CLC Models: Grassroots Spirituality Movement

Grassroots Spiritual Movement Model

Commonweal Local Communities (CLCs) started as a grassroots movement.  Commonweal provided readers with a webpage to link up with established CLCs, or to initiate a new one for their area.  Most of our members were Commonweal subscribers generated by the web site; only a few knew each other beforehand, and only a few were recruited by members. Religious movements grow through the personal relationships of social networks (family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc.) not through mailing lists of unrelated consumers of products and services. 

According to the website, “Commonweal fosters rigorous and reflective discussions about faith, public affairs, and the arts, centered on belief in the common good.”  CLCs “gather in their local communities for critical conversation on the issues that matter most. Each community determines their goals, set-up, meeting times, and the readings best suited for them.  As for the conversation itself, many use Commonweal's Conversation Starter Series while others discuss readings from the pages of the magazine or set their own agenda entirely." 

Therefore, Commonweal Local Communities may be seen as a spiritual movement of persons and communities engaged in the practice of reading Commonweal or other materials on issues that matter most in the light of faith centered on belief in the common good. Pope Francis’s vision in the Joy of the Gospel of “an ecclesial renewal which cannot be deferred” can be applied CLCs. 

“I dream of a ‘missionary option’, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything, so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world rather than for her self-preservation.”

Francis claims that “The parish is not an outdated institution; precisely because it possesses great flexibility, it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community. It is a community of communities."  He also says: “other Church institutions, basic communities and small communities, movements, and forms of association are a source of enrichment for the Church, raised up by the Spirit for evangelizing different areas and sectors.”  What Francis says about the flexibility of parishes as networks of communities and the multiplicity of forms of association within dioceses and the universal church should be applied to creating CLCs

Discussion Questions:  Are we missionaries? Are we interested in transforming everything? Ourselves? Our households?  extended families? parishes? friendships?  workplaces? professions? neighborhoods? cities? counties? What Commonweal articles could we choose to begin discussions that might lead to transformations of our ways of doing things in each of these social networks? With whom might we want to begin these discussions?  What are the “issues that matter most” in each of our local social networks?  Are we interested in developing a spirituality that focuses upon the common good?  Do we see others as friends of the Commonweal, open to the pursuit of the common good