The beauty of collaboration

“The non-profit that I run feels strongly called towards collaborations across organizations. We lean into this with our eyes wide open, as we know through experience that with any partnership, there will be natural tensions, obstacles and challenges. Over the past year, we have been exploring a new partnership that seems to be blossoming in some particularly significant ways for both of the organizations involved. Because of this significance, we decided to spend some time together to intentionally seek the Holy Spirit’s guidance for our collaboration.

Each of our organizations brought three executives and board members together for a discernment session with Attune. Coming into the session, each person had prepared themselves to really seek God with an open heart and mind. Together, we named the strengths and possibilities that attracted us to this collaboration, and also named the potential areas of brokenness and risk that could get in the way of our joint work. Though many of us were meeting each other for the first time, it was amazing to hear the transparency, vulnerability and alignment that surfaced as we listened for God’s voice together. By the end of the session, there was a unanimous sense of what the Holy Spirit was showing us. We walked away with three guiding pillars, which have become not only the sub-themes for the initial project that we’re working on, but also for our partnership more broadly. 

It’s now been several weeks since that session, and as we’ve gotten into the nuts and bolts of this joint project, several challenges have already presented themselves. While it’s no surprise that we’ve run into challenges, it has been surprising to see how – at least so far - we’ve been able to navigate through each tension point with relative ease. Some of this is because we have these core pillars to return to. There hasn’t been a meeting where we haven’t pulled out some element of these guideposts to shed light on the issues at hand.

Probably the bigger factor, however, is the deep sense of unity and calling to this collaboration that both of our organizations now hold. It just feels like a true partnership – in a way that I don’t know I’ve ever experienced before. It almost doesn’t feel like we’re working for two different organizations. 

It feels like one family. It feels like the Body of Christ.”

"…the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are."

"My husband and I are the co-pastors of a church, and Covid has ushered in a new chapter for our ministry. It had been five years from the moment we started as a church to the last Sunday we were allowed to worship in person. As we went online, we watched people slowly leave our church as we kept trying different things to make it work. It became clear that our ministry could not proceed as it once had. We could sense in our spirit that a new vision was emerging, but we couldn’t see where we were going. We weren’t even sure where we were, or where our people were.

Based on the recommendation of an advisor, we decided to bring Attune in to help our core leadership team gain more clarity on the path ahead. The biggest theme that came forward was this idea of “withness.” It came up during the very first meeting, stuck with us throughout the discernment process and we continue to step into it more fully even now – several months later.

We’ve now defined withness in two dimensions: 1) People coming alongside you, where people are in your stuff with you; and 2) We’re leading together – with a flattened sense of leadership. Along the first dimension, we’ve realized just how central this theme of withness is to our church culture, and our desire is to help all of our people understand and intentionally lean into this. Along the second dimension, my husband and I have realized that, while we had intentionally equipped and empowered our first set of leaders – we had stopped there. As a result, we had found ourselves doing more of the work, and then feeling a little grumbly about it. It was working against this sense of withness.With these themes of withness now surfaced, we’ve been able to pursue both dimensions more intentionally. For example, in a couple of months, we’ll be kicking off a series of dinners to create space for all of us to better understand this idea of withness – by reflecting on what we are doing well in coming alongside each other, and where we have missed the mark. To add to this, the effort will be led by one of a couple of new powerhouse leaders we are intentionally pouring into, who were involved only at the margins before.

And even beyond this theme of withness, the attunement process helped to catalyze a rich season of clarifying who we are and where we are. We can now much more clearly communicate this to people and empower others to join in with the work of our church. Because of this, we are now planning to officially relaunch the church in just a couple of months. We’re also redefining, clarifying and igniting our discipleship process. And we’re building a new website. And we’ve developed some intentional ways to grow a more missional outpost identity. There are still so many challenges we’re facing, and so much work to do, but we know God has already gone before us. We know he is calling us and others further into this work. We know he is showing us what withness looks like first hand, as he is with us in our stuff, and in our leadership."

“My church is in the process of starting up its third social enterprise."

We see these ventures as the work of stewardship, formation and discipleship. As a former banker and serial entrepreneur, I felt both excited - and overwhelmed– as the church looked to me to take the reins on this new business.

