Crest Manor enters into ‘Shalom Partnership’ with Dismas House, celebrates vitality of Sunday Discussion Group and Book Club

Crest Manor Church of the Brethren and Dismas House of South Bend, Ind., have entered into a “Shalom Partnership” to offer mutual friendship, support, and community for residents of Dismas House seeking to find their way back into society following incarceration.

The congregation also is celebrating the continuing vitality of a Sunday Discussion Group that has been meeting on Sunday afternoons for six years and has become a initiator of ecumenical connections, and a Book Club that has become a sustaining and invitational group in the congregation.

Shalom Partnership

In Dec. 2025, the Crest Manor Church and Dismas House entered into a Shalom Partnership to offer mutual friendship, support, and community for residents of Dismas House and with members and friends of the congregation. Crest Manor has happily shared green space for joint events between the congregation and Dismas residents and the large church kitchen has supported a bread-making event that included people from Crest Manor and Dismas House friends.

At a six-month evaluation of the partnership, both sides were pleased with the results and committed to continue for another year, widening the inclusive and restorative outreach of Jesus in the neighborhood.

What is particularly noteworthy about this new partnership is that it has occurred while Crest Manor has been operating with a pastoral team model of leadership. The team includes one part-time paid pastor and one or two volunteer pastors from the congregation who have spiritual gifts for ministry.

We celebrate that the Shalom Partnership could evolve within a small congregation that, like many other small congregations, is using a new manifestation of the free ministry.

Sunday Discussion Group

In March 2020, as the Covid lock-down began, a small group of Crest Manor members and friends gathered on Zoom to discuss Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ, a book several people had been reading and wanting to discuss. When the group finished that book, they wanted to continue their weekly Sunday afternoon conversations and chose another book by Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice.

The conversations flourished and the group enlarged as original participants invited others, both local residents of South Bend as well as relatives or friends from other towns, states, and even Canada. The pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church of South Bend has become a valuable member of the conversation.

Now in its sixth year of Sunday afternoon conversations, the group has read and discussed approximately 18 books on wide-ranging topics such as Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Dispossessed, John Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, Brian McLaren’s Do I Stay Christian: A Guide for Doubters, the Dispossessed, and Disillusioned, and Drew Hart’s Making It Plain: Why We Need Anabaptism and the Black Church.

From the Sunday afternoon conversations, the Crest Manor Church and St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church have shared three Christmas Eve worship services, joined to serve a Martin Luther King Day breakfast, and enjoyed some social times together.

Book Club

For people interested in gathering monthly around current books of fiction and nonfiction, the Crest Manor Book Club began several years before Covid, when it moved to a Zoom format. The inspiration of Connie Mummert, encouraged by the late Mike Mitchell and other enthusiastic readers, the Book Club has become a sustaining and invitational group for the congregation. Like the Sunday Discussion Group, the Book Club has attracted friends from the physical neighborhood of the church and from other churches and faith traditions.

–Ruthann K. Johansen contributed these items to Newsline.

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