The Good News of Shipwreck: What Does Church Look Like Now?

The Center for Leadership Excellence presents a Day of Learning with Kenda Creasy Dean…

(Doors open at 9am)

Hayes Barton UMC (map it)
2209 Fairview Road, Raleigh 27608

Bring Your Team! We believe this Day of Learning, like most of our events, will have the biggest impact when clergy and laity attend together. Bring a group of 3 or more from your church and receive a 20% discount on your total registration. You must register by January 10 to receive this discount!

About the Day:

Research on congregations after Covid is mixed: attendance, giving, volunteers are on the rise, while American church life overall continues to shrink in influence and size. Many congregations still feel shipwrecked—an experience that we will reframe using the story of Paul’s shipwreck on Malta.

How might shipwreck actually be good news—for the church as a whole, for our denomination, for your congregation? What kinds of ministries are called for in our post-Covid context? How is innovation in the church different from innovation in Silicon Valley?

In this interactive day together, we will take up these questions while you begin to lay the foundation for innovative change in your congregation. Come with an idea for ministry—or not (you’ll have one by the end of our day together)—and see where it goes!

About Kenda Creasy Dean

Kenda Creasy Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor and the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she
works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry and the Farminary. In 2013 she and Mark DeVries co-founded Ministry Incubators.

She is the author of numerous books on youth and the church, including Innovating for Love: Joining God’s Expedition through Christian Social Innovation, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church, and The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul-Tending in Youth Ministry, co-authored with Ron Foster, which just came out in its 25th anniversary edition, rewritten with (millennial) Megan DeWald.

A graduate of Miami University (Ohio), Wesley Theological Seminary (Washington, DC), and Princeton Theological Seminary (New Jersey), Kenda has served churches in Arlington, VA, College Park, MD, and Kingston, NJ. She and her husband, Kevin, love digging their toes in the sand on the Jersey shore and hanging out with their hilarious grown kids.