Part 1 Training on overcoming the obstacles to becoming a synodal parish . . . especially positional thinking
Wednesday October 15, 2025
One of the biggest challenges to creating a synodal parish is positional thinking, i.e. sides each holding on to their position so strongly that each one is unable to really listen and learn from the other side. This training session will help address this issue and offer guidance how to move past this obstacle to holding the belief that maybe, just maybe, each of us has something more to learn about all of this.
This program is sponsored by CCRI and is Part 1. Part 2 will follow on Saturday, October 18 where participants will move into breakout rooms and will have the opportunity to put this training into practice.
Sign on is https://zoom.us/j/
Part 11 Training on overcoming the obstacles to becoming a synodal parish . . . especially positional thinking
Saturday October 18, 2025
This is part 2 training for overcoming positional thinking, one of the primary reasons why parishes fail to succeed in becoming a synodal parish. When each side holds on to their position so strongly that each one is unable to really listen and learn from the other side, they will never be able to achieve synodality. This training session will help address this issue and offer guidance how to move past this obstacle to holding non-positioinal thinking, i.e., the belief that maybe, just maybe, each of us has something more to learn about all of this. This can be done without ever letting go of your true and deepest values as a person.
In this session, participants will move into breakout rooms and will have the opportunity to put this training into practice.
Sign on is https://zoom.us/j/2429500175: Password is spirit. To find the times for you in your locale, click on Our Universal Calendar and scroll down to this date, October 18.
The Spirit is still speaking with Heidi Schlumpf
October 21, 2025
FutureChurch is excited to welcome Heidi Schlumpf as our Keynote Presenter. With more than three decades of experience as a Catholic journalist, Heidi is uniquely positioned to point out where “The Spirit Still Speaks.”
Heidi Schlumpf is an award-winning journalist and podcaster with three decades of experience covering religion, spirituality as well as political, social and women’s issues. She spent 16 years with the National Catholic Reporter as a columnist, correspondent and executive editor/vice president. She previously served as managing editor of U.S. Catholic magazine and a reporter at Chicago’s archdiocesan newspaper. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, CNN Opinion, Commonweal and Sojourners magazine. She has made appearances on CNN, NPR, PBS and the New York Times podcast.
Schlumpf has been a co-host of the Francis Effect podcast for five years. She also is a part-time faculty member in theology at Loyola University Chicago. She previously taught journalism as an associate professor of communication at Aurora University in Chicago.
A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, she also earned a master’s of theological studies from Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University, where she studied with feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether.
To purchase tickets, c lick FutureChurch Annual Fall Event. To find the times for you in your locale, click on Our Universal Calendar and scroll down to this date, October 21.
Future Church awards
October 23, 2025
Dr. Cynthia Bailey Manns, Louis J. Trivison Award
FutureChurch is honored to present our 2025 Louis J. Trivison Award to Dr. Cynthia Bailey Manns in recognition and gratitude of her care-filled and faithful service to the People of God as a delegate to the Synod on Synodality.
Dr. Cynthia Bailey Manns is one of four lay people from the United States appointed by Pope Francis as the first lay women and men to be voting delegates at the general assemblies of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality in 2023 and 2024. She was also one of the six St. Paul Minneapolis Archdiocesan representatives in the Continental phase of the pre-Synod preparations.
Dr. Bailey Manns is the Director of Adult Learning at Saint Joan of Arc Catholic Community in Minneapolis—a community whose vision is to be a visible, progressive Catholic Community, compassionate and welcoming to all. She holds a Doctor of Ministry in Spiritual Direction from the Graduate Theological Foundation in Florida and currently serves as Adjunct Faculty at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
FutureChurch was honored to host Dr. Bailey Manns as the keynote presenter at our 2023 Fall Event after her return from Rome. And we were grateful that for her pastoral presence at FutureChurch listening sessions on women and on the working document in the lead up to the October 2024 Assembly. Finally, Dr. Bailey Manns was a panelist at our recent program on the election of Pope Leo, speaking about the Pope and the future of synodality. There has been no stronger advocate and or more committed champion of both the principal and process of Synodality than Cynthia.
