Ashley Boggan, Ph.D., chair of the Design Team’s innovation subgroup, explains what participants will do together in Calgary and what is being asked of each of them. She walks through the five covenant cohorts, the covenant groups within them, and the three-day movement from naming what is true to imagining what could be.
This video is part of a series on how participants will listen and discern together at the Leadership Gathering. Read the Covenant for Conversation & Sharing and watch the other videos in the series.
Video transcript
Friends, I’m Dr. Ashley Boggan. I’m part of the design team and chair of the innovation subgroup. As we prepare to gather in Calgary, I want to give you a quick sense of what we are actually going to do together and what we are asking of you.
First, this is not a conference where you are primarily coming to sit and listen. You are coming to participate in discernment. Throughout our time together, we will move between worship, plenary presentations, and covenant group conversations. Worship will ground us in Christ and remind us that this work ultimately belongs to God. Our speakers will challenge assumptions, tell stories, and introduce possibilities that might stretch our imagination. And then we will take all of that into covenant groups, where much of the real work of the Gathering will happen.
Every participant has been assigned to one of five covenant cohorts: Discipleship, Leadership, Impact, Stewardship, or Accountability. Think of these not as five committees but as five expressions of our connectional life. Discipleship will be asking, who are we becoming? Leadership will ask, whose gifts and powers are we releasing? Impact will ask, what is becoming different? Stewardship will ask, what are we willing to put at the service of that transformation? And Accountability will ask, how will we hold what comes out of this gathering together in love and in trust?
Within each of these cohorts are three smaller covenant groups, and each looks at the same area but through a different lens. Those are innovative discipleship formation, engaging and empowering younger generations, and amplifying global voices. The covenant group is your table of discernment. This is where we need your voice.
Our work is going to follow three simple movements: name it, newly relive it, and imagine it.
On day one, we name it. We ask, what is true about the church and the world right now that we can no longer afford to ignore? Your group will identify and prioritize three named realities. And our discipline on day one is that we don’t immediately try to fix them. Before we solve, we listen. Before we prescribe, we see.
On day two, we begin to respond. Given what we now see, how might we live differently? What have we tried? What have we missed? Whose voices have been absent? And what assumptions might we need to release? On day two, we will begin to develop newly living practices. These will be concrete ways that the church might embody its mission differently in response to our named realities.
Then on day three, we imagine. We practice faithful imagination, looking beyond the church as it currently exists, while remaining deeply rooted in Jesus Christ, our Wesleyan identity, and the communities that God has called us to serve. We will ask what might be possible if we stop beginning with “Why can’t we?” and begin instead with “What if?”
Your role: where you come into this conversation. You do not need to arrive in Calgary with an answer. You do not need to speak for your entire annual conference, episcopal area, generation, country, or constituency. We need you to bring your experience and to become genuinely curious about everyone else’s. So we ask that you listen as seriously as you speak, that you make room for voices that have not yet been heard, and that you ask questions before defending your positions, and allow yourself to encounter an experience of the church that is very different from your own.
And when disagreement emerges, we do not need to try to erase it. Holy conferencing does not require artificial consensus. Sometimes disagreement tells us something important that we might need to preserve.
In your covenant groups, your facilitator will steward the conversation, but they will also be a participant. Your recorder will steward the group’s memory, but they will also be a participant. And every person around the table is responsible for that quality of discernment.
And what happens at those tables will not disappear when Calgary ends. The groups’ reports will be gathered across the five cohorts at the end of each day, and they will help identify areas of convergence, difference, possibility, and continued discernment. That work will continue beyond Calgary as the church moves towards its next iteration.
I want to give you all five one final image as we prepare. Think of these connectional groups, these covenant groups, these covenant cohorts as the parable of the five loaves. We began thinking about our five cohorts as these five loaves. They’re familiar things. They’re things we’ve inherited. They’re things we’ve built structures around and developed assumptions about what they mean. But in Calgary, we are opening them and ourselves to the transforming work of the Spirit. Our task is not to manufacture the miracle of taking five loaves and helping it serve thousands. Our task is to open ourselves to the Spirit who does that work of transformation. For that multiplication belongs to God. The openness is ours to bring.
So come ready to worship. Come ready to speak. Come ready to listen. Bring your experience and your curiosity. Bring your convictions, but leave room for surprise. And above all, come not simply ready to imagine a transformed church. Come willing to be transformed yourselves. I’ll see you in Calgary.
Return to A Covenant for Conversation & Sharing.
Return to the Council of Bishops Leadership Gathering.