The ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship is a year-long intensive program in which leaders within religious communities come together across traditions to promote interreligious understanding, deepen relationships, and cultivate spaces of belonging in order to combat religious bigotry and hatred.
Recognizing the important role religious and lay leaders play in the religious education and formation of their communities and larger society, the year-long ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship brings together a cohort consisting of one official religious leader and two lay leaders in equal numbers from the following religious communities: Islam; Judaism; Roman Catholicism; Protestantism; and the Black Church.*
The purpose of the Fellowship is to support religious and lay leaders in the development of skills, knowledge, and facility to be advocates of interreligious learning and understanding within their congregations and to connect congregations from across the region to build a robust, interreligious network that reflects the religious and social diversity of our community.
Through cultivation of relationships and collaboration on developing interreligious programs—as well as study, shared learning, and dialogue around human dignity, flourishing, and justice—we can build robust interreligious communities that interweave the civic, educational, and religious dimensions of our lives together.
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*”We use the term ’the Black Church’...as a kind of sociological and theological shorthand reference to the pluralism of black Christian churches in the United States” (C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church in the African American Experience, 1).