2016 National Gathering: Feb 22-24 – Register Today!

Faith at the Crossroads

 

What’s at stake?

For you? For your congregation? For your community?

First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta

Feb 22-24, 2016

This NEXT Church National Gathering—timed at the beginning of Lent—will engage questions that invite us into the transformative power of reconciliation and inspire us by the stories of those witnesses who go before us. We will hear stories of reconciliation from Allan Boesak, liberation theologian and advocate for social justice in apartheid South Africa. Atlanta native, Bob Lupton will share experience to prevent charity from becoming toxic. Andrew Foster Connors, Bishop Doug Miles, and Glenna Huber of BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) will witness to the importance of community organizing in creating social change and reconciliation.

We will worship together and be enriched in workshops, testimonies, IGNITE presentations, and relationship building. The questions framing our time together are:

  • How do we navigate the choices before us in faith-filled, Christ-honoring ways?
  • What’s at stake in the mission of the church today? Why does the church matter to the world?
  • What does it look like when the community of faith engages in reconciling work in a fractured city?
  • For what are we willing to give up the past and present form of the church we know and love? For what are we willing to sacrifice ourselves and lose our lives?
  • How do we practice the reconciling work about which we preach without giving in to partisanship or confines of ideology?
  • How do we give voice to places of sin, brokenness, and violence without becoming stuck and overcome by guilt, but able to move forward in hope and humility?

There are choices to be made in how we go forward as Christ’s church — as individual disciples, as congregations, as a denomination.

Learn more and register here!