this new hospital were questions about, oh my, that's going to create competition. And oh my, it's going to put more pressure on having enough professionals to fill the space. And oh my, what's going to happen as the government cuts back on funding and as in Indiana, at least, there's a deliberate effort to go after hospitals with the phony belief that they're making too much.
Phillip Amerson [00:01:22]:
Oh, I know some of the pay is enormous, and I know some of the expenses are way out of line, but by and large, our healthcare system is one that serves relatively effectively. I say that having not spent time in the hospital recently, but as I watched the conversation go on, there were concerns about the number of professionals needed, about the competition, about this, that and the other. And I finally found myself thinking, what if instead of building new buildings and competing with who has the biggest building or the most doctors or the best equipment only, I'm for good healthcare. But what if we start at another place and ask, how could we spend our dollars on building community? Instead of building buildings or building a staff, how about we work at building community, a community of health workers? For instance, Dr. John Rich taught at Drexel University Medical School. He was Harvard educated, African American guy. And on a trip, friends of mine talked with him about what the church might do in any neighborhood, rich or poor, urban or rural, to improve health outcomes. And Dr.
Phillip Amerson [00:03:04]:
Rich looked back at them and said, who are the healers, the natural healers in your neighborhood? You know, around the world there is something called community health workers. We have so professionalized, not just medicine, education, financial banks and that sort of thing, even the church, we've professionalized it. And we have forgotten that one of the ways to strengthen our financial reality, our education, our hospitals, even the church, is to begin at the other side, to begin at the grassroots, to ask, how can we invest resources as effectively as we can in building community and community strength? Seems to me that this is around the question of our congregational life in the United States. I hope you have a congregation or two or three. According to the recent story in the New York Times. Many people now worship in two or three congregations. It's pretty important for us to understand how important, how valuable congregations can be not only to individuals, but also to the health of an entire community. I recently saw a quote from Brian Wilson, who's a sociologist in Europe, and he said, in Europe, the churches became less popular and in the United States, the churches became less religious.
Phillip Amerson [00:05:06]:
What do you think he meant by that? Well, we've done some things. Let me take a swing at sharing with you some of what I think Brian Wilson was saying. In the churches, like in health care, we've turned the facilities, the gathering places, the places of medicine or the places of faith into objects. They're the objects of our health or the objects of our faith, and health and faith aren't related outside that little world. We've objectified. The church is the place you go for self realization. The hospital is the place you go to have health care. We've also turned our hospitals and our churches into places where coaching is needed, where we've got to work to fix everyone.
Phillip Amerson [00:06:26]:
We've turned everyone into a client in the church and even the congregations and in the hospital and even the hospitals. We've got to have some program to fix them. You know, I've gone through some health issues in the last few years, and one of the. One of the little secrets I kept to myself was as I would go into a hospital setting or a doctor's office or therapy sessions especially, I did my best not to be their client. Only I knew I was their client. I was paying them for a service. But as best I could, I wanted to make a community. I wanted to bring little gifts, little candy to the woman at the desk and something, a book to my therapist and a question to my physician.
Phillip Amerson [00:07:26]:
The last time I talked to one of my physicians, I think he was puzzled that I want to talk with him about something that had nothing to do with his being my doctor. And I just said, I know you're a busy man, but do you think it's possible that our health care isn't just about me as an individual, but it's about the people with whom I live and work? And maybe it's about, well, maybe I'm healthier if I sing in a choir, or maybe I'm healthier if I'm a part of a group that meets regularly and discusses things? One of the really fine pastor theologians is Sam Wells, and he's a pastor in London. He's really quite remarkable in the ways he has become the pastor at St. Martin in the fields there. And he talks about all the gifts that they have at St. Martin, the glorious building, the traditional music and liturgy, all the institutional strengths, the. The people who try to do things well. But he says, you know, we need to think anew about not just what goes on inside our building, inside the school, or inside the hospital, but maybe we need to think about, oh, some of the elements that have been crowded out.
Phillip Amerson [00:09:09]:
I believe that some important spiritual elements, some important faith elements have been crowded out of congregations in the United States. Yeah. What you say, Phil? What's been crowded out? Well, you know, I think the focus on being a part of a community that lives outside the walls of this place has been crowded out. We live in our little. If you walk around the streets these days, especially if you're on a college campus, I counted yesterday 46 people between my home and the campus, and 31 of them were. Were looking at their phones. We've crowded out the ability. Well, Jesus talked about loving your neighbor.
