What becomes possible when churches learn to see relationships—not programs—as their greatest resource? In this podcast episode, Lewis Center Director Jonathan Page speaks with Angie Williams from the non-profit training organization Open Table and Audrey Smith about community convening, social capital, and re-embedding the church in the life of its community.
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What becomes possible when churches learn to see relationships—not programs—as their greatest resource? In this podcast episode, Lewis Center Director Jonathan Page speaks with Angie Williams from the non-profit training organization Open Table and Audrey Smith about community convening, social capital, and re-embedding the church in the life of its community.
Jonathan Page: Hey there, friends. My name is Jonathan Page. I’m the director of the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary, and it’s my joy to welcome you to another episode of the Leading Ideas Talks podcast. In this podcast, we try to have conversations with leaders who are doing incredible things in their communities and really think about how we can translate some of that into our own context, wherever we might be serving. And so today, we are centering on a theme around community focused ministry and what does it look like to lead with the community at the center, not only at the center of our work, but at the center of our spirits. And so, I’m excited today, to be joined by two good friends of mine: Audrey Smith and Angie Williams.
Hey y’all, thanks for being on the Leading Ideas Podcast.
Angie Williams: Thanks, Jonathan. Hello.
Audrey Smith: Good to be here.
Jonathan Page: So, Audrey, I wonder if we would start with you, can you give just a little bit of background to what you’re doing. Who you are? Maybe, why we’d want to be talking to you about community focused ministry?
Audrey Smith: Sure, Jonathan. I’m a licensed local pastor in the United Methodist Church, and they sent me out as a church planter into Petersburg in 2021. And that work has translated into community convening in the tiny village of Ettrick, Virginia and working with Open Table on their community convening model using the principles of asset-based community development.
Jonathan Page: That’s awesome. And Angie, you’re a part of the Open Table, and I wonder if you’d tell us a little bit about what the Open Table’s doing with community convening.
Angie Williams: Yeah, absolutely. So, Open Table is a national nonprofit. We train communities, and we train individuals what it looks like to access their social capital, to organize that, and to invest it through relationship in the lives of other people. We have models that we train at all different levels. So, we train one-on-one at the individual level; we train small groups to do this; we train organizations; and we train the community as a whole.
So, for community convening, the whole idea is: What does it look like for the church to rethink and reconsider how they define who they are and who they’re called to be in the community, as it relates to the community itself?
Jonathan Page: So Angie, in what you were sharing, you talk about community convening; you talked about social capital. I wonder if you could define that a little. Like, so the community convening process. What exactly does that look like for churches in their communities?
Angie Williams: Yeah, so social capital, first of all, is it’s very simple. It is who we know and what we know, and it’s looking at that at all levels. Social capital comes through the relationships that we have, and everyone has social capital. But what is important is being intentional in how we take the relationships that we have—who we know, what we know—and bring all of that together to invest it into the lives of other people, and to invest it in our communities and the challenges that our communities are facing.
For the church, community convening is an intentional model and a process that teaches the church how to go out into the community, first of all, by defining the neighborhood. Think, so often churches have become people traveling far and wide to come to that church, and that church doesn’t necessarily look like its neighbors. It doesn’t necessarily have a relationship with its neighbors. And so, thinking about, “How can we be intentional about going out into that defined area around the church, and getting to know our neighbors again?”
Part of the process of community convening, and the part that’s the most important, is a process that we train called “socially valid indicators.” And what it is doing is it’s inviting the neighbors through relationship, through getting to know them, to let them be the ones to name what they believe are indicators of impact, that are outcomes that they wanna see in the community. Once that’s been named, and once you discover that through relationship with the neighborhood, with stakeholders in the community, then the church has the opportunity to redefine who they are, how they live out mission and ministry through a defined shared purpose with the community because of what has resulted from learning that and getting to know that from the community.
Jonathan Page: I think that’s incredibly cool, and what a novel concept too. It sounds like that’s really invested in a space of deep listening and really being able to be attentive to just where people are, and how we live together in community in really robust ways. I’m curious, Audrey, so, you are a practitioner of this community convening model at Ettrick. What are some of the outcomes that you’ve seen in your time in Ettrick from practicing this in real time?
