Congregations of the Future: Continued Education for Clergy and Youth Leaders

After a pilot survey centered on congregational programing and clergy understanding of global needs for youth and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the requests from many clergy were to have continued education in varied formats on topics that they do not understand, did not learn in their education, but know will impact their congregations and communities. If religious congregations want to be effective mediating structures of the future, then we must strategize and provide continued education on topics that impact their communities. The next step in this process is to design a curriculum with expert advice and the continued feedback from a team of clergy. The objective is to create a curriculum that fills in the gaps of knowledge and provides continued education as well as additional data to create a model on how to address and and train clergy on societal issues that will continue to arise.