Gathering 2015 Update
Phil Kenneson, Jenny Williams
Forming Youth in Our Congregations: Raising Danielle and Daniel to Live in Babylon
We're less than two months away from Gathering 2015 and we're excited about the opportunity we'll have to be together and reflect on this year's theme. If you haven't registered yet, please do that soon. And even if you can't attend this year, here are two important ways you can contribute to the success of this year's Gathering:
First, we're asking as many folks as possible to contribute to a resource page that we'll keep on the website well after the Gathering. Have you read a book or article, watched a film or video, listened to a podcast, etc., that has changed the way you think about and practice forming youth as disciples? If so, please write (at most) two paragraphs about this resource, describing in the first paragraph what you found most important about this resource and in the second how it shifted your thinking and/or practice in your context. (Because these won't be reviews as such, but guides to use, it's likely that we'll post more than one submission if multiple folks identify the same resource but have been shaped differently by it.) Please take a few minutes and email a submission to Stephen Lawson, our able collator of submissions.
Second, we're asking those who are able to make a contribution to the cost of this year's Gathering. As always, we offer scholarships to a lot of folks and this year we'll be helping even more because we have a larger-than-usual number of young people who will be joining us and participating in our conversations. We're excited that we'll be talking with young people and not just about them, but we need your help to make this possible, even if you aren't able to attend.
If you haven't taken a look at the more detailed list of speakers, preachers, and workshop leaders, you can see that on the registration page. Here are a few highlights that we are particularly excited about given this year's theme:
Chanon Ross, Director of the Institute for Youth Ministry at Princeton Theological Seminary, will offer two plenary sessions on Thursday afternoon, the first on engaging youth culture and the second on some of the significant shifts taking place in congregational ministry to young people.
Morgan Guyton, director of the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola University in New Orleans, which preach at our opening worship service on Thursday afternoon. The daughter-father pair of Jessie Larkins and Joel Shuman will offer a little intergenerational preaching at our closing worship on Saturday morning.
During our Friday afternoon plenary, we'll have the opportunity to hear youth leaders and young people from Redeemer Community Church (San Francisco) and Hopwood Christian Church (Milligan College, TN) interview each other about some of the formative practices with which they are engaged, as well as be in conversation around tables regarding formative practices in our own congregations.
We also have a very fine slate of workshops scheduled for Friday that will help participants to further explore youth formation in various contexts. Workshop subjects include "Transforming Polarization into Discipleship", "Congregations as Ecologies of Formational Practice" and "Churches, Home, and Friends: A Reflectivce Conversation." For a complete list of workshops and speakers, click here.
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