Reflecting Together to Thrive Together. 

As ministries and communities of faith, we are in the midst of an uncertain and unsettling season. Our local communities are affected in many different ways and there are challenges everywhere we look. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the range of voices to which the church has had to respond has been unrelenting: new ministry models, shifting guidelines, diverging parishioner preferences. The unrelenting voices have led to an unrelenting pace at which these voices call for response. Political voices, financial voices, social voices, and dare we say it? – religious voices – all are vying for our attention and response.

The church, and the people that make it up, have been hearing these competing voices and have been reacting as fast and as best as they can.  Yet, this season we find ourselves in has only seemed to amplify these voices, both from without and within, that were already calling for the church’s response: Numerical decline, financial strain, injustice, racial and political division, dwindling cultural capital.  Not only has the church not “kept up,” reacting to these voices has all too often come at the cost of hearing and responding to the voice of God.

 

Is there a way for the church to recover a posture of prayerful response to this divine movement rather than further exhausted by the loudest voices of our time?  

Is there a different way detached from the unrelenting pace, that instead creates space to listen to another voice?

 

Exploring a different way is at the heart of The Examen(ed) Church. 

The Examen(ed) Church is designed to help churches (re)discover a posture of prayerful reflection and response in the midst of an uncertain and unsettling season.

The Examen(ed) Church is designed to help congregations grow closer to Christ by learning to listen for the signal of God’s voice in the noise of life.

The Examen(ed) Church is designed around individual and collective reflection using the time-tested practice of the Examen of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The practice of the Examen has been described by Jesuit George Aschenbrenner as... "a matter of Spirit-guided insight into our life, and courageously responsive sensitivity to God’s call in our heart.”