My guest is Pastor Mike Mather. He is a leader in equipping the church to engage in community development. The author of Having Nothing, Possessing Everything, Mike shares inspirational stories about nudging a faith community to positively impact the neighborhood where they reside. Mike is ordained in the United Methodist Church currently serving as the Senior Pastor at First UMC in Boulder, CO, and a faculty member of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute.

Key Topics and Tips Discussed

5 minutes - Making the Mindset Shift from programming to collaboration

12 minutes - Theology of Abundance - “I realized, all the practices in the church around this are built around scarcity, not around God’s abundance. And so the only things I knew how to do were to try to fill empty spaces, rather than to recognize that those spaces I thought of as empty were actually full of something else.”

13 minutes - Pay Attention to, “How [can] we see God’s abundance, where everybody else sees nothing?”

14 min - We discuss why 'Teach a Man to Fish' is still misplaced, and how it keeps us from the gifts of people in the community.

15 min - What Advantage Does the Church Have? - more discussion on theological framing of God’s abundance

17 min - Acting into new ways of Thinking (including the act of asking questions)

18 min - How poor are you is the wrong question? So what is the correct one? 

19 min - Hire a Connector

25 min - What Questions to Ask - John McKnight - 'The Future of Low Income Neighborhoods and the People that Reside There', 10 page survey

26 min - Discovering Gifts

31 min - Strategic Clever Introductions - introducing the congregation to community residents/citizens/collaborators/partners

We had some static on the line. Apologies for that.

You can learn more about Mike and his work at https://fumcboulder.org/meet-rev-mike-mather-our-new-pastor/

https://resources.depaul.edu/abcd-institute/faculty/Pages/mike-mather.aspx

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