Friday April 25, 2025
12:30-5:00 PM (CT)
Online or In-person
This workshop explores how faith-based community organizing skills can revitalize congregational leaders and cultivate dynamic community ministries. These organizing skills empower leaders to build meaningful, transformative relationships that extend into the public sphere. Organizing is not limited to outreach beyond the church—these relationship-building strategies also help leaders strengthen connections within their own congregation or organization, fostering a deeper sense of community and purpose. In the workshop you will practice a real skill needed for a current community or congregation project.
Rev. Dr. Linda Noonan has spent the last thirty-five years of ministry between South Africa and the United States and serves as Senior Pastor at St. John’s United Church of Christ in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. On appointment with the United Church Board for World Ministries, she served as Chaplain to Inanda Seminary (a girls’ residential school in a township outside Durban) and Lecturer in Theology at the University of Durban Westville in South Africa. She has a PhD in Religion and Social Change at United Lutheran Seminary in Philadelphia, where she is also an adjunct professor, teaching public theology, faith-based community organizing, and ritual. She is currently writing a book on the power of people organizing together across lines of faith and race to create change in their communities. She serves as Co-Chair of the national UCC Palestine-Israel Network, which works for a just peace in Palestine. She writes biblical commentary for the “Liturgy That Matters” series of “Enfleshed,” and is on the Editorial Board of the Community Organizing Journal. She lives on Lenapehoking land/Philadelphia.
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Rev. Dr. Dietra Wise Baker is the Assistant Professor of Community Leadership, Director of Walker Leadership Institute at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Dr. Baker is certified anti-racism trainer for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and a trainer of faith-based community organizing in the Gamaliel network. Dr. Dietra teaches Church Planting, Youth Ministry, Preaching, Faith Community Organizing, Anti-Racism/Anti-Caste, Vocational Resilience and Formation. Dr. Dietra is a respected trainer and community leader who often consults and collaborates around her sustained work in community organizing, youth justice, detention/prison/jail, and faith justice movements. Dr. Baker has a Bachelor of Science degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C.; a Master of Divinity degree from Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO; and her Doctorate of Ministry in Preaching degree from Aquinas Institute of Theology St. Louis, MO. Dietra is mother to son Cornell A.
