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The Congregation as Retreat Center and Intentional Community: Pastoral Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization
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The Congregation as Retreat Center and Intentional Community: Pastoral Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization
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Journal Article
The Congregation as Retreat Center and Intentional Community: Pastoral Sensemaking in an Age of Individualization
2025
Overview
Drawing from narrative interviews with eight Protestant pastors in the U.S. and Canada, this paper explores community-building under the conditions of late modernity through the lenses of individualization and sensemaking. Exploring pastoral approaches to what Ulrich Beck calls “institutionalized individualism”, this paper argues that pastoral sensemaking manages polarities between the societal demand for self-construction and the human need to belong, between an individual’s freedom to make a life (or god) of their own and the fact that such work requires a community. Pastoral leaders manage this polarity through sensemaking strategies that strengthen and clarify the central values and practices of the congregation while also managing the boundaries of the congregation, envisioning the congregation as a retreat center in some cases and as an intentional community in others. In an age of individualization, pastoral leadership requires the dexterity to move between dynamic collective and individual identities, making processes of belonging a collaborative sensemaking effort in which boundaries are drawn, enacted, erased, and redrawn in new ways.
