Amos Yong and newly added participant Lisa Slayton – a longtime leader in our community – will help Karam Forum 2022 envision theological schools that rely on the Holy Spirit in our digitalizing, globalizing, pluralizing cultural environments.
And speaking of globalization, during our Global Session, Kara Martin will ask Bernard Boyo and Linda Chonco to give us an update on theological education in Africa! You won’t want to miss this unique opportunity.
Denise Daniels, Michaela O’Donnell, Helen Young Hayes, Fernando Tamara and more will also lead our collaboration, with a focus on Thriving in a Changing World.
Join us on November 17-18! We’re looking forward to gathering as we reaffirm, reimagine and refresh our vocations – collaborating to seek new life for ourselves, our students, our schools and our communities.
The time to register for Karam Forum has arrived!
Gather with us LIVE at Park Church in Denver, OR join by Zoom from wherever you are!
Check out our event website for details, including the schedule and FAQs.
We’ll start at 7:00pm on Thursday, Nov. 17, and finish up with lunch on Friday, Nov. 18.
Members of Karam Fellowship get discount admission to Karam Forum. Find out more and join the Fellowship to enjoy great benefits, like a subscription to our peer-reviewed journal Faith & Flourishing, and support our work as we help you build the future of theological education.
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We know that our changing world is a huge challenge. From the digital revolution to the challenge of cultural pluralism, almost everything that our schools were built to do needs to be rethought. The Lord is leading his people out of their familiar home and into a wilderness, toward a land they do not know.
That’s a key reason for our annual Global Session, in which colleagues from around the world join us via Zoom. This year we’ll hear an update about developments in Africa from Bernard Boyo and Linda Chonco; the session will be hosted by Kara Martin of Alphacrucis College. We always discover rich insights by hearing about what the Holy Spirit is doing among our global peers in theological education.
Speaking of which! Amos Yong of Fuller Theological Seminary will give Karam Forum 2022’s keynote address, on how our schools can rely on the Holy Spirit to find new opportunities amid the challenges of digitalization, globalization and pluralization. As he wrote in his recent book on the future of theological schools, Renewing the Church by the Spirit:
Theological education cannot avoid the impact of these broader developments. Its institutions used to rely on hierarchical ecclesial connections that are now fraying in a flattened, connected and networked world….How can theological education serve these developments at the vanguard of world Christian growth but also be more subdued about the inevitable comings and goings of social forms?
The key, I think, is to be both ecclesiological and more fully pneumatological….I wish to nurture a kind of theological sensibility – a pneumatological imagination, more precisely – that, when confronted with specific curricular, pedagogical and policy questions in dynamically shifting environments, can explore effective contextual responses by asking, in effect: What has the Spirit done? What might the Spirit be doing? What would the Spirit do? What would the Spirit wish for or empower us to do?
See a longer excerpt, printed in a previous edition of the ON newsletter, here.
Discussion will follow Yong’s keynote address, with three longtime ON leaders speaking into this mission from a variety of standpoints. It would be hard to find a better combination of people to speak from the cutting edge of the new things the Spirit is doing among his people!
Lisa Slayton of CityGate has just been added to the 2022 Forum lineup, and we’re overjoyed to have her with us. Among other contributions, Slayton graced our very first Karam Forum in 2017 with a pointed report from the field on the crisis of discipleship in our churches – including among pastors. We’ll be hearing from her in Denver about how other kinds of Christian organizations are finding ways to thrive in a changing world, and what the church most needs in these times from theological schools.
Fernando Tamara of Assemblies of God Theological School will discuss the new educational program he is leading at AGTS, contextualized specifically to Hispanic and Latino pastors. Tamara has also graced the Forum before, in 2019, bringing us a passionate discussion of the growth of the Hispanic church and its implications for evangelicalism. Tamara will help us consider the role of cultural context in education as we serve an increasingly multidimensional church.
Philip Thompson of Kairos University, a member of the Karam Fellowship governing board, will make his inaugural appearance at the Forum this fall. We’ll welcome him to the stage to discuss the challenges and opportunities he’s experienced in helping build alternative models of theological education. Thompson has been part of the Kairos experiment from the ground floor, yet brings a big heart for the traditional concerns that are at the heart of the theological knowledge tradition.
We’re looking forward to these catalytic conversations!
We also have plenty more in store, including:
Michaela O’Donnell and Meryl Herr will lead us through a vocational formation workshop they’ve developed at Fuller’s De Pree Center to harness the power of imagination and hope and help us find life-giving renewal in our tumultuous professional circumstances. Their workshop was designed for people going through the toughest vocational challenges, so by offering it to theological educators, we are really stress testing it!
Denise Daniels of Wheaton College will help us explore what’s emerging in the world of Christian entrepreneurship, as God’s people find new ways of bringing life to the world. This will include an exciting conversation with Denver entrepreneur Helen Young Hayes, former powerhouse executive at global investment fund Janus and now founder of ActivateWork, which helps marginalized workers succeed. (See Faith & Co.’s gripping profile of Hayes and ActivateWork, “Second Chances.”)
And Jeff Hoffmeyer of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work will introduce us to local ministries embodying the mission of God in Denver. Wherever Karam Forum goes, we’re always honored to yield the stage to the people who are building the future of Christian community and mission on the ground in those places.
Register today to join us LIVE in Denver, OR by Zoom from wherever you are!
