In a time when the gospel of Jesus is threatened by the ascendance of Christian nationalism and white supremacy, what is the apprehensive, overstretched church leader to do? How does a leader tend one’s soul for the elevation of the gospel? How do followers of Jesus meet this moment with courage and imagination?
Building on the content of past conferences such as CoInspire, DisGrace, and MLK’s Unfinished Agenda, we will engage in three days of peer learning group work in partnership with Crossroads to examine the current challenges of leadership in this time and place. Furthermore, we will critically reflect on the obstacles of leadership as well as explore tangible and embodied practices involving creativity, movement, and contemplative exercises with the goal of building capacity and endurance for this important work. All levels of interest and experience are welcome as we will host three customized tracks of learning, nurture, and growth.
Participants will:
- Deepen their understanding of how they are caught in the cycle of fraught and flummoxed due to external forces and how they are implicated/complicit in legitimizing/upholding these conditions
- Practice within cohorts and in cross-pollinating spaces the collective nature of this work, learning what it means to be co-conspirators in liberation by engaging in:
- Critical self-reflection
- Power analysis
- Transformative antiracist accountability
- Animating transforming values
- Engage in laboratory spaces that awaken the imagination and begin to unlock our capacity for resistance and open us up to new emerging stories
- Construct their own next steps manual gathered from their interpersonal conversations, practices, and cohort reflections
