Year Round Programs for Congregations
(Scheduled to Your Calendar)
Workshops/Forums:
Contemporary Hymn Writing
In this workshop, We will look at the history of familiar hymns and the circumstances under which the hymn writers created them. We will learn how to write and sing our own faith experience, using the great hymn writers as teaching models.
Training in Lectio Divina
This intimate Benedictine practice of prayer & meditation teaches us how to listen to scripture, hear its message for us in our life circumstance, and how to intercede for others. (Ideal for evening prayer services.)
Sacred Story and Symbol in Stained Glass.
Enjoy a brief history of stained glass and take a pilgrimage of faith using your congregation’s stained glass windows as the teaching medium.
Retreats or 4-week Small Group Offerings:
Cultivating Gratitude as Spiritual Practice
Reduce anxiety and dissolve resentments by developing a daily discipline of gratitude. Watch how that changes your heart, your relationships and how you view life. Learn how to incorporate journaling, meditation, prayer, and ritual into your daily practice of gratitude. Study the remarkable relationship between happiness and gratitude and use gratitude to intentionally raise your happiness quotient.
Discovering Your Gifts & Calling in Life
We will help each other identify our gifts, our core values and our spiritual purpose in life. We will explore images of God and examine their influence in naming and being named by the Sacred. We will examine where our gifts have taken us and where we want to go with them. We will examine what it means to be called to a specific task or vocation and what it means to pay attention to blessings in the common things of daily life. Participants will complete a Life Map that may serve as a spiritual guide for the third act of their lives.
The Power of Ritual for Healing & Celebration
Use the seasons, sacraments and rituals of the church for spiritual healing and celebration. Create new rituals to address specific needs and experiences in your life individually and communally. Examples: rituals for healing from experiences such as abuse, miscarriage, abortion or the ending of a relationship; rituals marking important passages such as “coming out” or coming of age; and rituals celebrating unions or anniversaries or important family events.
Living Word: A Good Word at the Right Time
We will look at good words from scripture to live by and then reflect on those pivotal moments in our lives when someone told us what we needed to hear in order to do something, overcome something or get through something so that we could become the person we are.
Exploring Your Spiritual Genealogy
Who are your spiritual forebears and where have they come from? What experiences shaped their worldview, their occupations, their relationships and their core values? How have you been influenced by them? What spiritual role models do you now have in your life? If you could interview someone living or dead to ask them something of importance to you, who would that be and why? We will create a spiritual family tree and scrapbook of those we are related to and those whom we have chosen as spiritual family to us. We will examine what we have inherited, what we would like to pass on and what we would like to leave behind.
Storytelling Around the Fire
In the ancient tradition of our spiritual forebears who gathered around the fire to tell their personal and communal stories of faith, we will gather around the hearth in a cozy lodge to study two great Hebrew stories of deliverance: Joseph in the Royal House of Egypt and Esther in the Court of Persia. Using what emerges from these stories, we will share our own stories of faith. Our stories can live on as expressions of God’s “living word” for: home meditation & devotional use; contemporary readings in worship; and archival history preservation.
Other Offerings customized to your specific populations and needs.
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