Faith and Everyday Leadership™
Celebrating the Best Practices of Leaders at Work and in Congregational Life
In your work, communities, and family lives, as people of faith you have opportunities every day to engage in acts of leadership.
From your smallest gestures to your most ambitious efforts, your work, service, and leadership already make it possible for you to become agents of grace and transformation to shape and heal the world.
What would it look like to be more mindful of these opportunities and to cultivate the best practices of leadership you already know?
Your faith touches not just your participation in congregational life, but also the person that you are and the decisions that you make in boardrooms, businesses, offices, homes, classrooms, and hospitals.
Faith and Everyday Leadership™ is the Alban Institute’s innovative research and educational initiative designed to
- learn about faith at work by listening to the experiences of leaders in everyday life;
- build collaborative understandings of vocation among clergy and laity;
- expand the capacity of congregations to provide the resources faithful people need to fulfill their diverse callings to leadership.
Faith and Everyday Leadership™ is designed to address the hunger many of you frequently express for a stronger connection between your faith and the realities of everyday leadership.
If you are seeking a way for your faith to address who you are and what you are doing with your life — each day of every week — then this program has been designed especially with you in mind.
Background to the Faith and Everyday Leadership™ Initiative
Today a number of movements and initiatives locate themselves in the interplay between faith and the challenges of everyday life.
Some speak of ministry in daily life, others of faith and life, or faithfulness in daily living. These efforts come in the wake of more than four decades of institutional attempts to shift the church’s preponderant emphasis to lay ministry, the work of the whole people of God, and the ministry of the baptized or baptismal ministry. While many changes have occurred in the laity’s roles in congregational life, in many ways the church remains a clergy-defined and led institution.
What are we to make of the fact that recent years have seen a resurgence of concern with faith in the workplace, spirituality of work, marketplace ministry, or faith at work?
Each new approach to the perennial questions about faith, life, and work has grown out of a common recognition of the everyday vocational challenges existing in the lives of members of faith communities as they try to live out their roles as leaders in ways that connect home, job, government, faith.
Faith and Everyday Leadership™ is the Alban Institute’s contribution to helping people discover a renewed connection between faith and their lives of work, service, and leadership by lifting up and celebrating the best practices of everyday leaders, both at work and in congregational life. We seek nothing less than to help participants to become more effective agents of grace and reconciliation in the world we share with one another.