Pastors & Leaders | Deep Faith 2022

When grief goes unresolved it’s like a broken zipper; whether you ignore it or forge ahead, you won’t be warm in your comfy sweatshirt if you ignore the broken zipper. During this session, Yvonne Riege, Licensed Clinical Addictions Counselor and Church of the Brethren Ordained Minister for over 20 years, will help ministers in identifying those who may be struggling with complicating grief and/or are handling grief in unhealthy ways (addictions). Resourcing and creative ways to work with grieving individuals will be provided.

This workshop combines the practical expertise of woodworkers with the wisdom of spiritual leaders who informed and inspired the building a cedar strip canoe with a seminary class. Building a cedar strip canoe is an example of a focal practice that is bodily grounding and spiritually orienting.

In the midst of the anxieties of the COVID pandemic, a broader anxiety lurks — how climate chaos creates an increasingly dim future. How can churches provide hope and engagement rather than anxiety and powerlessness? We will consider the emotions around climate change and Christian teachings, practices and rituals that help people engage climate justice. Specifically, we explore teachings around hope and apocalypse and engage a ritual of ecological lament.

Leading congregations in Canada and the United States today is challenging for many. How do we lead toward the vocation of the church that the Book of Ephesians describes? Using exercises, spiritual practices and scripture this workshop aspires to be a respite for the weary and a word of hope for leading toward discovery of the calling of the Church.

Many churches are wandering through a wilderness of questions about race and whiteness. Using Mennonite Central Committee’s new resource, Embracing the Beloved Community, this seminar will introduce how church leaders can facilitate spaces to help congregations understand the importance of having conversations about race within a faith context for their congregations and communities.

Those of us working in ministry need a vibrant spirituality. However, for many of us, what we used to do doesn’t seem to work anymore. We, and our world, have changed. I propose that we don’t need a new model to try, but a different perspective on spirituality altogether. How might we see ourselves and our contextual realities as the fertile soil to grow something new? God doesn’t use one-size-fits-all programs, and neither should we. This workshop will help us explore an everyday spirituality for each of us.

With violence rising throughout the country, and violent rhetoric corrupting the church and broader Christian theology, Anabaptists find themselves in a wilderness. How do we embrace faithful responses to violence amid fear and uncertainty? How do we measure success in situations of danger? This workshop will use Mennonite Central Committee’s new resource, FEAR NOT, to introduce ways congregations can have conversations and create their own practices and policies that embrace a non-violent approach to active violence within and around their walls.

Pastors and others sometimes try to lead churches by casting a vision and offering answers. In this workshop, we’ll wonder what might happen if we lead a congregation by asking lots of questions instead of providing lots of answers. Our inspiration will be Jesus, who asked over 300 questions and answered only three.

Hope Journals are small books in which people may place scriptures, hymns, poems, or other artifacts that speak of hope. They can be used for daily meditation at home, taken along to medical appointments as a prayer aid for the waiting room, or given to people who are facing a difficult experience. In this workshop, each participant will create a Hope Journal to take home. No artistic experience is required. Limited to 15 participants.

This session is intended:

• to lay hold of narrative equal to wilderness experience
• to demonstrate wilderness uses of story both personal and collective
• to name what is numinous and propelling in story

Participants are encouraged to reflect in advance on a story pertinent to wilderness experience, whether personal or community.

“That Part” is a buzz phrase these days. When someone highlights a point significant in their conversation with another, the response is now, “That Part.” Try using it, especially when talking to the younger generation – and watch how they respond. That applies well here, “What part of the gospel is essential for us to assist others to get through their arduous journey today? Whatever part of the gospel you are called to be in the world, be that. If we as the Church are to model the Body of Christ to the world, we can then reflect the Body of Christ – as a healing gospel to the world? Revisiting 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, we are One Body but Many parts offer something needed in our hearing today. Could this mean we are more interdependent on others than we realize as we discern our call and ministry to the church? Jesus came to offer salvation, healing, and peace to the world. Jesus comes to us as the Prince of Peace. As we live out our compelling confessions, how do our identity and faith reflect the Body of Christ to the world? How are you called to “offer healing and wholeness to a peace faltering, dying world in this post-Christian-pandemic era?” While we pray for hope, healing, and peace for this dying world, “That Part” that links the wayward to the savior Jesus Christ is your part that contributes to the Body of Christ?

