Programming Highlights: An Update

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we have had a change of plans for our Ministry Days Keynote Programming. We are pleased to announce that our new keynote speaker will be Dr. Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez. Dr. Cervantes-Gómez (she/her) is a queer and trans Latina theologian who ministers and writes at the interstices of body, race, and community. 

Keynote: After Inclusion
If at one time Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “famine of the church” aided in describing the loss of worship for not activating and feeding the souls of our ministry, it is indeed a glutton of inclusion that paints our historical present. For aliveness is no longer the norm to people of color and our transgender communities, inclusion and reconciliation are but an extravagant liturgical waste when souls are not afforded a right to be fed in the first place. In other words, why do we prepare a table for many when only a few arrive? As collective liberation brings together our diversity of humanness, it is also wasteful in the face of times in which certain bodies become less than human, and rather, expendable resources. Dr. Cervantes-Gómez speaks to an apophatic and process theology of the not-fully-human that demands of the church to minister in a time after we have accepted the divine brief to be inclusive. After Inclusion is a theological praxis of being with and alongside the Other outside of the church in a non-inclusive world. This talk meditates on how to rethink what collective liberation might look like for ministry from beyond the unexpected borders of the church.