Where do our churches go from here?

Church and Christian community look a lot different than they did before the horrors of the coronavirus pandemic, racial trauma, and economic uncertainty revealed difficult truths about the wounds we carry. The damage caused by trauma is deep and affects every part of our lives together. At the same time, the pandemic has upended or called into question many of our traditional ministry models. For those tasked with leading congregations through this disorienting new territory, the challenges are great indeed.
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Yet God's people are amazingly resilient. In All Our Griefs to Bear, author Joni S. Sancken builds on her own trauma-aware background and engages leading sociologists and mental health professionals to name some of the largest issues that congregations now face and will face as we process the cascading trauma of our time. Chapters focus on practices such as lament, storytelling, and blessing to help leaders and church members to nurture resilience and compassion.
We cannot go back to who we were before. But the church can experience new life and renewal in the wake of trauma as God's healing and hope move through us into our world.

Joni S. Sancken is associate professor of homiletics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She is interested in theological and contextual issues in preaching and is the author of Words that Heal: Preaching Hope to Wounded Souls (Abingdon Press, 2019). Joni is an ordained pastor in Mennonite Church USA and has served congregations in Indiana and Pennsylvania and completed level one STAR training (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) through the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in 2017. She lives in Oakwood, Ohio, with her pastor husband Steve Schumm and children Maggie and Theodore.