2022 CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP FORUM THEME: AWAKEN WHAT’S POSSIBLE SMALL GROUP LEADER GUIDE|
Thank you for serving as a small group leader for FTE’s 2022 Christian Leadership Forum (CLF). Through your leadership with Forum participants, FTE seeks to create a safe and generative space for established and emerging leaders to have meaningful conversations with peers from diverse, ecumenical backgrounds.
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP FORUM OVERVIEW AND THEME The Christian Leadership Forum will bring together approximately 100 diverse participants to explore the theme Awaken What’s Possible. The CLF participants include young adults who have been nominated by their communities, pastors, and other leaders of faith-rooted organizations, as well as a cohort of leaders from FTE’s vocational network. These network members are those who have received grants from FTE to work with emerging young adult leaders, along with faith-based leaders across a broad spectrum of religious programming (including, academic institutional leaders and nonprofit leaders). Who could have predicted this moment! What we all have experienced, lost, and endured throughout the pandemic. This apocalyptic moment now calls us to imagine and think differently about our work, each other, and the world we inhabit together. We invite us to awaken to what’s possible now in ourselves and each other as God’s beloved community. The way forward is hybridity and diversity. It requires church leaders to think differently about how they will accompany diverse, young people in exploring their purpose, passion, and calling to serve increasingly diverse churches, communities, and causes. This way will require that we occupy more than one exclusive form of church and training dedicated to connecting, educating, and healing diverse communities of people. The future and what’s now possible will need us to cultivate our vocational and ecclesial imagination for a post-pandemic era. During this year’s CLF, we’re gathering artists and futurists, priests, organizers, and designers to discern and awaken possibilities all of us are longing for, storying, embodying, and experimenting within our communities and with one another. Each of us holds stories and deep longings of a more hopeful future.