Audrey Smith: That listening is key, and getting people to speak is even more important. So, we’ve gone out with the intent to listen, but as the church has become separate from its communities, there’s a little bit of lack of trust, Jonathan. And so, in practice, the process takes a while. It’s a process that’s gonna be long-term and for the long haul.
It’s interesting to see who will talk to you and who will not. We’ve been at community events; we’ve engaged young people from Virginia State University to go out into the neighborhoods. And when you’re listening it’s also kind of cool to hear what people are not saying. Right? The traditional asset-based community development approach is to find a Person’s of Peace or a Minister of Introduction, and then you tag onto that person and that person will lead you to the other people, so you can hear the voices that are speaking, right? And so, some of that has occurred. What’s been surprising to me is how long it gets people to talk to you. So yeah, listening is at the core of what you’re doing, but you have to be really patient and find different people.
So, when Angie mentioned the stakeholders, we have nonprofits who are part of the community convening, and then we speak to residents, and a resident was a… who’s a social worker. You know, she spoke about the needs of the community.
When we listened to a little over a hundred people, what we found is that really important to them was the socially valid indicators, first of all, are safety. It’s at the crux of being a human being—that need for safety, right? And safety for community means streetlights or speed bumps. It could mean more presence of police in the neighborhood. It can mean more social connections with people, so they know their neighbors and they trust their neighbors.
The other two socially valid indicators are education. Surprisingly, when I spoke with one woman, she had two older adult children in the house, and she was looking for a place for them to gather and to be safe in this community. We usually think about preschool or children in K through 12 education, but there are a lot of young adults who are living with parents. And so, how is there a focus on that, okay?
And the third socially valid indicator when we ranked them was education or job training. And so, when we’re talking about community convening, we’re also talking about repairing local economies. Ettrick is a community in a large county. Chesterfield County is the fourth largest in the Commonwealth of Virginia, but it’s one of those tiny places that’s been neglected, and part of that is because it’s in proximity to Petersburg. And so, the people there have not had the job opportunities, and so they leave. And so, when you’re trying to get information from a community, you have a great deal of people who are renters or transient. And so, that’s just part of the process and that’s why anyone considering doing this needs to know upfront—It’s going to… you’re going to have to invest your time. You’re going to have to invest a lot of walking, or just showing up for people until they’re ready to show up for you.
Jonathan Page: So, I think that’s a really, really great perspective, Audrey, and I appreciate that so much. You’ve given me a lot to think about, and I have about 43 follow up questions, so let me see if I can narrow it down to one to start.
When you use the language Person of Peace or Minister of Introduction, I have some thoughts about what that could mean to me, but I wonder: What does that mean for you? Could you define like what a person of peace is and maybe how you identify that person?
Audrey Smith: Going back to my childhood, I grew up in a really small town in Tennessee, and there were these women, you know, who knew everything that was going on in the community. And so, as a young person, if you passed by her house and you were walking with a young man, you’re a teenager, the word would get back to your mother or grandmother before you could get back home. And so, when I was young, I thought that was just very intrusive and the women were nosy. And now I understand those people who were the lookouts in the community. They were taking care of the community. They love their community and the individuals, and so you want a person who is intimately knowledgeable about the community.
I would say the person, the closest we’ve come to it in Ettrick is a barber. His barbershop is open sometimes at 7:30 AM on Saturdays whenever I pass by there, and I’ll see the “open” sign. And so, I just went in one day. I’m like, “Can you connect me with the people in the neighborhood?” because he knows all of the older residents who are really invested in this community. So, I’ve kind of tagged him as a Person of Peace. I met another young man who lived in both Petersburg and Ettrick, but he lives in Chesterfield now, but he grew up in Ettrick. And so, one day he just walked me through the neighborhoods and introduced me to the different people who still are in that neighborhood.
So, a Person of Peace is somebody who cares about the people in the community, even if you think they’re being a little nosy or intrusive. They are connected, grounded, rooted, and grounded in that community, either as a young person who’s gone away but still has connections, or somebody who’s just in that neighborhood and on the lookout, so to speak, every day.
