Facilitator: Paul Okoye  This highly interactive and educational workshop invites you to consider the building blocks that create conflict and those that assist or detract in conflict’s resolution. The workshop includes reflection, conversation, and exercises as conflicts are studied and models for addressing conflicts are considered. Significant time will be given to skill building for …
View course details “Understanding Conflict Foundations–ONLINE”

Instructor: Marg Van Herk-Paradis Conflict within churches can involve complex dynamics and highly-charged emotions, leaving those involved with deep hurt and pain. Often people from all “sides” of the conflict look to their pastors and lay leaders for assistance in helping to resolve these tensions. Being an “insider third party” – that is knowing the …
View course details “Informal Coaching and Mediation Skills for Church Leaders”

Facilitator: Betty Pries This workshop uses the two lenses of conflict drivers and conflict paradoxes and considers seemingly intractable conflicts and their transformation. Questions for consideration include the nature of intractability, de-escalation strategies, transforming intractable conflicts, and engaging emotions. This workshop builds on Understanding Conflict: Foundations. It is highly interactive, insightful, engaging, and critical for all …
View course details “Understanding Conflict Advanced”

Facilitator: Paul Okoye This highly interactive and educational workshop invites you to consider the building blocks that create conflict and those that assist or detract in conflict’s resolution. The workshop includes reflection, conversation, and exercises as conflicts are studied and models for addressing conflicts are considered. Significant time will be given to skill building for …
View course details “Understanding Conflict Foundations”

Facilitator(s): Betty Pries and Cayla Charles Recognizing that our social structures and personal biases can get in the way of commitment to respecting our colleagues and community members, this interactive workshop will engage themes of prejudice, power, and privilege in a manner that honours all voices in the room while also challenging the biases and …
View course details “Transforming Power, Prejudice and Privilege”

Facilitator: Marg Van Herk-Paradis While giving and receiving feedback is difficult in the workplace, it is even more challenging in the congregational context where the desire to be kind can outweigh a commitment to honesty and where most of those to whom feedback might be given or from whom feedback might be received are volunteers. …
View course details “Courageous Conversations: Speaking Truth in Love”

Jesus is clear that it is the peacemakers who are blessed, and this is what his disciples are to be. But Christians have disagreed for centuries as to just what it means to be a peacemaker. Does it mean that Christians are obligated to refuse the use of all violence? Does it allow for participation …
View course details “Violence, War, and Christian Peacemaking”

Civil discourse is a critical part of engaging in our civic life together, as it can help us to bridge partisan political divides, learn from one another, and create better solutions to the problems in our communities. But what is civil discourse? Is it different from civility? Based on the online class created by The …
View course details “Make Me an Instrument of Peace: Civil Discourse Training”

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” (William O’Brien) Is this true? If it is, it could be read to say, “The success of a church depends on the interior condition of its leadership.” How are we as leaders (whether paid or lay) – attending to our interior journeys …
View course details “Ministry from the Inside Out”

This course is an opportunity to learn from the story and theological writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church of the mid-20th century in Germany. In the context of the struggle for faithfulness in the midst of the Nazi era, we will learn how Bonhoeffer’s theological commitments flowed into his spirituality and political resistance. …
View course details “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Spirituality of Confessing Christ & Resisting Tyranny”