Date: March 22, 5 PM - March 24, 10 AM, 2012

Place: Central Church of the Nazarene Lenexa, Kansas (Nearest airport - Kansas City International, Kansas City, Missouri)

Lodging: Hawthorn Suites, Overland Park, KS (Free shuttle to the church)

Speaker: Nancy Ammerman

Cost: The conference itself is free. Housing and meal costs are held to a minimum.

Theme: Connectedness: What can our congregational connections tell us?

Click here for the program.

Registration is now open.



About Nancy Ammerman: Dr. Nancy Ammerman has spent much of the last decade studying American congregations. Her most recent book, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners (University of California Press, 2005), describes the common patterns that shape the work of American’s diverse communities of faith. Her 1997 book, Congregation and Community, tells the stories of twenty-three congregations that encountered various forms of neighborhood change in communities around the country. Along with a team of others, she edited and contributed to Studying Congregations: A New Handbook, published in 1998 by Abingdon. Her book Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, received the 1992 Distinguished Book award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Prof. Ammerman’s current research, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is the “Spiritual Narratives in Everyday Life” project. Begun in the summer of 2006, it is exploring whether and how religious belief and action are present in the stories people tell about their everyday lives.

About our theme: A much-touted strength of a denomination is its connectedness – the structural facilitation of relationships and opportunities beyond the local congregation. But are we as connected as we think, and in what ways? The denominational structure is designed to facilitate communication and encourage collaboration between churches by its administrative structure (Region, Field, District, Zone, etc.) and its program content (Nazarene educational institutions, NCM Child Sponsorship; NYI District Camps; NYC; Work & Witness trips; SS literature; Quizzing; Caravans, etc.). Denominational churches interact with one another at local, zone, district, national and international events and through denominational programming brought into the life of the local church. But churches may connect institutionally and programmatically with many other local, regional and international organizations/institutions as a part of the life of a church. Churches may interact with:

• Churches that are not a part of the denomination, perhaps aligned by interest or geography (e.g. church sports leagues, community projects, etc.),
• Faith Based Organizations (FBOs) (e.g. ministerial alliances, Heart to Heart, Teen Challenge, Rescue Missions, Heifer Project International, InterVarsity, etc.),
• Community Based Organizations (CBOs) (YMCA sports leagues, Boy/Girl Scouts, Upward Bound programs, community gardens, etc.)
• Other local organizations (schools, local governments, community clean-ups, St. Patrick’s Day parade floats, etc.).
• Other programs (Grief Share, Financial Peace University, Alcoholics Anonymous, Advent Conspiracy, etc.).

Members of churches have all kinds of connections they bring into the fellowship, but some of these personal connections become significant parts of a congregation’s social life and regularly offer opportunities for congregations to be connected to one another in common discipleship (formation). We assume that the pattern of connections in each church differs, but this needs to be measured. We wonder in what ways they differ, and what the impacts of the different patterns of connectedness might be on local congregations, a district and the church as a whole.