“Answering the Call to Radical Faithfulness,” Pendle Hill’s new pilot certificate program in faith-based activism and social movement organizing, is going well with 11 participants this Spring and Summer in a multi-ethnic, interfaith, and multi-generational cohort.
The five-month program includes four short-term training residencies, weekly readings, online discussions, and independent fieldwork and writing projects. The program seems particularly important now during this dark time of mass incarceration, frequent police murders of unarmed black folks, and the hate crime killings of nine bible study participants at a black church in Charleston. Along with the ongoing social sins of climate disruption, endless war, growing economic inequality, and corporate domination of the world’s governments, the “Answering the Call to Radical Faithfulness” program helps participants reach greater clarity, knowledge and skill to promote the power of diversity, justice and inclusion within their organizations and the world.
How can we organize strong issue campaigns and social movements that can address these issues and help us build up what Martin Luther King called “the Beloved Community?” Spiritual activists and faith-based organizers clearly have an important role to play in fostering such a “nonviolent revolution of values” in the months, years, and decades ahead. Pendle Hill seeks to support such visionary people to deepen both their spiritual grounding and their strategic effectiveness in this organizing work.
Given the success of this year’s pilot program, which includes Pendle Hill’s first foray into online education, Pendle Hill’s education department has decided to offer two additional sections of this program during the 2015-2016 year – one starting in late September and the other starting in late February. Scholarship money will be available again for these next two iterations of the “Answering the Call to Radical Faithfulness” program and we encourage people to visit our website and help us spread the word. Click here for more information.
In the coming year or two, we will also likely be adding new blended online/short residency learning programs such as biblical literacy, radical interpretations of scripture, envisioning a moral economy, and nonprofit leadership and management training for young adult Friends, with a special focus on working for Quaker organizations.
We look forward to seeing many of you participate in these innovative, new, extended educational programs at Pendle Hill.
