Faith Community Innovations
A 9 Month Process: 3 days of leadership development and program planning followed by collaborative learning through video conferencing
This is your invitation to create a participatory mission development process with up to 10 other innovative faith communities.
About Faith Community Innovations
The intention of this process is to develop the capacity of a faith community to become agents of cultural change within the church system. Activities intended to effect systemic change are very different than activities intended to create new programs within stable organizations.
For the church to move toward greater collaboration among faith communities by clustering and networking, there must be a shift in the ways we work with one another. There must also be a cultural shift in the self-perception of congregations as being independent and self-sufficient.
A few leaders from a select number of faith communities will be trained and supported over a period of 9 months to engage church and community members in small and large group conversations. The outcome of the conversations will be innovative emergent practices that have the potential to create a more collaborative church culture, relevant mission and ministry, and life-giving community.
Training and orientation
- 2 or 3 key leaders from up to 10 communities of faith (or clusters) attend a 3-day training event.
- Participants learn and practice Art of Hosting methods (world cafe, open space etc), learn to use the video conferencing platform and become familiar with the overall process.
- Community of faith leaders will design a process to suit their own context. They will discern the right inquiry questions for the small groups and learn how to create meaningful conversations to foster a culture of innovation.
Small Groups — Learning, Discovering, Discerning
- Each leadership team will implement the process in their context.
- Local small groups meet 4 times to engage questions developed by the local team and “probe” the community of faith and their neighbourhood to learn where change is possible and where there are opportunities for discipleship and ministry
- Teams will gather online with other faith community leaders through monthly video conference calls for collaboration and support.
Innovation Cafés & Safe to Fail Experiments
Innovation Café #1:
- Small groups come together with the whole community of faith to host a world café style session to discover the themes and patterns that are emerging.
- Together the community of faith will identify small changes and simple new ideas or activities to try, based on the themes and patterns emerging from their conversations.
- Through open space sessions participants propose “safe-to-fail” innovative experiments that can be tried over the next few months.
- The faith community experiments with innovative activities for 4-6 months.
- Small groups gather again for 3 sessions to probe and learn what is changing and how changes might be related to the experiments.
Innovation Café #2:
- Another round of world café conversations is held by the community of faith. Together they celebrate positive changes and share the learning from their experiments.
- A second open space session helps them create new “safe-to-fail” experiments (or amplify existing ones)
- Leadership Teams will continue to discern where this new spirit is leading the community of faith and decides next steps.
- The monthly on-line gatherings will be a place where ideas and challenges are shared and leaders are encouraged by others on the innovation path.
Your Leaders and Hosts
Allan Smith-Reeve
Greenwood United Church / Bedford House Community Ministry
Ordained minister, conversation host, social innovator, community activist, poet
Joe Ramsay
Joe Ramsay and Associates, Inc
Ordained minister, conversation host, organizational consultant, musician, singer-songwriter
Apply Now!
Interested in participating in this event? Complete the form on this page and indicate in 250 words or less why you believe this program would be a good fit for your faith community (or cluster of faith communities). We will let you know when the next Faith Community Innovations program begins.