Jonathan Page: That’s really helpful. Thank you. I might pivot to Angie for this question. So, Audrey mentioned, like one of the socially valid indicators that they came up with was safety, and that could include things from like creating like a greater police presence to things like speed bumps and making sure people are driving the right speed.
So, when I think of what churches are capable of building, “speed bumps”—metaphorically sometimes churches are really good at that—but physically, sometimes that’s less of a thing. I’m wondering from like an Open Table perspective: How do you coach churches through, as they’re examining those socially valid indicators, what their capacity is, and where they enter in on those spaces?
Angie Williams: Yeah, that’s a really great question. So, it’s so important, in part of the process Audrey mentioned the different stakeholders, too. And one of the things that I didn’t define, but it’s so integral to when we’re having these conversations, is really being able to understand the need, and again, understanding the need as it is being communicated by the person that we’re talking to, and us not making assumptions, and us not defining something from our own lived experience, or what we have encountered.
And so, once the needs are defined, or the challenges, or what a community or individuals in the community might want to focus on through those socially valid indicators, a really helpful part of the process is understanding what we define as a priority support need, and what that is saying, “If you could name the thing that is the most critical today for you to overcome a barrier or accomplish a goal. What would that one thing be?” And we have priority support needs, again, at all levels. We have them as individuals; we have them in our families; we have them within the organizations that we work or live within; and then the community as a whole. And so, once we’ve heard how the community, or how individuals define safety—and to your point, a church is not gonna go out and actually be able to put up lighting themselves necessarily, directly, or construct speed bumps—but through social capital, and through intentionally developing, again, the strength of the relationship that comes.
Churches have to think about “Not only do we know our neighbors in our neighborhood, but do we know our schools? Do we know the local businesses right in our community? Do we know our local government officials? Do we know the other nonprofits, the healthcare sector, human services? And once you develop those relationships, what’s on the other side of community convening after you’ve heard the voice of the community is bringing everybody together and figuring out how can we collectively address whatever this priority support need is.
And the reality is, what one of the other things that we talk about through social capital, is this concept that if you sometimes… we as the church, we’re so focused from a standpoint of scarcity, and we have fear around scarcity and everyone is sort of fighting or needing to go all from the same resources. We don’t really think about abundance from this standpoint. If you take just 10 people, and if you assume those 10 people each have 20 contacts in their phones, probably we have hundreds or thousands, but that’s 200 people. And then, if those 200 have 20, it’s 4,000. So 10—just 10 people in our community together, a few people represented from the church and from these other stakeholder groups—10 people in two steps can get to 4,000.
And so, what sometimes seems like, “How could we possibly address this? How do we come together? How through our social capital and the exponential power of that, do we find solutions, and then find the church’s role in those solutions that might not be apparent otherwise?”
So, it’s really just following that process. And, the beautiful thing is that the neighbors and the community, through that community convening process, they do finally start to see the church as a trusted community partner. And again, a shared purpose with the community, where the church is existing for its neighbors and for its community starts to form and, really, that is how transformation really comes in the community.
Jonathan Page: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting and really thinking about that this is a long game, right? It, this isn’t something where you’re gonna snap your fingers and all of a sudden, “whazam!” there’s change. It’s really… it’s something that plays out more in years than in weeks.
Audrey, let me ask you this: As somebody who’s leading this right now, I’m mindful there was a leader once who talked about vision leaks, right? That’s this bucket that’s got a hole in it, and you constantly have to be filling it up and that sort of thing. I’m wondering, how do you keep in these sorts of longitudinal spaces where it’s like, “Hey, this is not something that we’re gonna accomplish in just a couple days. It’s gonna take some time.” How do you keep people motivated in that space, or keep people centered in the work of really being able to stay focused on this?
Audrey Smith: Jonathan, I’ll try my best to answer that, but I wanna go back to what Angie was saying before, and you, about the speed bumps. So, the residents of Ettrick did say street lighting would be good. And so, I was able to connect with a government official, a county official, and he told me how you do this. Because the church is in the community, you need to talk to all of the residents who are within 200 feet of where you would place that streetlight— north, south, east, and west. You go out and you talk to them, and if at least 75% of them say “yes, they want a streetlight,” it can happen. So, that’s a beautiful thing that might be easy to accomplish.
