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Risking Everything: Growing Communities of Love

Reviewed by Alun Brookfield.

This book arrived for review a little too late for me to use it during 2007, but I shall look forward to making good use of it next year. It consists of a series of 13 chapters, each intended for use as the basis of a group meeting during the season from the beginning of Lent through to Pentecost. Opening and closing worship suggestions are included, but the 'meat' of each chapter is a reflection on an aspect of the book's title, Growing Communities of Love.

Greenwood is well known within the Anglican communion for his excellent work in encouraging the development of collaborative ministry, first in Gloucester Diocese, then in Chelmsford, and more latterly in the Church in Wales. Much of that work was done with the aim of making parish congregations less cleric-dependent and more inter-dependent as communities, so the theme of this book will come as no surprise to those who know this author and his passion for the Church.

I shall look forward to using some of this material, but, if I have a quibble, it is that it all feels a little dated, especially as we are increasingly being forced to think of our church people, no longer as a single community, but as a community of communities, with some groups only rarely meeting other groups. Is it possible for a Christian congregation of more than, say, forty people to be a single organic entity? Is it even desirable? Has it ever actually been so? I think of one of my parish churches where a congregation of fifteen is in fact at least two different communities meeting as one congregation. I think I would have valued in Greenwood's book a little more recognition of the reality that many of our churchgoers will rarely meet some of their fellow churchgoers except possibly at festivals.