This past week we hosted the 2025 Rebuilt Conference, our first conference in seven years. The conference welcomed about 800 parish leaders from 150 parishes and diocese from every part of the country, and 4 foreign countries, here to our Ridgely Road campus. Over 150 member ministers served the conference over a three day period. It was a very big deal, but what was it all about?
Through the course of the conference our purpose was to help strengthen parish leaders for the important work of parish ministry and parish renewal. Our prayer for participants was that they would be refreshed and renewed in three ways.
Inspired
We hope they were inspired to dream new dreams and think great thoughts regarding the possibilities for what God wants to do in their parishes. Those new dreams, those great thoughts can be overwhelming for sure. But they can also be inspiring.
What we especially wanted them to be inspired by is what the local parish church can do when pastors, staff, and parishioners are committed to mission and ministry, working together selflessly to be the Church Christ calls us to be.
We’ve been inspired by other churches, including evangelical churches, and hope we in turn can be a source of inspiration to others.
Encouraged
We aimed at inspiring their mind as well as encouraging their hearts.
Working in a parish is not all that glamorous. Tell people you work for a church and you rarely get a high five. More than one of my staff, when explaining they work for a church, have been asked “But, what do you do for your full time job?” Besides the fact that you can go out and make more money somewhere else, it’s tough work that people think is easy.
Sometimes it’s hard work because we are building the kingdom of heaven on earth and in the process are fighting systems and structures that work against it. Sometimes it’s hard work because we are in a culture that doesn’t always value the church or even necessarily want it around. That’s the part we can’t do anything about. But sometimes it’s hard work because we are doing ministry in ways that make it hard on ourselves. We have to learn the difference.
Bottom line though, there will always be challenges and difficulties in running a parish. And those challenges can beat us up, those difficulties can wear us down; deeply discouraging us or worse, causing us to lose heart.
We wanted conference attendees to walk away encouraged and motivated to lean into this hard work. We like to say that parish renewal is a long obedience in the same direction. It is work that takes perseverance and resilience of heart. We hope they were encouraged in that determination.
We want them to know that they are not alone in the work they do and the challenges they face. We hope they left the conference
reconfirmed in the truth that bringing people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ is the most important work there is. We invited them to walk away confident that the Church really is hope for the world and that the local parish is the heart of the whole Church.
Equipped
We aimed at inspiring their minds, encouraging their hearts and equipping their hands with very specific action steps to renew, refresh and rebuild their parishes.
We don’t know everything about running a parish, (that’s for sure) and we certainly don’t know what works in every parish. Our aim was to share what we have learned and take what we do know, the steps and strategies God has used to build our parish here in Timonium. Some of them will not work elsewhere, but some of them just might. And we’re convinced that more than a few of them definitely will. We shared both the overarching strategies we’ve formed, as well as the tactics we use, leaving them with both changes they can make right away, to build momentum in their ministry, as well as ideas for long term planning.
REBUILT 2025 was a wonderful success and surely has planted seeds of renewal in many places. I want to thank all our member-ministers at both Nativity and Rebuilt for all the extra effort and enthusiasm that truly made the event special. And heartfelt and undying thanks go to our Nativity and Rebuilt staff who were, in a word, wonderful.
