Why would an established organization change its name?

Last week, our ministry changed its name from “Leadership Education at Duke Divinity” to “Forum for Congregational Life.” Changing every word in the name after 18 years feels risky to me. Why is this a good idea?

For about 10 years, I fretted that the name of our ministry said very little about our actual work. When explaining what we did, I frequently acknowledged that the name indicated nothing about our mission, goals or audience.

At our start, the name was accurate. Our work was continuing education for leaders, so Leadership Education worked fine. Our home was Duke University Divinity School, so that part was clear if you knew much about the school and its commitments. However, the name never explicitly identified our mission to strengthen the institutions that serve congregations. It did not communicate our hope to nurture congregations through building up their support systems.

At a deeper level, the opportunities and challenges facing congregations aren’t served well by one-size-fits-all programs. Leaders need peers with whom to trade ideas and share what’s working. Leaders need time to reflect. Organizations need collaborators from various communities and disciplines. We all need encouragement to think long-term and base our decisions on our theological convictions.

We found that not many people had the opportunity to ponder the realities of congregational life. Not many groups could invest resources to study, experiment, reflect and try again. Leaders found what we were doing meaningful but did not refer to it as education.

Still, changing the organization’s name was a huge step. There was much to consider before we made the change:

• How important is the message embedded in the new name? For five years, our website homepage has said, “We believe in the difference congregations make in the lives of people and communities.” A new name could make that belief clearer.
• Are the resources available to “be” the new name? A forum is a kind of network, which is seldom a self-supporting ministry. Ongoing philanthropic support is usually required for any such effort. Leadership Education was launched and sustained through grants from Lilly Endowment Inc. The Endowment asked Duke Divinity School to consider changing Leadership Education to the Forum and invited a proposal for substantial support. Because Lilly Endowment previously asked us to support their initiatives with Thriving Congregations, Thriving in Ministry and Ministry in Rural Areas and Small Towns, hundreds of organizations have developed relationships with us and with each other. These connections are the bases for the network.
• Do we know how to do the work? About 80% of the Forum’s activities will be built directly from the activities of Leadership Education. We will host Lilly Endowment grantees. We will write stories and amplify the stories written by others. We will reflect practically and theologically on ministry. We will offer grants to support practices of reflection. All of our publications will continue, and we will add a new one. In short, we have the resources and experience to do this.
• Is the work different enough to justify a new name? Yes. Congregational life will be so central to our ongoing efforts that we want to identify it explicitly in the Forum. We will host conversations about congregational life that will connect scholars and practitioners. It will connect experiments funded by philanthropy with congregations and their leaders. Over time, this work of nurturing meaningful connections will grow.

A forum is a place of deliberation that is outside the normal rhythms of life. A forum is not a center or an institute. It is a place of connection that supports the development of insight and action.

One concern with changing a name is the impression that the old goes away. But everything that Leadership Education did lives on through the Forum. In fact, several of our grant offerings will grow exponentially, especially our Reflective Leadership grants. In the next year, we will offer grants to individual leaders and teams that support congregational life. While we are setting up for that growth, we are pausing a few specialized programs, like our Foundations of Christian Leadership course.

No name can do everything we would want it to do. “Forum” is not in common usage. We will have to work hard to prove that a forum is for all people and all types of congregations. The word “congregations” excludes some faith traditions that don’t use the term. Nevertheless, we want to hear from these traditions and that they will share their insights with those of us who think in terms of congregations.

Hopefully our name will prompt reflection on what you think is happening with congregations in the United States. I have devoted my entire career to congregations, and they have always nurtured me. My earliest job was as a custodian at my family’s church. That congregation licensed me to ministry as a teenager and ordained me as a young adult.

My kids believed that no matter where they were, if they ever needed help, I would always know someone from a nearby a congregation who could provide it. (The advantage of spending more than two decades as a church consultant is knowing many churches.)

Congregations are significant contributors to the spiritual formation of individuals and supporters of families. Congregations impact their neighborhoods and beyond, from participating in shared community events to addressing daunting regional needs.

Congregations and parishes are complex. Like families and other such systems, they can do harm. No simple description contains all the truth. We hold congregations to higher standards because they should reflect God’s beloved community. When they don’t, we ask for forgiveness and hold them up for correction.

But have you ever tried to explain how a congregation gets things done? Have you tried to explain a Baptist congregation to a Catholic parish or introduce either one to a Pentecostal or Quaker congregation? The beliefs of these groups impact worship, decision-making and more.

People with experience in business or government or medicine can only use some of what they know about organizations to understand the living organism represented by a congregation in any of its forms. There is some specialized knowledge and experience that is transferable, but other aspects are specific to a tradition.

