The FTE Guide to Discernment Retreats

The FTE Guide to

DISCERNMENT RETREATS

The FTE Guide to

DISCERNMENT RETREATS

contents INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................ 4

How to Use This Guide ....................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 PREPARATIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS......................................................................10

A Vision for Success: Goals, Evaluation, and Ongoing Improvement.................................10

Insights: Young Adults and Vocational Discernment................................................................. 12

Waiting in Complexity by Emily McGinley................................................................................ 12

What Really is a “Pastor” These Days........................................................................................... 15

Working Definitions of Call, Purpose, Vocation, and Pastoral Leadership........................ 15

Who Comes and Why? ...................................................................................................................... 18

FTE Project Team Darlene Hutto Director of Strategic Partnerships for Leadership Networks dhutto@fteleaders.org Dori Baker Senior Fellow for Research and Learning dbaker@fteleaders.org Callid Keefe-Perry Project Consultant Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) 160 Clairemont Avenue, Suite 300 Decatur, GA 30030 www.fteleaders.org

The Art of a Careful Invitation.................................................................................................... 18

Nominations.................................................................................................................................... 18

Applications..................................................................................................................................... 18

Insights: The Nuances of Welcoming Diversities......................................................................20

Designing for CARE .......................................................................................................................... 21

Create Hospitable Space ................................................................................................................ 21

Ask Self-Awakening Questions ................................................................................................... 22

Reflect Theologically Together ...................................................................................................... 22

Leadership Team.............................................................................................................................19

Enact the Next Most Faithful Step ............................................................................................ 23

Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Ann Marie Do.................................................................................. 23

Insights: Vocational Discernment: The CARE Practices ........................................................ 25

Sacredness Comes With Us by David Shinn ............................................................................. 25

Creating a Way Where There is No Way by Jocelyn A. Sideco .............................................. 28

A Sense of Memory and Wholeness Embodied ......................................................................... 28

Marginalized Identities at the Center ........................................................................................ 28

New Narrative Untethered to Institution, but Boldly Following Jesus ................................. 29

Convening Across Difference.........................................................................................................30

The Story of the L.A. Retreat ........................................................................................................ 32

Insights: There is No Perfect Retreat........................................................................................... 74

Even If in a Whisper by Teresa Delgado ...................................................................................... 33

Building Blocks................................................................................................................................... 74

Women Ministers: A Diverse and Mighty Throng by Ashley Easter................................... 36

Threading........................................................................................................................................ 74

Insights: On Scheduling................................................................................................................... 38

Reflection in Small Groups.......................................................................................................... 75

How to Pray on the Street Level by Tyler Sit............................................................................ 38

Leading with Song........................................................................................................................ 75

The Urgency of Creating Accessible Faith Spaces by Zoie Sheets.................................... 40

Theatre of the Oppressed.............................................................................................................. 75

Insights: Venue Selection Decisions...............................................................................................41

Non-Verbal Prayer Practices........................................................................................................ 76

Trauma-Informed Retreat Design by Callid Keefe-Perry......................................................43

Journaling....................................................................................................................................... 77

CHAPTER 2 PRACTICES THAT SUPPORT VOCATIONAL DISCERNMENT...........................46

Embodiment Practices................................................................................................................... 76

Personal Reflection Time............................................................................................................... 77

Curating Inclusive and Equitable Space by Alicia Crosby..................................................... 78

Insights: Ten Principles for Exploring Vocation........................................................................ 47

FTE Discernment Retreat Practices............................................................................................48

CHAPTER 4 AFTER THE RETREAT ENDS........................................................................................ 81

The Clearness Committee.............................................................................................................48

The “Next Most Faithful Step”..................................................................................................... 82

Spiritual Direction.........................................................................................................................48

Mentoring for Discernment by Lawrence Whitney.................................................................. 83

Calling Forth the Culturally Specific Muse..............................................................................49

Learning the “Tunes Written in Our Flesh” by J.H. Hill, Jr.................................................86

Theology at Sunset........................................................................................................................50

Discernment Cafe and Theatre of Discernment........................................................................50

Discernment Through Group Spiritual Direction by Maggie Klaers................................. 88

Holy Listening................................................................................................................................ 52

CHAPTER 5 EVALUATION, FAILURE, AND LEARNING.............................................................. 92

Vocational Autobiography............................................................................................................ 52

This Work is Valuable to Young Adults......................................................................................... 92

A Common Desire............................................................................................................................. 93

What “Ministry” Means...................................................................................................................94

Ritual............................................................................................................................................... 53 Worship............................................................................................................................................54

Chat and Chew.............................................................................................................................. 55

Prototyping New Practices........................................................................................................... 56

Holding Tension................................................................................................................................. 95

Wading in the Water: The Role of Ritual in Spiritual Discernment

by Melva L. Sampson....................................................................................................................... 59

What We Have Learned and Where We Are Headed................................................................96

Insights: Building a Portfolio of Failure...................................................................................... 97

“Are You With Me?” Preaching a Relevant Word to Digital Followers

by Kit Novotny.................................................................................................................................. 60

On Christian Contemplative Life and Practice by Dan Wolpert.......................................... 63

Got Body? by Lakisha Lockhart.................................................................................................... 65

CHAPTER 3 FACILITATION TECHNIQUES AND SKILLS.............................................................69

Framing the Time..............................................................................................................................69

APPENDIX OF RESOURCES................................................................................................................99

Appendix A: Documents and Files...............................................................................................99

Appendix B: What We Learned from Evaluation.....................................................................99

Appendix C: Discernment Retreat Checklist........................................................................... 103

GUIDE OF CONTRIBUTORS............................................................................................................... 107

welcome W

e have been planning for this moment for months.

Now it arrives.

Seventy-three young adults pour out of buses into a cozy lodge at a retreat center in the mountains east of Los Angeles. We greet them at the door. In a matter of hours, these strangers will become friends. They will see each other into existence, open their lives to one another, and hear one another’s deep longings.

When they leave, most of them will have named a next most faithful step to continue discerning how they will live out meaning and purpose in their lives. They may also leave with something they did not even know they needed: a cohort of friends, peers, and mentors whose evolving calls echo and support one another.

This vignette describes a Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) Discernment Retreat—a weekend set aside for people between the ages of 18 and 35 to discern that to which God is calling them. Over the past five years, FTE has gathered more than 600 young adults for 12 retreats specifically designed to help them discern their next steps as faithful people who want to make a difference in the world.

This guide invites you to take on the work of hosting young people for discernment.

Some of the young people we hosted went on to seminary to prepare to be pastoral leaders; others discerned a call to continue leading in faith communities, while pursuing other careers. Whatever their next steps, we count it a success when a young person gets clearer on who they are, how they are gifted, and how God might want to use their gifts in the world. The young people we accompany are doing the work of theology—they are making meaning out of the raw materials of life.

In this guide, we introduce the practices, people, and principles that result in a robust discernment retreat, inviting you to adapt them to your context. Your retreat

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THE FTE GUIDE TO DISCERNMENT RETREATS

WELCOME

may be rich with young leaders who imagine themselves as pastors, following the path of pastors before them. They may be creating radically new ways of serving the church. Or they may simply be asking big questions about their lives. They may not identify with organized religion at all, but nonetheless articulate spiritual longings or already provide “care for souls” among their peers.

Discernment retreats can happen through campus ministries, congregations, leadership programs, volunteer service groups, or intentional communities—anywhere young adults hunger for meaning and purpose. We believe the Christian faith stewards special gifts for this work, and we can share these gifts with a wider culture hungry for meaning and purpose.

The young people we accompany are doing the work of theology— they are making meaning out of the raw materials of life.

We share our practices and theological groundings, as well as ways to provide ongoing support around vocational discernment after the retreat is over. Along the way, we introduce you to a diverse network of pastoral leaders, community organizers, artists, spiritual directors, and theologians who join us in this work.

We’ve invited these partners to add their voices and to bring the best of their particular religious traditions and cultures to the mysterious and joyful task of helping young people uncover their gifts and talents. We’ve also included a checklist in the Appendix to serve as a tool you can adapt to help you to plan and develop a discernment retreat.

Creative and courageous young leaders bring the promise of hope, healing, and compassion to faith communities and to a world in need. But often they do not see the church as a viable source of engagement. Perhaps the intentional act of coming alongside young people who want to make a difference in the world can create lifelines of connection between congregations in decline and something new that is longing to be born.

Our own lives and vocations have been deeply graced by this intentional exploration of God’s call. We approach it by “taking off our shoes,” for we know

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we are entering holy ground. We invite you, too, to take off your shoes, prepare to walk alongside young people on holy ground, and join in a culture-shifting movement of mentors, leaders, and faith communities engaging in this lifeaffirming work.

The Rev. Darlene Hutto Director of Strategic Initiatives for Leadership Networks Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) The Rev. Dr. Dori Baker Senior Fellow of Research and Learning Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE)

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THE FTE GUIDE TO DISCERNMENT RETREATS

WELCOME

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THE FTE GUIDE TO DISCERNMENT RETREATS | EDITORS NOTE

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intro EDITOR'S NOTE

How to Use This Guide

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his guide lays out the core methods and assumptions that shape the heart of FTE’s work with young adults.

This is not the one definitive way to support young adults in vocational discernment; it is simply FTE’s collected wisdom. We share principles that inform the design and implementation of our retreats, as well as our learnings. We hope you will adapt them to meet the needs of your context and community.

This guide can be read sequentially or piece-by-piece. Look first at the Table of Contents and see what captures your attention. If the words of one of our contributors strikes a chord with you, reach out through the contact information you’ll find at the end of the guide. They’d love to connect with you. The authors are all people who have attended or served on a leadership team for one or more of FTE’s retreats.

We hope this guide empowers you to engage young adults to consider—and act upon—how God is calling them into the world.

Can you imagine hosting a discernment retreat in your area? Can you help organize one with regional partners? Are there specific practices you might want to experiment with in your organization or program? Are you reminded of practices, images, authors, or stories from your life or community that could be put to good use for vocational discovery?

Whatever you decide to do, we are grateful for your interest in the vocational journey of young adults. Your support of their discernment is a vital part of the work of God’s church in transforming communities and the world.

Callid Keefe-Perry Project Consultant

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chapter 1 Preparations & Assumptions

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his chapter shares the guidelines we keep before us while planning a retreat.

You’ll learn about concrete things to do before a discernment retreat begins.

You’ll also find perspectives on the ways you might better serve and support young adults. Consider what might be useful to you and your context. Is there something here that you want to share with your team? Is there a topic or speaker you've never considered before, but now want to include?

A Vision for Success: Goals, Evaluation, and Ongoing Improvement Before designing a retreat, set a vision for it, name your goals, and identify ways that the retreat can impact participants’ lives. Hopefully, the time set apart for reflection and building relationships will deliver resources that are helpful into the future.

By the end of a Discernment Retreat, FTE seeks for its participants to have:

»»Reflected on key vocational questions within a diverse community of peers and practitioners, exploring their sense of purpose, passion, and calling in light of their faith;

»»Named key vocational questions they are challenged by; and »»Gained practical tools from Christian ministry and theology for their ongoing vocational discernment.

Achieving these goals depends on three essential ingredients:

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Surrounding young adults with other seekers. We create a diverse community of peers who can identify key vocational questions and explore together their sense of purpose, passion, and call in light of their faith. This mitigates against the sense of isolation that young Christian leaders often feel, and it gives them access to an ongoing peer-learning cohort.

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Involving pastoral leaders who are five to 10 years into their ministries. We engage leaders who are alive in their calls and remain excited about the ways God is using their gifts. Hearing them enlarges the imagination of young adults about potential pathways into ministry and the types of ministry they can pursue. It also creates rich networks for future mentors, internships, and practical help in determining next steps.

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Applying practical tools from Christian ministry and theology to young people’s ongoing exploration of ministry. This expands their repertoire for thinking theologically about their gifts, identity, and purpose.

Encourage young adults to experience other contexts while staying grounded in their own—expanding the genre of vocational reflection with images, stories, and practices that reflect the diversity of human experience.

Well-defined goals direct decisions about how a retreat is designed—from whom to invite to creating the detailed agenda. Begin planning with pre-retreat phone calls to better prepare the leadership team for the diversity of young adults who will attend the gathering. Coach retreat leaders to leave their lectures behind in favor of more interactive teaching strategies. Most importantly, perhaps, encourage leaders to lean into young adult preferences for multisensory experiences, engaging in practices of worship, teaching, and community formation that integrate mind, body, and spirit.

Goals also form the basis of a written evaluation to measure the retreat’s impact.

Save 30 minutes at the end of each retreat for participants to complete a detailed evaluation of their experience. Send the evaluation form out via email while everyone is still present and ask them to complete it on-site. Based on these evaluations, you will learn what worked and what didn’t, allowing you to make improvements. These adjustments may relate to the length of the retreat, the kinds of spaces created for conversation, or gaps in the content of the retreat.1 1 Our learnings from an external evaluator who surveyed and conducted follow up interviews with past participants are woven throughout this guide. See Appendix B for additional learnings from evaluation.

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Insights Young Adults and Vocational Discernment

There’s the queer black woman who grew up in an emotionally and physically unsafe household where faith values stood in tension with her sexual orientation and gender performance. Her unsuccessful attempts to attend a four-year university eventually landed her a job working in the business office of a taxi leasing company. As she grew, and as her faith evolved, she found a new curiosity, guided by the Spirit, that has led to an exploration of filmmaking and storytelling.

In particular, she has interviewed and collected the stories of queer women of color whose faith commitments have shaped the Chicago church landscape.

• Young adults between the ages of 18 and 35 are particularly ripe for digging into the traditions that formed them to question, wonder, and imagine how God wants to work in their lives.

• Young adults are active agents in creating their own futures, and their agency expands in the midst of multiple kinds of diversities.

• Young adults best discover their passions amid peers and role models who embody many diverse images of how to make a difference in the world.

There’s the rapper whose work has led to a grant to fund an all-female hip-hop album. In spite of this recognition, her father says that she’s approaching her work all wrong. He insists that she should focus on building celebrity and fame, rather than improving her craft and amplifying under-promoted voices.

• Young adults—like all of us—store joy and pain in their physical bodies.

Therefore, retreats should emphasize practices that invite the body’s ways of knowing.

Waiting in Complexity

BY E M ILY M CG IN LE Y, EX P LO RATIO N LAB LEAD ER

Conversations about faith, family, and vocation are on constant rotation in my ministry at Urban Village Church (Hyde Park-Woodlawn, Illinois). The texture is different, but the questions are, remarkably, the same: “What is the right path to take? How do I navigate the expectations of my family and the complications of life? What ways should my faith inform my next steps?”

These questions come up in various forms from young adults whose lives are following tremendously diverse trajectories.

There’s the young white woman from a wealthy suburb who grew up nominally attending a tall steeple church in downtown Chicago. The daughter of successful surgeons who came to a deeper sense of faith in college. She is working to reconcile the family values of high achievement and pursuit of privilege with little regard for the transiency which this all demands. Having been accepted to the top five law schools in the country, she grappled with the growing understanding that deepening one’s faith and finding rootedness can force a choice between elite status and building authentic community.

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And there are others. The PhD student who grapples with the shrinking landscape of theological education. The queer-identifying artist who simultaneously continues to heal from an anti-gay religious space while making sense of a call to ministry among creatives in the fashion world. The music-loving worship leader whose multigenerational household and economically struggling family complicates a path through graduate school that would allow him to pursue his passion for exposing underserved youth to the arts. The list goes on and on—but the questions are the same.

As I have journeyed with young adults through these transitional seasons and complex questions, I am honored to stand with them at moments of life that will almost always be looked back upon as a turning point. And, while it would be easy to get caught up in the surface-level questions, the underlying pastoral task is focusing on the question, “In what ways should my faith inform my next steps?”

With this question, we are reminded of the ways that the gospel calls us to differentiate ourselves from the norms and values we’ve been taught to embrace—to be, as Jesus prayed, in the world but not of the world.

What are the biblical models and stories that help you navigate complex and intersectional questions of faith and vocation? Are you David—facing the

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“Goliaths” of bureaucratic academic or financial application processes for which your family or social location never prepared you? Or, perhaps, you are Priscilla, wealthy and gifted, finding your way among a faith and value set that is foreign to what you’d been enculturated to value, and drawn to the depth of what a community of faith offers. Or you might be the Ethiopian eunuch whose identity has no ready model in existing faith communities, but the Spirit calls you nonetheless.

Working Definitions of Call, Purpose, Vocation, and Pastoral Leadership

What is the spiritual negotiation that must take place as you discern whether the next most faithful step is to pursue the career you are called to or the people you are called to? Are they the same? Where do you draw the courage that it takes to stand firm in your commitments, over and against the disappointment of family or professional repercussions you might face by not choosing to make the most “obvious” choice of ascending in rank and privilege? What does it mean to follow Jesus in a culture that elevates hyper-capitalistic values and upward mobility above the soul work of purpose and people? How do you discern what it means to “take up the cross” in your particular set of intersectional realities? What makes for the flourishing life for which we were all created?

Our working definitions of purpose, call, and vocation are:

More than anything, what they need in a pastor is someone to sit with them in the complexity.

These are the kinds of questions and conversations that shape and inform many of the anxieties that I have observed in young adults as they grapple with questions of vocation and faith. More than anything, what they need in a pastor is someone to sit with them in the complexity. They need someone to offer biblical models and theological frameworks that don’t just answer the presenting question but tap a much deeper dilemma.

What they need most of all are resources that equip them for the process of faithful and courageous decision making and the assurance that—no matter which path they walk down—they are still loved by God and belong to the family of God. They need to know that whoever they become or whatever they go on to do, they need not go alone.

