with Dr. Eun Strawser

Centering discipleship in the church raises disciples who not only imitate Jesus in their spiritual formation but incarnate Jesus in their locally rooted neighborhoods. Discipleship without mission is discipleship without Christ and spiritual confidence must run alongside social competence for the flourishing of our neighborhoods and communities.

with Ebony Walden

In this interactive workshop, you'll explore how personal experiences and creative expression can foster deeper understanding and community. Through 2–3 guided exercises, you'll craft original poems and have the opportunity to share them in a supportive group reading. No prior writing experience needed — just bring your voice and an open mind.

with Tom and Karen Wuest

In this collaborative workshop, we will make and eat Southeast Asian salad rolls together while sharing stories about the table as a place of welcome and belonging in our urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods. How have you experienced the table as a “home” for neighbors, friends, strangers, and adversaries? How have you found a sense of home by nurturing relationships with the created world around you? Who (and what) is still missing or excluded from the tables in your place? Tom & Karen Wuest will gather ingredients for the salad rolls from their organic gardens on the Edge of Appalachia in southern Ohio as well as Lawndale’s Ogden Farm. If you would like to contribute a seasonal offering of produce from your place, please let the Wuests know by emailing brasstrumpetpublishing@gmail.com.

with Brenna Zeimet and Geoffrey Gill

As relational beings, we were made to know and be known, and to build networks of companions who will be our people on this journey of life. Churches tend to do well being each other's people inside their walls, but with the neighbor we tend to be much more transactional - focused on serving and meeting needs, not discovering the true essence of the people around us. This workshop will explore the practical tips and tricks to building meaningful relationships, fostering deep conversations, and overcoming the barriers of fear and social anxiety that keep us from knowing our neighbor.

with Ruth Lin Nakai

Much of our current world and news is leaving us feeling stressed and overwhelmed; and when we're stressed, it's easy to feel pretty disconnected from ourselves and from others. But what if -- instead of staying stuck in our stress-- we took the time to reconnect with ourselves and tapped into the well of inner-resources we already have but currently feel disconnected from? How might our communities and neighborhoods benefit if we felt more rooted and connected to our sense of self, purpose, and maybe even strength? Join Ruth Lin Nakai (a spiritual director and creative) as she guides us through a mindful art practice aimed at helping us regain a sense of self and purpose. In this workshop, we will use mixed-media art materials, journal prompts, as well as a Howard Thurman meditation to guide us into a time of contemplative reflection and art-making.

with B.J. Stewart

This workshop will share Sunshine Enterprises' place-based approach of supporting entrepreneurs in Chicago's under-resourced communities so they launch and grow their small businesses and lead the transformation of the neighborhoods where we all live, work, and play.

with Chelsea Kim Long

Contemplative spirituality invites us to be faithfully present—to slow down, pay attention, and root ourselves in love. Hope is not abstract; it is embodied through how we show up—our attentiveness, our consistency, our participation in God’s work of renewal. In this workshop, we’ll explore how this way of being not only opens us to the sacred in daily life, but also equips us to embody hope in the neighborhoods we live in. We’ll consider questions like: What does it mean to embody hope in a specific place? How can spiritual attentiveness shape the way we show up in our neighborhood? Through shared reflection and practice, you’ll walk away with practical ideas for living out contemplative presence in your local context.

with Tabitha Montgomery

Flourish Placemaking Collective is a Minneapolis based nonprofit consultancy on a mission to influence how properties and buildings remain in a perpetual state of readiness to enliven community wellbeing. Invest 60 minutes in sharpening your perspective on the power of fostering clarity. This workshop will guide participants through how to consider and prioritize past and present insights to inform future decisions. This framework will be explored through the lens of furthering placemaking in community but also provides relevant steps for anyone looking to contribute toward community building beyond themselves. 

with Jennifer Allen Craft

Sin is often written into the landscape of our neighborhoods and cities, in things like structural racism, environmental destruction, socioeconomic injustice, or housing insecurity. And inasmuch the church lives within and reflects its place, we must acknowledge the ways we are often complicit in these realities, that we have sinned in things we “have done and left undone.” This workshop will explore the ways that the church can cultivate a stronger “sense of place” by giving attention to and confessing our communal “sins of place.” We will explore the ways that “confessional mapmaking” can become a tool for your church to engage the work of repair and reconciliation through the work of place-based confession. As we acknowledge the ways our vision of place has been damaged or darkened, we ask God to make us into the vision of Christ crucified for our places, bending our hearts toward the work of repentant repair in our neighborhoods and cities.

