Registration open for 18th Believers’ Church Conference, Sept. 14-17
Conference: 18th Believers’ Church Conference: “Word, Spirit and the Renewal of the Church”
Date/Time: Sept. 14-17, 2017
Location: Goshen College
Cost: $75 ($50 students) before June 30, $100 ($75 students) after June 30. ($35 Friday only). Registration includes meals (Banquet $25).
Goshen College and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) will co-host the 18th Believers’ Church Conference, titled “Word, Spirit and the Renewal of the Church,” Sept. 14-17, 2017 at Goshen College.
The conference will explore the gifts and tensions of the Reformation legacy for the Believers’ Church tradition, with a view toward its ecumenical and global dimensions, focusing on the debates that have swirled for 500 years around the themes of Biblical authority, the movement of Spirit and the renewal of the church.
John D. Roth, director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism at Goshen College and a co-organizer of the event said, “This event is a unique opportunity for pastors, scholars and interested lay people from across the theological spectrum of the Believers Church tradition to join in conversation.” The conference marks an effort to revive the well-known Believers Church Conference series, which first convened in 1967.
Keynote speakers include Miroslav Volf, Joel A. Carpenter, Nancy Bedford and Frank A. Thomas.
Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale University Divinity School, is a Croatian Protestant theologian and public intellectual who has been described as “one of the most celebrated theologians of our day.” In addition to his well-known Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996) Volf is the author of numerous books on themes of reconciliation, hermeneutics, truth-telling and memory, interfaith relations, and globalization. He is the founder and director of Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
Joel A. Carpenter, professor of history at Calvin College and director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, is a highly-regarded historian of American religion and culture. Carpenter’s more recent focus has been on the history of Christianity in Africa and Asia, with a particular emphasis on Christian higher education in the global church. As director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, a research and faculty development agency of Calvin College, he worked with the officers of the John Templeton Foundation to develop grant-making programs in theology and in the social sciences for African scholars.
Nancy Bedford, is professor of applied theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary (Evanston, Illinois). Equally at home in Argentina and the United States, Bedford has lectured and published widely in the fields of global feminism, Latin American theologies, theologies in migration, intersectionality and the problems of whiteness, liberating readings of Scripture. Bedford, who has both Baptist and Anabaptist confessional orientations, is a member of Reba Place (Mennonite) Church in Evanston, Illinois.
Frank A. Thomas, professor of homiletics and director of the Academy of Preaching and Celebration at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, is an ordained minister and renowned teacher of preachers. Thomas is the CEO of Hope For Life International (former publisher of The African American Pulpit) and a member of the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers of Morehouse College. He also serves as a member of the International Board of Societas Homiletica, an international society of teachers. A revised and expanded version of his classic text on homiletics, They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ God: The Role of Celebration in Preaching, appeared in 2013.