In everyday conversation and within Christian tradition, the words “call,” “purpose,” and “vocation” are often used interchangeably. That’s okay, but it can also be helpful to name some distinctions.

»»Purpose is the telos to which a life aims. Purpose is the answer to the question, “Why am I here? Toward what end is my life pointing?”

»»Call is the episodic, time-bound expression of purpose as it bubbles up over the course of a lifetime.

»»Vocation is the long arc of a life spent searching for purpose and acting out call, and it applies to individuals and to collectives. Discerning one’s next steps toward a life of meaning and purpose is the ongoing work of vocation.2

What Really is a “Pastor” These Days?

We frequently encounter pastors who are working as farmers, baristas, brewers, artists, activists, social workers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, blending their gifts and talents with the building of Christian community. This causes us to keep asking, “What really is a ‘pastor’ these days?” The image and role of pastors is undergoing rapid change. Multiple hybrid images are blooming. In many communities, young pastors may follow a long tradition of “tent-making,” which refers to the paid work done by Christian leaders to support their unpaid work for the church. We use the following working definition of a pastoral leader in an attempt to name continuity between the historical role of pastors and the many pathways that are emerging to meet contemporary needs.

We see a pastoral leader as one who:

»»Nurtures Christian community in one of its many forms (online, in hyperlocal niche communities, and in traditional or new forms of church).

2 Stephen Lewis, Matthew Wesley Williams, and Dori Baker, Another Way: Living and Leading Change by Design (St. Louis: Chalice Press) Forthcoming, 2019.

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»»Creatively engages and interprets the Christian story and its symbols (through music, art, ritual, preaching, and education).

»»Helps others explore ways to live out their Christian call in the world. »»Embodies a priestly or prophetic way of being that holds paradox and tension, and creates a calm, non-anxious presence in the most harrowing of circumstances.

When working with young people specifically called into roles of leadership within the church, we ask them to consider: “Which of these roles appeal to you? Which ones are distasteful? What’s missing from this list that seems important for the church to remain a visible and viable presence in the world?”

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Who Comes to the Retreat and Why? the art of a careful invitation

When FTE gathers young adults for discernment, our baseline assumption is that the greater the diversity in the room, the more we are able to broaden young people’s imaginations about:

»»What pastoral leaders look like, »»What the church might become with their leadership, and »»How they might use their call to serve the church through their unique gifts.

We practice the art of a careful invitation, which includes a nomination process, an application, selection of the leadership team, and tending to the nuances of welcoming diversity. nominations

Long before a retreat is announced, FTE is tending to relationships with people who are in close proximity to diverse young leaders. We look beyond “the usual suspects” to gain access to wider circles of young adults. We send an email to our partners, asking them to recommend young adults who have gifts for leadership, are already leading in their communities, or who desire to make a difference in the world through their faith. Once the nomination is received, we send the nominee an application.

leadership team

An ideal discernment retreat leadership team includes small group leaders, exploration lab leaders, spiritual directors, and a resident theologian. We gather the leadership team to meet each other and pray together prior to the beginning of the retreat. Then we gather each evening after the programming has ended to debrief the day, report any concerns, and enjoy each other’s company.

Small group facilitators are pastoral leaders who are under age 40 and who currently serve as leaders in faith communities. We select leaders who are just a few vocational steps ahead of our participants. They may be fresh out of seminary, they are alive in their call, and they are excited about the ways they are blending work, play, purpose, and passion. They are also able to speak with appropriate vulnerability about their struggles and challenges.

Exploration labs are workshops re-invented. Leaders are people with specific skill sets who are doing ministry in compelling and innovative ways.

We’ve learned that the act of being nominated becomes a significant marker in the life of a young adult. It indicates that someone has noticed and named their gifts, perhaps for the first time.

Spiritual directors come from multiple Christian traditions and are trained to use practices such as non-judgmental listening to accompany groups and individuals along their spiritual journeys.

applications

Resident theologians are thought leaders who provide a central theme around vocation.

Immediately following nomination by a pastoral leader or other adult, FTE asks young adults to complete an application to attend the retreat. This application asks them to articulate their journey, their questions, and their reasons for wanting to attend a discernment retreat. Often, young applicants are not quite sure about any of this; it is sometimes all quite new to them. They may have experienced

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a youth retreat, leadership academy, or a church summer camp, but they may be brand new to these kinds of experiences. The application gives us a chance to assess their readiness and to group them based on their capacity to reflect theologically on questions about meaning, purpose, and call. We seek to identify particular needs that our retreat cohort group reflects, including specific areas of interest, past experience, or trauma that we will want to address with effective resources. A sample application is included in the Appendix A.

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Criteria for all of our leaders is that they are able to decenter solo expertise.

This means avoiding the single talking head in favor of leaders who model the conviction that everyone carries a portion of wisdom that needs to be shared.

Our facilitation practices engage interactive learning that speaks to a diverse

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Insights context. In advance of the retreat, FTE hosts a conference call with the retreat leadership team to remind them of the essential ingredients of a successful interactive learning event. We also offer resources to help them with preparation and presentation. During the retreat, the leadership team collaborates in adjusting the design to reflect emerging needs.

The Nuances of Welcoming Diversities For us the word “diversity” means all kinds of diversity. Carefully consider how your group will reflect these categories: • Geographic • Racial/Ethnic

Designing for CARE

• Theological • Denominational

Underlying the design of our retreats is a set of core practices that we know by heart and use almost intuitively. We use the acronym CARE to describe them:

• Gender Expression/Sexual Orientation • Ideas About What Ministry Can Look Like

Create hospitable space

Convening wide diversities of Christians can present challenges. We often have in the room Christians from every imaginable denomination and nondenominational setting in North America. This means participants might belong to a church that falls on opposite ends of the spectrum regarding LGBTQIA inclusion and ordination. One person might be a Pentecostal who regularly experiences speaking in tongues, while another person is altogether unfamiliar with that practice. We lean into this diversity with care through our Covenants of Presence. We share the covenants with participants before they arrive. We re-visit them during the small group meetings and in moments when people need help holding the tension of conflict or disagreement. The leadership team reflects the diversity of the participants, and we encourage participants to seek out elders when questions arise.3 We welcome the ways that cultural differences inform how young adults choose to participate.

Ask self-awakening questions Reflect theologically together Enact the next most faithful step create hospitable space

As we stated above, our retreats begin with a careful invitation.4 We ask partners to nominate young adults in whom they notice gifts and grace for ministry and leadership. In other contexts, it may mean inviting young people who are in the midst of a search for meaning and purpose, or who are nearing a marker of transition, such as the end of a gap year. Keep in mind that young people who desire to make meaning of their lives through faith show up in multiple spaces. Many are caring for their families, working more than one job to support themselves, are in and out of college, or have never had access to college.

While planning, give careful thought to the choice of your retreat space. Include considerations such as natural light, easy access to the outdoors, healthy dietary options, and seating areas that are both accessible and welcoming to young adult bodies. When we convene, we introduce the leadership team and establish the covenants we use to hold “brave space” for hard conversations.5 We open with a carefully framed introduction that addresses the purpose and goals of the retreat See the "Invitation and Application" in Appendix A.

4

See the “Covenants of Presence” in Appendix A.

3

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See the “Covenants of Presence” in Appendix A. See also Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens, The Art of Effective Facilitation in From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice, ed. Lisa M. Landreman (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2013).

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and names the diversities present as a reflection of God’s image. People don’t walk in ready to divulge their deep desires to strangers, so we engage in an embodied activity or two to warm up the room, giving folks an experience of playing together and experiencing delight in one another’s presence. All of this is part of creating a space that is welcoming, lets people know what to expect, and how to show up for each other. ask self-awakening questions

We strive to help people acknowledge and honor their inner teacher. We introduce self-awakening questions by sharing excerpts of Howard Thurman’s “The Sound of the Genuine.”6 Then we use a technique called Holy Listening. After listening to the spoken reading from Thurman, we ask participants to break into groups of twos or threes and take turns listening to one another as they answer the prompt: “Tell a story about a time when you heard the ‘Sound of Your Genuine.’ ” With this self-awakening prompt, we create the expectation that participants will ask one another questions to which they cannot possibly know the answer, questions that hold no agenda, and questions that do not aim to “fix.” This creates a rhythm of Holy Listening and storytelling. Storytelling is a way of knowing that opens us to points of connection, allows for empathy, and deepens our understanding of where a person comes from, who they are, and how God is at work through all of us. This sets a tone for discernment as a deeply personal journey which is also deeply communal. We embed self-awakening questions in all elements of the retreat, including small groups, breakout sessions, and spiritual direction. These types of questions become habit forming; they emerge in informal conversations among peers over meals and free time. reflect theologically together

We work to democratize the doing of theology. In our opening plenary, our resident theologian frames the concept of vocation, creating a shared language that participants can try on, embrace, bump up against, or reject throughout our time together. The purpose is to get participants doing theology for themselves—which means drawing from their own understandings of who God is and acknowledging how scripture and tradition operate within systems of power and privilege. We urge 6 Howard Thurman, “The Sound of the Genuine,” Baccalaureate Address at Spelman College, May 4, 1980, edited by Jo Moore Stewart for The Spelman Messenger Vol. 96 No. 4 (Summer 1980), 4. The entire speech can be accessed here: www.uindy.edu/ eip/files/reflection4.pdf

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the lively practice of doing theology together as an ongoing conversation between ourselves, others, our varying social locations, and evolving perspectives. enact the next most faithful step

Vocational discernment can appear to be a daunting task. It can overwhelm even the most fearless sojourner. Naming a “next most faithful step” invites one to move from the liminal space of holding big questions to narrowing down on one direct, attainable action. This invites the retreat participant to name the “one thing I must do” next. It provides focus for ongoing reflection and action after the retreat.

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

BY ANN MARIE DO, YOUNG ADULT RETREAT PARTICIPANT

As a Filipino-Vietnamese woman, my culture claims God first, family second, and everything else after. While I was growing up, this was straightforward.

Until it wasn’t.

Like many young people, I took a break from the church during college, seeking to acquire spiritual fulfillment in other ways. Though I knew deep in my bones I could never stray too far away from faith, I understood that there were parts of myself not yet fully realized.

Listen to the sound of the genuine in you.

Tell your story or someone else will tell it for you.

That “until it wasn’t” moment came toward the end of college when I decided it was The church needs a time to face the tectonic plates of my reality: new narrative.

I was queer. My faith tradition would never approve, and so I knew that it was time for me to acknowledge the jagged edges of my tradition and to root myself in a radically different one.

I spent the better half of my first year in this new faith tradition in an internal struggle, trying to deconstruct the ways in which the church conditioned me to believe that there was something wrong with me. I examined the ways the

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Insights expectations of my culture perpetuated that narrative. When I wasn’t working or sojourning with my fellow interns, I was swallowed in reconciliation work within myself, trying to bridge the wrongfully created disconnects between my faith, my culture, and my queer identity.

I knew that the FTE retreat would be the place for me to start the bridge building that would explore my questions: “What does my queer faith look like? How does that shape my ministry?” I asked those questions, and the answers were: Listen to the sound of the genuine in you.

Tell your story or someone else will tell it for you.

The church needs a new narrative.

Vocational Discernment: The CARE Practices

1 Because vocation is communal, we must create hospitable space that

welcomes diverse people and perspectives. This is often countercultural.

It takes time and multiple iterations across the span of a retreat.

2

Because vocation is simultaneously an inner journey best done in conversation with the “sound of your genuine” and an outer journey involving conversation with others, we ask self-awakening questions, and we serve as holy listeners, one to another.

3 Because vocation is an ongoing conversation with God, we reflect

During this time in my conversation with God, and in the reflections of Spirit that I found in the people around me, I came to embrace that bridge building is my calling, and that my struggle is integral to my ministry, not separate from it.

“I want to deconstruct the cultural taboos around queer faith in my ethnic community.” The sound of the genuine in me could not have been sweeter.

It is this conviction that has stirred me to delve into the application process for my master’s degree in divinity. It is this faith that has urged me to claim my identity of intersectionality without apology, to tell the story about the corner I occupy, and to use that as the foundation to change my part in the church’s narrative.

theologically together on meaning and purpose—always keeping our theology rooted in the concrete reality of our lives.

4

Because vocation can seem overwhelming, we encourage retreat participants to engage in a design process that helps them enact their next most faithful steps. This breaks the big idea of “vocation” into the smaller calls that are bubbling up at this particular time and context. This helps convey a sense of an unfolding journey and the emerging understandings of God’s call on our lives.

Participants go forth having learned to continue creating spaces in which they ask self-awakening questions and reflect theologically with others in order to enact their next most faithful steps. These steps do not happen in chronological order. Rather, they are tools in the ongoing process of getting clear about how one’s gifts, identity, and purpose serve God in the world.

As Bishop Yvette Flunder praised at the beginning of the FTE retreat, “A great shaking is coming.”

Sacredness Comes With Us

BY DAVID SHINN, RETREAT SMALL GROUP LEADER

As an associate pastor for the pastoral care ministries of my church, my job is to invite and create a safe and welcoming space for my members to share their lives with me—and more importantly, for me to listen, receive, and treasure the stories they open their lives to reveal. During the FTE Discernment Retreat, I asked my small group gathering of young and brilliant adults to bring sacred objects from their own

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lives. Then, as we gathered for the very first time as strangers, we waited for one another to speak and fill our shared space with powerful and real stories.

They brought objects that were sacred to them. One young man pulled out his journal. As he lifted it up for the group to see, he made eye contact with each and every person in the room. Then he began his sacred story. The journal was a road map of past journeys and reflections. It was a depository of his thoughts, his experiences, and his hopes and dreams. The journal was a place of respite and prayer for him while he served the youth in his church. It was the threshold he could cross to meet God and to lift up his joys and concerns. With the practice of mutual invitation, he invited another person to share.

A young woman extended her arm and pointed to the watch she was wearing. Her voice was soft at the start. It wasn’t a fancy watch, she said, but it was a watch she always wore. It was a gift from her brother. The gift was more than just a watch. It was a timeless and enduring connection between the two siblings. Furthermore, the watch was there to remind her of being on time for the essential things in her life: family, church, school, and work. She explained to us that she came from humble family origins. To rise above the challenges in her life, she told us, she will need to excel. To excel, it is important for her to be on time.

As the young adults took their time to share, a miracle of transformation became visible to our naked eyes. Over the course of the hour, we experienced the formation of friendship and respect, felt the compassion in our hearts, and experienced the desire to enlarge our circle of understanding beyond ourselves.

These young theologians brought to the group the stories that have shaped and formed their lives. With the addition of the living stories of their peers, they would return to their communities with added dimensions to their own stories.

When Jesus called Simon Peter and Andrew to follow him by the shores of the Sea of Galilee in Matthew 4:18-22, they, too, were strangers meeting for the first time.

Peter’s sacred object was his fishing nets. Carrying the symbolic sacred object in his heart, Peter shared his whole self with Jesus and the other disciples for the next three years, and his life was transformed. After the death of Jesus, Peter—still confounded by Jesus’ death—returned once more to his sacred nets and fishing (John 21). There, he again went through a transformation with his sacred object,

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reconciled with Jesus for his betrayal of Christ, and became the leader of the new movement that turned (and is still turning) the world upside down.

The FTE discernment retreat I was part of provided myriad opportunities and learnings for the leaders of the future church. FTE prepares, sharpens, and (when they are ready), launches young adults into a future that will turn the world upside down for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Like Peter, the students carry their sacred objects and stories forward, ready to be changed, and to become agents of Christ for God and for God’s work in the world.

Creating a Way Where There is No Way

marginalized identities at the center

In my experience, many young adults interested in ministry present as LGBTQIA. As folks on the margins bring an intimate experience of Jesus from their own faith lives, they seem to clash with institutions that are not affirming. The very label of affirming seems to be both relieving and upsetting. Young adults—queer and straight and everything in between—need queer-identifying role models that resist the narrative of death and loneliness. And when a young adult can face, head on, their own sexual and gender identity in the light of a loving God, the shadows only fall in our human-made closets filled with rules, regulations, and processes. The gift of the LGBTQIA young adult is their own empathy with being excluded. This means that they find ways to include, include, include.

BY JOCELYN A. SIDECO, RETREAT SMALL GROUP LEADER AND SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR

a new narrative untethered to institutions, but boldly

Companioning young adults in the age of unreliable and discredited institutions has been for me a gift of deep wonder, awe, and hope. Here I share three moments from FTE discernment retreats. May they be an invitation to churches that are considering how to support both young adults and the future of their communities.

following jesus

a sense of memory and wholeness embodied

Where the world has mindfulness and yoga, the Christian experience has contemplation. Ignatian Spirituality was a gift I brought to young adults who wanted both stillness and movement. They wanted a space to live into the range of emotion from extreme guardedness, protection, and certitude to openness, companionship, and grace. Being rooted in a tradition of monastic mysticism offered a well of depth for young adults to move freely, righteously naming hypocrisy in their own lives, in their relationships, and in the institutions around them. The metaphor of a contemplative-in-action allowed young adults the agility to feel connected to a larger purpose and to a community that improves people’s lives.

Jesus’ parable in Luke 5:37-39 speaks to an age-old phenomenon that is being experienced in today’s churches: “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.

Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. [And] no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”

During the FTE retreat, I enjoyed lunch with a young woman who told me that she is responding to Jesus’ call to ministry, is now enrolled in seminary, and will figure out which denomination makes the most sense to her. I was initially taken aback by her apparent lack of loyalty and relationship in community. How can she explore her call, I thought, when she hasn’t been called by any one congregation?

To my surprise, she can! Her relationship with Jesus is so strong that she remains faithful in these matters with God. She also remains open to the community that can best offer her the space to live into God’s call and best navigate the tensions of following Christ as a community.

