The Congregational Leaders Fellowship brings together clergy and lay leaders from mosques, synagogues, and churches to learn about each other’s traditions, foster interreligious literacy, and build relationships to strengthen community in Greater Baltimore.
Is your congregation looking for a way to deepen its interreligious understanding and capacity for interreligious dialogue? Do you want to build relationships with other religious communities?
If so, consider the Congregational Leaders Fellowship.
At a time of polarization and partisanship, we need to cross divides between communities—even our own religious communities. Now more than ever, we need religious leaders (both clergy and lay leaders) who are willing to engage and mobilize across religious divides.
The Congregational Leaders Fellowship (CLF) is a 6-month cohort experience for leaders from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish congregations to build understanding and relationships across those divides. Fellows learn about each other’s religious traditions, discuss the foundations of interreligious work, and collaborate on an intercongregational project.
The fellowship is directed by Christine Krieger with support and instruction provided by ICJS scholars.
The next fellowship cohort will begin in January 2025.
When I signed up to be part of ICJS’s Congregational Leaders Fellowship (CLF), I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the core beliefs and practices of the Jewish and Muslim faiths. I had read articles and attended lectures, and I have a few Jewish friends, some more religious than others. I’ve come to…
Growing up, I developed a friendship with a child playing on the playground. As we grew older, we continued to gravitate to each other, noticing that we shared similar values. We didn’t allow ourselves to be negatively influenced by others. We both were stable and firm enough in our values that when peers attempted to…
My mother was a logophile, a lover of words, who understood nuance even when she spoke directly. She taught her children to speak without the preparatory steps of babble and baby talk. It was a “sink or swim” technique. We developed burgeoning vocabularies and fluency, but I’m not sure that we learned to communicate beyond…
As I wrap up the ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship, I reflect on experiences I had during one of the most difficult periods of my life that laid a strong foundation for my interreligious story and upon which the fellowship built years later. A journey of profound interreligious sharing began when my wife Jill was diagnosed…