Jonathan Page: See, there you go. I presumed that it was not possible, and it was possible.
Audrey Smith: It’s possible, it’s possible. I didn’t know either until I asked. So, to your question about vision and motivation, this is Holy Spirit driven inspired to work. Without that, it doesn’t happen. So, Angie and I with our stakeholders began in February of this year, and we’ve had monthly meetings—some quarterly, some in person—but the last one we had that was in November. The Holy Spirit inspired me to say, “let’s go walk and tour the neighborhood.” We had the loveliest November day, and even though we walked where a fall line trail is gonna come—it’s gonna be behind Virginia State in the Ettrick neighborhood—we walked a trailhead that’s there in the community. We went to communities and schools that’s inside, an elementary school there. We went to the train station. There’s a little train station, so that day was a day of seeing all of the assets. And what really happened on that day is that our stakeholders really became a community of their own.
And so, it didn’t require me as a leader to motivate them. It just happened. What it requires is a person who listens and is in tune with the Holy Spirit because we have pivoted and adapted and changed so much in the year 2025, and that comes from deep listening and time spent with the Holy Spirit and just almost say “ready, set to go.” So, an idea might come to you, and that might be that your “ready.” It doesn’t mean you go yet. And then you’re waiting for the “set.” Does everything come together? Do all of the pieces just work together? Is there a flow to what’s going on in the work, and then no individual leader has to motivate people, has to just beg people to do something. That’s what we do with leadership in our churches, right? Every year you nominate people, and then you gotta make sure they show up for meetings. But when there’s something that energizes people … On that day, when all the stakeholders were together, you could just see that this little sleepy town could come alive again, and that we get to be a part of this, right?
And so, just that attunement to the Holy Spirit is so necessary.
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Jonathan Page: Coming from a pastoral background myself, one of the things that I’ve often said related to the Holy Spirit is that it’s rarely static and often dynamic. And you know that Holy Spirit’s on the move
Audrey Smith: And it’s on move and you have to run to try to catch up, or just be in step, or not get behind.
But it’s the Howard Thurman saying: “Find what makes you come alive, go do that.” Because what the world needs is people who have come alive, and that Holy Spirit makes us come alive and wanna do this work. That can be challenging, and Angie talked about doing this work with churches. And so, I don’t have a church. All of the people who do this work in the community are volunteers. And to see that they are energized and wanna continue is just a… It gives us hope during this season.
Jonathan Page: I love that. I love that. And so, noting the dynamic nature of the Spirit. Sometimes that means the Spirit will pivot us. And we thought we were going in one direction. We had… we’ve got the socially valid indicators. We’ve got some plans around what we’re gonna do, and then it’s let’s take a left turn here. How do you, and this could be for both of you, I think. How do you help people to sense that Spirit of pivot in a process like this? And what are some of the challenges that come with pivots within the community convening model?
Angie Williams: I’ll give my thoughts on that first. Actually, related to and as Audrey knows, ’cause we’ve done this together with a cohort… so, there have been other churches that have right in the same step in timing as Audrey and her team, been implementing this community convening process. And I think one of the beautiful things that really comes from that deep, authentic, mutual, and reciprocal relationship that does develop when you have this intentionality by which you are going out to the neighbors and to the community is that once you have that relationship, then by the very nature of that where you are loving and caring together for your neighbors, you want to lean into what you are hearing that might be totally different than what you were expecting originally. And even if it catches you off guard, there’s that sense of excitement that comes from, “Wow, this shocked me. And this is not what I was expecting, but I feel so honored that God is now giving me this opportunity, right, through my relationship with you, and what we’ve discovered together, and how we’ve gotten to know each other to, again, to lean into this opportunity.”
And one of the stories that came from this with our community convening experience in this initial cohort that I think is so powerful is another one of the churches went into the process of doing the socially valid indicators, absolutely believing and making an assumption, like we always do, right? That, that this was the particular need that they felt like they were gonna hear from their neighbors and from the community. They had been there a long time, and they just felt like we, we know food insecurity is a challenge, like food insecurity is gonna be something that we hear that we’re going to need to address and want to have that shared purpose with the community around food insecurity.