Young adults are offering us, the current followers of Jesus, a way that is new. Do we not perceive it?

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Convening Across Difference One of FTE’s biggest “Aha moments” in convening young adults for vocational discernment has been around the contextual nature of this work. We’ve always assumed that young adults from different cultural contexts would navigate the questions of purpose, call, identity, and gifts differently. But we repeatedly discovered that these very differences are the “stuff” through which they discern.

Not a by-product or an addition, cultural specificity must remain front and center. As soon as we begin to talk about vocation as if it exists in a space above culture, we are doing violence, usually defaulting to white, Eurocentric norms that presume to reflect everyone’s humanity. Instead, we strive to make our retreats spaces that explicitly frame the conversation in particular terms that allow for both “in-gathering” and “cross-gathering” to happen.

By in-gathering, we mean time for folks to connect to others who share some clear and common areas of overlap. This could mean providing a space for Catholic women to consider what ministry looks like in their contexts. It could be giving participants of color who are considering attending seminary the opportunity to talk with current seminarians of color. So much of what goes on at a retreat can be very new. That’s why it’s essential to have some time set aside where connection among people of similar backgrounds can happen.

This helps a participant feel grounded. Sometimes introverts might want a space to be apart from all the action and socialization, and the extroverts might want a space explicitly named for meeting new people.

Not a by-product or an addition, cultural specificity must remain front and center.

The use of in-gathering as a convening methodology allows those who come to the conversation to arrive on equal ground with their shared values and experiences.

We experimented with an in-gathering approach for the first time in Los Angeles, where we carefully invited a group of Latinx young adults and a leadership team reflecting this context. Through this experience, we learned about the differences between perception of call and exploration of vocation as experienced within Latinx contexts specific to the West Coast. We also learned that a critical mass of Latinx participants allowed more relevent and nuanced conversations to occur.

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Some young adults can see their identity and Engaging at the leadership gifts more clearly during crossintersections of their gathering, when they are outside of their everyday contexts. For example, at a recent gender, racial, and retreat, we gathered a table conversation for spiritual identities women called to ministry. Around the table allowed these women sat a Roman Catholic, a Southern Baptist, and a rare opportunity that a Missouri Synod Lutheran. Tears fell as these women expressed their unfolding identities would not have been within these traditions, which are places where present at a more women’s leadership is not fully affirmed, and homogenous gathering. models of ordained female clergy are either difficult to find or non-existent. Also around the table were women from United Methodist, Presbyterian (USA), United Church of Christ, and African Methodist Episcopal denominations—traditions which have been ordaining women for decades.

Engaging at the intersections of their gender, racial, and spiritual identities allowed these women a rare opportunity that would not have been present at a more homogenous gathering. Perhaps you can imagine other examples from your context where getting outside one’s normative experience might reveal broader vocational imagination or provide affirmation for someone’s leadership gifts in ways that could not happen at home.

The takeaway here is that "young adult" is not a monolithic category. Each of your retreat participants lives in an intersectional identity, some facets of which might not be evident. Plan for facilitation that meets the needs for a variety of learning styles and personality types. Make time for both in-gathering and cross-gathering, allowing for rich days of new connections, discoveries, and growth, as well as opportunities for quiet, reflection, and familiarity.

We have decided to “convene the convenable.” On rare occasions, a participant finds the theological diversity of our gatherings too difficult to navigate. If anyone finds that they are unable to share space with someone whose differing theology creates too much discomfort, we try to connect them with a leader who can support them right where they are. Once, a retreat participant chose to go home

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rather than be present in an LGBTQIA-affirming space. Far more often, we see people learning to hold space for different theologies, “turning to wonder” (a phrase from our Covenants of Presence) when challenged, and sometimes leaving with a new vision of how God can work through all people.

relationship. We learned that for some contexts the very act of survival is central to vocation.7 We heard the importance of overcoming struggles—such as the traumas that occur as a result of generational poverty—as an important element in fulfilling one’s purpose. The ability to hold our original design lightly—and the flexibility of our leadership team—proved paramount.

The Story of the L.A. Retreat During the course of a discernment retreat in Los Angeles, we found that some of our most valued retreat practices hold assumptions that are not true across all faith communities. For example, we assumed all young adult leaders easily emerge into their communities as leaders. But some communities require a process of vetting or explicit mentoring by an elder. We also assumed those same young adults have access to resources that can propel their aspirations and dreams, such as support for higher education or the ability to attend a far-away school.

Embedded within our design was a particular Rather than seeing privileging of exploration, without consideration for the ways that specific racial-ethnic them as the problem, communities function. Within the retreat itself, we turned to wonder we began to sense a dissonance. People weren’t about ourselves. showing up the way we expected; they seemed What are the places disoriented and withdrawn. Very few people spoke up during worship. Rather than seeing where our definitions, them as the problem, we turned to wonder practices, and about ourselves. What are the places where our assumptions don’t fit? definitions, practices, and assumptions don’t fit?

Checking in with our Latinx leadership, we were able to tease out the points of disconnection and correct our course within the design of the retreat. This proved essential. We leveraged the expertise of our Latinx leaders to translate meanings that ultimately became accessible to the audience we were hosting. For example, our participants felt that some of our implicit definitions of call were in conflict with the expectations set by their family and community’s hopes for economic mobility. As we allowed our assumptions to be challenged, we were able to receive images and stories of vocation that were present in the community. We heard about the importance of “la familia” and its emphasis on connection and

Even If in a Whisper

BY TERESA DELGADO, MADRINA-IN-RESIDENCE8

Listen more often to things than to beings Listen more often to things than to beings Tis' the ancestors' breath When the fire's voice is heard Tis' the ancestor's breath In the voice of the waters Those who have died have never, never left The dead have a pact with the living They are in the woman's breast They are in the wailing child They are with us in our homes They are with us in this crowd The dead have a pact with the living.9 Discernment is as much about making the space for listening as it is about making choices. In the mentoring circles of which I’ve been a part, I have been struck by the ways we have tended away from hearing the wisdom of our own past and histories—our ancestral wisdom—to figure out our next most faithful step. This song serves as a reminder that ancestral wisdom is available to us if we take a moment to listen to the whispers all around us. Still, our societal norms do not typically affirm the multiple ways of knowing and learning from the whispers, and this can create an internal conflict about whose voices can be trusted in the process of discernment.

Patrick Reyes, Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood., (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2016).

7

This role occurs in Latinx communities and refers to a guiding, maternal presence or godmother.

8

Sweet Honey in the Rock, Breaths: Live at Carnegie Hall, 1988

9

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This was made abundantly clear to me in a conversation I had with an FTE retreat participant, a Latina who was having difficulty finding an opening to enter into the faith conversation during the retreat experience. Her own journey had led her to a place where she incorporated many different strands of spirituality into her life; there wasn’t one particular faith tradition that could serve as a container to hold all the wisdom she valued. She could sense spirit energy. She prayed the rosary. She wore Buddhist prayer beads. She experienced a strong connection with the spirit world. And she was mindful of the concern about superficial appropriation of spiritual practices that were not her own. Still, she could not deny that something very powerful was happening when she took the time to listen to the whispers all around her, especially at times of tremendous anxiety.

In that moment, I was reminded of all the popular religious practices I had grown up thinking were part of Roman Catholicism but were really strands of indigenous tradition —African and Native American—that were so intimately woven into and no longer distinctly discernable from Catholicism. In this syncretistic, “both/and” reality of religious experience, what is the role of la curandera, el santero, la espiritista? Who are the saints but orishas and abuelas speaking through the fire and the water? What would it mean to have guidance from mentors who understand the pact between the dead and the living and can help distill the wisdom from these sources?

If we believe that God is a God of love, life and freedom, then our discernment of the whispers of ancestral wisdom will align with love, life, and freedom.

If we believe that God is a God of love, life and freedom, then our discernment of the whispers of ancestral wisdom will align with love, life, and freedom. And I shared the same with this young Latina searching for affirmation about the legitimacy of the spiritual wisdom she values. Anything that undermines the love, life, and freedom of your spirit, I told her, is perpetrating a fraud; anything that uplifts the love, life, and freedom of your spirit is a spirit of God. I’m not sure if she left the retreat with greater clarity about the discernment process, but I do know she appreciated the willingness to work through what felt

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to her like a cacophony of disjointed sounds. Perhaps that’s what we can do for and with each other: listen together for the sounds, even if in a whisper, emerging from the ancestral wisdom deposited in our souls and dare to be courageous enough to receive them together.

Women Ministers: A Diverse and Mighty Throng

were introverted and spoke with deliberate phrasing. Some worshiped in peaceful, calculated prayers, while others did so through joyous dancing and celebration.

I was encouraged to see this diverse group of female leaders proving to the young women (and men) present, that God may call anyone, and it is not required for a female minister to fit into a one-size-fits-all box.

God calls us knowing our personalities, styles, expressions, and personal forms of worship. We don’t have to replicate popular male preachers to fit in, nor do we have to attempt to look and sound just like the female pastors and preachers in mainstream Christianity.

BY ASHLEY EASTER, YOUNG ADULT RETREAT PARTICIPANT

The Lord announces the word, and the women who proclaim it are a mighty throng…

- Psalm 68:11 Though the battle for women’s equality and acceptance into leadership in the church is still being fought on many fronts, there is a generation of female leaders rising within the ranks of ministry.

I was able to witness a gathering of these diverse leading women at FTE’s Discernment Retreat in Minneapolis. They hailed from a wide variety of faith traditions, including Lutheran, Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, NonDenominational, and others. Truly these women are changing the world as we know it through their faithful steps into ministry across the theological spectrum.

We are together the mosaic image of God, and there is no need to attempt to copy others.

My experience with FTE led me to a fuller realization of what it can look like to be a woman and a leader in ministry. It solidified for me that who I am is just right.

God called me just the way I am, and I can use my distinct personality, style, and worship expressions for God’s glory; there is no need to change to meet others’ expectations for me.

What struck me even more than their denominational differences was the expression of diverse female leadership styles. With the prevalence of male church leaders and the scarcity of female church leaders in the branches of evangelical Christendom I call home, it can be difficult for a young woman to envision how she can embody female ministerial leadership.

We are together the mosaic image of God, and there is no need to attempt to copy others.

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The many female ministers at the FTE event each embraced their own personalities, their own styles of communication, their own expressions of self, and their own approaches to worship. Some wore traditional clerical collars, others wore flowing skirts and dresses, and still others wore a distinctly sharp, professional style. Some were outgoing and lively with their preaching; others

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Insights On Scheduling

suggestions of where to visit, a quick word on safety, and then they’re off.

Over the course of 12 discernment retreats, we’ve learned three rules about scheduling:

There’s wisdom in walking.

1

As feet touch pavement, they’re connecting with land that indigenous people walked centuries before, with communities that came and left, with a place where people lived out their dreams and mistakes and callings.

2

As the interns walk, they say a prayer over every person and place they encounter: “God’s peace be in this corner store; God’s peace be with the man sleeping on a bench; God’s peace be in this community garden.” In prayer walking, we try to trade our eyes for the way God sees the world.

A large portion of the young adults attending retreats stay up late at night socializing. Connecting with one another is a vital part of their retreat experience. That’s why we never plan programming to begin before 9 a.m.

Unstructured time is vital in order for participants to process their experiences. This is especially true for introverts, who can become overwhelmed with packed programming from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Leisurely shared meals with time to decompress afterwards helps, as does opening up the schedule so that individuals can organically connect with each other in unstructured ways.

3 However you structure the time, some participants will feel that the

schedule was too busy and others will feel that it was too light. There

is no“perfect” retreat. Provide enough opportunities to bring value to

participants’ personal discernment, and then make sure that

participants have time to reflect on and process their retreat experience.

Planting, however, is an entirely different endeavor. There are habits and best practices, but those are not guaranteed to hold water once you’re in the neighborhood. I had read about 50 books in preparation for church planting, only to realize that most of them were written for white, suburban contexts that do not reflect my neighborhood at all. The sterling guideposts that these books lay out do not match the streets I am walking.

How to Pray on the Street Level

BY TYLER SIT, EXPLORATION LAB AND SMALL GROUP LEADER

As a faith leader in church planting, I often host seminary and college interns at New City Church, the faith community I lead in Minneapolis. I like to infuse their time with practices designed to help them discern who they are and what their community might be calling forth in them. I offer the following reflection in hopes that it may be adapted for your context.

The first activity that I always give to new interns—before sharing the Google Drive, before setting goals, even before introducing them to the staff—is to go on a prayer walk. I give them a map with the outer limits of our neighborhood, some

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Since the goal is ultimately leadership formation, I want my interns to shift away from the mindset of, “My job is to complete tasks that are given to me.” Most of the interns are coming from environments where they are given a laid-out plan (like a syllabus) and told to complete things in order, and on time.

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In prayer walking, New City interns shift from, It wasn’t a list of tasks “My job is to complete tasks that are given to to be completed; it me” to, “My job is to facilitate a community in was a new world to be launching something that delights God.” And it all starts on the street level. We found that created. after enough walks, God starts to inspire an imagination: “What if we had murals where the gangs keep spray painting? What if these stressed out activists could find peace in worshipping?”

After my first walk in my neighborhood, I felt this kind of inspiration: “What if there was a church that focused on climate change?”

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Insights Venue Selection Decisions

But then I walked around my neighborhood a couple dozen times, talked with whoever would chat, and realized that the phrase “climate change” is too intimidating and ethereal for my neighbors.

There is no single perfect venue for hosting a discernment retreat, but here are some dynamics worth noting: • It is wise to get away from urban environments that provide too many attractive distractions. By selecting a venue that is a bit removed from access to nightlife, we encourage participants to focus on being present with each other and to minimize entertainment beyond the retreat.

I kept walking and listening, and after trying a few more iterations I realized that New City needed to focus on gentrification. That’s what everyone couldn’t stop talking about (interestingly, gentrification and climate change are related conversations).

Day after day, the neighborhood showed me what kind of community—and what kind of leader—they needed, and it was my job to midwife it into existence. It wasn’t a list of tasks to be completed; it was a new world to be created.

Ultimately, the leadership teaching in our head is only as valuable as our love for the neighbor down the street. A habit of prayer walking reminds us with each step how God is already moving in the neighborhood, and how we might pave the way for prayer walkers to come.

BY ZOIE SHEETS, YOUNG ADULT RETREAT PARTICIPANT

If I hadn’t been blessed with finding spaces and people that were willing to confront their ableism and learn quickly about how to form spaces that were accessible to my mind and body, I’m not sure where I’d be today. I’m not even sure I’d be a Christian.

I share the following perspective in the hope of helping other leaders address ableism in the spaces they create for young adult discernment.

Many of the places where I have found disability and accessibility conversations most lacking have been faith-based spaces. I’m blessed to find myself in heavily justice-oriented ministries, which speak of racial justice, LGBTQIA inclusion, and other ways to make this world better resemble our God’s radically-inclusive love.

Disability justice, however, is rarely mentioned. This is a vitally important problem for three core reasons.

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• We take care to choose facilities that are safe, clean and comfortable, without being too deluxe in ways that would raise ethical issues regarding materialism and economic disparity.

• We select venues that provide high-quality meals with vegetarian and vegan options as part of creating a hospitable environment. Likewise, we avoid plastic utensils, provide recycling, and choose venues that reduce the impact on the earth.

The Urgency of Creating Accessible Faith Spaces

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• Some spaces are more physically conducive to building relationships than others. Rooms in conference centers are sometimes set up for models of learning in which experts expound. We prefer venues that are more flexible in their room design, provide common areas with natural light, access to the outdoors (such as walking trails or pathways between buildings), access for those with disabilities, and informal gathering spaces. These elements help create the conditions for small conversations that warm participants for the work of discernment.

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First, we know that young people are rapidly leaving the church. It is often because they don’t feel fully recognized and valued. Disabled young people— including those with often-invisible chronic illness and mental illness—are no exception to this growing group of young people who are unwilling to tolerate exclusion and silencing, even when it is unintentional. People with disabilities make up 20 percent of America! This is a massive group of people to fail to recognize. For the church to begin growing again and truly represent the body of Christ, access must be a priority.

Second, the world is too dangerous for us to not continue pushing for justice.

We cannot achieve full justice of any kind without also including disability justice.

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Third, having accessible faith spaces that understand disability from a justice standpoint (rather than a compliance standpoint) matters simply because disabled people matter just as much as any other children of God. Knowing it’s important to create accessible faith spaces and knowing how to do so are two entirely different concepts. There’s no step-by-step guide to creating a fully accessible space, but there are a few important things to note.

For the church to begin growing again and truly represent the body of Christ, access must be a priority.

Accessibility does not just mean ramps. Ramp mentality is dangerous because it allows us to forget all disabilities beyond physical impairments, as well as the mental and spiritual experiences of those with physical impairments. In addition, it is important to ask disabled people what they need, but this should never cross the line into exploiting their labor. There is a tremendous amount to learn online and through disability organizations, and not all of the educating should be the burden of the disabled person. This applies to leadership, too. Educating about disability should not be the only leadership role offered to disabled young people. Finally, it is vital that you take the time to seek resources, reminding yourself that disabled people are the experts of their own experiences and needs.

Using effective resources—while also establishing a culture of feedback—can create space for disabled people to speak up, without placing the full burden of accommodation on them.

Trauma-Informed Retreat Design

BY CALLID KEEFE-PERRY, RESIDENT THEOLOGIAN

Most stress experienced in daily life is managed through familiar coping responses. Stress affects a person’s mood, cognition, and behavior, usually resulting in outcomes that deviate from the normal baselines of behavior for that person.

People will not necessarily have the same response to the same stress. Following this line of thinking, trauma can be understood as an instance where levels of stress overwhelm normal functioning. Such a traumatic instance could be acute, like a car accident or robbery, or could emerge from persistent and/or inescapable circumstances like spousal abuse or racial profiling.