My previous companies were started with no more than a couple of others. Here, we had a whole team of people involved – all of whom have different areas of buy-in and knowledge, and I had no clue about any of it. Could I really lead these people? Would they listen to me? To add to it, this is a brand new industry for me. I’m in uncharted waters and there’s so much to figure out.  What are the processes involved? How do we make money at this? Where do we even start?

We brought in Attune to take a core group of five of us through a few workshops, to discern more of God’s guidance as we got started with this new adventure. They led us through a few exercises that revealed more of everybody’s thoughts and ideas, allowing us to really get to know each other’s hearts and minds. It became clear that this is a group who wants to glorify God – and who believes you can do this while also making a profit, while treating people well and doing good for creation.  Back in my corporate – “It’s all about the bottom line” days - I used to say to myself: “This is a machine, and I can’t be mad at a machine for doing what it’s designed to do.” 

What became clear to me through these workshops is that this new enterprise is not a machine. This is really “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The workshops helped us to root our new venture firmly within this overall revelation. We were also able to discern and align around who we want to be, who we want to serve, and what our mission is. It’s clarified these things and helped us to keep them front of mind. Just the other day, I was reading something and I was able to quickly say “This won’t work because it doesn’t fit inside of our mission, our mantra and our value proposition. How do we tweak this?” 

I still feel a little overwhelmed sometimes, but I now feel more prepared and confident with what God has equipped me with. We have a stronger sense of unity among our team. And we’ve affirmed that this is not a space where we need to turn off our connection to the Holy Spirit. He will give us the wisdom we need when we don’t know the answers.”

"The video of the murder of George Floyd shook me to my core..."

Erin Slone, Director of Strategy and Operations for Attune, shares this-personal story of formation:

…The recent string of unarmed black people killed by white officers or vigilantes destroyed my spirit. I’m a 40-year-old black woman, the daughter of migrants from the deep south who came of age in the sixties in segregated Chicago.  Racism in all of its forms, from the micro to the macro aggressions, has been a part of my daily life. I have learned to push through this dark reality and most importantly pray for the healing of our country from this awful reality. The release of this video was different though. I could not push on any longer. I was an emotional wreck, I lost hope, and feared that nothing was ever going to change.

I thank God on a regular basis to be working at Attune.  Tracy and I have worked hard to foster a culture centered around grace, that is free of judgment, where we can show up as our full authentic selves, and support one another to grow and attune to God’s voice and purpose in our lives.  We can discuss the hard things.  We have been companions to one another on our spiritual journeys. We laugh often, we cry at times, we go deep into our personal struggles and triumphs as women of Christ, but we had never discussed our personal experience with racism as two women of color.  Was it impolite? Were we afraid to offend one another? Was it not germane to our daily work? Perhaps it was just hard.  Whatever the reason, we had never discussed race directly, yet we were compelled during this time to process current events and feelings, refusing to let fear get in the way of God’s desire to deepen our relationship into further understanding. 
 
One particularly heavy morning, Tracy and I decided to walk through Attune’s Big Story Lens - and God came through without fail!  Our collective discernment brought about so much healing.  For me, God restored hope!  He affirmed that the more honest and vulnerable we can be, and the more actively we listen, not only to one another but to God Himself and His Word, the closer we can actually get to creating heaven here on Earth. 
 
For Tracy, God breathed courage into her, calling her to engage more intentionally in the work of racial reconciliation. God compelled her beyond her very present fears of venturing into territory that would likely expose the ignorance within her that she was becoming ever more aware of. Tracy expressed how God whispered acceptance and anointing despite this ignorance, and despite the years of apathy that had led to it. Largely through Attune, God had been showing her how to create spaces that allow people to hear from God in new ways, and He was now calling her – calling us – to bring this forward as a vital part of this deep and hard and ultimately life-giving work.
 
After we completed the lens, both of us walked away feeling as if a great heaviness had been lifted, and yet at the same time with a deep resolve to bring what we have to the table. We’ve discerned that God is calling us to offer Attune tools toward this work of building bridges across racial lines, to help people attune to more of His hope, courage, wisdom and power – and where He guides, we will follow.
 

For such a time as this…"