Understanding Community: Engaging Oxford College Students in Loving God’s World

Abstract

This article addresses town and gown relationships, those complicated interactions between colleges or universities and the communities in which they are situated. In particular, the focus is on the relationship between Oxford College of Emory University where I am the college chaplain and the city of Oxford, Georgia. Research demonstrated a gap between these communities - in the interactions between them as well as in the potential for creating belonging between Oxford College students in particular and the local community of Oxford, Georgia. My doctoral project addressed that gap through a course taught in the fall of 2016, Understanding Community: Oxford Encountering Oxford. In the course, students were required to move their bodies into the local community to see a community once invisible to them and to engage in loving God's world primarily through interviews with local residents. Theological themes of incarnation and revelation played a major role in this project, and are addressed here, especially with regard to implications for the church and its ministry in the world.