The threat of harm from social dynamics can be just as traumatic as a violent physical event—and the repercussions can be profound, both psychologically and physiologically.

Research is beginning to confirm that the effects of trauma on the brain, emotions, and personality include the stressors of generational poverty, insecure citizenship, or repeated collisions with systemic structures of racism. These can have lasting traumatic effects.

Allowing for reflection upon painful experiences can inform one’s discernment, when held in a way that is positive and cares for the individual’s specific needs.

What does this mean for designing discernment retreats? It means that we should not assume that survivors of traumatic events—or circumstances —might be in the room; we should assume that they are in the room. A trauma-informed retreat leadership team creates a culture that can positively influence how facilitation and planned exercises unfold. It demonstrates a willingness to recognize how prevalent trauma is, including the ongoing struggle to survive it.

Until my faith spaces took these steps, I couldn’t relax and feel comfortable enough to hear God’s voice, to discern my next faithful steps, and to feel brave enough to walk toward the path I feel called to follow. If faith-related people hadn’t taken these steps, I wouldn’t trust that I, too, am made in the image of God. I’m so looking forward to the day when our churches, ministries, and other faith spaces—which can include, really, all spaces—are accessible to each mind and body created in the image of God.

For example, consider that the person who seems withdrawn, or who doesn't want to disclose some personal detail, might not be opting out because of mere 42

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preference. One of the effects that trauma can have is a warping of people's ability to relate to others. We’re especially aware that embodiment exercises, worship, and listening to stories about another person’s journey can awaken traumatic experiences. We certainly do not want to re-traumatize. And yet, we are aware that every part of one’s past can be a trail toward one’s future, shaping the ways that young adults will become healers, activists, or artists. Allowing for reflection upon painful experiences can inform one’s discernment, when held in a way that is positive and cares for the individual’s specific needs.

Trauma is a tough topic to address, but not addressing it does nothing to make it easier.

This should never be expressed as “armchair diagnosis.” It is inappropriate to guess as to whether or not someone is a survivor of trauma. It also isn’t as simple as making sure that there are trained clinicians, chaplains, and/or pastoral care givers solely dedicated to being available if retreat participants need to connect — though definitely do that, too.

A wholistic approach to trauma-informed care educates in advance, preparing your team in ways of facilitation that support the thriving of those living in the wake of trauma. This includes an intentional focus on the ways that trauma can influence the lives of participants. As Patrick Reyes notes, for some the vocational call isn't “calling us out of our present reality and into some divinely purposed and infinitely better future.” Vocation can also be God calling out for survival.10 The intent of the integration of knowledge about trauma is not to achieve a “trauma-free zone,” or to presume that such a thing is possible. Rather we must attempt to minimize re-traumatization. A trauma-informed approach to events will be one that simultaneously recognizes: 1) the ways in which an active acknowledgement of trauma can, and ought, to change many systems and practices, and, 2) that even when there is an earnest attempt to support a traumainformed culture, we will often make missteps and mistakes. Trauma is a tough topic to address, but not addressing it does nothing to make it easier. We owe it to ourselves and to those we serve to reckon with trauma's presence among us.11 Reyes, 2016

10

Adapted from Callid Keefe-Perry and Zachary Moon, “Courage in Chaos: The Importance of Trauma-informed Adult Religious Education,” Religious Education. Published Online. 10.1080/00344087.2018.1435989 Print Forthcoming v. 114 11

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chapter 2

Insights Ten Principles for Exploring Vocation FTE follows 10 core theological and pedagogical principles as it explores vocation with young people:

Practices That Support Vocational Discernment

1

W

Reflecting theologically is always experiential. It leans into the stories that shape us.

2 Reflecting theologically moves us from the head alone to the

hat moves a person to cry out, “There’s got to be a better way” or, “We can’t go on living like this?”

whole person.

3

Often the pain points in our lives and communities drive us to innovate new paths or to forge a different direction with our life’s work. It is often in the midst of heartbreak that God speaks to God’s people, creating a burning bush like the one that directed Moses back to the cries of his people in the city.

This chapter shares FTE principles and practices for creating space to identify and transform those burning bushes—be they spiritual mountaintop experiences or points of deep pain and trauma—into guides for discernment.12

Locating margins is a task of acknowledging social location; we must always ask “whose margins?”—explicitly naming privileges of gender, class, race, and sexual orientation.

4

A sense of community is essential in order to live into one’s purpose, vocation, and call. Therefore, nurturing community matters.

5

Discernment is a communal endeavor. We discern together to learn from one another’s wisdom. Sometimes others help us to see obstacles—and possibilities—we cannot see alone.

6 Theological exploration is generated in community for the sake of community.

7 Vocational clarity comes through the entirety of one’s life journey.

8 Decolonized engagement with scripture as a practice for

discernment means allowing our critical reflection and our reading

of the “text-in-context” to sometimes turn traditional understandings

upside-down. It sees them with a new lens and then acts accordingly.

9 Experimentation with alternative practices and pedagogies can

sometimes open up new avenues of exploration and sight.

10

The work of doing theology belongs to everyone.

Exodus 3:1–4:17

12

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introducing a culturally specific muse

FTE Discernment Retreat Practices the clearness committee

This is a disciplined contemplative practice stewarded by the Religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers. The steps of a Clearness Committee create and hold space for one “focus person” to explore a specific issue around which they are discerning. It begins with a time of centering silence, then moves into a time in which all conversation is governed by one rule: members are forbidden to speak to the focus person in any way except to ask honest, open questions. This discipline aims at giving the focus person greater access to their own truth.13 Our long-term research shows that Clearness Committees hold promise as one of a handful of traditional practices ripe for revisiting in light of contemporary needs.14 Facilitators for this practice can be found through the Center for Courage & Renewal. While many of FTE’s vocational discernment practices alternate from retreat to retreat, we always include a Clearness Committee, and we encourage participants to share this practice as they return to their own contexts.

Every religious tradition holds stories, images, and practices that focus on finding one’s purpose or hearing God’s affirmation. Introducing such pieces of poetry or prose as a theme for a retreat, a particular worship service, or a small group conversation can call forth a nuance of one’s emerging call. FTE frequently uses Howard Thurman’s “The Sound of the Genuine” because it invites the listener into a place of gentle, quiet, interior reflection.15 These words were spoken by Thurman at a commencement address at Spelman College in Atlanta, a historically Black women’s college. Thurman’s words provide a culturally specific muse that can invite others into wondering about the ways they are living into—or are perhaps disconnected from—the sound of their own genuine.

We encourage you to dig deeply into the treasure chest of your own traditions, taking a new look at favorite stories, hymns, or iconic images. Where do they point toward ways of giving voice to meaning and purpose? For example, United Methodist partners we once worked with lifted up John Wesley’s story about the moment when his heart was strangely warmed at the Aldersgate church, turning this well-known story into a prompt for young adults to reflect on their own Aldersgate experiences.

spiritual direction

FTE always provides the opportunity for participants to receive either one-onone or group spiritual direction. We invite trained spiritual directors to be part of the leadership team, and we provide a sign-up sheet for participants to reserve one-hour blocks of time with them during free time. We find that young people are extremely receptive to spiritual direction and are often encountering it for the first time. It is a structured opportunity for them to receive direct, compassionate attention and presence, something they may never receive in their everyday lives.

They leave a retreat knowing that spiritual directors are available in almost any community and often on a sliding-fee scale. They also might see training as a spiritual director as a path to take for their own ministry.

15

Parker Palmer, “The Clearness Committee: A Communal Approach to Discernment in Retreats.”

13 14

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Sometimes a culturally specific image creates a paradox. When held with care, a moment like this can open valuable learnings. At one retreat, our resident theologian used the image of a playground to evoke aspects of vocational discernment, assuming that most people hold positive connotations of playgrounds.

Later in a small group, a 21-year-old participant from the south side of Chicago shared through tears that playgrounds in his neighborhood were places of danger, gang warfare, and shootings. Making it to the age of 21 was, for him, a marker of survival. He spent much of his free time during the retreat weekend tossing fall leaves with children who lived at the retreat center. In this way, playfulness became a central metaphor for exploring his identity and purpose. Throughout the retreat weekend, with the right kind of support, he found a way to make good use of the theological image of play as a window into his own sense of meaning and purpose.

Thurman, 1980

Baker & Keefe Perry, “Clearness Committee Revisited: Gathering Young Adults for Communal Discernment.”

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theology at sunset

We prepare retreat participants to return home by “doing theology together” around the events and experiences of the time we have shared. As we do this, we describe the practice of “theology at sunset” used by some Christian communities in Latin America during the second half of the 20th century. In this context, campesinos worked with local priests to create more just living conditions for the poor. At sunset, they gathered to review their day in light of stories from the Judeo-Christian canon. We, likewise, reflect on our time together during the retreat as the creation of a temporary congregation, and we wonder, “Where has Often these theological God been present among us? Where did and scriptural scripture come alive before us? Where is connections allow God continuing to reveal God’s self to us people to imagine their in community? What ideas about God are shifting or changing for us?”16 Often these next most faithful steps. theological and scriptural connections allow people to imagine their next most faithful steps. discernment cafe and theatre of discernment

FTE uses two embodied communal practices to address two questions that young adults often face at the conclusion of our retreats. The first question is, “What’s next for me?” The second question is, “How do I move forward?” How do participants take what has opened for them during a two or three-day retreat back into their world in an actionable way?

A discernment retreat is not meant to simply be a spiritual high. It is meant to spur ongoing decision-making about one’s vocation. The Discernment Cafe invites peers and role models into a process of designing together “a next most faithful step” as people prepare to return home. In Discernment Cafe, we use the Pro-Action Cafe17 model, inviting people to host a table around a particular niche in ministry to which they may be called. The table host shares their idea, receiving input from others around the table. After 20 minutes, everyone except the host moves to another table, and the host further refines their idea among new

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16

Baker, Dori, The Barefoot Way: A Faith Guide for Youth,Young Adults, and the People Who Walk with Them.

17

More information about Pro-Action cafe, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sWHCLWYa8o

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conversation partners. In two final moves, the host names what they still need and reports out to the room how their idea has changed, grown, or shifted based on questions and insights of others.

In Theatre of Discernment, we adapt human statue technology from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed,18 inviting people to name a social ill or everyday issue that they experience as a “pain point.”

Participants who share similar interests join A discernment retreat up with others to reflect and create a living is not meant to simply statue that visualizes the reality. After the statue is formed, participants walk around, be a spiritual high. It is observing the pose being held by others. meant to spur ongoing Upon review of all the statues, participants decision-making about enter a guided, facilitated process that helps one’s vocation. them identify and sense the statues. We ask, “What are you feeling? What do you see?

What is your interpretation of the image being formed?”

The next stage of the practice invites participants to shift the statue in ways that promote healing within. This invites participants into a first-hand experience of stories that desire to be told. We’ve seen groups enact in deeply moving ways in response to police brutality, immigration policy, silencing of women’s voices, and marginalization of the mentally ill. This practice can create a lasting impact on ways that our participants experience and reflect on their areas of interest.

This multi-sensory approach is an effective tool, but it can also trigger experiences of trauma. We are learning to hold space for these feelings, knowing that they can be powerful guides toward finding one’s purpose. At the same time, we take care to remind people that they should never be pushed into an experience that does not feel safe, and we always provide non-shaming ways to opt out if necessary.

In leading these two practices, we’ve seen volunteers pop up to host sessions around ministries as varied as raising awareness around able-ism, creating an 18 Boal was a Brazilian activist and actor who developed the techniques to combine performance with an increase of political awareness and change. See Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).

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LGBTQIA-friendly campus ministry, and leveraging the arts for social movement building. We’ve seen concrete next steps emerge around God’s call to issues such as mass incarceration, immigration reform, food security, climate change, jobs for returning citizens, sex trafficking, mental health recovery, and child advocacy.

Next steps take the shape of building a mentored project, choosing to attend a skills-based conference, deciding to attend seminary, or finding a pastoral internship. These exercises provide a moment to envision and embody a “next most faithful step” that benefits from a roomful of potential connectors to a wide network of diverse people and resources. holy listening

Listening is an essential Christian practice: listening to scripture, listening for the Holy Spirit, listening to our neighbor, listening to the cries of the poor.

All of these forms of listening are “active.” They require something of us both in the moment of listening and in the next steps that emerge. And yet, how rare it is that we take the time to deeply listen. Douglas Steere writes, “To ‘listen’ another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.”19 Holy Listening invites us to slow down, take a look around, and create space between us to speak the truths of our lives out loud to one another. We are invited to listen to another person in the way we listen to scripture. We focus on the speaker, as the listener practices a disciplined posture of care, hospitality, relaxed awareness, and attentiveness—not responding, but silently holding the space for the other person to be truly heard. Holy Listening becomes the antithesis of the busyness of young adult lives. We usually use this practice during our opening session, giving triads the opportunity to listen to one another around a topic such as, “Tell a story about a time when you felt alive to God’s Spirit working in you.” vocational autobiography

We hold in high regard the vocational journeys of the leaders we bring into the room—both the young leaders just a few years into their ministries and the elders whose journeys stretch across decades. We create opportunities for them to weave their stories into the retreat, both as explicit teachings and informally over meals 19

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Steere, Douglas V. Gleanings: A Random Harvest, (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1986).

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and small table conversations. For example, one of our exploration lab leaders, Christopher Carter, tells the story of growing up as the grandson of Mississippi farmworkers who were poor and sometimes hungry. That experience is directly related to his call to become a United Methodist pastor and a practical theologian who focuses on food security. During his exploration lab, he shared his experience of writing a vacation Bible school curriculum focused on urban gardens and healthy eating for children in Compton, California.20 Sometimes what you need is people who can Sometimes what you testify to the unfolding of vocation out of the need is people who details of a human life. These glimpses of how one person navigated their life’s journey— can testify to the incorporating discovery, trauma, healing, and unfolding of vocation recovery as they find their purpose—can be out of the details of a extremely life-giving to a young person who is human life. confused about how God may want to work through them. That is why we select leadership team members not only for their skills, but for the stories they carry and are willing to share through their own vocational autobiography.21 ritual

We use symbols and ritual very intentionally to broaden imagination about the Spirit and its presence among us. We find that young people are often able to hold experiences beyond what has been familiar. When experiencing something new, they get to choose, “Do I want to incorporate this practice into my identity, or do I want to conserve the traditions that are dear to me?”

Diverse practices become opportunities for discernment. For us this often looks like an invitation to turn natural elements into sacrament—to create meaningful engagement by drawing upon the senses with fire, water, stone, oils, spices, or textiles from around the globe. We invite all of the senses—hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting—into the discernment process during opening and closing sessions. We sometimes ask people to bring an artifact from home that holds particular meaning. Bringing these gifts to a worship table at the start of a retreat 20

Read more about Chris’s story http://www.sandiego.edu/cas/theology/faculty-and-staff/biography.php?profile_id=840

21

See Guide to Leading Holy Listening in Appendix A.

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and taking them home at the end can help symbolize the continuity and change that has occurred as a result of our time together. Once, because of a strong connection with a local Native American pastor in Minnesota, we were able to open a retreat with a ritual that included blessing the land, its creatures, and the time we would spend together. On another occasion, a pastor began his workshop with a water-pouring ritual that honors ancestors.

scripture, and prayer. In addition to offering a quiet interactive meditation room that is available at all times, we gather for a 30-minute worship service each morning and evening. Morning worship invites participants to evoke the presence of God throughout the day to come. Evening services are contemplative in design. These modes of worship intentionally allow plenty of time for process and reflection.

With careful framing, authentically shared ritual elements awaken participants to new perspectives, widen imaginations, and create opportunities for the selfawakening questions and theological reflection that lie at the heart of vocational discernment. Rote ritual that seems trite, canned, rigidly professional, or inauthentic is the surest way to disengage young adults who want to experience something alive, fresh, and vital.

Our concluding worship service highlights a creative, wise young preacher through the sermon. At a recent retreat, our guest preached about his journey as both an engineering professor and a senior pastor. He highlighted the theme of our gathering as he spoke directly to those in the audience who felt called in more than one direction.

Following the sermon, we save time for questions and answers. Our participants enjoyed talking back to the sermon, gaining insights that they could directly apply.

worship

Our retreat participants come with a variety of leadership experience and expertise. On our application form, participants name if they are interested in leading worship. They may also provide favorite worship songs and/or scripture passages. Some of the gifts our participants name include the ability to play musical instruments, write or perform spoken word poetry, choreograph and perform liturgical dance, sing and lead singing, or curating visual art. About two weeks before the retreat, the worship coordinator starts to convene a team, beginning with a video conference for introductions and carrying through to collaboration during the event.

chat and chew

We set aside a lunchtime early in the retreat for participants to find people with shared commitments. This “chat and chew� is organized around topics of interest such as: exploring seminary, being a woman in ministry, dealing with white privilege, alternative pathways to ministry, LGBTQIA persons in leadership, and interest in church planting. Doing this early in the retreat can mitigate against people feeling adrift in a sea of others. We assign a leader to lightly facilitate each conversation.

We learned to always create two specific chat and chews with particular care. We always create gathering space specifically for persons who identify as LGBTQIA. We name this as protected space, which is extremely important for people whose sexual orientation may have excluded them from church leadership in their home traditions. In introducing this topic, we say, "This space is not for those who are figuring out biblical and theological issues around the inclusion of LGBTQIA people in the church, or in Christian leadership. If a need arises for that conversation, we can also make space for it to happen."

Leading worship among peers can be transformative.

