A Free Course for Concord Leaders on Turning a Crowd Into a Community
Anyone who has organized anything in Concord knows the feeling. The room fills up, the night goes well, people say kind things on the way out — and a month later hardly any of them are back. On September 2, Solo Faith Church published a free online course built around that exact gap: not how to draw a crowd, but how to turn one into a community that holds.
What the Course Actually Is
The Art of Community: A Community Building Course runs nine modules and twenty-four lessons, with a short quiz after each lesson. It is self-paced and free, with no cohort, no start date, and no application. Pastor Doug Lattimore is the instructor. Someone can begin on a Tuesday night after work and finish it across a month of lunch breaks.
The course is organized around the seven principles of belonging set out by author Charles Vogl in his book The Art of Community, which gives the course its name. Each principle gets its own module:
Boundary — who is inside a community and who is not, and how that line gets drawn
Initiation — how a newcomer crosses from visitor to member
Rituals — the repeated practices that show a group what it values
Temple — the place set apart where the community's real work happens
Stories — the accounts a community tells about who it is and where it came from
Symbols — the objects and signs that carry meaning without needing explanation
Inner rings — the paths that let committed members go deeper without shutting anyone out
Two more modules bracket the seven. The course opens with Recognizing Community, which works through the difference between a community and an audience, a mailing list, or a crowd of customers. It closes with Advanced Practice and Legacy — what happens when the person who started something steps back, and whether the thing they built outlives them. The posture of the whole course shows up in a pair of back-to-back lessons inside the boundary module: "Why Every Community Needs a Gate," followed by "Drawing the Line with Welcome, Not Walls."
Why a Concord Church Built a Leadership Course
Pastor Lattimore built the course for the people across Cabarrus County who are already doing the gathering — pastors of small congregations, nonprofit staff, volunteer coordinators, and the neighbors who end up running things because nobody else raised a hand. Most of them can fill a room. Far fewer have ever been handed language for what is supposed to happen after the room fills.
That gap is not abstract for Solo Faith Church. The congregation runs a food pantry and a free grocery delivery program for Concord households that cannot get to a pantry themselves, and that work only holds together because volunteers keep coming back — people who understand they belong to something rather than people who signed up for a shift. The course is an attempt to write down what the church has had to learn by doing it.
How to Enroll
The course is hosted on the church's site at the The Art of Community course page. Select Join to enroll, or take it through the Solo Faith Church mobile app. There is no cost and no application. It sits alongside six other free courses — on the ancient Near East, Greek civilization, daily life in the ancient world, the apostolic fathers, American religious history, and preaching — all listed at Solo Faith Church. Sunday services are held at 587 Old Charlotte Rd SW, Concord, NC 28027.
Questions Neighbors Are Asking
Do I have to be a member of Solo Faith Church to take it?
No. The course is public and free, and enrollment is open to anyone with a login on solofaith.org — members, visitors, and people who have never set foot in the building.
How long does it take?
That is up to the person taking it. There are nine modules and twenty-four lessons, each followed by a short quiz, and the whole course is self-paced. Some people finish in a couple of weeks; others work through one module a week.
Is this only for pastors?
No. It was written for anyone responsible for bringing people together and helping them feel they belong — nonprofit staff, volunteer leads, small business owners, teachers, and neighborhood organizers included.
Solo Faith Church is sharing this because Concord is full of people quietly holding groups together — PTA leads, shift supervisors, small church pastors, block captains — and almost none of them were ever trained for it. Putting that training within reach at no cost is one way a congregation can strengthen the whole county rather than only itself.
You're Invited — Visit Solo Faith Church This Sunday
Solo Faith Church meets at 587 Old Charlotte Rd SW, Concord, NC 28027 — Saturday at 1:00 PM, Sunday at 1:00 PM, and Bible study Tuesday at 7:00 PM. Come as you are. Learn more here.
Community Support Note: This story is part of Solo Faith Church's community journalism initiative to keep Concord neighbors informed about resources available across Cabarrus County. The details in this post were drawn from a description provided directly by Solo Faith Church leadership, together with the church's own published course listing.
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