Faith Leadership Campus

Faith, Values, and Leadership: Understanding Yourself as a Leader

This course will help faith leaders reflect on the ways that their faith and values shape the way they lead. In many ways, this course is foundational for the other courses offered on this platform. Much of what we do and the reasons why do them are shaped by our personalities, beliefs, gifts, passions, pains and sorrows. Through six guided sessions, users will engage in various exercises of introspection to help them articulate the ways their faith and values influences the way they lead others. 

Community Organizing

This course offers a theoretical and theological framework for addressing social needs through community organizing. It begins by discussing the world as it is and the world as God designed it to be and covers multiple theories of change, giving particular attention to community organizing. It covers practical strategies for building and exerting power by combining people’s interests and resources. 

The material also addresses the importance of leading and developing leaders and using strategy to turn resources into power to achieve collective goals. In addition, it highlights the effectiveness of storytelling and the power of narratives to bring about social change. The course ends by mapping out a pathway for putting community organizing into practice.

Narrative Approaches to Conflict Transformation

This course provides a systematic approach to conflict transformation utilizing narrative theories and practices. The course offers simple working frameworks for conflict, distinguishes between conflict management, resolution, and transformation, and introduces narrative theory as a theoretical and practical framework within which to understand and approach the transformation of conflicted contexts.  It includes several practices that support conflict transformation employing narrative theory. The practices can be applied in congregational and community contexts.

Participants will learn to recognize the long and short-term organizational impact of different approaches to conflict. The course is presented on three levels: theoretical, personal, and communal. Materials include short videos, self-assessment and reflection, and readings.

Change Management and Organizational Development

Effective leaders understand the importance of being able to manage change in the organizations they lead. This requires a high level of self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the ability to manage oneself amid anxiety and conflict. 

Change management focuses on the techniques and skills of a leader, while organizational development focuses on culture change and identifying root causes of institutional dysfunction, considering how systemic shifts can take place that leads to institutional health and change.

This course will help faith leaders become better equipped to effectively lead through change with confidence and integrity. Participants will work through eight sessions comprised of readings, video lectures, examination of case studies, self-examination, and practical application.

Non-Profit and Church Administration

This course will examine the essential elements of management in ministry and non-profit organizations with an emphasis on church administration. These seven sessions will guide you through an exploration of the unique nature of leading and shepherding in the collaborative, interdependent body known as the church.

Overseeing a church calls a person to many of the tasks and responsibilities of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  We assume that money, stewardship, human resources, technology, and organization are all critical aspects of the ministry of the church and non-profit organizations. The course will examine those aspects of ministry that go beyond preaching and teaching to administration management and finance in religious and non-profit organizations.

Adaptive Leadership and Systems Thinking

Structured in six sessions, this course provides an overview of the building blocks of adaptive leadership and systems thinking. Participants will acquire diagnostic tools, intervention strategies, and resilience skills, enhancing their capacity to lead change and manage conflict in their organizations and in broader contexts.

In each session, participants will analyze in depth a personal leadership case of their choice, putting into practice the lessons acquired throughout the course, overcoming personal obstacles, and reflecting on the values that guide their leadership practice. The materials of the course include short videos, slides, readings, and personal reflection exercises.

Social Entrepreneurship

This course offers the participants the opportunity to explore how social entrepreneurs living their faith can cultivate community, economic progress, joy, and abundance for the common good.  It will explain the concept of asset-based community development, how it is practiced in communities, and how it relates to social entrepreneurship and enterprise. Successful entrepreneurs must learn to build and leverage community relationships with all stakeholders.  In this course, participants will learn specific skills to:

• Develop methods for selecting projects 
• Build effective and meaningful collaboration with stakeholders.  
• Develop and implement effective fundraising methods
• Discover social enterprise in communities
• Define five types of social currency and how to use them within social enterprises
• Use data to insure a return on investment and a return on community