The Next Faithful Step

For four years, women from Plymouth Congregational Church, a predominantly white congregation, and Corinthian Baptist Church, a predominantly black congregation, had been finding ways to know one another.

The two churches sit less than two miles apart in Des Moines, yet for more than a century had rarely shared life together in meaningful ways. Slowly, intentionally, that began to change. There were Bible studies, book discussions, music events, jazz happy hours, and community storytelling gatherings. Relationships formed over time, steadily and sincerely.

So when the Austin Story Project Story Circle process arrived, it did not begin from scratch. It became the next faithful step.

The group met over Zoom, eight women ranging in age from their thirties to eighty, representatives from both congregations gathering week after week in small digital squares from kitchens, living rooms, and home offices across the city. At first, facilitator Karen Downing was gently corralling the conversations back toward the structure of the process. But over time, the women logged on earlier just to greet one another. They noticed birds outside someone’s window. They asked about each other’s families and weeks. A community was forming, even through screens.

What stood out most was not simply that the women grew closer. It was how the structure of Story Circle changed the dynamic between the churches themselves and built on the prior work of getting to know one another across cultural difference.

In previous gatherings, the white women from the Congregational church often entered carefully, wanting to honor the relationship but also afraid of saying the wrong thing. Conversations sometimes carried an unspoken imbalance, where the women from the Black Baptist church bore more of the weight of explaining their worship, their faith practices, or the deeply embodied way they related to Jesus. The differences were real. At Corinthian Baptist, worship often meant standing, clapping, and praising aloud. At Plymouth Congregational, faith could feel more restrained, more thoughtful than expressive, more head than heart.

But Story Circle shifted something.

Each woman was given the same amount of time. No interruptions. No correcting. No explaining. The structure itself slowed the room down enough for people to stop performing carefulness and simply speak from lived experience.

And as they did, deeper connections emerged.

During the final session, centered on renewal and resurrection, Kristen spoke about cancer and the way the diagnosis had forced her to slow down and reconsider the story she wanted her life to tell. Her honesty opened space for others to speak about aging, infertility, disappointment, physical limitations, and the painful necessity of beginning again. Across differences of race, age, and church tradition, the women found themselves sharing not explanations about faith, but the realities of being human.

Karen felt an acute awareness of how resurrection comes from struggle. Place of new beginnings often begins with loss, hardship, and challenge. There was a palpable warmth in hearing participants share their personal experience, like sticks rubbing together to create fire

By the end of the gatherings, the Story Circle had done something their earlier efforts had only begun. It had created a container sturdy enough for honesty, intimacy, and spiritual connection to grow equally between them.  

Not by erasing difference.

But by teaching everyone how to stay present to one another inside it.