When Community Becomes Our Counterweight
Parish Story from Chamberlain | Goshen, Indiana
Today's Parish Story comes from our dear friend Shannan Martin, an inspiring parish practitioner, author, and member of the Parish Collective Fellowship rooted in the Chamberlain neighborhood of Goshen, Indiana.
The following excerpt is from Shannan's new book, Counterweights: An Essential Practice for Holding Hope in a Heavy World(Revell, 2026), our July Book Club selection. (shared with permission)
From "Me" to "Us"
Now, life itself delivers the facts, surprising as they are. It turns out it was never about me.
Jesus paints community as a garden, a biosphere of complication where something is always dying even as new life germinates. We are the garden.
Grounding my life in the soil of my ordinary, imperfect community reorients my faith from a "me" story to an "us" story. That has changed the way I see almost everything, from politics and money, to relationships, to God and my place in the world.
The people blooming near me are my pastors and guides. My community is among my steadiest counterweights, centering me on the bedrock belief that God's weighty hand always and only tips the scales toward goodness.
If it is not good, it is not God.
A Living Faith
A changing faith is proof of a living faith, like growth nodes on a sapling. This is unsettling within a religious framework that depends on certainty.
"But aren't we supposed to lose our faith?" Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle asks. "It's not different from our voices changing in puberty or our hair turning gray. Like snakes shedding skin, aren't we always meant to break through to something more expansive?"
I still believe in heaven, but I am compelled by the breath of God permeating this love-crafted world and by the whole lot of us who are knocking around, messing up, and grateful for do-overs, mercy, and gentle human contact along the way.
Anyone paying attention is painfully aware of the stark injustices that plague our land. I, regrettably, have no easy answers for this. It is not my task to explain or defend God.
The Slow Work of Blooming
My job (and yours) is to keep blooming, with an eye for making the garden as lush as we are able.
As we do this slow, daily work, God's kingdom is made known, right here, right now, to all who live.
Escaping earth's pain and confusion by being beamed into heaven was never God's holy endgame. The Good News is not that God will save us from reality but that God will redeem it, healing everything bruised and broken—even us.
Sara Miles writes, "God is happening all the time," which means this world I fear and adore is always inching back toward Eden.
Resurrection eternal.
If we have trouble seeing God's active and illuminating presence, it's possible we need to nudge ourselves deeper into the garden of one another, where bad news and brilliance mingle and goodness somehow holds the upper hand.
“My community is among my steadiest counterweights, centering me on the bedrock belief that God's weighty hand always and only tips the scales toward goodness.”
Join Us This July
We're reading Counterweights together in the Parish Collective Book Club.
If you'd like to read alongside us and join the conversation, we'd love to have you.
→ Learn more about the July Book Club and pick up a copy of Counterweights.
