NEW Webinar Series this Fall
Ministry Forum webinars are back! This season, we're hosting webinars that together make up our "Listening Partner Network Training," but each webinar is open to anyone interested in a particular topic.
Thursday, September 17, 2026 | 1:00pm ET
(Re)Learning to Listen
(Re)Learning to Listen will take us through the basics of Listening with intention. Join us as we explore together the benefits of supporting by listening, what it is and what it isn’t, and the key skills to effectively listening. Likely many of us do a lot of listening in our lives - whether to friends, family, colleagues, or community members. This training is intended to help us come back to basics and refresh our skills so that we can listen more intentionally and more effectively.
Key Learning Points:
Defining Listening Partners: What it is, what it isn’t, the values, the benefits, and the ethics
The Practical Skills for Effective Listening: Preparation, Self-Awareness, Self-Determination, Empathy, Reflective Listening, Holding Space, Sharing, and more
Tools for Effective Listening: The OARS Method, The Four Pillars of Active Listening
Click Here to Register
Thursday, October 8, 2026 | 1:00pm ET
Listening for the Sacred: Spiritually Integrated Listening Skills for Peer Support
This interactive training introduces peer supporters in ministry contexts, including clergy and lay leaders, to the practice of spiritually integrated listening. Participants will explore how spirituality may be expressed explicitly or implicitly in a person's story, and how listeners can recognize spiritual cues and gently invite deeper exploration without imposing their own beliefs or theological framework.
The session will focus on curiosity, empathetic presence, strengths-based listening, and the safe and effective use of self.
Participants will consider:
how to respond when someone's theology or spiritual perspective differs from their own
how to hold space for questions, doubt, grief, anger, and spiritual struggle
how prayer can be offered as an invitation rather than an assumption
Through reflection, examples, and small-group practice, participants will develop practical skills for noticing spiritual language, mirroring their peer’s own language for God or the sacred, asking open and curious questions, and discerning when and when not to introduce explicitly spiritual practices such as prayer or Scripture.
The training will also conclude by considering spiritually integrated self-care: what listeners draw upon before an encounter, how they remain grounded during it, and how they release what they have carried afterward.
Key learning points:
Notice spirituality in the stories of others.
Listen for both explicit and implicit spiritual cues, including spiritual resources and strengths, faith expression, identity, and belonging.Listen with curiosity and invite rather than impose.
Practice open, permission-based questions; mirror a person's own spiritual language; and discern when it may or may not be appropriate to introduce prayer or Scripture.Hold space for spiritual difference and vulnerability.
Develop greater comfort accompanying people with theological perspectives different from their own, without needing to shift them.Remain grounded as a listener.
Identifying spiritually grounded practices that support presence before, during, and after a peer encounter.
Click Here to Register
Thursday, October 22, 2026 | 1:00pm ET
Cultural Humility
Developing cultural humility isn’t a skill or a tool that you can find online. It’s a practice and a committed journey to know oneself, one’s unique history and to keep sustaining that curiosity and extend it beyond the self. This workshop will uncover and cover a curated pathway of resources that together are more than foundational building blocks to help you craft your journey of cultivating cultural humility.
Key Learning Points:
Examine how power dynamics are cultural
Explore the cultural iceberg + social location tool
Reflect on belonging + unconscious bias + microaggressions
Learn about interrupting bias
Become a “Fundi” at listening with the 4 levels of listening tool
Click Here to Register
Thursday, November 12, 2026 | 1:00pm ET
Group Facilitation
Inspired by and drawing on the seminal work of adrienne marie brown, this workshop will empower and equip you to be a strong leader with a whole bunch of people you don’t know and steer them confidently through a complicated - complex topic.
Key Learning Points:
Learn about emergent strategy and core principles relevant to group facilitation
Learn ways to establish the covenant of trust
Learn about the ‘hold change’ practice
Learn about group personas and how to attend to conflict