How does the Church thrive in the wilderness of division and polarization? The energy that sparks from healthy conversation amid difference offers hope for the church to model a different way, living out a theology of peacemaking and reconciliation in our most personal conversations. In this workshop, facilitators will introduce “peaceful practices” – skills for addressing divides present in congregations and communities – and offer resources that return hope to a splintered church.

This seminar offers an overview of white Christian nationalism and makes suggestions for how pastors and congregations can disorient it both internally and externally. In conversation with texts of the Bible, we will explore the political metaphor of idolatry and the ways white Christian nationalism distorts one’s knowledge of God.

This workshop will equip pastors and leaders to teach from Scriptural texts infused with violence. What if we could refocus our reading of the Bible to center the voices of trauma survivors? Join Dr. Susannah Larry, MC USA minister and AMBS professor, as she explores how we can experience Scripture as attuned to the wholeness of survivors, both in the Bible and in our world, bringing hope from “wilderness texts.”

Many of our congregations are old and almost all of our congregations have older people in them. This last part of life is its own wilderness. Retirement, aging bodies, losses of all sorts are challenges and often challenges that threaten our safety and sanity. In other words, true wilderness. In this workshop, “Refuge for the Warm-blooded: Eldering as Vocation,” we will create space to ponder how congregations can call older people to take on eldership, not as a congregational committee, but as an identity and as important work in a community.

Shalom Readers is a program from Central Plains Mennonite Conference that invites children and adults to read and engage with a variety of books that promote the Jesus-way of peace. Learn more about the program and how you can facilitate it in your conference, congregation, or home!

The Bible Project offers free videos and podcasts. This workshop will explore ways to use these videos with a range of ages in faith formation. We don’t have to do all the biblical work on our own. Come ready to interact and share what tools have been helpful for you in faith formation classes.

Howard Thurman wrote: “It is good to make an end of movement, to come to a point of rest, a place of pause. There is some strange magic in activity, in keeping at it, in continuing to be involved in many things that excite the mind and keep the hours swiftly passing. But it is a deadly magic; one is not wise to trust it with too much confidence.”

How much of our lives is given over to the deadly magic of restless activity without pausing for reflection? Like Martha (Lk 10:38-42), we scurry from one activity to another, believing that our work is what keeps the Church, or even, the Christian faith, from languishing. I used to justify my Martha-tendencies by reminding folks that, “Jesus loved Martha, too.”

This is true but misses the point of the story, entirely. It is not about who is “doing the most” or even “doing the right thing.” The point of the story is about the “one thing necessary,” complete trust and absorbing contemplation. I can hear the reply, “If we all did that, who would teach the toddler class?” In this workshop, we will learn the place of contemplation and contemplative prayer in the life of a servant of Christ. We will learn about practices and practice together doing the one necessary thing. We will learn how contemplative practices lead us into teaching the toddler class, directing the choir, preparing food for the hungry or even opening a homeless shelter.

This workshop will strengthen the theological mooring of church leaders by reflecting on Jesus’ adoption of the hopeful visions of the Old Testament prophets, and Jesus’ decisive victory over the powers of evil via the cross and resurrection.

Come learn about strategies for discernment in the midst of the online information wilderness. The session will also provide direction to numerous free online theological, biblical, and leadership resources that can help you lead with hope. Together, we will work to discover solutions to the challenge of misinformation in church communities.

Over 15 trips into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) in N. Minnesota have taught me a thing or two about surviving and thriving in the wilderness. Many of those lessons apply not only to wilderness travel but also to life and leadership. Through stories and pictures, we will share learnings from wilderness experiences.

As we approached another school year of young people not being vaccinated we had to dream together about new ways to have Sunday School. Come and experience the inter-generation, activity-based learning approach to faith formation. Bring a spirit of play, your ideas of what worked for your church, and ideas of what you learned from that.

“I didn’t grow up in the church, so I don’t really know the whole Biblical story.”

“I grew up in the church and I know some Bible stories and have favorite verses, but how does it all hang together?”

Proclaiming the word of God in diverse ways is essential to the ministry of the church and a weekly challenge for preachers, worship leaders and Christian formation leaders. Our congregation has been using the Narrative Lectionary for a couple of years — an alternative to the Revised Common Lectionary, which follows the whole arc of the Biblical story each year. During this COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve studied this lectionary and interviewed more than 20 Anabaptist pastors in Canada and the US who have experience with the Narrative Lectionary. Come hear what I’ve learned and how the BIG story of scripture might fuel hope across multiple generations in your congregation.