This becomes a significant discernment moment for those who step up. Leading worship among peers can be transformative. Often the worship team grows during the event to include a whole chorus of participants, some of whom were shy at first, but later join the team, thus becoming an extremely participatory form of engagement.

We structure the event to include multiple times for worship. At the beginning of the retreat, we have opening worship, which includes a theme-related song,

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Similarly, we learned to name a space for those needing to discuss white privilege and cultural competency. Some of our participants come to us from middle-

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class, white progressive traditions, and feel called to serve among marginalized populations in sites such as homeless shelters or after-school programs. These participants benefit from space set up specifically for white young adults to engage in conversations around white privilege, in hopes of developing their cultural competency and reducing harm to communities they serve.

In both of these cases, being very specific about who the space is for and who it is not for helps to ensure that participants’ needs get met. prototyping new practices

FTE discernment retreats always include the 10 practices named above, but we also experiment with new practices, especially those specific gifts our guest leaders bring. These have included pilgrimage, site visits, gifts assessment, honoring location, or alternative forms of prayer.

On several occasions, honoring the location where we found ourselves opened deeper levels of reflection. While gathering in Houston, we realized we were only a few miles from the spot where Black activist Sandra Bland had died the year before. We wove the story of this young woman and her unjust arrest and death into our storytelling and ritual. In this way, conversations about racism, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement all grew directly from the place where we met. It deepened our reflection on discernment.

justice. There they participated in service, worship, and conversation with pastoral leaders and lay members.

We occasionally use gift assessment tools such as StrengthsFinder, the Enneagram, or the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. These tools provide a common language and framework for understanding how one’s personality and gifts may inform a sense of call.

We regularly intersperse alternative forms of prayer. We’ve set up rooms with evocative prayer stations, calling forth both contemplative and active forms of praying. We’ve invited leaders to guide us through intoning, a non-verbal vocal form of prayer, and praying in color, which uses crayons, marker, and paper in a free-form artistic prayer.22 This is one more way of welcoming young people who have expertise in a form of prayer, such as Taizé, to practice their leadership. To run their fingers through the sand as an act of prayer—or to light a candle about something that breaks their heart—invites young people to experience the holy in ways they may never have done before.

Life-coaching differs from spiritual direction or therapy, and it can work alongside other practices to help a young person integrate their learnings and carry them forward beyond the retreat. We sometimes invite trained life coaches into our leadership team.

On one powerful occasion, a retreat leader took participants on a pilgrimage through the streets of Atlanta, visiting sites of import to immigrants from Central and South America. We prayed at stations such as a detention facility, a community shelter, and the steps of the Georgia General Assembly, ending there with the invitation to take part in a public action advocating for immigration reform. Along the way, people engaged in one-on-one conversations as they walked—making new friends, finding shared theological values, or surfacing points of disagreement.

On another retreat occasion, we engaged in site visits. Some of our participants went to a nearby seminary, where they asked questions of faculty and students.

Others visited partner congregations who reflect the integration of faith and social 22 https://prayingincolor.com

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Wading in the Water: The Role of Ritual in Spiritual Discernment

BY MELVA L. SAMPSON, RESIDENT THEOLOGIAN

I have lasting memories of first Sundays in the Black Baptist church of my youth.

The ordinance of baptism was my favorite, followed by Holy Communion. I remember how the heavy purple velvet curtains fastened by gold-braided ropes would be drawn back on both sides of the baptismal pool. The choir would descend down from the stand to the pews in order to bear witness to this ritual of renewal. As the candidates, dressed in all white, made their way down into the chilly water, the missionary society and other seasoned mothers and male deacons would begin to hum “Wade in the Water.” The pastor would motion for the congregation to join them. Our singing reached a crescendo and moved in concert with tapping feet on hardwood floors bearing the communal weight of generations who waded in water in hopes of freedom.

Rooted in the African American sacred music tradition, “Wade in the Water” ritualizes movement from spaces of opacity to desired clarity. Ritual is a call to Spirit and is foundational to the process of spiritual discernment. According to Sobonfu Somé, “In ritual we call on spirit to Ritual is a call to Spirit show us obstacles that we cannot see because of our limitations as human beings. Rituals help and is foundational to us to remove blocks standing between us, our the process of spiritual true spirit and other spirits.”23 Plainly speaking, discernment. ritual aids in making the invisible visible. The meaning of the song “Wade in the Water” was unclear to slave owners. However, it was clear to the enslaved. It meant that freedom is on the horizon. When rendered, the song served as a call to the water.

In ritual processes of spiritual discernment, water represents restoration similar to the baptism rituals of my youth.

Wading can produce anxiety because we do not know what awaits us on the other side of the spiritual river banks. The power of ritually wading in the waters of spiritual discernment issues great promise in distinct ways. First, Spirit meets us 23

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Sobonfu Somé, The Spirit of Intimacy, (New York; Quill Books, 1997), p. 40.

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at the water’s edge. Somé contends, “Every time we move into ritual, we should recognize that there’s a whole line of ancestors behind us, there’s a whole spirit world around us.”24 Second, we are not called to navigate the terrain of spiritual discernment and vocational exploration alone, but in community. None of us are free until all of us are free! Third, wading encourages deep immersion into the spiritual waters of the soul. It is there where we come face to face with our most authentic selves.

Including ritual as part of a spiritual discernment process requires a few things.

Identify a purpose for the ritual. Set an intention. For instance, determine what the ritual will resolve. Create ritual space. In this case use water, either in containers, or in a well. Also delineate stones. Light candles. Call your cloud of ancestral witnesses into your space by identifying the capacity they possessed that you desire to acquire.

On occasion, I make my way down by the riverside. I, like the congregation of my youth, begin to hum and then loudly sing, “Wade in the water, wade in the water children, God’s gonna trouble the water.” I dip my feet in and kneel down with cupped hands to touch the water. Balancing myself on top of smooth and jagged rocks, I get back up each time I fall. I feel the support of my ancestors, and then I know that discerning God’s call is often blurry work—but the more I wade, the closer I get to freedom.

“Are You With Me?” Preaching a Relevant Word to Digital Followers

BY KIT NOVOTNY, SMALL GROUP LEADER AND PREACHER

I saw a meme going around Facebook and Twitter the other day—a triple Venn Diagram showing what DJs, bank robbers, and preachers all have in common.

I had to laugh at the taglines it called us preachers out on: “Are you with me?” (shared with DJs), “Give me your money” (shared with bank robbers, yikes!), and at the center of all three overlapping circles, “Put your hands up.”

As a young adult minister primarily working with people aged 18 to 30 in the post-Christian San Francisco Bay Area, I can’t help but hear that first question— 24

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“Are you with me?”—in the back of my mind every time I prepare to speak on God’s Word. Preaching to an audience of fellow millennials, I try not to take myself too seriously, as we millennials are excellent B.S. detectors and are often suspicious of religious certainty or sanctimony. I try to be playful, conversational, and less, well, preachy.

When I was invited to preach at an FTE Discernment Retreat in 2016, the text pretty much chose itself. It was that quintessential call story from Matthew 4, Jesus calling his first disciples by saying: “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” I focused on the central motif of following and followers—that language of discipleship and vocational discernment that also happens to be the central contemporary idiom of social media.

Here’s a sermon snippet, bringing the fishermen of Galilee to digital-age disciples: Everybody Bank Robbers

on the floor

DJs

“Today we are all tangled up in new Put your kinds of nets. Nets of instant updates hands up and information overload, nets of Give me Are you commerce and consumerism, nets of your money with me vast connection and porous identities.

These new nets of connection can Preachers be remarkable, tying us together, hashtagging us into relationship, even revolutions. At the same time, these nets can just as easily tangle us up in distraction (cat videos!), or envy (the black hole of comparison), and leave us as lonely and isolated as ever. My question is, ‘Who are you following? Are those in your feed actually feeding you?’”

Preaching to young adults is something I get to do regularly in my current ministry setting. In the fall of 2015, I launched a new worship gathering for young adults at First Church Berkeley, California. Gathering in the round in our pewless chapel space, bedecked with twinkly lights and a banjo, we chose a simple name to emphasize God’s radical welcome. We call this space “Open Chapel.” While I tend to preach from a manuscript on Sunday mornings, the intimacy of Open

Ibid, 42.

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Chapel calls for more extemporaneous authenticity (which paradoxically takes just as much preparation, if not more!). What started as a traditional sermon moment evolved over the years as I kept asking, “Are you with me?”

On Christian Contemplative Life and Practice

BY DAN WOLPERT, EXPLORATION LAB LEADER AND SMALL GROUP LEADER

Now, in Open Chapel, we practice a kind of communal reckoning that we call “Sharing the Sermon.” I kick things off with an informal homily grounded in story, lifting up my own life to the light of scripture. Then I let go and let the Holy Spirit fly.

The Christian spiritual tradition is replete with rich teachings concerning contemplative life and practice. Roughly synonymous with terms like meditation, mindfulness, prayer practices, or spiritual practices, contemplative practices help us to listen deeply and gain greater awareness of ourselves, our lives, and the presence of God.

Everyone is encouraged to “listen for the Spirit to speak.” Then, if so moved, anyone is invited to share an observation, a question, or, more often than not, a story. Connections get made that I never could have dreamed up on my own—the whole Body of Christ awakens more fully as different voices illuminate the Word from fresh perspectives:

These activities promote the transformation that Paul encourages in Romans 12 when he calls for a renewal of our mind. They are not only helpful for the development of our general spiritual life, but they are also valuable as we seek guidance about vocation.

»»A trans woman reflects on her relationship with her transformed body, made in the many images of God.

»»A scientist speaks of the nature of God like the dual nature of light: particle and wave.

»»A stroke survivor testifies how despite his aphasia, he can still sing fluidly. »»An unhoused man who wandered in begins to praise God in Spanish and English.

I have come to see that the way to keep this community “with me” is to keep up with them. The way to hold on to pastoral authority in this particular preaching context has been to give it away. My calling here is less about casting the perfect net and more about rounding up my fellow fisherfolk.

Young people moving to adulthood face multiple contemplative pressures to “figure out” what they are going to practices help us to “do when they grow up.” These pressures come listen deeply and gain from, among others, parents, school, society, one’s social location, and college debt. This greater awareness of chorus of voices, as well as the general chaotic ourselves state of the world, can create confusion and uncertainty as a young person looks toward their future. Contemplation is perfectly suited to help sort through this fog and seek the mind of Christ (Philippians 2:5).

Contemplative practice—including activities such as silent prayer, praying with scripture and other creative prayer forms—is a time set aside to “do nothing” other than pay attention to our thoughts and feelings. Returning over and over again to this place of awareness allows our minds to settle naturally. We do indeed become still and know God (Psalm 46:10). Over time, confusion shifts to clarity and our deepest desires, those things that God has placed upon our hearts as our direction and vocation, begin to surface. Contemplation allows us to become our true selves and is thus ideally suited for young adults who are at the stage of life where they are finding and developing their identity.

Are you with me? (If so, put your hands up!)

The contemplative process also grounds us in who we are and in our relationship

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to the Divine. Looking at the life of Jesus, we see that he alternates between action and contemplation. By day he is healing or teaching while by night he goes by himself to the mountain to pray alone (Luke 6:12). One description of the contemplative life is that it allows primordial confidence to flourish. This beautiful phrase points to the value of becoming grounded in our being. In their vocational search, young people can feel adrift and lost, the opposite of grounded. When we are unmoored we tend to become more reactive, grasping for something to hold onto rather than steadily moving toward that which is life giving and fulfilling.

Contemplation can help young people move steadily toward their vocation with greater calm and confidence.

I have always found young people to be very open and receptive to engaging in contemplative practice. Often it is their older adult leaders who are less interested and thus assume that young people will be uninterested as well. As young adult’s lives are increasingly programmed and structured, they rarely are given time to reflect, slow down, and just be. At one FTE retreat where we gave the young participants a full three hours to be silent and reflect upon their life and vocation, I had many young people tell me that they had never been given that kind of time before, and they found it to be wonderful and deeply meaningful. In ministry settings where youth have been given time to be quiet, leaders often report that this quiet time becomes the group’s favorite activity.

Young people who have a group or community setting where there is support for contemplative life and practice experience a flourishing of both themselves and a sense of direction for their lives.

The practice of the Examen, or the Examination of Spirits, is another valuable practice for young people engaging in vocational discernment. Invented by Ignatius of Loyola, this practice trains us to look back over our experience and notice what is ‘life giving’ and ‘death dealing,’ what is a fruit of the Holy Spirit and a fruit of a Spirit that is not of the Divine. This helps us learn to trust that we can come to know and be guided by God from within our own experience and the experience of our community. As we look backward, we gain insight into those activities and settings that produce good fruit. This allows us to look forward and to make

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choices that will continue to lead us toward life-giving vocation.

Finally, the Christian spiritual life is meant for community. Discerning vocation within our highly individualized and alienated society can be lonely and discouraging. Young people who have a group or community setting where there is support for contemplative life and practice experience a flourishing of both themselves and a sense of direction for their lives. This is because a group that prays together creates a web of spiritual support within which the mind of Christ can manifest and speak to both the individuals within the group and to the group as a whole. Developing these prayerful communities is a great gift to young people and to the world.

Got Body?

BY LAKISHA LOCKHART, EXPLORATION LAB LEADER AND SMALL GROUP LEADER

Often we invite our young people to hear, see, listen, and even participate and perform in worship and church experiences, but we don’t invite their bodies! We deny the embodiment of their faith as they discern who they are and who they are becoming.

As the director of a Youth Theology Institute for high school students, I invited a presenter, Tiffany Trent, to lead us in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed as a way to explore what it means to live out our faith in the world today.25 I vividly remember watching students use their bodies with and through scripture, when one young woman stopped, with tears in her eyes, and said, “This is the first time I ever felt my body connected to my faith.” She continued to express that this was the first time someone had seen and talked about her body in a positive way, connected to scripture and to God. She said it made her feel as if all of her was created with a purpose and in the image of God. So often, we tell young people to deny their flesh while asking them to praise dance, but we do not invite them to reflect on what is going on in their bodies when they do this. We chastise and police their bodies before we invite them to see the Divine within them—and then we wonder why what they feel called 25

Boal, 1985

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to is disconnected from their bodies and what they are most passionate about!

We objectify and demean their bodies in various ways and yet expect them to have a healthy and positive understanding of their bodies as “temples.” Much of the work with bodies stems from and is influenced by very real trauma that has happened and needs to be cared for in a particular way. This work must start with a re-connection to the body. I have come to find that a vital part of any theology of vocation and discernment for young people must be embodiment—connecting one’s mind, body, and spirit with the Divine.

The body and practices of embodiment—such as play and theatre—are not often associated with achievement and success. However, what if we took the time to really embody Jesus’ words, “...unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven?” 26 What if we gave real thought and consideration to what it means to become like a child? According to Jerome Berryman, the founder of a Montessori approach to Sunday school called Godly Play, Jesus’ “becoming-like-a-child aphorism...shatters the hope of entering a state of perfection…In contrast, Jesus said that life is neither just becoming nor just being. It is living in the continuing creativity of the kingdom.” 27 It is a kingdom, or rather kin-dom, in which all bodies are sacred and holy as they are created in God’s image, according to God’s likeness.28 This includes the bodies of young people. When using the body to discern and resist, it can become a medium which creates a brave and liberating space 29 for identity formation, meaning making, trauma naming, and vocational discernment.

just a few ways in which young people can begin to re-connect with their bodies and begin to discern with and through their bodies.

Our young people do not want to just read about their faith. They want to live into it with every fiber of their being, including their bodies. We must be sure they know that their bodies are sacred and holy as they are uniquely created in the image of God. This should be a vital part of their vocational discernment.

Here are a few practices that you can start right now to help your young people:

»»Remind them daily, or as often as you see them, that their bodies matter and are made in the image of God. Do this not only verbally, but through practices like body prayer, movement activities such as stretching, dancing, running, and making time for bodily reflection and meditation to check in with their bodies.

»»Invite them to not only read scripture, but to take it into their bodies through various modes of play, Theatre of the Oppressed, role-play, dancing, and other movement.

»»Encourage them to start their own daily bodily reflection/meditation practice. (You might want to consider doing this yourself as well!)

»»Create a play table/corner in your gathering space. Fill this space with play dough, coloring books, pencils, markers, stress balls, paint, paper, canvas, yarn, and other creative materials. Allow this to be a space where they can go any time they want and need to experience God, or themselves, in a different way.

As youth ministers and those working with young people, we must make more brave space for the many ways in which our young people come to know, learn, make meaning, have their being, and discern with and through their bodies.

These same bodies are often filled with hurt and trauma that needs to be released, named, and worked through bodily. We need to reconnect with our own bodies so that we can invite our young people to reconnect and to use their bodies to live into their own passions and callings. Experiences of play, Theatre of the Oppressed, games, using imagination, creating through art and various media are

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26

Matthew 18:3; NRSV

27

Berryman, Jerome. Becoming Like a Child: The Curiosity of Maturity Beyond the Norm. 23-4.

28

Gen. 1:26; NRSV

29

M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 18

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chapter 3 Facilitation Techniques and Skills FTE curates a variety of facilitation practices that help leaders stay grounded in their inner wisdom, attend to diverse young adults, and integrate the head and the heart.30 The best of these practices help us move fluidly from theory to practice. Weaving kinetic expression throughout our programming invigorates and keeps learners engaged. It also allows for better integration and ownership of new knowledge.

We take seriously the work of planning retreats—but then we hold our plans and expectations loosely. Each discernment retreat gathering is a living human organism with accompanying potential for misunderstanding, frayed nerves, or cultural clashes. The ability to get a read on the mood of the participants, check in with trusted co-leaders, and then make adjustments comes with experience. It also helps to practice the art of maintaining a calm, non-anxious presence when rolling with surprises. Remember to call for help when you need to talk a sticky situation through with a trusted colleague.

