Spiritual Formation Practices in Multicultural Contexts

2023: CUME’s mission is to provide a contextualized theological education for urban practitioners. We partner with and are informed by the local church as a training partner. This grant would enable CUME to design its programs for institutional learning that would elevate how we engage the ministry needs of the city and the spiritual formation of ministry leaders in the current, critically evolving context. Specifically, this planning grant would enable CUME to investigate and design for that context and thereby refine its equipping of urban leaders through focus groups with key stakeholders.

We hope to learn from multicultural, urban practitioners best practices and models which they use in the urban church and various other ministry settings. We also hope to identify the components of our current formation practices that do not provide our students’ spiritual formation with the requisite multicultural skills and dimensionality. The learnings will then be used to shape our current and future program offerings and to inform our urban curriculum. We will also use the learnings to create tools as well as to publish our findings on contextualized urban spiritual formation as resources applicable to varied contexts for our current students and alumni.