And as it turned out, through the process of socially valid indicators, and by really listening, they found out that is not in fact the case. There is so much food. There are many food banks, there’s food ministries, there’s discounted food. The problem was transportation. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, what they kept hearing over and over again, not just from individuals and communities, but from the actual small business owners, from grocery stores, from bankers, from everyone who knew kind of what was happening in the community, the problem was transportation to get to the places where the food could be accessed by people. So of course—but the church then was so excited to actually, really understand the true challenge and then to lean in and follow the Spirit’s guidance that really comes through that relationship. Say, “Okay, now we know. Now we know what we can really do together to make a difference.”
Jonathan Page: Incredible. Audrey, would you wanna follow up on that?
Audrey Smith: Sure. So, when we first started our community convening it was to repurpose the former Ettrick UMC, almost a 10,000 square foot building, a beautiful sanctuary inside, basement, two floors above that. It’s on a little over three acres, and so that was an initial idea. But after a couple of months of working with the community, they were not saying that was important to them. And then Angie and I were together with some other folks on a community health day in the parking lot and we had fresh fruits and vegetables, and people kept passing by the church and not stopping to talk to us. We moved to the stop sign, like they had to stop. We moved to the stop sign at the end of the road and still had to cajole people to talk with us.
And so, I think all of us went home a little confused that day, a little concerned about what’s going on, right? And over the course of the next few weeks, with prayer and discernment, it dawned on me that the United Methodist Church that had been on that place for 180 years, but excluded black people, may be a symbol of oppression. And how can I get the community to engage with me when what they see when they see me is somebody who represents that symbol of oppression? I had no idea we would get to that place, or I would get to that place. And I held that in check for a while.
Finally, Angie and I were having a conversation one day and she was like, “Audrey but if you could do anything, if money were no object, what would you do?” And I said, “I would just start in a parking lot, just on asphalt pavement somewhere to begin a ministry of presence.” Perhaps you could have mobile clinics, mobile washers and dryers, mobile showers, maybe a modular trailer that we start in, right? So that people know you are invested here, you’re going to be here. These are the days and times that we are here.
And then she said to me, “What would you do with the building?” And I said, “I would demolish it. As a symbol of…of oppression, as a symbol of injustice, as a symbol of the United Methodist Church saying, ‘We confess and we repent of racism and discrimination, and we want to repair, reinvest in this community.’” So, in 2023, when we first went in those doors together, to get to that point two years later was wholly unexpected, and I think it was a Holy Spirit speaking in a way none of us could anticipate, Jonathan.
Jonathan Page: Wow. That’s really… what a story and what a reminder that, that when we’re willing to lift the veil of what’s really there in our community, the stories and the histories that we might find that inform not only the present, but where we’re headed. It’s incredible. It’s just incredible what you can discover if you take the time to be with people. That’s sort of the word that comes to mind is incarnational, right? That, that you’re an embodied presence in that community that’s not in a rush, not a “What can you do for me?” But genuinely is walking alongside people to say, “Here are my hands. How can I help? Here we are. Not to fix you, but to be with you.” And there’s something really incredible about that. Audrey, I’m curious, as you think ahead and kind of what’s next for Ettrick, where are y’all headed now? What’s the, what are the big, the big, hairy, audacious goals, and dreams that you’re pursuing now?
Audrey Smith: I mentioned the modular unit. I wouldn’t — and we’re talking to county officials about that — I wouldn’t consider that the big, hairy, audacious goal. The big, hairy, audacious goal is that Ettrick becomes a place where people want to come. They wanna visit, they wanna get off that train and see what’s going on. They wanna walk up from the trailhead at Petersburg, people who bike and hike or are train enthusiasts. They wanna come and be present in this little small town of 6,000 people, including about 3,000 students at Virginia State University. But that this little sleepy village comes alive again because a small group of people paid attention to it and followed the prompting of the Holy Spirit not to give up on it, to engage with residents, to help them see with eyes that are new what their community can be. So that would be the big, very audacious goal—that there’s a pinpoint on a map of places to visit, and that would be Ettrick because God is at work there.
Jonathan Page: Wow. How incredible. I think I think we’ve got a bunch of people listening to this that are gonna be praying with you for that and imagining that with you.