Leadership Education has changed its name because we want to be part of the conversation about congregational life. We want to encourage congregations to learn from each other, and we want congregations to reflect on God’s purposes for Christians. At our core, we believe in the difference that congregations make in the lives of people and communities.

This book reframes traditional Euro-North American conceptions of theological education by reflecting critically on my lived experience as a British-born Chinese-North American woman, a family member, an immigrant, an urban theological educator, a maker, a gallery curator, a community gardener, a Girl Scout troop leader, and a scholar. It is not limited to the context of formal institutions recognized as places where theological education happens, nor the content of a seminary curriculum as philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher might have designed it in nineteenth-century Germany. It reimagines theological formation for the many together rather than the individual alone, and as happening in a wide range of times, spaces, and places.

Now, how and where we come to know and with whom we come to know are as important as what we know. We are learning again how to learn. Rather than receiving inherited knowledge, we are expanding sources and means of understanding and being; we are living theology as a verb.

This collaborative approach to cultivating wisdom has some resonance with the early church. In Acts 1:12-14, when the apostles and others were sent back to Jerusalem to await direction after Christ’s return to heaven, they gathered together, prayed, and waited. The Pentecost was a spiritual and physically embodied event that included the sound “of a violent wind” that came from heaven and “tongues of fire” that came to rest on each of them. The filling of the Holy Spirit led to the powerful testimony of Christ’s reality and good news, in every language of those present.

From there, a crucial decision was made in Acts 15 after much discussion and discernment through the Holy Spirit, namely, that the church need not be culturally homogeneous. Rather, the church was for the Jew and the gentile. It was together that the church waited in order to become wise.

In our own contemporary time of uncertainty and unraveling, we too are waiting, waiting for the wisdom needed for this turbulent age. We as a world Christian church can come together around what Latina theologian Elizabeth Conde-Frazier calls la mesa. This is not simply to redistribute power and resources from a historical center to the margins (presuming there even is a legitimate center) and to confront a legacy of structural and systemic racism in institutions and communities. It is an opportunity to witness a rearrangement of locations, a remapping of plural centers of power and margins of possibility.

The late African American writer bell hooks describes the margin as “a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a ‘safe’ place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.” By embracing the tension of writing out of the margin, from who and where I am, this work performs an alternative, aesthetic, oppositional act of becoming, of creating space to see differently and make meaning. It is a book I write to remember, to rehearse, and to map out what God has done in places where I come from, where I have been, and where I am going with others, with my “community of resistance.” This is not simply nostalgia, as bell hooks points out; it is a “remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present.” I take time to pause, reflect, and connect the dots of seemingly disparate stories that show how God is at work in my life.

In listening to and sharing stories of coming together around la mesa, we encounter the possibility to engage a complexity of kinds of knowledge and approaches to wisdom. Through such coming together as the diverse but unified body of Christ, we can enter a liminal space between what is familiar and what is unknown. This is true for theological education as it has been described, and for our world more broadly, in these times between the times.

The late Scottish missiologist Andrew F. Walls suggests that through such necessary coming together we are returning to an “Ephesian moment” in our day, a moment in which our global urban world reflects an even greater diversity than in the early days of the church of what it means to be “Christian.” The reality is that we need each other now more than ever. “The very height of Christ’s full stature is reached only by the coming together of the different cultural entities into the body of Christ. Only ‘together,’ not on our own, can we reach his full stature,” notes Walls. This reimagining and reorientation take the form of the church flourishing in its diversity and becoming God’s shalom together in the city as family, friends, learners, and leaders. God’s shalom is found in the reconciling of God’s creation to right relationships with God, self, the other, and the natural and spiritual realms.

If, as Walls suggests, “the purpose of theology is to make or clarify Christian choices,” and if this attempt to think in a Christian way comes from within particular contexts and cultures, and in interaction with the Bible, then we are asking new questions every day. We are converting the material of life toward Christ through this Spirit-informed creative process that involves thinking, feeling, and acting. Yet will the church in all its diversity “demonstrate its unity by the interactive participation of all its culture-specific segments, the interactive participation that is to be expected in a functioning body? … Will the body of Christ be realized or fractured in this new Ephesian moment?”

As it did in the early days of Acts when practices of radical hospitality challenged the intersectionally compounded boundaries of class, gender, law, and tradition, so today the physical and spiritual realization of the body of Christ has theological, social, and economic consequences. The implications are ever present in intensified moments of pandemic, protest, increased racism and violence, globalization, and climate change. The invitation is to embrace being a part of Christ’s body while moving with others toward completion. In this movement, we need the generative work of the Holy Spirit to take action in us.

Excerpted from “On Becoming Wise Together: Learning and Leading in the City,” by Maria Liu Wong ©2023 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.