Happy New Year from Faith & Reason! If you’re a church education leader, lead your own church study, or are a member of a bible study, you can begin the new decade by turning your critical thought into critical action, and applying it to your study! Here are just a few ideas for New Year’s Resolutions that will help you make progressive change in your church.

 

Challenge your mind with different perspectives on traditional theology.

Discover community, meaningful discussion, and personal growth through our spiritually progressive resources for church leaders, small groups, classrooms, and individual study. With a wide array of paradigm series, books, and seminars from scholars like Joan Chittister, Richard Rohr, and John Dominic Crossan, Faith & Reason products encourage critical thinking about Christianity.

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Find ways to be more inclusive of all people. 

Faith & Reason works to inspire churches to become more inclusive and make progressive change in the church. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, the perfect place to start is with innovative group study, where you can discuss why these changes are important and the process for how to get it done. 

There are multiple online toolkits to help church members and leaders make a congregation more inclusive overall, and we’re pulling it all together so that you can access simple steps easily and quickly. The How to Inspire Progressive Change in Your Church toolkit can be applied to any church wanting to make progressive change, whether it be in terms of helping the environment or striving for equal rights for particular groups of people. 

 

Bring local and international current events & topics into discussion. 

If you can’t think of a central focus for your study, just look around you for inspiration. Bringing current events into church discussions can lead to great engagement and conversation, because it leads to people talking about things that affect them personally and matter to their local environment. For example, Fondren Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi recently completed a series titled “Green Faith Series: Toward a Life of Creation Care” that explored how faith and ecology intertwined, and it was inspired by members who watched the news and realized they wanted to learn more. Learn more about the series.