I think, Angie as we’re wrapping up, if somebody listening to this is hearing about community convening and saying, “Hey. That sounds great. How do I get plugged in with that?” Can you talk a little bit about sort of the work of Open Table, and how folks can get connected with Open Table if they’re interested in this?
Angie Williams: Yeah, absolutely. I would say, you know, Jonathan, a while back in this conversation you alluded to, that this is always evolving. One of the things I want to emphasize as we’re wrapping up this conversation is the beautiful thing about once churches, I would say “re-learn,” right? because it’s who we are called to be. It’s who we were created to be is in relationship with one another and in community with one another.
But technology and industry—all these things have separated us from our neighbors, churches from their neighborhood. But the beautiful thing about once a church goes through this process of community convening and learns. It is—it’s not a one and done. It’s not a box that you just check and say, “Okay, now we’ve gotten ourselves reacquainted with our neighbors and the neighborhood and the community.”
You continue to do this repeatedly. And that’s the beautiful thing—is that then, once this model and this process really becomes clear, it becomes a way that on a regular basis the church can continue to be intentional. To make sure that we don’t ever again get to a place where we’re out of touch with our neighbors, and where we don’t have that defined shared purpose together with the neighborhood. And we do communities of practice where the pastors, and the leaders, and the church members, and those who have participated in this come together on somewhat of a frequency and discuss together what’s working? What’s not? What are the things that we’re learning? How is the Spirit moving us?
Number one, I think it would, for any church that might be considering this or any organization, it can be any group of stakeholders in a community that being willing to maybe sit in on one of these communities of practice and hear more from Audrey—hear more from some of the other organizations that have participated and what they’ve learned from it. And so, we would be more than happy to help facilitate that and make those connections.
And then, just on a more detailed level, reaching out to me, reaching out to Audrey. We can provide our contact information. We would be very happy to talk with anybody one-on-one that would be interested in exploring this and talk about what the process might look like. Audrey alluded to this, but in general, you are looking at a one-year commitment. Of a regular rhythm and flow of meetings and then these action steps that you have in the community. But then you’ve learned it. And it’s just something that becomes natural about who we are, the way that we live and practice mission and ministry in the community.
Jonathan Page: That’s beautiful. The idea that this becomes like our essence instead of it needing to be this like exercise that you’re having to learn, it just is a thing that you do.
Angie Williams: Exactly.
Jonathan Page: I think that’s really incredible. You all have been so generous with your time. One of the things that I like to do with guests is say, you all get the last word, the last phrase. Audrey, do you have a last word or phrase that you’d wanna share with, with folks?
Audrey Smith: I would say… What we’re doing, this community convening, is literally a Wesleyan approach to community. It is not something that’s new. If you would consider your community a practice, a band, or class, your class members—John Wesley laid it all out when he said, “Yes, we need personal holiness but you also have to have that social holiness and that community connection, and that when we all do this, we become whole together,” right? Our communities improve because everyone in the community is a part of it. So, I would ask people to really go back and think about Wesley again, and how he went out into the fields, and how he connected different kinds of people together. Knowing that we’re just really going back to find something new.
Jonathan Page: That’s beautiful. Angie, what about you?
Angie Williams: and I would piggyback off of that by saying exactly, reclaim what it looks like to make the world your parish or even just your neighborhood. That is what it’s all about is how we make sure that in indeed the world is our parish.
Jonathan Page: Wonderful. Wonderful. Well hey, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you both for joining the Leading Ideas Talks podcast. Many blessings to the Ettrick community and to the work at Open Table, and we’ll look forward to visiting with y’all again sometime soon.
Angie Williams: Thanks, Jonathan.
Audrey Smith: Thank you.
Announcer: Thank you for joining us for Leading Ideas Talks.
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Related Resources
- Open Table, a non-profit training organization
- 4 Key Practices of Community Engagement by Doug Powe and Sam Marullo
- Doing Community Ministry in the Small Church, a free Lewis Center resource
- Taking Church to the Community, a Lewis Center video tool kit resource
- 7 Dos and Donts When Considering the Redevelopment of Church Property by Rick Reinhard
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