Welcome to the Engaging Impasse Book Club. This section of our site will provide you with occasional reflections based on the stories told in the book, Crucible for Change: Engaging Impasse through Communal Contemplation and Dialogue. These reflections will introduce you to the insights of the authors who participated in the Engaging Impasse Circles. The reflections offered here are meant to be a companion to the book.

We hope you will enter this sacred space often and linger in contemplation and prayer with the comments and questions raised here. We invite you to order a copy of Crucible for Change so that you can deepen your own experience of engaging the ecclesial and societal impasses you encounter in your work and ministry. Click here to find out how you can order the book.

Throughout Crucible for Change, the authors identify and describe impasse, discuss how they came to engage impasse before, during and after participation in the Engaging Impasse Circles, and reflect on a few of the ways participation in the process has affected their ongoing efforts for justice in their communities, in church and in society.

The chapter titles hint at the variety of experiences related in more detail in the book.

Everything Before Us Brought Us to This Moment

Being Present to a Process

One Inch Long, Many Miles Deep

Becoming the Change We Want to See

Resisting the Isolating Allure of Impasse

Be-ing in the Story

Embracing Impasse and Her Sisters

Communal Quest Makes the Difference

A New Energy, A New Hope

The Horizon Just Before Dawn

Take a few minutes to write your own reflection on one or more of the titles that may speak especially to you – to your own experience of impasse – to the way you engage impasse -- or would like to engage impasse?

You may send your reflection to circles@engagingimpasse.org. If you wish to give us permission, a part of your reflection may be incorporated into a future Book Club entry.

Written by Mary Jo Klick

© Institute for Communal Contemplation and Dialogue 2003-2006
Reprint with permission circles@engagingimpasse.org

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