5 Programs

1

Weekend retreats and seminars for ministers and music directors to learn Love Beyond Belief™ techniques for tweaking their Sunday services and small-group ministry programs. 

The goals of these retreats and seminars are to deepen spiritual practices, expand theological understanding, and develop strategies and practices for Sunday services that speak to head and heart through words and music.

2

Love Beyond Belief™ small-group ministry programs that encourage and facilitate openhearted fellowship with others.  

Love Beyond Belief small groups create within us and among us direct experiences of care, support, and love that prompt acts of lovingkindness.  They are a practice of insight, reflection, and action guided by compassion. Each step begins with the discovery of connections that create awe, care, and joy.  The discoveries heal broken hearts, mend injured souls, and calm restless minds because unconditional love is felt.  They help us develop a deeper sense of who we are and what we can do together. They create the actual experience of Love Beyond Belief.

3

An eight-day on-site Love Beyond Belief™ vitality program custom designed to enhance the emotional development work of congregations through a series of workshops for clergy and laity. 

The goal is to revitalize congregational life. Love Beyond Belief™ congregations can become a network of congregations working together to create local, regional, and national initiatives that will help heal and transform the world.

4

Love Beyond Belief™ programs to train Love Beyond Belief™ ministers and laity at liberal seminaries. As part of this initiative a Love Beyond Belief™ program with Process and Faith for new Center for Process Studies (CPS) course work and research at Claremont School of Theology.

Liberal seminaries, like mainstream congregations, are small, shrinking, or closing. Consider the statistics compiled by Richard Ostling for his November 17, 2015 essay for the online journal Get Religion: five of the most prominent liberal seminaries combined, namely, Chicago (324), Harvard (336), Union (232), Vanderbilt (233), and Yale (412), have fewer students enrolled than one evangelical seminary Gordon-Conwell (2,067). Liberal seminaries need Love Beyond Belief™ programs that include teachers who are musicians, artists, and contemporary affect theologians to attract and train a new generation of seminarians for thriving Love Beyond Belief™ congregations. 


Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness by Thandeka (Polebridge Press, September 2018) can serve as part of the rationale for this new liberal seminary initiative. As John B. Cobb Jr., notes in the forward to this book, Thandeka has written a book of great practical importance that can help dying churches come alive again and help those alienated from these churches to develop community activities that will lead them to experience love beyond belief. 

5

Advance models of success for Love Beyond Belief™ communities, beginning with First Unitarian Church of Dallas and a Protestant church in southern California.

Help grow these two congregations as Love Beyond Belief models of large, well-attended, financially secure, liturgically and programmatically vibrant congregations engaged in the public square with outreach campuses linked to them.

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