Barbara Anne Kozee; Christine Schenk Award
FutureChurch is honored to present our 2025 Christine Schenk award to Barbara Anne Kozee in celebration of her courageous work as a scholar-activist, working for justice for women and the LGBTQ+ community in Church and society.
Barbara Anne Kozee is a PhD candidate in theological ethics at Boston College. Barb is interested in the intersection between theology and the social sciences and works primarily in the fields of gender and sexuality as well as war and peacebuilding. Her dissertation focuses on how building just forms of social trust might contribute solutions to contemporary political and religious contexts of polarization.
Prior to starting at BC, Barb received her M.Div. and certificate in women’s studies in religion from the Jesuit School of Theology and her undergraduate degree in international political economy from Georgetown University. Barb has also previously held jobs in university ministry and Jesuit international programs. Having been Jesuit educated or employed since 2013, Barb deeply values Ignatian spirituality and the intersections between faith and justice.
Along with her academic studies, and as a queer and feminist Catholic, Barb values staying close to grassroots work for Church reform and justice. She is a regular contributor to the New Ways Ministry blog on LGBTQ issues and served as a board member and Vice President for Women’s Ordination Conference. She continues to stay connected to WOC’s development of feminist theology and advocacy for human rights at the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women.
To purchase tickets, click FutureChurch Annual Fall Event. To find the times for you in your locale, click on Our Universal Calendar and scroll down to this date, October 23.
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There is nothing Apostolic about the Catholic Church October 30, 2025 Sponsored by Root & Branch
"There is very little continuity," says historian Dr Jon Rosebank "between the humble, spirit-led, house-church movement before Constantine, dating back to Jesus’s time and the first Apostles, and the worldly, corrupt, bitterly divided and violent outfit, decked out in its fourth century imperial robes, that burst upon the Roman Empire from the AD320s. By AD300 the church had lost virtually all interest in the first Apostles. It was not holding on to any idea that there was a direct connection between its own times and those of Jesus. The evidence the Church now chooses to quote is little more than a series of errors in translation. Nor is there any reliable historical or archeological evidence that St Peter went to Rome or was buried there." Do not miss this rare opportunity to spend an evening with historian Dr Jon Rosebank and Penelope Middelboe, producers of the History Cafe podcast. You may never think the same about the Church again. You had always wondered, had you not, how we got from the carpenter and fishermen to the overweening majesty of St Peter's in Rome? From Jesus's spoken Aramaic and koine Greek to the Latin Mass and vestments? From the earliest personified symbols of the Good Shepherd, beardless and pastoral, to the post 4th-century glittering representations of Christ Pandokrator, King, Ruler and Judge, Christ in Majesty? What we have today is a Church completely reinvented in the 4th Century. It had lost virtually all memory of Jesus’s first Apostles. It still uses its invented ‘historical’ genealogies of bishops of Rome (from St Peter to Leo), to shore up its authority. Jon takes us through the travails of the 4th century, which effectively forms the basis of the church we have today. He reveals how the Catholic church is so rooted in the fourth century that every Sunday we recite a list of long-forgotten popes and saints (Linus, (left, 10th C), Cletus, Clement...) from that narrow period of time in the Roman Canon, several of whom now turn out to have very little - if any - historical reality. The reality is much more shocking. And it joins up the dots that you always wondered about... REGISTER HERE - NOTHING APOSTOLIC
To find the times for you in your locale, click on Our Universal Calendar and scroll down to this date, October 30. |
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Your donations are most appreciated YOUR GIFT – IN ANY AMOUNT – IS PRICELESS When you make a donation to support our cause, you join with others who are investing in restoring our Church to what Jesus intended. The dollars we receive are used to run our programs and to reach a broad spectrum of the People of God. We are focused on reaching out to the Faithful, reform activists, young adults as well as those who feel abandoned by the Church, to mention just a few. Your personal contributions in offering your suggestionsand your donations are most appreciated.
Be watching for the series of events coming next month demonstrating successful examples of parishes building synodal commmunities.
On behalf of the CCRI steering committee, Rene Reid, CCRI director |