In January, Missioners Terri, Adrien, and Michelle submitted an application to the Roanridge Trust for a grant to dive more deeply into our Becoming #Beloved Community initiative. Roanridge is specifically designed to provide training programs for church leadership in small-town and rural areas, on various topics (as designed by the grant requestor), while giving special attention to the Five Marks of Mission:

To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To teach, baptize, and nurture new believers
To respond to human need by loving service
To seek to transform unjust structures of society
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.

Our EDNIN grant application grew out of our Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) initiative, which allowed us to hire Missioner Adrien Niyongabo (thanks to a 2017 United Thank Offering grant!). Missioner Adrien spent his first eight months with the Episcopal Church in Northern Indiana sharing the concepts of ABCD and listening deeply to the various faith communities he visited. These fruitful conversations have revealed a deeper need for healing, for reconciliation, in our communities as a whole.

The Roanridge Trust grant, administered through the Domestic and Foreign Mission Society, will allow us to develop training for our clergy and lay leaders so that they can create a process for Becoming #Beloved Community that is specific to their own contexts. Maybe this means more reading groups, or deeper conversations around sharing our stories of reconciliation and healing. Maybe we will utilize the concepts of Becoming #Beloved Community and customize them for our context in ways we haven't dreamed of yet! We are THRILLED and HONORED to have received this vote of confidence and to have this opportunity.

Stay tuned for more details this summer! Thank you Roanridge.