Speakers
Shane Claiborne
Bestselling Author, Prominent Christian Activist, Sought-after Speaker and Recovering Sinner
With tears and laughter, Shane Claiborne unveils the tragic messes we’ve made of our world and the tangible hope that another world is possible. Shane graduated from Eastern University, and did graduate work at Princeton Seminary. His ministry experience is varied, from a 10-week stint working alongside Mother Teresa in Calcutta, to a year spent serving a wealthy mega-congregation at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago. During the recent war in Iraq, Shane spent three weeks in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team. Shane is also a founding partner of The Simple Way, a faith community in inner city Philadelphia that has helped to birth and connect radical faith communities around the world.
Shane writes and travels extensively speaking about peacemaking, social justice, and Jesus. He is featured in the DVD series “Another World Is Possible” and is the author of the several books including The Irresistible Revolution, Jesus for President, and Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers. Shane speaks over 100 times a year in a dozen or so countries and nearly every state in the US. Shane has given academic seminars at Vanderbilt University, Duke University Pepperdine University, Wheaton College, Princeton University, Goshen College and Harvard University. Shane also speaks at various denominational gatherings, festivals, and conferences around the globe. Shane’s work has been featured in everything from Fox News and the Wall Street Journal to CNN and National Public Radio.
Click here to learn more about The Simple Way
Danielle Shroyer
Danielle is the pastor of Journey Church in Dallas. She is the author of The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and speaks often on issues of theology, church leadership and emerging communities of faith. Danielle lives with her husband and two children in Dallas, Texas.
Click here to visit Danielle’s blog
Spencer Burke
For the past 10+ years, Spencer has been at the forefront of the emerging Church movement, including creating and maintaining TheOOZE.com – one of the earliest expressions of this transition in the Church. TheOOZE.com has become one of the largest relational networks where people of all Christian traditions interact in a web-based community (numbering over 150,000 users a month from over 90 different countries). He also hosts an offline gathering – a learning party called Soularize – which offers participants a safe place to experience and explore the emerging trends in theology, Church, the arts and faith.
Spencer is the author of three books: Making Sense of Church, establishes new metaphors to help define the future trajectory of the Church; Out of TheOOZE, chronicles the spiritual awakenings of members from TheOOZE.com in their own words – using articles from the site – with Spencer’s commentary; A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, ground breaking and controversial book that explores grace and salvation beyond the confines of religion.
Through both experience and research, Spencer uniquely bridges the worlds of the traditional and emerging Church. His ministry experience spans a broad range from church planting to the merging of church bodies; from speaking weekly to leading retreats; from being a pastor to being an elder, where he learned the heartaches and joys of a pastoral search to leading a pastoral restoration. Spencer’s 22 years of professional ministry culminated with his position as one of the teaching pastors at Mariners Church in Irvine, California where he played a strategic role in the congregation’s growth from 800 to 10,000.
Click here to learn more about Spencer
John Franke
John R. Franke is the Lester and Kay Clemens Professor of Missional Theology at Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, PA. He holds the DPhil degree from the University of Oxford and is particularly interested in engaging postmodern thought and culture from the perspective of missional Christian faith. He has spoken on the relationships between the gospel, theology, mission, and culture throughout the US and around the world and is actively involved in research and writing. In addition to publishing numerous articles and reviews he is the coauthor of Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Westminster John Knox Press), the author of The Character of Theology (Baker Academic) and Barth for Armchair Theologians (Westminster John Knox). His most recent book is Manifold Witness: The Plurality of Truth (Abingdon).
Nick Fiedler
Nick is a twenty-something currently living in the heartland of the American Southeast. He has taken a hiatus from institutional Christianity and church in order to give himself some breathing room to form a healthy faith of his own. He struggles daily with understanding what it means to embody the teachings of Jesus. He and his wife recently got back from a year and a half traveling abroad and immersing themselves in other cultures and ways of life. In December 2009, Nick published his first book, The Hopeful Skeptic: Revisiting Christianity from the Outside, with Likewise and he is the co-creator and co-host of The Nick and Josh Podcast, a podcast on “Faith, Reason, and Absurdity”, that has been interviewing authors, speakers, and community leaders for the past 4 years. Nick also has 8 years of Youth Ministry experience and randomly bumps into people that say “Hey man, weren’t you my Youth Pastor?”
Cheri Honkala
“While freedom and democracy are celebrated today, the poor still live in terror, with no right to healthcare, food, affordable housing, or a job at a living wage. They are trying to drown out our voices, but we will be heard” – Cheri Honkala
Cheri Honkala is a founder and national organizer for the Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC). PPEHRC is an organization of 125 poor peoples groups from across the country that uses the economic human rights as contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (the rights to housing, health care, food, clothing, education and living wage jobs) as the framework for a movement to end poverty.
As a woman who was formerly homeless and on public assistance herself, Cheri has been a tireless fighter for the rights of poor families for many decades. In 1999, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Zucchino profiled Cheri Honkala in his book, The Myth of the Welfare Queen. Cheri co-founded the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) with other poor women in 1991 to fight for the rights of poor families in Philadelphia’s once thriving, now struggling, Kensington neighborhood. PPEHRC was founded out of KWRU.
Through Cheri’s leadership working alongside the poor and disenfranchised, the issues of poverty have been raised at a level that the powers would wish to keep hidden. These have occurred through such events as the tent cities and marches of 10’s of thousands of peoples at the Republican National Conventions of 2000, 2004, and 2008, a national truth commission putting poverty on trial, and the upcoming march from New Orleans to Detroit. At the same time victories have been achieved ranging from saving FEMA housing being taken away from Katrina victims on the Gulf Coast to housing takeovers of vacant abandoned homes for those without homes.
Doug Pagitt
Doug is an author, speaker and consultant for churches, denominations and businesses throughout the United States and around the world on issues of postmodern culture, social systems and Christianity.
Doug’s professional endeavors include pastoring a Holistic Missional Christian Community – (www.SolomonsPorch.com), speaking and writing (www.DougPagitt.com) and owning businesses in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is seeking to find creative, entrepreneurial, generative ways to join in the hopes, dreams and desires God has for the world. Doug was one of the founders of Emergent Village.
Doug is the author of A Christianity Worth Believing (Jossey-Bass 2008), Church Re-Imagined (Zondervan 2004), Preaching Re-Imagined (Zondervan 2005), and BodyPrayer (Waterbrook 2005). He is the co-editor of An Emergent Manifesto of Hope (Baker Books 2007). He has contributed to numerous books, including The Post-Evangelical (Zondervan 2003), Practioners (Regal 2006), and Listening To The Beliefs of the Emerging Church (Zondervan 2007).
