RETREATS AND FORMATIONS

The SpiritHouse Project has conducted nonviolence formations as well as community and leadership formations in faith-based and secular communities throughout the United States. These communities include Black activists and religious leaders from the Black Belt South, Mennonites, Quakers, African American ordained and lay leaders, Jonathan Daniels and Samuel Younge Youth Fellows, Every Church a Peace Church Conference attendees and members, the local NAACP in York, Pennsylvania, Goshen College, Word and World, Servant Leadership School, and Princeton University.

The Jarius Project

The Jarius Project engages us in a creative and ongoing process of building a beloved community that moves us from fragmentation to wholeness, from individualism to community, and from chaos to justice. To paraphrase Carlyle Fielding, community formation helps us free our minds and spirits to imagine, transform, interpret and create a culture inimical to the tyranny and culture of domination, violence and oppression.

For those who derive their power from dominating and unjust structures, community and leadership formation provides the space and support for healing and transformation in order for us to:

• develop a new consciousness that moves us away from individualism and fragmentation to community.
• develop a liberating and communal view of leadership.
• help us to begin anew with each other by restoring our common connections to each other.
• ignite our collective memories so that we remember who God has been with us and who we have been to each other.
• renew our hope, courage, creativity, and reason to live with dignity and meaning as we tackle racism, sexism, materialism, militarism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, and all forms of systemic injustice and violence.

On the Road to Jerusalem: A Nonviolence Training for Adults

On the Road to Jerusalem is a Christian nonviolence formation designed by SpiritHouse and its allies from the Mennonite Community. It is spiritual formation for Christian lay leaders, congregants, youth, activists, and clergy that make a connection between spirituality and nonviolence and justice. On the Road to Jerusalem:

• helps us to understand the culture of structural violence in our society and how it impacts our lives on multi-dimensional levels.
• causes us to think about ways that structural violence goes against Christianity.
• helps us develop fundamental strategies and ways of living that resist the culture of violence and enable us to act for peace and justice.
• requires us to interrogate our assumptions about violence and nonviolence.
• involves us in a process of nonviolence and justice formation that continues after the collective formation process. It calls on us to create a project that continues to transform us into nonviolence and justice educators while we simultaneously transform others.
• restores our hope, reason, courage and will to answer God's call to build up a nonviolent and just world.