A Parish Story from Camp NaBorLee
written by Lauren Goldbloom
“I just remembered! It’s together o’clock!”
With all sincerity, my spunky 6 year-old neighbor blurted this out to the neighbors gathered around on stumps and camping chairs. She was the rightful host of the talent show this year, during our 5th Annual Neighbor Camp at the aptly named Camp NaBorLee. Everyone burst into delighted laughter, and continued to enjoy creative acts, silly tricks, and a lot of spontaneous entertainment, performed primarily by the younger campers.
Friends, I’m actually convinced my sweet neighbor has preached a word for all of us. It’s together o’clock. And we’d best not forget it.
Peter Block says that leadership is convening. It’s a one-word definition that has miles of implications. Leadership is convening. It’s letting people know, hey! It’s together o’clock!
The beautiful thing about this weekend of camping was that for 4 straight days, the plan was simply to be together. Together setting up camp, together at the lake, together playing badminton, together on the paddleboards, together making camp bracelets, together grilling burgers, together around the fire, and together in those times in between. There were chances for genuine one on one conversations, chances for just quietly sitting and enjoying the scenery together, and chances for rowdy and hilarious team competitions. We had time for deep breaths and belly laughs, time to listen to bird songs and scary stories narrated by an eight year old, time for cannon balls and slow floats. It was together o’clock.
I should probably mention that I wasn’t sure the camping trip would happen this year. Convening is hard, people. Convening with the added elements of camping? Maybe harder. In our five years of organizing a camping trip with and for neighbors, we’ve faced swimmer’s itch, cold nights, heat waves, air pollution from wildfires, and there was that year with a terrible wasp infestation. Plus there’s all the challenges of, well, people – schedules, anxiety, figuring out how to pay for things, relational conflict, sharing workloads and so on. I won’t discount any of that. But I’m pretty confident that invitations to togetherness can have profound impacts on our neighborhoods.
Leading and convening toward community in your neighborhood will require something from you. It’ll take some discernment – what could together look like? It’ll take some guts – how many invitations are you willing to send that might never be responded to? It’ll take some commitment – are you in it for the long haul of relationships with your neighbors?
I can’t make any promises about how much it might cost you and what the outcomes might be. But friends, together o’clock is an invitation I don’t want to miss.
Lauren Goldbloom serves on the Parish Collective staff as the Director of the new Grounded Faith Initiative, a collaborative project with the Whitworth Office of Church Engagement made possible by the Lilly Endowment. Grounded Faith seeks to connect young adults and parish-focused churches for the sake of the common good of their neighborhoods. Lauren lives in Spokane, Washington, where she and her husband Matt and their six kids have embedded their lives in the fabric of the Cliff-Cannon neighborhood. She pastors Common Well, a hyper-local community of neighbors learning to follow Jesus in their everyday lives, and teaches as a substitute in the local schools.