Framing the Time We begin our retreats by framing the time for participants. This means creating a scaffold for what will happen, who we are, and why we are together. An opening framing makes clear who we are and why we are together. It also makes clear that we are not trying to sell participants anything, force them into a vocational choice, or require that they have a particular doctrinal position. Naming these dynamics explicitly and early is important to allow each participant to really show up and to make the most of the time and space. What follows is one example of this.

30 Many of these practices are alluded to in the book, Another Way: Living and Leading Change by Design by Stephen Lewis, Matthew Wesley Williams, and Dori Baker. They include work from the Center for Courage & Renewal, the Art of Hosting, Mystic Soul, ARC: Arts | Religion | Culture, and The World Cafe.

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Opening Welcome and Framing

Rare is the opportunity to find three and a half days to be intentional about reflecting with peers on ways our gifts might speak to a distinctive purpose, passion or call. The goals for this retreat is to create such a space for you to:

We are so glad you are here.

»»Reflect on key vocational questions within a diverse community of peers

Hear these words of Paul in the beginning of the book of Romans, as paraphrased in The Message. “We thank God through Jesus for every one of you. That's first. You are who you are through this gift and call of Christ. People everywhere keep telling us about your lives of faith and every time we hear them we thank God.” Paul's joy speaks our joy about you.

We at FTE have the best jobs in the world. We get to spend our time getting to know your pastors, campus ministers, friends, and directors of your volunteer service years—so they will trust us when we ask them to send us their wisest, most creative, and courageous young leaders.

Then, we get to create a leadership team from some of the most innovative, courageous, risk-taking, creative, and alive young Christian pastors, ministers, and theologians from around the country—inviting them here to be with you as teachers, mentors, listeners, and companions to you, as you pause in your busy lives to reflect on your journey and the path unfolding ahead. Then after all that fun…

We get to show up here. We bring our whole selves here. We bring our love for the church. We bring our frustrations for the church. We bring our own individual passions and convictions. And we get to listen and learn and wonder and worship and listen some more to what God is up to in and through you. We get to learn about your individual passions, convictions and wonder together how God is calling forth a new generation of leaders.

You are different kinds of leaders, with different types of calls. Some of you have decided what your next step in life will be; Some of you hear the word pastor and look for the exit sign. A few of you are in seminary. Some of you embrace the word Christian. And church. And baptism. Wholeheartedly. And some of you have been harmed by the human failures those words sometime represent.

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and practitioners,

»»Identify a vocational questions that you wrestle with, »»Gain practical tools from Christian ministry and theology for your ongoing exploration of vocational/spiritual discernment.

You are ALL welcome here. Bring your questions and your doubts. We are all here on purpose!

We invite you to join us in the work of being fully present, open, expectant, and on-the-lookout for surprises. God may look, feel, smell, and sound a little different here than God does in the community in which you are most at home. That's because you represent one of the most wildly diverse gatherings of Christians imaginable. You come from all places on the theological spectrum. (Did you notice that I’m not referring to God as “He”? That may be the only pronoun you’ve ever heard for God, or you may come from a tradition that intentionally avoids assigning a gender to God.) Raise your hand when you hear a tradition you call your own: Baptist.

Episcopalian. Mennonite. Roman Catholic. Non-Denominational. Church of God. Lutheran. Brethren. Quaker. Reformed. Pentecostal. Charismatic. Spiritual But Not Religious. Methodist. Presbyterian. Orthodox. Who did I miss?

That means we all hold different convictions, ideas, and understandings—some firm, some fluid—about how we live out our faith. We have ideas about how we name God. We may call God Father, Mother, he/she, Friend, Breath, or Creator.

We have ideas and convictions about what it means to cherish life. Some of us identify as pro-life, some of us are pro-choice. We have convictions about sexual orientation, or gender normativity, or who can be ordained or whatever!

Do you hear me? There are a multitude of deeply held convictions on which we might disagree. That means we need to create a place big enough for all of us to feel welcome and brave enough—not safe enough, but brave enough—to bring our whole selves here.

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You may not always feel at home here; you may at times feel challenged or stretched. You may hear an opinion that causes you to think. Or that you flat out disagree with. Or that stretches you in a way that you may not want to be stretched today.

You may feel that you are all alone—but we guarantee that you are not. So any of you, if you feel alone this weekend in your thoughts or identities, pay attention to that feeling. Tend to it.

Find another leader with whom to chat. Look for peers who are navigating the same questions you are and connect with them. A full 89 percent of the young adults who come to one of these retreats stay connected to someone they meet here! Your time will be so much richer for it. It takes a special kind of intentionality to create a space that holds all of us with grace. I invite you to practice that care, that grace. That hospitality. And if you need help with that, find someone in the crowd. We will make time and space for your questions and quandaries.

We have created a way to structure our time here together that welcomes messiness while intentionally remaining hospitable and welcoming. To hold that space together, we introduce the Covenants of Presence.31 Let's review them together.

31

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See Covenants of Presence in Appendix A.

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Insights reflection in small groups

There is No Perfect Retreat FTE pays considerable attention to how the context of an event must shape the leadership team we assemble and the kinds of activities we ask them to prepare. As facilitators, even while attempting to do the right thing, we will sometimes trip on our own feet and unintentionally act out of unexamined privilege, assumption, prejudice, or our own woundedness. When we fall short, our practice is to name the failing, apologize if appropriate, learn from it, and make sure that future events take the learning into account.

To think that all missteps can ever be entirely avoided is naïve. As leaders we must all model a kind of leadership that takes responsibility for continual learning, experimenting, and growing.

We affirm that everyone at the retreat has something to give and to share.

Storytelling in small groups is a way for participants to know and understand one another. It provides an opportunity not just to learn about discernment, but to practice it together. It supports the practice of empathic listening, a deepened understanding of where others come from, and how they understand God to be at work in their lives. Powerfully listening to another not only affirms the person who is sharing their story, it also is an invitation into seeing new ways that God might be calling upon the person who is listening.

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Small groups put young adults in regular conversation with peers, creating space for them to process their thoughts and feelings in a protected and supported way. The small group facilitators know they are not present as experts, but rather as gentle guides who encourage connection and deeper sharing. The connective listening space provided by small groups (see the Sample Schedule in the Appendix) invites participants to see that their input is valued.

threading

leading with song

We thread themes, key words, and concepts throughout our discernment retreats, using images that resound well with participants. Sometimes these images arise from scripture readings. Other times they come from a talk given by a resident theologian, or from a comment made by a participant during a large group session, when we harvest ideas and themes. Threading provides a “stickiness” that helps people think more deeply about evocative concepts and convey the experience of the retreat to their home communities. For example, when Callid Keefe-Perry was theologian-in-residence, he vividly used an image of a colander to illustrate that discernment is a tool used to separate and sift things in your life, leaving you with what you need. When you use a colander to drain pasta, he noted, you have to let the water go to keep the good stuff. Similarly, in our faith lives we sometimes need to let go of relationships, habits, or assumptions that hold us back. Many retreat participants took up this image of discernment as a spiritual colander and played with it—even though the metaphor was brand new to them.

This kind of threading adds cohesion to the event. It works best when it arises organically and is not forced.

A melodious voice in song invites others into the space. This can be an excellent tool for holding space or for shifting the group from one exercise to the next. Familiar songs of the church, short chants, or songs from social movements make great transitions from one activity to the next. The more these reflect the specific cultural or religious context of the participants, the better.

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theatre of the oppressed

Embodiment practices invite retreat participants to move from the theoretical to the lived experience. We use a variety of techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed,32 especially Image Theatre, which involves the building of human statues. We invite people to name a social ill or everyday issue that they experience as heartbreaking or as a “pain point.”

32

Learn more about this in Chapter 2, under the heading “Discernment Café and Theatre of Discernment.”

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Too often we only permit ourselves to admit argumentation that arises from well-reasoned and compelling rational discourse, and yet all the while our bodies and hearts cry out to be heard.

embodiment practices

As Lakisha Lockhart writes in her piece “Got Body?” in Chapter 2, “Young people do not want to just read about their faith, they want to live into it with every fiber of their being, including their bodies.”

We recognize that many ways of knowing and being are marginalized. This marginalization is part of what maintains systems of oppression and domination. Indeed, the church’s failure to treat bodies as holy is the source of much of the “church harm” from which so many young people suffer.33 FTE includes retreat practices that affirm the importance of our bodies and stories. Too often we only permit ourselves to admit argumentation that arises from well-reasoned and compelling rational discourse, and yet all the while our bodies and hearts cry out to be heard. non-verbal prayer practices

We periodically invite participants to engage in what Sybil MacBeth calls “Praying in Color.”34 This is a form of art-based prayer that MacBeth says is especially good if you “want to pray but words escape you” and when “sitting still and staying focused in prayer are a challenge.” The practice isn’t just for artists, but for anyone willing to explore drawing, color, and non-verbal ways of tapping into communion with the Divine.

At several retreats, pastor and scholar Holly Benzenhafer offered opportunities for a prayer practice called “intoning,” which she developed with inspiration from the Iona Community. It emerges out of the ancient contemplative practice of breath prayer and invites participants to deeply focus by moving between sound and silence in meditation. Participants—through breath, voice, and sound—become resonant as they incorporate their whole bodies and selves in prayer with the parts of life for which language is inadequate. Intoning is both personal and communal An example of this is the way the “purity industry” captivated conservative evangelicalism and shaped many teenagers’ approach to sexuality and their bodies in the late 1980s and throughout the 90s. See Linda Kay Klein’s Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free (2018).

33

34

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prayer. As with Praying in Color, no prior expertise is needed. Offer a non-verbal prayer during a down-time supports individual processing. journaling

We ask participants to pause, reflect on a question, and respond in a journal.

Sometimes this is simply a break in the midst of an all-group session in which the facilitator has asked retreat participants to consider an idea. At other times it is a dedicated hour in which participants find a personal space and respond at greater length to a question.

We think it’s important to provide a balance between high energy, relational activities and individually focused, reflective ones. We provide a small journal to every participant at every retreat. We encourage retreat leaders—especially small group leaders—to provide time and space for participants to process some of their experience in writing. This benefits those who might not verbally share outright at depth without first processing their thoughts on paper. It also helps some participants take home a written record of their questions, thoughts, prayers, and hopes. Like an ongoing friendship begun at the retreat, the journal becomes a touchstone to revisit when challenges arise, as they surely will. personal reflection time

FTE retreats may call for days of deep and intense reflection. Leadership team members are encouraged to “feel the temperature of the room” as they facilitate to ensure that participants stay more engaged than overwhelmed. Self-care is a core value of our facilitation practice.

We lived into this practice during a retreat in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was a Saturday afternoon, with a busy schedule. We had a plenary, chat and chew conversations, and workshops, followed by a small group session. While there were plenty of breaks built in, we observed a lull in the energy of one small group. We stopped the conversation and asked the participants to give a one-word description of how they were feeling.

Participants said that they were overwhelmed and tired, so we asked them what they needed. Some wanted a power nap or a quick run in the woods. We then

https://prayingincolor.com

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recommended that participants take a 30-minute break to tend to their needs, trusting that time together could be redeemed upon their return. Holding planned programming lightly invites participants to be more fully present. It also models ways of being together as a community of care and wholeness.

Curating Inclusive and Equitable Space

BY ALICIA CROSBY, SMALL GROUP LEADER AND EXPLORATION LAB LEADER

Whenever I’m asked: “What is the trick as it relates to setting the space as a facilitator and justice educator?” my reply is, “I make space for people to show up as their whole selves.” I work hard to curate environments in which people feel free to be authentic and to trust that they will be cared for by those engaging with them.

I lead individuals and communities in dynamic conversations related to identity, intersectional equity, and inclusivity. These conversations don’t come about by happenstance; they are intentionally constructed with the essential building blocks of inquiry: Who. What.

Where.

When.

Why. How.

If you want to set the space in a way that lays the ground for transformation—if you want to really make a difference—ask questions.

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? Ask your retreat community what their needs are around safety and security. Ask them about what has compromised these things for them in other spaces. Inquire about their journeys. Ask about the history of the community or institutions with whom you are working. Then sit with what you’ve heard and be responsive to the expressed needs and concerns of the people.

Asking questions is a challenging endeavor. When you enter into greater depths of knowledge, you are then tasked with applying it! In theory, you could choose to be unresponsive and ignore what was expressed. But what does that say about your priorities and your regard for the people who make up your community?

There are enough spaces in the world where people are expected to follow without question the will or direction of another. Too often, leaders let agendas move them instead of being stirred by the perspectives of their people. Dare to be different; ask questions and see where that takes you.

The truth is that I don’t have any tricks; I just have a praxis rooted in inquiry.

Asking questions not only makes room for understanding, it also disrupts how power and privilege function in an environment. To explore what I mean, let’s unpack the concept of “safe space.”

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The reality is whether you’re a minister, a justice worker, or other professional, if you lead from a place where you fail to get buy-in from those you are engaging, you are not doing work that is as liberating, healing, and enriching as it could be.

If you find yourself hesitating to do this work, turn those questions inward.

Ask yourself what things within your personhood are serving as barriers to understanding.

These words are among the most vital tools I have available to me in my justice work and in my ministry. My experience is that whether someone is seeking understanding about an unfamiliar concept, other people, God, or themselves, if you give them room to be who they are and to ask questions, you are curating space that allows for growth and transformation.

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There’s a difference between declaring somewhere to be a safe space and asking questions in community (or with individuals) to determine what constitutes safety in an environment. Making a declarative statement is assumptive. It positions the space’s curator as the authority. In contrast, asking about and taking note of people’s needs around safety invites them more fully into whatever is taking place.

It helps construct an environment that is more egalitarian in nature.

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chapter 4 After the Retreat Ends

W

e want people to leave a retreat inspired and able to sustain an awakened sense of their own purpose and potential. But this can’t be done alone. Part of the beauty of the retreat is being surrounded by a community of others who share similar gifts, struggles, and joys. Fostering these friendships after the retreat and structuring other ways for ongoing support is key. We do this by helping participants name their next most faithful steps before they leave.

We created mini-grants (up to $1,500 per person) for a participant to use for an ongoing exploration in ministry. We encourage them to pool these resources to organize an ongoing learning community. Three young women used this grant to spend a month visiting seminaries and sustainable organic farms on the coast of California. Another woman attended an event sponsored by Womanpreach!, an organization that mentors and helps young change-makers find their voice. This helped her decide to attend seminary and pursue ordination. One group of folks from Chicago—who were moved by their experience in a Clearness Committee— expressed a desire to meet with one another over the course of the following year, so that everyone in the cohort could have the experience of being the focus person.

We’ve helped people go to the Academy of Young Preachers, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, a storytelling conference, the Why Christian gathering, and a pilgrimage with others exploring people and places of the Civil Rights era Deep South. In all of these explorations, we encouraged finding a mentor with whom to process the ongoing discernment. When helpful, we connected young people to mentors from our networks.

In all of this, retreat participants discover the diversity of the gifts of the church.

For many of them, it will be the first time they’ve had conversations about specific roles in ministry with people outside their own denomination. In doing so, they may discover language, questions, and conversations about faith and calling that expand their previous categories. This environment engenders a spirit of collaboration and

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encouragement to consider the kinds of connections they want to maintain after the retreat is over.

Mentoring for Discernment

Some will choose to remain in contact with us. Some will ask a retreat leader to support them in a mentoring relationship. Others will stay connected to a set of participants who have a shared passion around a particular justice issue or theological question. However these life-giving connections emerge, we affirm the importance of walking away from the retreat with relationships that support young adults in their ongoing discernment and faithful explorations.

“Brother Larry, I’m not sure I believe in hell.” “Brother Larry, I’m thinking about running for student body president.” “Brother Larry, how can the church be so callous?” “Brother Larry, is there room here for me and my gifts for ministry?”

The “Next Most Faithful Step” One of the refrains that echoes throughout all of FTE’s retreats is the idea that while discernment can be about major life decisions and goals that are far off, it is also just as much about “the next most faithful step.”

We have found it useful to reiterate that discernment does not have to mean immediately figuring out the entire story of a life or knowing its ultimate destination. We openly acknowledge that lives unfold and interruptions happen. Our life stories are more of an improvisation than they are a Homeric journey.35 At our retreats we invite young adults to think about discerning while staying rooted in the daily realities of their lived existence—not off in an ideal world. This is what mujerista theologians call lo cotidiano—the realities that we face every day, and how we face them.36

While discernment can be about major life decisions and goals that are far off, it is also just as much about “the next most faithful step.”

We have found that most participants respond positively when we asked to narrow the scope of their focus to the next most faithful step—to what is in front of them and not years off in the future. FTE strives to create a retreat space that focuses neither on an infinite consideration of options, nor on the assumption that lives have a single, clear, “right” path. We work to engender the sense that discerning the next most faithful step is a vital part of a life lived in faith and service.

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35

Bateson, Mary Catherine. Composing a Life.

36

Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-first Century. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Oris Books, 1996): 172.

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BY LAWRENCE WHITNEY, EXPLORATION LAB LEADER

For emerging adults discerning their vocation, social, cultural, familial, and ecclesial pressures frequently result in a sense of disorientation and dislocation.

This arises in the midst of the internal process of wrestling with choices that at least feel determinative of all future possibilities. Having a mentor to gesture toward promising prospects and point out potential pitfalls can be a rock of stability amidst this otherwise chaotic maelstrom.

The person with the big fancy title may seem like the best option for a mentor because of the doors they might open, but they may not be able to fully invest and commit due to the distraction of other responsibilities. The pastor you have known since childhood seems an obvious choice, except that they have known you since childhood and may not be able to imagine you any other way. Emerging adults benefit greatly from being pointed toward mentors who have a track record of fostering healthy vocational discernment—but a history of mentoring success is no guarantee that the potential mentor and the mentee will have the right chemistry.

