Watershed’s 4 C’s
(a.k.a. our philosophy)
These are the big ideas that shape the way we show up theologically and ethically in the world. They can be thought of as tools or technologies that equip us to navigate our beliefs, mission, and pathways.
Communion
We choose the word “communion” instead of “community” in order to note the inherently binary or dualistic nature of community. Whereas a community is a grouping around a shared presence, a communion is a grouping around a shared absence. Communion is dialectical and holistic and allows for genuine collectivity. It creates a sense of universal non-belonging that unites us and helps us to see our common humanity.
Curiosity
Curiosity names the provisionality of our interpretive lens, our understanding of the world. We know that our perspective is always contextual. A posture of curiosity demands that we assume from the outset that there’s always more to see, be in others, the biblical text, God, or the world.
Compost
This illustrates our conviction that borders or border spaces are generative. Things like death, failure, and endings generate and produce conditions for new possibilities. Resurrection goes through death and out the other side, never around. As a famous poem once said, “every new beginning is some other beginning’s end.”
Contradiction
Tarrying with contradiction forces us to resist the temptation of assigning “victory conditions” to our world, of reducing its contradictions to oppositions. Our insistence on BOTH/AND in thinking and language is a reflection that more than one thing can be true concurrently and not a clean black and white sense that coheres in a satisfying way. It’s messy.