Introducing The Beloved Community Fund
Grants for congregations of every size across Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, begun with the offering at Dr. Crowder’s installation
The Beloved Community Fund is a new grant fund for congregations of the future Living Waters Region. It was established on Saturday, October 3, with the offering received at the installation of Rev. Dr. William E. Crowder Jr. as Regional Minister and President at Divine Word Ministries in Country Club Hills, Illinois, and gifts have continued to arrive online and by mail. Together they build the fund that will make the grants.
What the fund is for
The fund supports the work Dr. Crowder has set before the region: work that sends us into God’s world, wellness that strengthens God’s people, and worship that draws us closer to God, each other, and creation. Each grant supports a congregation’s ministry in its own context, wherever God has planted it. That might be such efforts as a food pantry in a county seat, a ministry of care for people worn thin, or a worshiping community learning to pray in more than one language.
The congregation carries out the ministry, and the fund helps it do so. The region does not run these programs; it stands alongside the churches who already know their neighbors by name.
Who can apply
Congregations of every size across Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin will be able to apply. That matters in a region where many congregations are small and many pastors serve bivocationally, and where some of the most faithful ministry happens with a handful of volunteers and a borrowed van.
Guidelines for applying are being prepared now. They will set out who may apply, what grants can fund, how large they will be, and when applications open, and they will be announced in the Common Cup and here at cciwdisciples.org in 2027. Until then, a congregation already doing this kind of work can begin writing down what it does now, who it serves, and what a grant would make possible.
Why “Beloved Community”
The fund takes its name from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of the Beloved Community. The King Center describes it as “a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence,” and says plainly, “In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it.” King believed such a community could be built. Congregations across this region are building it now, in food pantries and at bedsides and around the Table.
Disciples practice that vision every week at the Lord’s Supper. The identity statement of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) reads, “We are a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world. As part of the one Body of Christ, we welcome all to the Lord’s Table as God has welcomed us.”
How to give
Gifts can be made online through Givelify or on the Beloved Community Fund page. Checks can be made payable to the Living Waters Region and mailed to 401 W. Jefferson St., Bloomington, IL 61701, with “Beloved Community Fund” in the memo line. A congregation that wants to receive a special offering for the fund can send it the same way.
Water poured out
Regional Assembly 2026, which closed with Dr. Crowder’s installation, took its theme, “Come and Believe,” from John 7. Jesus speaks those words on the last day of the Festival of Booths. During that festival, people carried water up from the pool of Siloam and poured it out at the altar as a prayer for the whole year’s rain. The offering received on October 3 was poured out in the same way. It runs downstream to congregations most givers will never visit, doing work they will be glad to have joined.
John 7:37-38, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.'”