by: Rev. Anna Golladay
We so often mention Hagar as an afterthought. As an enslaved Egyptian woman whose body Sarah and Abraham use to settle a problem of inheritance, she is cast out into the wilderness once she’s no longer useful. She has no status, no protection, nothing but a child and an empty water skin. But it is in the woods, not in Abraham’s tent, not anywhere near the center of covenant and promise, that God meets her. She names God in return — El Roi, the God who sees me. The first person in scripture to name God this way isn’t a patriarch. It’s a woman with no power at all who is alone in the wilderness.
I think there’s a detail about this story that is worth sitting with. Revelation doesn’t happen in the comfort of a large group. It happens after Hagar is pushed all the way outside of it. The place of clarity is not the place of resources and established structure. It’s the place stripped of all of that, the place she didn’t choose and couldn’t control.
This also isn’t unique to Hagar’s story. Moses meets God in the wilderness, not in Pharaoh’s court. Elijah hears God in the silence after he’s run for his life. The pattern recurs because crisis does something comfort doesn’t: it strips away the performance and forces a person, the congregation, the movement, to become honest about who it actually serves. It is often because of the mess that we are forced to a quiet place. And in that quiet place, we find unexpected answers.
I use this analogy because I think that Convergence also sees this pattern in our work with congregations. Those we work with are rarely the comfortable ones with everything humming along. They’re communities in the middle of an overwhelming transition, weighing a leadership change or a building decision, trying to figure out who they are after a season of decline or conflict. That’s not a deficiency in the work. It is actually where the real clarity tends to live. A congregation in crisis can finally see clearly what it’s been avoiding the rest of the time — namely, whether the people sitting in the pews actually feel like they’re part of shaping what happens next, or whether they’ve quietly settled into watching decisions get made for them.
This might present itself as a congregation where a small group carries the weight of every decision, while everyone else has, understandably, stopped expecting to be asked. So what does it actually look like to build a congregation where that doesn’t happen, where people don’t have to wait for a crisis to feel like they belong to the process of their own community’s improvement?
Our assessment process begins with a structured engagement that touches the whole congregation. We offer a way for folks to weigh in, not via a single listening session where only those most comfortable speak up, but via low-barrier opportunities for input that meet people where they are. The goal isn’t to extract opinions to hand to leadership for a decision. It’s to make the improvement process something the whole congregation is doing together, with visible evidence that what people say actually shapes what happens. The aim is a community where everyone, not just the most visible or most vocal, has a working sense that the place is theirs to help shape.
Hagar named God before anyone gave her permission to speak. The lesson for a congregation is that no community is fully whole when any of its members, however ordinary their place in it, have quietly stopped feeling like they’re part of naming what’s true and what’s next. Convergence’s hope through this process is that we aren’t looking for people in the wilderness, but that we are helping build an organization where nobody ends up there in the first place. If people feel like participants in what your congregation is becoming, your results will simply be greater.
If your congregation’s improvement process has started to feel like something happening to people rather than something they’re building together, that might be exactly the right time to talk with us.