Learning Activities
Prizing the journal people
In every congregation there are phone people, letter-writing people and text-messaging people. Add in a few stand-around-and-talk people, a few lecturers, one or two pontificators, a good sprinkling of teachers and perhaps a stray videographer or two, and you have pretty well named most of the communicators in your church.
Except one: The people who keep journals.
They’re an interesting lot, these journal people. They scribble furiously at odd hours, in fiercely private moments, chronicling their days and their ideas in prose and poetry so that generations yet to come will know what was true, bright, beautiful and hopeful during these times.
You can take advantage of the urge to journal as one way to foster simple living in your congregation. Consider these possibilities:
- In simplicity circles or small groups, ask journal people to share entries in their journals that speak to specific simple living topics or yearnings.
- Offer a journal-writing class or learning experience. Feature some of your congregation’s journal people as teachers.
- Challenge some of the journal people to focus their thoughts for a period of time – one week – on matters relating to simplicity. Use their entries in a class, a simplicity circle or a congregational newsletter article.
- Interview several of your journal people on camera – with that stray videographer as producer – and ask them to share their thoughts, journals in hand, about simplicity and its many connecting thoughts.
- Ask class or circle members to write several journal entries using subjects or titles from Sustaining Simplicity. Ask journal people to serve as writing coaches.
- Portray one of your simplicity circles as “especially helpful to people who journal.”
However you involve them, think of those who keep journals as natural colleagues and wise partners in this matter of bringing simplicity into the heart of your congregation.
And if you haven’t done so already, you might want to start keeping your own journal.
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