Community of Practice 2025

Application for the 2025 Community

This application for new members asks for significant reflection on your own life experience and how it shapes your desire to apply for membership in the Community of Practice.

If you're a previous member seeking to return, please fill in questions #1 to #8 with the word "returning”.

“Community” as experienced at Bread of Life emerges from attitudes formed by processes of “Depth Formation.” By this we mean intentional engagement of experiences and practices encouraging growth and freedom in God in the following areas:

a) Ability to reflect on the human/spiritual experience in oneself and others, allowing time and space to witness and respond out of deep listening and compassion to what is arising.

b) Willingness to engage with internal and inter-personal resistance, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty as they arise, as well as joy.

c) Trust that in God we are never finished and don’t need to be. This trust allows examination of embedded beliefs that ultimately might hinder personal growth and connection with others, and includes surrendering tendencies to judge, smooth over, fix, advise, to be “finished” or the need to have “right” answers.

d) Willingness to discern next steps with a listening spirit and capacity to choose freely out of self-knowledge and input from trusted community.

Name

First Name

Last Name

Address

Address 1

Address 2

City

State/Province

Zip/Postal Code

Country

Phone

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1. How did you hear about this Community of Practice?

YOUR STORY AND PRACTICES:

2. Describe your experience of community and what you would hope for or expect from a “depth spiritual community.” How would you recognize an experience of community compatible with your values and desires?

3. How does your interest in this community connect to what has shaped or formed your human spiritual journey over the years?

Please write 2 paragraphs: One describing key influences in your spiritual journey (faith tradition, family, etc.) and one describing tensions or challenges with which you have struggled.

4. How has your journey influenced the way you engage the world?

Give examples of how you serve or offer your gifts.

5. There are rhythms in relationship with the Holy.

Please describe a time when you felt close to God/Divine Reality. Then describe a time when you felt abandoned or distant from Divine Reality. What kept you in the relationship?

6. Briefly describe the spiritual practices which are meaningful for you now and how they inform and support your relationship with the Holy and with others?

THE COMMUNITY: The Community of Practice desires to provide space to “attend to the depth human journey in ourselves and others with compassion and truth” in ways that will “bear fruit and be life-giving to deep needs of the world.”

* Please read the full description of the Community of Practice here including the commitments.

7. Which aspects of this Community particularly resonate? Which do you resist?

8. What leads you to seek out this particular community at this time? Is there anything else important for the community to know about you?

For Previous Members Seeking Return:
Please write a paragraph describing what drew you to leave previously. And then a paragraph describing what draws you back now.

For All Applicants:
I have read through the descriptions of the community and the quarterly meeting dates and confirm I have the time and space in my life to be a committed participant.
Please sign below.

Thank you for your time in completing this application which now initiates a process of mutual discernment of fit. The next step will be a contact from a member of the community for mutual conversation.
　
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Thank you for your application! We will be in touch soon.