with Matthew Soerens

Immigration is a headline political issue, often marked by fear, division, and dehumanizing rhetoric—but immigrants are neighbors whom we're called to love and, more often than not, they are integral members of the church. In this workshop, we'll explore immigration from a theological lens, get updates on how recent policy changes and consider practical responses rooted in love for our neighbors.

with Genia Palmer-Stone

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore how faith can be a transformative force for justice and community restoration. Led by Genia Palmer-Stone, Residential Service Coordinator at Lawndale Christian Legal Center, this session invites us into the heart of North Lawndale—one of Chicago’s most segregated, under-resourced, and heavily policed neighborhoods.

Once a thriving destination for African Americans migrating from the South, North Lawndale has endured decades of disinvestment, systemic injustice, and over-policing. But it is also a community full of resilience, deep faith, and bold visions for change. Through the work of LCLC, residents are reclaiming their power and shifting resources back into the hands of the community.

Participants will hear stories of hope and transformation, reflect on the role of faith in this work, and explore tangible ways to partner with and serve their own neighborhoods. This workshop is a space to listen, learn, and lean into a more just and connected way of living—together.

with Pr Jeffrey Schulz, Heather Craig, Ruth Rinard, & Kristina Fruge

This workshop is not a workshop. It is an invitation to experience how at a time of trauma and dis-integration a group of grandmas came together, took their public masks off, and shared their stories and tensions, and found themselves woven into a tweedy, somber, flexible tapestry. By being vulnerable, we hope participants and we ourselves sense God's motion and have thoughts and questions about our journey together as neighbors and beyond the walls of our churches.

with JR Woodward

As authoritarianism rises and the vulnerable bear the brunt—from displaced immigrants to neighbors impacted by trade wars and collapsing support systems—how can local communities of Jesus-followers respond with clarity, courage, and compassion? This workshop invites participants to explore faithful resistance in the neighborhood, drawing on grounded spirituality, prophetic imagination, and the liberating power of the Holy Spirit. We’ll engage the biblical language of Powers and Principalities, unmasking the spiritual and systemic forces behind harmful policies and political doublespeak. Inspired by voices like Óscar Romero, Dorothy Day, William Stringfellow, René Girard, and Paulo Freire, we’ll explore how to resist domination without mirroring its violence. Participants will leave with practical insights on forming communities of care and courage, where prayer, worship, and neighbor-love become frontline acts of holy defiance in contested times.

with Pastor Phil Jackson

Stop the Funeral! Pastor Phil Jackson Founder & CEO of the Firehouse Community Art Center, which exists to interrupt the cycle of violence among youth and young adults in North Lawndale through the power of the arts!
We will look in to practical ways to engage faith in the lives of those who are labeled most violent in the community. How do you reach young men in that life? We will look at very practical and ways to do outreach, mentoring, workforce development. The real question is how incarnational are you willing to go to meet people where they are to journey with them were God would have them to be.

with Darrin and Debra Brown

Join Pastor Darrin L. Brown, Sr. an Associate Pastor at Lawndale Christian Community Church where he serves as Director of Hope House Men’s Recovery Home and mentor Debra A. Brown for this powerful session. Rediscover of your new life one day at a time through a twelve-step program by embracing spiritual growth and accepting a proactive choice. The steps embody the concept of "let go let God" and then turn it over to him.

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.” (James 5:16a)

with Chico and Tatiana Fajardo-Heflin

Justice-minded Christians are committed to making their neighborhoods better. However, the way we do this – by starting institutions of uplift – often reinforces, rather than undoes, the historic divisions of the caste system: rich and poor, helper and helped.

Come hear the story of how Chico and Tatiana Fajardo-Heflin moved to a crumbling town and stumbled into a model of neighboring that defies caste. By opting out of the nonprofit industrial complex and, instead, sharing everyday life with gang members and single moms on the block, they were introduced to their town’s, sprawling, informal, front stoop family of love and mutual aid—a bottom up form of neighboring, free of the caste divisions institutions of care so rudely impose.

Chico Fajardo-Heflin is an artist, storyteller, and next-door neighbor. He and his wife Tatiana share life on the block with friends and neighborhood family in Ford Heights, America’s poorest suburb.

Tatiana Fajardo-Heflin is an artist, homemaker, and vacant lot farmer. She and her husband Chico share life with neighbors in a segregated African-American community outside Chicago.