A Companion for Your Congregation
Leading a church today is heavy work. We’ve compiled these resources from the ICS community to help you and your congregation tackle the most pressing issues facing Christians today.
What we've been making, and why
The Institute for Christian Studies has walked alongside churches for more than fifty years. In that time we've listened to a great many congregants describe what they are wrestling with: polarization, anxiety, and hard conversations nobody quite knows how to start, to name only three. Over the years we've hosted conversations, curated events, and created resources in response.
Free to be Faithful is the name we give that work now: a conviction that an ancient faith can meet the pressing questions of our moment without flinching from either. What follows is the part of it built for congregations.
Justice and Faith
A four-year research project, and a play written out of its findings
ICS asked a question that turned out to be harder than it sounds: how do members of the Christian Reformed Church in Canada actually understand justice, and what do they do about it? The answer came from interviews across the country and a representative survey of congregations, carried out with the Centre for Community Based Research and Canadian Ministries of the CRC, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Rather than leave the findings in a report, the project turned them into Just Faith?, a play built from what people actually said. It was written to be watched by a congregation and argued about afterward, which is still the best use for it. The full production is here, and the survey report and interview summaries are free to download.
Conversations worth having together
Three recorded conversations from the Free to be Faithful community, each on a question congregations are already living with. They run about an hour, which makes them workable for an adult education hour, a small group, or a council that wants to think before it decides.
Discerning faithful action in an extraordinary moment
Dr. Hanna Reichel & Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez
On For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional, and the practical question underneath it: how the wisdom of Scripture and the historical church guides a community that has to act now, without certainty.
For a congregation feeling the pressure to respond to events and unsure what faithfulness asks of them.
Reading Scripture faithfully on questions of sexuality
Dr. Sylvia Keesmaat & Rev. Len Vander Zee
A scholar and a pastor work through how Scripture is read well on the questions of sexuality and gender that congregations are navigating, attending to the text itself rather than starting from the conclusion.
For a congregation that needs a way into this conversation that doesn't presume where it ends.
When people start taking their faith apart
Angela Reitsma Bick & Dr. Peter Schuurman
On Blessed are the Undone, and what deconstruction looks like from inside a church rather than from a distance, including what it asks of leaders watching people they love question everything.
For leaders wondering how to stay in relationship with members whose faith is coming apart.
Free to be Faithful, for people in your pews
Alongside these recordings, ICS teaches Free to be Faithful courses online. They are seminars led by scholars, open to anyone, with no prior study required. Some congregations send a member or two and let what they bring back shape the wider community's thinking.
See What's Being OfferedTell us what your congregation needs
This shelf will grow over the coming years, and what we make next depends on what we hear from churches. Leave your address and we'll send new resources as they're ready. If your congregation is navigating something we might help with, we would genuinely like to know.