Event time:
Wednesday, November 29, 2023 - 4:30pm
Location:
Zoom
409 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT
06511
Event description:
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Storytelling: Enlivening Faith and Leadership through Connection (Virtual)
This event is open to clergy, lay leaders, congregation members, and those who want to learn more about community formation… Join us virtually on November 29th at 4:30 pm using this link.
Storytelling plays a critical role in leadership and community formation. The church and society are in liminal seasons when stories are surfacing that were once silenced. Jesus shared stories in another period when societal and religious reckonings were on the horizon. His stories gave life to individuals, acting as the midwife for a new kind of shared community. His stories also act as models and reminders that authentic community forms around authentic stories.
As the world tilts in unexpected directions and a changing church tries to make meaning of seismic shifts, we recognize that stories bring us together in ways that are both large and small. Stories blend leadership, ministry, and empowerment. They can be transmitted in transformative ways not just in the church but in the home, workplace, and social gatherings where individuals are waiting for opportunities to link their stories with others.
Through the Gospel narratives, we see how storytelling was the first means of ministry to a new community. As we navigate a post-isolation world, we also learn how stories will continue to create space for the future of ministry in whatever form ministry takes.
Join Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School for the 2023 Bauer-Broholm Lecture as we learn together about leadership and community building through storytelling.
Our lecturer will be the Rev. Dr. Ned Allyn Parker, Associate Dean of Institutional Advancement, who also serves as a chaplain in New Haven. Ned will blend his experience in chaplaincy, parish ministry, and community building to model and reinforce the power of story.
Ned received his MDiv from Andover Newton Theological School and his DMin in Preaching & Homiletics from The Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry. His academic studies focus on storytelling and community building. With his father, a fellow storyteller, Ned told his first story at an international Biblical Storytelling event at the age of six.
The Bauer Broholm Lecture will conclude with a panel, which will include Ned, as well as The Rev. Dr. Frederick (Jerry) Streets (Adjunct Associate Professor of Divinity and Social Work), and Andrea Barton Reeves (Yale Divinity School student and the first Chief Executive Officer of the Connecticut Paid Family and Medical Leave Insurance Authority (PFML)). Please find bios for our panelists below.
More about the Bauer Broholm Workshop
This lecture is made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Bradley P. Bauer (DMin ‘16), who endowed a fund to be used to support lectures on the topic of the ministry of the laity. Paying particular attention to the typology of the church/world encounter, this lecture series explores practices of Faith at Work, while also shining a light on the ways in which churches produce and validate leaders who make ethical contributions to society. The lecture honors Andover Newton’s history of educating the laity to bring faith to their life’s work, especially Andover Newton’s former Center for the Ministry of the Laity, which contributed to this work in the 1980’s. The Bauer-Broholm Lectures shall commend personal vocational discernment and deepen skills and knowledge for both clergy and lay leadership in faith communities. The lectureship also honors Dick Broholm, who brought Robert Greenleaf and his writings on ‘Servant Leadership’ to Andover Newton Theological School, binding its principles with the practices of lay ministry.”
More about the Panelists
Frederick J. (Jerry) Streets as Senior Pastor of the Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, CT. from 1975-1992, led the congregation in significant growth, building a new church edifice and developing many social outreach programs and ministries.
He served as the Yale University Chaplain and Senior Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale from 1992-2007 where he established a model of multi-faith campus ministry. In honor of Yale’s tercentennial, Yale University Press published his (2005) Preaching in the New Millennium.
In 2008 Professor Streets was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Pretoria in South Africa where he taught in the Department of Practical Theology and explored the intersection of religious, social welfare and medical institutional outreach services to those affected by, and infected with, HIV and AIDS. He returned to South Africa as a Fulbright Specialist in 2010 to assess the transition of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa in becoming a multicultural and ethnic institution since the fall of apartheid.
He is a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Streets has served as an adjunct Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at Yale Divinity School since 1987. He is also an adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and in the Spirituality, Mind Body Institute in the Department of Clinical Psychology and Education, Teachers’ College, Columbia University.
A licensed clinical social worker, Professor Streets is the former Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor in Pastoral Counseling at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University in New York City and former Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Work and Latino Community Practice at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, CT.
He also served on the Board of the Fund for Theological Education and the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center. He was a 2009-10 Fellow of the Connecticut Health Foundation.
Some of his current larger involvements include membership on the Association of Theological School (ATS), The Commission on Accrediting. He is a member of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma through which he assists in the training of mental health professionals across disciplines, religions and cultures in providing mental health services to those throughout the world who have been traumatized by war and natural disasters.
A native of Chicago, he has been nurtured by the American Baptist Convention, Progressive National Baptist Convention and United Church of Christ denominations. He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and he is the recipient of many awards.
Andrea Barton Reeves is a second-year MAR student with a concentration in Ethics. Before attending YDS, she spent over two decades as an advocate for children and people with disabilities.
She spent 10 years representing children whose families were DCF-involved and trained other lawyers to act as advocates on behalf of abused and neglected children. She spent another 10 years at Harc, Inc., in Hartford, an agency supporting people with intellectual disabilities and their families. She served as its CEO during the last six years of her tenure there. She then entered into service with the State of Connecticut, starting the state’s Paid Family and Medical Leave program as its first CEO, standing up the agency from scratch in 2020, in the midst of the Covid epidemic. It now supports over 50,000 people with income replacement while they care for themselves or a family member with a serious health condition. In 2023, Governor Ned Lamont nominated her to serve in her current position as the Commissioner of the Department of Social Services, a $9B, 1800-person agency providing a wide array of supports and services to 1.2M of Connecticut’s residents, including Medicaid, SNAP benefits and long term services and supports.
In addition to her time at Harc Inc. and CT Paid Leave, Andrea has been recognized by the Hartford Business Journal’s 2021 Power 25 Healthcare, the CT NAACP, and recognized as one of 100 Women of Color in 2021 for her groundbreaking leadership during the pandemic. She has also given a TedX New Haven talk, entitled “Social Justice in a Gymsuit” and currently serves as the board chair of the YWCA-Hartford Region.