It starts with a willingness to respond, to engage at the point of discernment at a particular time, and then it evolves from there.

The basis of good mentoring is trust.

On one hand this means cultivating and exhibiting genuine care and concern.

On the other hand, it means establishing and maintaining appropriate professional boundaries.

Mentees must feel that what they are bringing to the mentor is being held in confidence and that the directions in which the mentor points are in

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Having a mentor to gesture toward promising prospects and point out potential pitfalls can be a rock of stability amidst this otherwise chaotic maelstrom.

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their best interests—rather than those of the mentor or the institution the mentor serves. Good mentors balance the important aspect of encouraging and fostering independence in mentees, while also providing structures of accountability along the way.

Gathering emerging adults to gain perspective on the vocational journey, hear each other’s stories and the stories of leaders further along the path, and catch a glimpse of possibilities they had not yet imagined is a precious gift to their discernment processes. Equally important is connecting these emerging adults with mentors who will accompany them for the long haul through the shifts and changes that inevitably transpire on a vocational journey. Sometimes a single journey a young adult can go on in the course of two months can be astounding!

Week 1: I’m thinking about a PhD in psychology.

Week 2: I’d like to be a high school chaplain.

Week 3: I want to work on food justice.

Week 4: How do I get involved in supporting indigenous

communities?

Week 5: Maybe I’ll go to school for social work.

Week 6: Brother Larry, you’re like the Google for vocation!

I think often about the story of Esther37 and how important it was that Mordecai affirmed Esther’s role at “such a time as this.” Young adults have histories, particularities, and gifts that make them needed for exactly this moment. In the Mentoring can be the end, being accompanied by a mentor is difference between often about mentees being reminded of a young adult seeing their capacity and the ways in which they their vocational journey are suited for this moment. Mentoring can be the difference between a young adult through and abandoning seeing their vocational journey through and it as hopeless. abandoning it as hopeless.

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Esther 4:9-17

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Learning the “Tunes Written in Our Flesh”

BY J.H. HILL, JR., RETREAT PARTICIPANT

Theologian Rubem Alves once declared that our bodies are manuscripts that contain many suppressed “texts” written over time. Alves referred to these texts as the “tunes written in our flesh”38 and argued that vain commitments to oppressive dogmas have caused many to lose the ability to recite the melodic testimonies incorporated within their own bodily frame.

As a black seminarian cultivated within the womb of the Hip-Hop aesthetic, I have long been aware of the incarcerated tunes languishing within my own body. Confined by perceived ecclesial limitations and compelled by a desire to constructively engage in a program of emancipatory potential, I applied for FTE’s Ministry Exploration and Mentoring Grant.

Today, years after my proposal was selected, I can say with unfettered confidence that this experience has proven to be transformative, empowering, and pivotal in my quest for bodily confidence within the community of faith.

Words could never fully convey how integral my mentor, Pastor Demetrius McClendon, has been to this entire process. As the senior pastor of One Church, located in Midlothian, Texas, Pastor Demetrius leads a thriving multicultural congregation in an area where many people believed the concept of a multicultural church to be wildly naïve at best. Together, we contrived an idea to cultivate an intentional community centered on hip-hop spirituality. We would meet weekly at my home with Pastor Demetrius providing mentorship, general oversight, and support.

poetics reminiscent of Lauryn Hill’s Unplugged performances. We compared Nazareth to South Dallas and wondered aloud if anything good would come from our graduating class. During Easter, we listened to Kendrick Lamar and re-framed the Passion Narrative as a discourse on police brutality. We attended rap concerts together, We constructed Venn Diagrams of Tupac Shakur’s “Changes” and the Epistle of James over late-night pancakes and Belgian waffles.

It is something altogether different— and dare I say holy—to enter into a mentor-mentee relationship that bridges the chasms of age and experience and inaugurates a previously unseen realm of possibility.

The lessons I learned from my mentor were invaluable. The time I shared with my group taught me lessons in fellowship and community that I could never learn in seminary. In fact, our time together has proven to be so rich, we decided to keep our weekly meetings going indefinitely. Recognizing how liberating it is to own our own texts and to play our own tunes, it is our desire to help other young adults in our community experience the very same freedom.

From my mentor I learned that in order to make a lasting impression in the world, youthful zeal must be tempered with understanding. I have come to realize that it is wholly possible to argue the need for intergenerational solidarity yet remain intractably fixed within spaces of fossilized comfort and tradition. It is something altogether different—and dare I say holy—to enter into a mentor-mentee relationship that bridges the chasms of age and experience and inaugurates a previously unseen realm of possibility.

Each week, roughly 15 young adults, whose ages ranged from 19 to 31, gathered together around a meal and sought to wrestle with their faith in a space that was both affirming and supportive. In this space, we were able to speak about our love for hip-hop and our longing for authentic places of worship and reflection.

Each week, we read and discussed scripture through the optics of a hip-hop hermeneutic. During Advent season, we interpreted Mary’s Magnificat as freestyle 38

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For further reading, see Rubem Alves’ The Poet, The Warrior, and the Prophet.

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Discernment Through Group Spiritual Direction

BY MAGGIE KLAERS, SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”

Matthew 7:7 This is a story about Jake and his searching. He was a recent college graduate with a major in business. The job Jake found helped pay his student loans but did little else for him. Jake didn’t find meaning in what he was doing. He had this feeling or awareness or a knowing that just wouldn’t go away.

Do you, too, have a sense that God is nudging, calling, inviting you to something beyond, to something more? But what? What is God asking of you?

Jake stated he knew he wanted to make a difference. He wanted his life to have meaning. He knew that God had planted this desire in his heart. But what was he supposed to do with this desire? How was he to discover what God wanted from him? Why was God so difficult to understand? He also thought he was the only one who felt this way.

In Jake’s search, he found and committed himself to a volunteer service group for a year. Part of this program was to provide the opportunity for small group spiritual direction. Much to Jake’s surprise he found five other individuals who had similar, but also different, dilemmas. They too were being pulled in some way toward God. Like Jake, they were not sure what God might be calling them to, what it looked like, and how to go about finding out. Their traditional churches and community fellowships felt “locked down.”

These six seekers joined together for group spiritual direction. I, a spiritual director, was blessed to be asked to facilitate their sessions. What is group spiritual direction? It is not a social group, although what develops along the way is something I call “soul friendship.” This happens because members become real and authentic as they develop trust in one another. The sessions start by each in turn telling their stories, how they are struggling and how this struggle is affecting the life he/she feels called to live. To be clear, group spiritual direction is not about giving or receiving advice or fixing one another. It is a time to explore how each is hearing God, to learn how one’s self and others listen to God, and how God is expanding their understanding of Godself.

In the midst of group spiritual direction, each participant was able to explore, name, and own their God-given gifts and talents. They begin to see themselves as God was seeing them right at that moment. This awareness began to lay a foundation that pointed to the direction of their individual prayer lives, personal ministry, and service. They discovered that naming what they did not enjoy doing was as informative as naming what they did enjoy doing. Activities that they found enjoyable highlighted their gifts from God. Some in the group began to look at traditional ministries, but with a bigger awareness of their generation’s need.

Several began to realize their call may be non-traditional and outside of their own religious traditions. Jake, for instance, found his religious tradition did not allow for the inclusiveness that he felt he was called to live.

The process for group spiritual direction is simple.

Be willing to:

»»Make a commitment to meet at an agreed time and place. »»Understand and honor confidentiality. »»Respect an individual’s differences. »»Be willing to learn how to listen deeper to God, others, and self. »»Do not give advice. »»Honor each person’s journey. »»Practice the habit of prayer.

“Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Matthew 18: 19-20

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Commit to group sessions consisting of:

»»A social time of gathering (food of some kind is always good) that allows for checking in with each other since they were last together.

»»An opening prayer that might be scripture, poetry, or a reflection.

Participants take turns in providing the opening prayer.

»»One of the participants is invited to share or tell his/her story. »»The group listens, and when the speaker is finished, asks clarifying questions. »»Sharing a short time of private prayer so that God is given the chance to speak to individual hearts.

»»Invite participants to respond to the speaker with what each heard the speaker say. This gives the speaker the opportunity to hear his/her own story reflected back to him/her.

»»Invite group members to write out a question or reflection to give to the speaker to reflect on later.

»»End each session with the question of how or what the session was for each person.

After our work together, the participants in my group could name for themselves their purpose and the meaning in their lives at that moment. Are these six young people set for life? I doubt it. Life will happen, changes will occur. But they have learned valuable skills for life to come.

Jake and I continue to have monthly phone conversations. It is a joy to watch how God is continuing to love Jake as Jake understands and grows deeper in love with God.

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chapter 5 Evaluation, Failure, and Learning FTE is a learning organization as well as a leadership incubator. Over the course of 12 retreats, we embraced the opportunity to reflect on what we are learning, so as to discern our own next most faithful steps. At the end of each retreat, we requested feedback and collected data from participants. Here are some highlights worthy of reflection.39 40

How Valuable was this Retreat in Providing an Opportunity to...

% of Participant Responding “Extremely Valuable” or “Valuable”

Name and share the key vocational questions with which I wrestle?

75.25%

Self-organize into ongoing communities of learning and practice to help clarify next steps in my vocational journey?

72.03%

Learn some practical tools from Christian ministry and theology for my ongoing exploration?

64.48%

This Work is Valuable to Young Adults Every single retreat results in the overwhelming majority of participants sharing that the event was important to them. While we do not yet have long-term data about the impact of these events on the ongoing lives of the young people who participate, we did learn that the retreat held immediate value for them.

A Common Desire

What we do at these retreats—a deeply personal and theological exploration of vocation—is a signature part of FTE’s commitment to inspire young people to make a difference in the world through Christian communities. FTE retreats give participants a distinctly alternative, contextual, and communal way to consider how it is that God is calling them to their next most faithful step.

We ask the question, “What might FTE provide to assist you in deepening the exploration of your purpose or call to ministry?” More than half of all participants refer to their desire for ongoing networking or connection. Respondents said that FTE could provide:

»»Access to networks to still be involved in, perhaps as a volunteer but maybe also as a staff member.

»»Introduction to mentors in their geographic region who can help challenge them and invest in their growth.

A significant percentage of retreat participants report feeling a sense of loneliness and/or alienation from some segments of their home communities. This is especially true for young adults who are wrestling with LGBTQIA+ identities and those who are identifying as markedly more religious than some of their secular— or anti-religious—peers.

39 Scaled survey questions were given on a five-point scale running from “Not at All Valuable” to “Extremely Valuable.” Openresponse questions were hand-written on evaluations at the end of the retreat and then transcribed. Figures given here are cumulative and combined from all of our data across retreats dating back to 2014.

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The retreats provide a space for participants to be joined up to a larger network that affirms and understands their commitments and hopes. This may be why

Additional learnings from external evaluators are included in the Appendix.

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The retreats provide a space for participants to be joined up to a larger network that affirms and understands their commitments and hopes.

the desired connections cited above are so prevalent. The theme of wanting to connect to a network significantly overshadows the next most common theme, which is the desire for “monetary support” in pursuit of vocation. Other themes around the subject of continued assistance cluster around comments such as “pray for me” and “keep sending me information.”

While there is some variety in what our participants are saying, they are clearly not saying that ministry is solely in the occupation of a pastor or a clergy member.

It is not so much that our participants are opposed to the idea of ministering in a traditional sense—though a notable number of them are indeed resistant. Rather, they understand the task of ministry to be broader than congregational ministry as it has often been understood, especially by most mainline church traditions in the late twentieth century. When participants imagine themselves within the descriptor of pastoral ministry, they envision it very much engaged in community service and justice work.

Holding Tension

What “Ministry” Means

We find great benefit to convening a broad range of participants, not only in terms of race and ethnicity, but also in theological diversity.

Exposing young adults to other young adults from varying traditions and backgrounds is helpful and largely a positive experience for them. However, one of the consequences of convening this breadth of experiences is that retreat participants are likely to bring vastly different expectations and needs.

One of the things we regularly ask young adults to share with us is their understanding of what ministry is. Below is a sampling of their responses.

Ministry is… »»Doing anything to the glory of God. »»Furthering the Kingdom of God the best way you know how. »»Intentional spiritual leadership or care. »»Making the world better (with Jesus). »»Ministry can be pursued in any realm. It is a vocation for all who answer a

When participants imagine themselves within the descriptor of pastoral ministry, they envision it very much engaged in community service and justice work.

Consider the following two responses from the same retreat, offered in the exit survey:

call to Christian life.

»»Working to bridge church and community. »»Ministry is anything that drives me closer to God. Therefore, it is anything where God is.

»»Ministry is vocation. It's what we do in church and in our careers, and in our daily lives.

»»Taking part in God's reconciling work in the world. »»Ministry has no box; it’s how God uses us to reach his people. Being his

This event was a very difficult space for me to be in because of the immense hurt and anger I have toward the church, specifically toward the Catholic Church.

Even though I knew it was a safe space, I still found it difficult to be open and vulnerable. I loved how one of the leaders sensed that some of us might be uncomfortable with the solely Christian language, and I appreciated that she made that space to make some of us, who might not strongly identify as Christians, or are highly questioning our faith, feel more welcome.

physical hands and feet.

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Insights I would like for the staff at FTE to know that I will carry this experience for the rest of my life. Made me so emotional to leave. From the anxiety of not knowing what to expect, being a female, Hispanic, Christian, from an urban inner-city area, not many opportunities are given in my society. My heart bursts with joy from my experience and God has affirmed what was stirring within me at this retreat. Made such incredible connections. Finally a place where I belong. Thank you ALL from the bottom of my heart. God's blessings.

The leadership team for a retreat should be comfortable holding these kinds of tension. These comments underline the importance of creating a leadership team that represents the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds of retreat participants.

Building a Portfolio of Failure Given the contemporary influence of the tech sector and business thought, many non-profit organizations and communities of faith like to talk about the importance of innovation in their mission. One of the challenges of innovation, though, is that truly innovative ideas rarely emerge without first leaving behind a wake of failure.

When FTE encourages retreat participants to imagine that God might be calling them into new experiments of what ministry and service might look like, we also make sure to let them know that some experiments will fail— and that is to be expected.

Mistakes and failures might be embarrassing or painful; but when mined for learning with a mentor or cohort of trusted companions, they provide a platform for more successful endeavors in the future.

What We Have Learned and Where We Are Headed FTE staff know the joy and privilege of accompanying diverse young adult leaders on the journey of discernment. We get to witness moments of elation, to stand with young adults in the midst of painful discoveries, and to share in the hope represented by hundreds of young people whom God is calling. We share our stories in hopes that you catch our enthusiasm and join us in this work.

As we go forward in our efforts to nurture the next generation of leaders, we will focus on capacity building. We aim to strengthen the ability of congregations, campus ministries, and other faith-related organizations to create the conditions in which young adult leaders can discern, pursue, and flourish in their calls. To do this, we convene leaders of organizations who are already committed to nurturing the next generation of wise, faithful, and courageous leaders who can help heal the brokenness of the world through Christian community. As these leadership networks emerge, we will continue to curate the wisdom and resources they have, and also help them develop the resources they need to better equip themselves to do this work.

way, we hope to see a national network of practitioners who engage regularly in context-specific practices of accompanying young adult leaders, learning from one another, and building shared wisdom.

We will continue to gather young leaders to learn directly from and with them, but we are also investing in the vast ecology of Christian communities—knowing that on-the-ground wisdom emerging from local contexts can be shared and adapted through this network for the benefit of all. We invite you to join the network by contacting FTE team member Darlene Hutto at dhutto@fteleaders.org.

Along the way, we expect new knowledge to emerge that is closely linked to regions, denominations, racial/ethnic ministries, and other contexts. In this

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appendix Resources and References Appendix A DOCUMENTS AND FILES

Visit fteleaders.org/guide-to-discernment-retreats to view or listen to the following resources: Covenants of Presence Discernment Retreat Promo Videos “How to Lead Holy Listening” by Dori Baker Recordings of Retreat Preachers and Resident Theologians Retreat Invitation and Application Documents Sample Retreat Schedule “Small Group Leaders Guide” by Claire Hitchens What We Learned from Evaluation

Appendix B WHAT WE LEARNED FROM EVALUATION

As part of our learning we hired an external assessment firm to review our work and our own internal retreat assessments. These findings may help you learn more about the incredible—and challenging—work of supporting young adults in their discernment. highlights and benefits

The singular strength of our discernment retreats, as reported by participants, is “the opportunity to be around a large and diverse array of like-minded young people similarly pursuing the question of call.” The data suggests that this is by far the largest point of appreciation and benefit, but other major factors also played into participants feeling as though the retreat mattered to them and their discernment.

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than the rest, the quantitative data underscores what the qualitative data also suggests: a well-facilitated, set-apart space, coupled with a diverse community of peers, is critical to success.

First, for one group of respondents, the retreat gave permission to attend to and articulate their calling, sometimes for the first time. For example, one participant said: The discernment retreat helped me formulate a perspective/framework that was less focused on immediate answers to the question of next steps, and more centered on the larger context of my calling. This framework created space/peace for the many iterations I’m sure the journey of vocation will take on.

participant questions and doubts

Analysis of applicant data shows that participants enter the retreats with significant doubts about their leadership capacity or their own sense of “worthiness” regarding a potential call to ministry. This is sometimes the case even when they have a fairly well-developed sense of call. These doubts came through in response to the application question, “What question do you continue to wrestle with as you consider your potential for leadership in a faith community?” For example:

For another group, the retreat provided practical tools for taking the next step on their journey. A participant wrote: The retreat gave me the space to think less about my future, and more about my “next most faithful step.” It helped me focus on what was right in front of me, rather than what might happen.

