Starting this Sunday: Supporting Ministry Through Scripture & Imagination
- windycooler
- 2 days ago
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Seven guided meditations and worship sharing sessions using Ignatius of Loyola's Simple Contemplation to explore call, resistance, suffering, and resilience through Hebrew Bible and New Testament passages...
August 30: Call
September 27: Spiritual Gifts
October 25: Anxiety
November 22: Pushback
December 20: Suffering
January 24: Integrity
February 28: Resilience Registration is free for each session (donations so appreciated), but limited to 15 Friends.
The work of ministry, both inside and outside of the Meeting community, raises a complex set of questions and emotions in the minister. How can I trust my call? What do I do when I encounter resistance? How can I stay true to my core values?
Scripture can be a remarkable tool for exploring these queries. For many, Christian scripture may be a didactic guidebook or something to critically study within a specific historical context.
But for 16th-Century Spanish priest Ignatius of Loyola, scripture was the site of an imaginative encounter with God. By imagining himself as part of the Bible story, particularly the Gospels, Ignatius found a wealth of emotional meaning, spiritual assurance, and self=revelation. He called this practice Simple Contemplation.
Friends Incubator for Public Ministry invites you to experiment with Simple Contemplation for yourself in a series of seven guided meditations and worship sharing sessions. Each session will focus on a common experience within ministry: hearing and responding to a call; naming and fostering our spiritual gifts; grappling with anxiety and fear; handling pushback and resistance; encountering suffering (both others’ and our own); maintaining our integrity; and embracing resilience after experiencing setbacks. The scripture we’ll explore together comes from both the Christian New Testament and the Hebrew Bible, with passages centering women and men facing these issues.
Each session will be held via Zoom at 7:00 pm EST. Our facilitator will be Friend Jim Webner, graduate of Heartpaths DFW certificate program in the Art of Spiritual Direction. These are all free (donations are gratefully accepted), but you must register for each one that you would like to attend on our events page. Space in each session is limited to 15 Friends.
August 30: Call
September 27: Spiritual Gifts
October 25: Anxiety
November 22: Pushback
December 20: Suffering
January 24: Integrity
February 28: Resilience
Jim Webner holds a Master's degree in Divinity (MDiv) from Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, with concentrations in Biblical Interpretation and Christian History, Theology, and Ethics, and a Certificate in the Art of Spiritual Direction from the HeartPaths training program. He is a Quaker employee, spiritual director, occasional teacher, and former convener of the LGBTQ+ Visibility working group at Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore. He lives in Ellicott City, MD with his husband and an irascible feline roommate.
Do you like all this free programming? :) We are very, very, very close to our goal of reaching $10,000 for the month of August! We're sitting at about $8,000 in matched funding! Can you help us reach our total match of $10,000 in the next few days!?
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