Phillip Amerson [00:10:12]:
I'm pretty convinced that if there was a Good Samaritan story told today, it wouldn't just be that the fellow on his way to Jerusalem had fallen, had been robbed and tossed aside. But. But the people who didn't see them were probably looking at their phone. They missed the opportunity to love the neighbor. That's part of what's been crowded out. A second thing that's been crowded out is self awareness. We start these days with self care. Now, take care of yourself.
Phillip Amerson [00:10:51]:
You should be healthy. You should live healthy. You should do it. But honestly, I think the scriptures are right. I'm not going to get into the argument about whether we are born in sin or born as a blessing, I. I tend to be on the blessing side. But until I am aware of my faults and my failings, until I am aware that I spend too much time on my phone and not enough time with my neighbor, until I'm aware of my own brokenness, until I have self awareness, I'm not going to be very good at self care. In order to care for myself, I need to be aware of what I need.
Phillip Amerson [00:11:46]:
Now, you can see that I've got a lot of work to do still, don't we all? This, by the way, is the gift of a congregation. A strong, healthy congregation will help us with the question of who is my neighbor, who am I, and how am I going to be more aware? Used to be we called that coming to terms with our own frailties or our sinfulness. It's amazing how many congregations no longer do a Confession of sin. Yeah, okay, I get it. How about just a confession of I'm human, I'm broken, there are things that I fail to do, and until I come to terms with those, I can't just leap to saying, oh, I now am going to have some kind of self care program to care for. What? We got to answer the first question, where do you need self care? And of course, the most important role for a congregation or for school or for a hospital is to seek to know who we are in God's creation and who others are and how we turn those places into places of community and not primarily a place of professional service. I mean, it's nice to know who, who has the education and who can be helpful. That's really important.
Phillip Amerson [00:13:35]:
But we also may want to learn what it means to, to live in community, to learn from others, to have a sense of fullness. I'll close with this. Many, many, many years ago, I was head of a program that worked with pastors, mainly urban pastors. And what we discovered was that we were trying to help apprentice pastors, younger or less experienced pastors, improve in their work in a parish. The program was funded by the Lilly Endowment. We learned a lot of wonderful things. I'll share another time, but one of the things that was most compelling out of this was that unexperienced or inexperienced or less experienced persons didn't learn as much by having the professional come and write, write on the chalkboard or give a lecture or put them through a workshop or have them go watch media presentations about how to be a pastor, how to be the church. Warren Bennis, who taught leadership for many years, said it best.
Phillip Amerson [00:14:59]:
He said leadership is caught more than it is taught. Community is caught more than it is taught. Being a congregation is caught. Being a hospital, a good hospital is caught more than it's taught. Being an educator is caught more than it's taught. We've had too much of a divide where we've sought to begin with who's the expert and who's the one here who has the problem? Well, in the world I've lived in for these almost eight decades, almost everybody that shows up has a little challenge. Maybe it's the challenge of just getting up on the wrong side of the bed. Or maybe there's a health issue or a relationship issue that turns that pastor or that teacher or that physician or that nurse or that therapist or that principal or that school superintendent or that church denominational leader turns them a little to a little less effective place.
Phillip Amerson [00:16:22]:
And sometimes it's simply the gift of another the young pastors in the mentoring program I talked about did a lot more learning and a lot more growing. When they would walk with the senior pastor or the more experienced pastor to the hospital or to the jail, or they would go with that pastor to a church meeting or to the city council meeting or to a meeting with other clergy, something was being caught more than taught. So I hope I'm creating some good trouble here. Next time you go to the hospital, make it more than just you're the patient. If nothing else, just say a nice word to the fellow at the desk or to the nurse or to the physician. Ask them how they're doing, what made their day brighter. Barbara Brown Taylor used to say that one of the things that captured her was the time she was at a church, a visiting preacher, and she was getting ready to preach and and the pastor of that congregation looked at her and said, barbara, what makes you more alive today? Oh, what makes you more alive today in a congregation, in a hospital, in a retirement community, in school? Self care begins with self awareness. The love of neighbor begins with recognizing the labor, getting off the phone.
Phillip Amerson [00:18:28]:
And the love of God is the basis for everything. The joy of knowledge of a good God who knows the names of everyone who knows your name. Beloved child of God. This is Philip Amersonfor the Belonging Exchange. This is the To Be and Do podcast. May God Bless.