Childhood is supposed to be the opposite of a barren wilderness—a time of abundant nourishment that forges healthy roots. But what happens when it’s not? Drawing from his own experiences growing up in the foster care system, Jon Carlson will explore how adversity and nurture are both necessary to cultivate resilience and grit. As participants reflect on their own formative experiences, we will also consider how we accompany families and children in our churches who are living through atypical experiences.

Currents of unease and change are swirling in today’s church and society, and it can be hard to find a framework or safe place for engaging one another in conversation. Bringing all ages together in worship and conversation around topics that matter is the vision behind Shine’s new thematic, digital, undated curriculum, Current. Join Shine staff in conversation and learning about how you can use this new curriculum to lead your church with hope in the wilderness of these times.

For the past year, Central Plains Mennonite Conference has worked at engaging visual artists to help us sharpen our collective imaginative muscles. Michelle Hofer is a visual artist from Freeman, SD, who has been integral in this initiative. In this session, learn about Central Plains efforts to increase the use of the arts in our publications and gatherings, explore some of Michelle Hofer’s Scripture-based work, and experience Michelle’s practice of Visio Divina (visuals to open and engage the eyes of the heart while contemplating the Scriptures).

After a brief outline of various ways we share our faith tradition, the facilitator will introduce a method of sharing faith in the context of worship. Participants will share what has worked and what has not in their attempts to share tenets of faith. We will compare the methods, settings, and goals of our various attempts at Christian education and faith formation.

This panel will give voice to leaders from South America, Europe, and the U.S. They will tell their stories of faith and resilience in the face of personal loss and community suffering during the pandemic. Karen Sethuraman of SoulSpace in Belfast will share about her journey as a community chaplain, testifying to hope in a setting of renewed sectarian conflict and Covid. Sharon Norton and Linda Shelly, regional administrators for Mennonite Mission Network, will join the panel, sharing the practices that have helped them accompany global leaders during Covid, as well as practice their own well-being in the wilderness. Participants can respond to these and other questions–What can we learn from global Anabaptist leaders that will help us in our journeys in the U.S.? What encouragement do you have to offer global leaders out of your own experience? What has sparked your curiosity and creativity as a result of this workshop?

Katerina Friesen and Wendy Janzen will share stories and practices from Wild Church and Forest Church communities where they pastor in the United States and Canada, respectively. This workshop will explore the theme of wilderness as a geographical place of transformation, where God invites us as church communities into a sacred connection with land and water. Participants will be invited to brainstorm and imagine together ways their communities might be more deeply immersed into love for their places as we face the ecological crisis with active hope.

For many faith formation leaders, the pandemic uprooted their programming and hurried to transition activities online or stopped offering programming all together. Many yearned for resources to help their children, youth, and families find moments of peace and well-being in the midst of upheaval and uncertainty. In the summer of 2020 seven faith formation leaders gathered regularly online to share their struggles and success as they made their way through the wilderness. Through that process, they birthed the Pause: Pray, Breathe, Play card deck. This workshop will introduce attendees to the Pause: Pray, Breathe, Play resource and explore how it can be used in a variety of contexts. There will be the opportunity for participants to share resources they have found useful and dream about the future of faith formation.

Those of us of faith, both ordained and lay, are navigating new waters in both their public ministries and in their intimate abiding with congregants, their leadership and staff, and also the wider world. In times of turbulence the impulse can be to either lead with an authoritarian hand or to be passively subject to prevailing forces brought about not by the pandemic but also in the evolving ways we relate to those we serve. As Anabaptists, however, we must look to a third way — to seek to become a soft yet sturdy and a relentlessly reliable, yet supportive and resilient presence in the lives of the people we serve, as well to those outside our immediate community’s walls. This workshop will speak to Hesed: what it is, why it is necessary to cultivate and model this attribute, and how important it is to make our communities full of Hesed Hearts.

As society continues to increase in technology and virtual space, we need to help youth navigate those spaces in a way that reflects the life of Jesus. Social media deeply affects the self-image of youth and as leaders, we need to remind them of their identity as a child of God. Likewise, during the pandemic, racial injustice was highlighted in new ways. As a church, how are we helping youth engage in the work of racial justice in a way that reflects living a life in Jesus?

The Mosaic Mennonite Youth Formation Team includes: Jaye Lindo, Brooke Martin, Hendy Matahelemual, Michelle Ramirez, & Danilo Sanchez

The Wounded Healer workshop introduces participants to key concepts related to trauma awareness, resilience-building, and ancient/contemporary spiritual practices.