How Do You Create Change When Your Clients are Congregants?

Exploring the Future of Spiritually-Based Organizations

with Rev. Allen C. Brimer, M.Div.

A TODN Change SIG Zoom Event

Friday, August 23, 2024

8:30-10:30 AM

 (8:30-10:30am - Bring your own coffee/tea and snacks.)

How Do You Create Change When Your Clients are Congregants?

Exploring the Future of Spiritually-Based Organizations

What can organizations, in general, learn from the history of change within culturally-rooted, non-secular organizations?

What is the value of a spiritually-based organization in a post-religious world?

How are spiritually-based organizations creating both internal change to adapt to new social preferences and creating external change that is relevant and valuable to society?

Throughout history, humans have perceived and sought to understand transcendent realities. Spiritual and religious practices have organized themselves in many ways in every culture and in every time. Today, the primary religious and spiritual organizations of Western Civilization are undergoing a great reformation. Church, Synagogues, Mosques and other religious organizations are struggling to continue to operate as they have in the past. Rising generations are spiritually hungry, longing for authentic connection within community, want to be part of something that furthers their values in the world, but are also institutionally suspicious. 

In this presentation, Allen Brimer will share his experience of starting two new spiritual communities that are attempting to reform how we live our spiritual lives together and the lessons that inform and support change in all organizational contexts.

Rev. Allen C. Brimer, M.Div.

Allen is the Pastor of The Church of Reconciliation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a historic congregation founded to address race equity at the height of the civil rights movement. Prior to serving ‘The Rec,’ Allen was the Co-Planter and Pastor of Farm Church, a congregation that meets on a farm and leverages the resources of the farm to address food insecurity in Durham, NC. He is also a co-founder of Bluestem Community, which is dedicated to nourishing ecological stewardship, community service, ​and spiritual practice in shared fellowship while operating a conservation burial ground for green burials in Orange County, North Carolina. Finally, Allen is the senior Religious Studies faculty member at Somerset Community College in Somerset, Kentucky, where he teaches the world’s religions as well as Old and New Testament. He holds degrees from the University of Tennessee and McCormick Theological Seminary, Chicago. 

• NOTE: Do you have an idea to polish or a presentation to try out? The Change SIG is looking for 2025 speakers.

  For more information, contact SIG leaders, Mary Charles Blakebrough (919-656-9573) or Susan Westbrook (405-343-0798).