Talk:Numinous programme
Can we have what is important for different religions - not just Christianity -----Snowded TALK 17:25, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
Updated proposals for what the Numinous programme offers religious leadership
Congregational Leadership: Faith communities are the co-creative partnership between clergy and lay leadership, and frequently include additional relationships among their broader communities. The ways leadership is entangled inside and outside the community of faith is an important and essential dynamic indicator of vitality and sustainability. The leadership landscape related to clergy, lay, and their broader situated communities offer a variety of ways to understand mutuality, and collaboration that exists within these spaces, and where public life, trust, resilience and civic engagement flourish.
Leadership from the Circumference: Religious organizations are broadening their leadership to include marginalized populations who previously, under traditional patriarchal leadership models, have been significantly underrepresented, if not altogether excluded from leadership positions. This leadership population of intersectional identities related to gender, race, and sexuality offer a unique vantage point relative institutionalized norms, and have been otherwise difficult to understand, assess and access the kind of impact they are having on faith communities and their broader networks and neighborhoods. The leadership roles of Black, Indigenous, People of Color impacts a variety of religious communities today; one such instance is the Black Lives Matter Movement. While many religious organizations are still racially segregated, some are embracing racial and ethnic identity as essential perspectives that enhance their own life as communities of faith. LGBTQIA+ leaders are writing about their experiences and the faith communities they are forming. Tracking the complexity of these intersecting identities will be helpful to understanding the adaptive leadership opportunities and challenges emerging among communities of faith.
Religious Imagination: Religious leadership is shaped by the way religious communities organize and embodily configure their identities in the world. Religious imagination has both formal (i.e. doctrine, worship/liturgy, prayer, sacred text), and informal (i.e. innovative experimenting, relationship to neighbors, civic partnerships, lay leadership vocations, etc) dimensions. The inherited traditions shape the imagination as also does the particular context, culture, space and time where the community of faith exists today. Working to understand the powerful impact of a communities operating religious imagination by placing it alongside where religious leadership renegotiates their meaning differently because of their pluralistic, and divergent contexts, cultures and identities.
Clergy Leadership Health: Many clergy in today's faith communities are overwhelmed, anxious, depressed by the enormity of the expectations to lead communities of faith, from levels of expertise, to expectations, to personal demands. The toll it takes on leaders today has significant impact on the health of communities of faith, the caring systems that support them, including the neighborhoods frequently benefiting because of them.
Interfaith Leadership: Interfaith grassroots movements among religious traditions are rising up in response to such things as Islamophobia, and other industrialized complexes rooted in xenophobic tendencies. These movements are creating training programs to build paths to understanding, and with commitments toward multi-faith peacemaking. See Paths to Understanding.