Living a Life of Faith

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ELCA Coaching is collaborating with Rev. Stephanie Luedtke and Rev. Mukesh Cheedie to facilitate our gatherings on the fourth Wednesdays of each month through 2025 to help us live out our faith. For January 2025, we met on January 29 instead of January 22.

(Most other Wednesdays will explore additional elements of Creating Beloved Community.)

Our regular gatherings in 2025 will have a general flow of listening, learning, and sharing for the first three weeks of each month -- with intentional movement from head to heart to hands. We are inviting you to go even deeper in these fourth weeks, among the Beloved Community, to discern and name your next most faithful step(s). How are we intentionally living out our faith in the world?

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We began gathering online with faith leaders in March of 2020 to wrestle together with Being Church in a global pandemic, which transitioned over the summer of 2021 to Courageous Leadership, as COVID revealed our perceptions and misconceptions about most things in life. Jesus is our primary model as we move toward Creating Beloved Community: Healing Together to learn together and experiment in community with a variety of spiritual practices and focus areas.

"Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion." -- bell hooks, All About Love

We believe this is in attunement with our call as Christians from:

Scripture and our expanding understanding and expression of love for ALL of our neighbors
MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail and Vision of the Beloved Community
What Is the Beloved Community and Why Is It Important?
The Idea of the Beloved Community: The creative friendship of Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh
ELCA Teaching, and especially our "connection to all of life"
ELCA Living Our Baptismal Covenant
ELCA Truth and Healing Movement (as facilitated by Indigenous Ministries and Tribal Relations)
ELCA Ecumenical and Inter-Religious Relations
Dr. Shawn Ginwright's The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves
And so many other diverse voices and sacred ways we engage with each other and with the world.

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To answer some commonly asked questions about these regular gatherings:

"Who is considered a faith leader?" The coaching ministry defines "faith leaders" as ALL members of the Body | "priesthood of ALL believers"| Beloved Community, so even if you do not feel like you are a leader, you are welcome in this space.

"Why are you still meeting?" "Don't become too familiar with loneliness. Community is a risk, but liberation depends on the collective. Who can you trust to hold you?" -- Cole Arthur Riley, author of Black Liturgies

"How can I prepare?" Beloved Community members pay attention and listen actively. We invite you to bring a spirit of curiosity and openness to these gatherings and to all aspects of your life. What are you noticing? Where is Spirit moving? How are you being invited to participate in the work God is already doing, especially outside the walls of the building where the church often gathers?

"What if I'm not a group person?" Beloved Community members take calculated risks. We invite you to take a small step outside your comfort zone and allow yourself to be seen and witnessed. We can almost guarantee that you will be pleasantly surprised by the loving, caring, and nurturing nature of community in this time together.