Designed for use with your board, pastoral staff or small groups, these provides you with a structure you can follow to create your own gathering using CBOQ’s materials from Reignite 2022. You will receive the guide and access to Andrew Root’s session videos. Feel free to utilize whichever components you find helpful.

Our hope is, through Andrew’s insights, this will help you discern ways to engage with your congregation and your community in this secular age.

Session 1: The Pastor in a Secular Age

Being a pastor is no easy task in our time. Institutions are weaker, budgets are in decline, people are uninterested, and commitment is wavering. But these are only symptoms of a bigger issue. This presentation will seek to peer beneath the symptoms and explore why many pastors find themselves in an identity crisis. The presentation examines what living in a secular age does to pastoral identity and how pastors can find new footing within it.

Session 2: The Congregation in a Time Crisis

It’s often assumed the church and local congregations are in a crisis of resources. Congregations are losing people, money, and overall cultural influence. So often we assume that what ails the congregation is this loss of resources, and what would heal it would be more resources. Yet, this presentation will show that these thoughts are misguided. The crisis the local congregation faces is not a loss of resources, but a loss of time. Time, in late modernity, just keeps speeding up. And local congregations simply can’t keep up. As our experience of time continues to accelerate—with technology, social life, and the pace of our lives—the structures that congregations need to remain stable melt away. We’ll explore how the congregation can attend to sacred time in a late modernity of accelerating time.