The Center for Leadership Excellence offered a workshop, Contemplative Prayer, Contemplative Living, Contemplative Leadership, with Winston Charles on February 26, 2019.
About the Workshop:
The twentieth century blossomed with a renewed appreciation of the stream of contemplative spirituality, which had been largely ignored by the West for centuries. Tilden Edwards and the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, Richard Rohr and the Center for Action and Contemplation, Thomas Keating and Contemplative Outreach, John Main and the World Community of Christian Meditation, all in their own ways opened these ancient avenues of spiritual deepening for clergy and laity in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century.
This workshop offered an understanding of how contemplative prayer and spirituality can become that deep source of communion with the Beloved to which Jesus invited those whom he met. Here is found a different center of grace from which to live lives of compassion and courage in church, at home, for the world. Returning to this center – or this spiritual heart – is a constant source of resilience, discernment, conversion, and calling, which becomes the very foundation for contemplative living and leadership.
About Winston Charles:
Winston Charles grew up attending St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bennettsville, a small town in South Carolina. He graduated from the University of the South (Sewanee) and Virginia Theological Seminary. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1974, Winston served congregations in the Dioceses of South Carolina, New York, and North Carolina before retiring from parish ministry in 2009 after fifteen years as rector of Christ Church, Raleigh. In midcourse, he earned a Ph.D. in Church History from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. For the past ten years, he has been a part of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation community, which for over forty-five years has been dedicated to reclaiming the ancient Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and leadership for a new century. He now directs the clergy program for Shalem, Going Deeper: Clergy Spiritual Life and Leadership.