Am I adequate enough to lead others when I have made mistakes in my past and how can God truly choose someone like me to lead others?

The notion of community is evident in other comments from retreat respondents, suggesting that a primary impact of the retreat was to alleviate the sense of isolation that many of them felt prior to attending. For example: It answered a question that I didn’t quite know I had.Was I alone in the journey as a first-generation college student? The answer was a resounding “no.”

This sense of community appears to extend beyond the life of the retreat: 83 percent of survey respondents report still being in touch with someone they met through their retreat. What is happening at these retreats is not a “one and done” event, but rather the beginning of a series of connections and questions that persist. We see this sustained discernment as a particularly hopeful outcome.

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These questions about discernment are also echoed in the answers that applicants gave to the question, “How do you think participating in this Discernment Retreat will help you discern and develop your gifts for ministry?” The most common theme among these responses was an expressed hope to interact with other young people asking similar questions. The sense of wanting to find a group of “likeminded young people similarly pursuing the question of call” is strong. It arises in different ways for different people. For example, there is a significant subset of applicants and survey respondents who came to the retreats with real questions about how to reconcile their unique lived experience with the institutional church. These questions tended to come from more marginalized individuals who did not feel at home in the church at the time they applied for the retreat. One participant wrote:

Finally, it is worth noting that despite being asked questions about process, most survey respondents did not point to specific tools, and only a few pointed to specific speakers or mentors when providing feedback. Rather, participants were more likely to comment on the overall environment of the retreat—and the dimensions they perceived to be most important for creating that environment.

A question I wrestle with is, how do I remain true to my roots while also seeking to lift my people up to places where historically we have not belonged? Do I compromise my identity and betray my people if I seek a position at a renowned institution… in essence leaving them behind?

While it’s clear that no one single feature is significantly more or less impactful

Making a space where young adults exploring call can meet a wide variety of peers and have their own journey affirmed is a vital part of this work. We recognize,

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though, that affirming young adults does not mean their struggling or wrestling will be removed. Supporting the work of discernment does not always mean making the path being walked smooth and uncluttered: sometimes it can be enough to know others are walking with you and are there to help.

Appendix C DISCERNMENT RETREAT CHECKLIST

pre-event planning

Theme and Goals °°Retreat Identify retreat theme

changes suggested

°° °°Develop 1 to 3 goals and objectives for participants

A small subset of applicants expressed hope for things that the retreats are not necessarily designed to deliver—e.g. deeper Biblical knowledge or concrete leadership development. Some of these misplaced expectations also show up in the impact data in the form of lower scores, or comments from people who felt the retreat did not deliver what they were hoping for. In light of this finding, it may be worth revisiting our invitation material to see if there are opportunities to correct these impressions and set accurate expectations. It is easier for participants to benefit when they arrive with a clear sense of what they are being invited into.

Selection °°Venue Determine an affordable space that is conducive to a retreat setting

°° venue has ample break out spaces and meeting spaces to ° °Ensure accommodate the anticipated number of attendees

for venue accommodations related to food, mobility, and ease of ° °Account access to building

In a similar vein, a subset of respondents commented that the retreat was either, a) not a good fit for where they were in their journey, or b) enjoyable, but no different than other vocational exercises they had experienced. For these attendees, the retreat did not play a significant role in their journey. Perhaps the most concerning of these responses are the few individuals who left feeling that their sense of call had not been attended to. The following comment underscores this sentiment:

Planning °°Program Develop a design or format for the retreat (establish a retreat rhythm

° °format, spacious breaks, transition times between sessions, and multiple

touch points for small groups)

°°Create the schedule for the retreat how the meeting space and break out spaces should be set up °°Decide Plenary space (concentric circles, small group around a table, etc.)

I enjoyed the retreat but I did not feel it was helpful for me. I felt that it was directed toward people with a clear call and I didn’t have ANY call or idea or direction, and I left feeling the same way.

• • Break out spaces (circles with a central focal point, classroom style,

etc.)

While we cannot address everyone’s vocational needs, we also do not want to inadvertently be a source of discouragement. Moving forward we support developing a follow-up protocol for participants who seem to be frustrated or discouraged with their experience.

°°Determine who will be invited to participate who will lead the gathering (workshops, small group leaders, ° °Determine etc.) and whose experience relates to the retreat theme and participants • Schedule a meeting prior to the retreat to discuss the theme and ways

leaders might integrate it into the gathering

• Provide guidelines and expectations for your leadership team • Develop a payment process and registration for leadership

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(Hosting) °°Event Complete an onsite walk through and set up

°°Develop a pre-survey (if the information received is helpful in planning) Develop an evaluation that is informed by the goals and objectives to ° °disseminate at the close of the retreat

°° participants upon their arrival and provide a process for them to ° °Welcome check-in or register

°°Establish a list of materials and supplies that will be needed music needs for worship °°Identify Instruments

°°Implement programming agreements for how to be in community together (Covenants of ° °Deliver Presence, “brave space,” etc.)

• • Singers • Leaders

Retreat °°Post Close out expenses

°°Develop application and registration forms (if applicable)

°° °°Disseminate an evaluation °°Provide a post survey (if applicable)

Planning °°Logistical Determine transportation for participants and leaders (if applicable)

°° °°Choose space for lodging participants and leaders (if applicable) food options that meet participants and leaders’ dietary restrictions ° °Select for meals and snacks during breaks any needed accommodations (roommate pairing for lodging, ° °Identify room assignments, accessibility needed for those with unique needs, etc.)

°°

Develop a retreat check-in process, which provides participants and leaders with (if applicable):

• Lodging Information • Retreat Agenda • Assigned Small Groups • Nametags • Journals • Other Pertinent Information Decide on a photographer to document the retreat and determine a ° °specific time and onsite location to take a group photo Host a Run of Show with leadership team members upon design and ° °planning completion

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writers Guide of Contributors Dori Baker DBAKER@FTELEADERS.ORG

Dori Baker directs research and learning across FTE’s programs. She also designs and co-hosts events for young adults and those who support them in their vocational exploration. Dori identifies herself as a spy for hope. “My inspiration is found in young people who are passionate about the future of God’s work in the world and who are acting out lives of justice and commitment,” she says. She is an LGBTQ-affirming United Methodist pastor who received her doctorate from Northwestern University and is the author of Doing Girlfriend Theology: God-Talk with Young Women and The Barefoot Way: Faith Guide for Young Adults and the People who Walk With Them.

Alicia Crosby ALICIA@CENTERFORINCLUSIVITY.ORG ALICIATCROSBY.COM

Alicia T. Crosby is a Chicago-based justice educator, activist, and (sometimes reluctant) minister whose work addresses the spiritual, systemic, and interpersonal harm people experience. Through her teaching, writing, speaking, and space curation, Alicia helps individuals, communities, and institutions explore and unpack topics related to identity, inclusivity, journey, and intersectional equity. She channels her creativity through her nonprofit Center for Inclusivity, as well as in her writing and speaking.

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Teresa Delgado

research primarily focuses on the relationship between religion, Black politics, and popular culture in the post-Civil Rights era.

DELGADO.TERESA88@GMAIL.COM

Teresa Delgado is director of peace and justice studies and professor and chairperson of the Religious Studies Department at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY. She received her doctorate from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Her scholarship lifts up the experiences of marginalized people to articulate a constructive theological/ethical vision. Teresa teaches courses at the intersection of theology and ethics and has completed a book titled Prophesy Freedom: A Puerto Rican Decolonial Theology (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).

Ann Marie Do Ann Marie Do is a graduate of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Do is a member of the United Church of Christ (UCC) denomination and served in the UCC's Young Adult Volunteer Communities with the Justice Leadership Program in Seattle. Do was nominated for and participated in FTE's 2016 Discernment Retreat in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Darlene Hutto DHUTTO@FTLEADERS.ORG

Darlene Hutto provides leadership for FTE's strategic partnership initiatives and is an ordained Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

She works with leaders of congregations and church-related organizations that support young Christian leaders, and in so doing, has the chance to impact young adults who are exploring their call. When asked what she loves about her work with FTE, Darlene notes, “It is exciting to know that my life’s passion and love for ministry serves a critical mass of young adults.” Darlene is a graduate of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, where she earned a Master of Divinity degree.

Callid Keefe-Perry CALLID@ARTSRELIGIONCULTURE.ORG ARTSRELIGIONCULTURE.ORG

Ashley Easter ASHLEY@ASHLEYEASTER.COM

Ashley Easter is a Christian feminist, writer, speaker, TV producer, news pundit, ordained reverend, and abuse-victim advocate who educates churches and secular communities on abuse. She is the founder of The Courage Conference for survivors of abuse—and those who love them—and is author of The Courage Coach: A Practical, Friendly Guide On How To Heal From Abuse.

J.H. Hill, Jr.

Callid Keefe-Perry is a minister within the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

He is an organizational consultant, retreat leader, and teacher of discernment who is deeply influenced by both Quakerism and Ignatian spirituality. He currently serves as the executive director of ARC: Arts | Religion | Culture, an organization committed to supporting individuals and organizations whose work is at the intersection of spiritual and creative practices, especially community-building and justice work. Academically, his focus is public theology, creative practices, and education. Organizationally, he helps groups clarify their goals, commitments, and accountability.

JAMESHHILL00@GMAIL.COM

J.H. Hill, Jr. is an interdisciplinary doctoral student in the Department of Religion at Northwestern University who is also pursuing a graduate certificate in African American Studies. His work engages a wide range of critical paradigms from Black studies, sound studies, and theology to popular culture, performance studies, and the relationship between U.S. religious culture and media. His

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CONTRIBUTORS

Maggie Klaers MARGUERITE.KLAERS@GMAIL.COM SACREDGROUNDSPIRIT.ORG

Maggie Klaers is a certified spiritual director from the College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota. She is grounded in the Jesuit Spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Her on-going learning includes the Art of Living and Dying, grief CONTRIBUTORS

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work, managing changes into transformations, facing personal shame, 12 Step Spirituality, facilitator of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, as well as mentoring young contemplatives. She provides individual spiritual direction, group spiritual direction, retreats, programs, and training for developing spiritual directors.

A lifelong member of the United Church of Christ, Kit studied theater and anthropology at the University of Chicago, received her Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, and was ordained in her home church in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts in 2013. Kit lives in Albany, California with her husband Nate Klug,a poet and UCC pastor, their daughter, and their terrier.

Emily McGinley

Melva Sampson

EMCGINLEY@GMAIL.COM

SAMPSOML@WFU.EDU

The Rev. Emily McGinley is the founding pastor of Urban Village Church in Woodlawn, Illinois. She has extensive experience working with leaders across diverse networks and Christian traditions, having preached and presented nationally on the topics of vocational discernment, preaching, church planting, social media, inclusive evangelism, and anti-racist church leadership. She has coached individuals and congregations, and is a contributor to the book, Inter-Cultural Ministry: Hope for a Changing World.

The Rev. Dr. Sampson is the assistant professor of preaching and practical theology at Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity. She is an ordained minister and a womanist practical theologian whose research interests include Black preaching, women’s embodiment, African heritage spiritual traditions, Black girls’ ritual performance, and the relationship between digital proclamation and spiritual formation. She is the creator and curator of Pink Robe Chronicles™ and Raising Womanish Girls,™ both digital platforms used to elucidate the role of sacred memory and ritual in the collective healing of marginalized communities.

Her current research on Black women’s bodies, the Black church, and sexual discourses of resistance appears in The Feminist Wire.

Lakisha Lockhart LLOCKHART@FTELEADERS.ORG

Lakisha R. Lockhart, PhD is a playful womanist scholar-activist. She serves as assistant professor of practical theology at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University, and also as a consultant for FTE's Campus Ministry Exploration of Vocation (CMTEV) initiative. As an educator and consultant, she actively advocates and uses the body as a locus for doing theology through engaged, embodied, and playful pedagogical practices. She is also the current president of ARC: Arts | Religion | Culture.

Kit Novotny FIRSTCHURCHBERKELEY.ORG

Kit serves as the young adult minister at the First Congregational Church (United Church of Christ) in Berkeley, California. She loves the many adventures of church life: preaching, teaching, prayer, pastoral care with all ages, standing up for justice, ripping open loaves of bread, and the occasional raucous dance party.

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Zoie Sheets LETSGETINCLUSIVEUIC.ORG

Zoie Sheets was raised in small-town Illinois and moved to Chicago to attend college and take part in big-city life. Through her exploration on her campus and within her faith-based communities, she found a love for teaching, a fierce desire to fight for true accessibility, and a deeper connection with Jesus Christ. As a bisexual, invisibly disabled Christian, Zoie is dedicated to creating faith-based spaces that are truly accessible and inclusive. Within her ministry, The Inclusive Collective, she serves as the leadership development fellow and challenges other young leaders of faith to explore the many forms faith leadership can take in our world. Zoie is currently pursuing her Master of Public Health degree before attending medical school.

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David Shinn

Larry Whitney

DSHINN@WPC-MPLS.ORG

BU.EDU/CHAPEL/

David is the associate pastor for congregational care at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Emory University, where he was the founder and leader of the Korean Christian Fellowship and the Chinese Student Organization. He earned his Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he founded the Asian, Asian American and Pacific Island student group. In the Congregational Care ministry, David works with trained lay leaders to meet the care needs of the entire church family. David is a graduate of the Executive Leadership Program at McCormick Theological Seminary and served for several years on the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program (PILP) board.

Brother Larry is a professed member of the Lindisfarne Community, an ecumenical neo-monastic religious order based in Ithaca, New York. The Lindisfarne Community ordained him to the diaconate in 2006 and to the priesthood in 2009. He currently oversees the ministry department of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, including a team of associate chaplains and student leaders, and is responsible for the programmatic ministry of the chapel. Brother Larry offers pastoral care and counsel to students in a variety of campus settings.

His academic research interests include religious language, comparative theology, ritual theory, religion and science, ontology, metaphysics, semiotics, American Pragmatism, and philosophical cosmology.

Jocelyn Sideco

Dan Wolpert

JOCELYN@INGOODCOMPANY.NET.CO

MICAHPRAYS.ORG

INGOODCOMPANY.NET.CO

Jocelyn is a retreat leader, spiritual director, and innovative minister who specializes in mission-centered ministry. She directs the Community Service and Social Justice office at St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, California, prays at St. Agnes Church, blogs for NCRonline.org, and consults with organizations like the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

Tyler Sit TYLER.SIT@GMAIL.COM

Daniel Wolpert, a healer and student of the spiritual life, worked as a research scientist, psychologist, spiritual director, farmer, teacher, and construction worker before earning his Master of Divinity degree at San Francisco Theological Seminary. He has taught in the fields of psychology and spiritual formation, led retreats, and delivered talks in numerous settings around the world. Daniel is the co-founder and executive director of the Minnesota Institute of Contemplation and Healing. He is the author of Leading a Life with God, the Practice of Spiritual Leadership and Creating a Life with God: the Call of Ancient Prayer Practices, as well as numerous articles on meditation and healing.

The Rev. Tyler Sit is the church planter of New City Church, which grew out of a small gathering in his living room in Minneapolis. He is a lover of Minnesota, a United Methodist pastor, and the son of a Chinese immigrant. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in communication studies from Boston University and a Master of Divinity degree from Emory University's Candler School of Theology.

Tyler has received training as a prison chaplain, community organizer, and social entrepreneur. When he's not at New City, you can find Tyler wandering around the Mississippi River.

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Books and Articles

Keefe-Perry, L. Callid & Moon, Zachary. “Courage in Chaos: The Importance of Trauma-informed Adult Religious Education.” Religious Education, 2018.

Alves, Rubem. The Poet, The Warrior, and the Prophet SCM Press, 2002.

Arao, Brian and Clemens, Kristi. "The Art of Effective Facilitation," in From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice, ed. Lisa M. Landreman (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2013).

"Around Diversity and Social Justice,” in The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators, ed. Lisa M. Landreman. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2013: 135-50.

Baker, Dori Grinenko. The Barefoot Way: A Faith Guide for Youth, Young Adults, and the People Who Walk with Them. Louisville KY, Westminster John Knox Press: 2012.

Keefe Perry, L. Callid “Clearness Committee Revisited: Gathering Young Adults for Communal Discernment" in The Prophetic Voice and Peace Making, (General Board of Higher Education in the United Methodist Church, 2016).

Lewis, Stephen, Williams, Matthew, and Dori Baker. Another Way: Living and Leading Change by Design St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, Forthcoming, 2019.

Palmer, Parker J. Let Your Life Speak: Listening For The Voice Of Vocation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

“The Clearness Committee: A Communal Approach to Discernment.” http://www.couragerenewal.org/PDFs/Parker-Palmer_Clearness Committee.pdf Reyes, Patrick. Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2016.

Schneider, Pat. How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Shafton, Anthony. Dream-Singers: The African American Way with Dreams.

New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Steere, Douglas V. Gleanings: A Random Harvest. Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 1986.

Thurman, Howard. “The Sound of the Genuine,” Baccalaureate Address at Spelman College, May 4, 1980, edited by Jo Moore Stewart for The Spelman Messenger Vol. 96 No. 4 (Summer 1980), 4. The entire speech can be accessed here: www.uindy.edu/eip/files/reflection4.pdf

Berryman, Jerome. Becoming Like a Child: The Curiosity of Maturity Beyond the Norm. New York: Church Publishing, 2017.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985.

Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.

Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.

Cahalan, Kathleen. The Stories We Live By: Finding God’s Call All Around Us. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017.

Florence, Anna Carter. Preaching as Testimony Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007.

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BOOKS AND ARTICLES

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

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