By Dr. Alyssa Fisher, Cal-Pac Director of Communications
Clergy and conference leaders from across the Western Jurisdiction gathered in Los Angeles for Making the Leap from May 21 to 23, 2025. The event was organized by the Western Jurisdiction Deans of Cabinets and focused on equipping clergy to thrive in complex systems, cooperative environments, innovative spaces, and pushing them to new understandings of pastoral leadership.
Making the Leap was designed as a training with the purpose of raising up leaders for the complex systems that fill our communities, congregations, and conferences, including leaders of large churches and cross-cultural appointments to those stepping into multi-point charges and conference leadership roles. Attendees shared their hopes to learn new skillsets, build resilient and sustainable communities, and create systems of support amongst fellow clergy.
The gathering offered a space for learning, worship, encouragement, and connection. Workshops and keynotes challenged clergy to embrace adaptive leadership and new paradigms for ministry. In the opening keynote, Dr. Philip Clayton described ministry as taking place “at the edge of chaos.” He highlighted how simple components can come together to create emergent complexity, and how leaders can work with, not against, those dynamics. Discussion groups reflected on the balance between chaos (autonomy) and order (belonging), asking: In this moment, do we need more structure, or more openness?
Workshops addressed issues at the edge of this chaos, including starting a vision from scratch (Bishop Cedrick Bridgeforth) and building cooperative and combined ministries (Bishop Sandra Olewine). Rev. Dr. Tom Choi introduced the concept of nunchi, or the subtle art of reading the room, especially important for clergy entering cross-cultural appointments. Rev. Trudy Robinson discussed using vision to lead capital campaigns and how digital culture is reshaping pastoral identity, authority, and ministry itself. Bishop Kristin Stoneking encouraged clergy to diversify incomes streams in their local churches, while Cal-Pac Director of Communications Dr. Alyssa Fisher shared strategies for various audiences, situations, and communication channels, and Alba Jaramillo provided tactics for addressing immigration challenges under the current administration.
Each day was anchored in worship centered around understandings of grace. On Wednesday, Bishop Cedrick preached from John 1:6-18, drawing attention to prevenient grace, or the grace that goes before us, and called attendees to remember their baptisms. During Thursday’s worship on justifying grace, or a grace that sets us free, Rev. Ken Suhr (Cal-Pac Director of Congregational Vitality) read from the First Nations translation of Romans 5:1-2, describing “a people filled with God’s beauty and shining-greatness.”
During Thursday morning’s keynote, Bishop Grant Hagiya spoke to our present moment: a world marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Bishop Hagiya shared that we can combat this world one piece at a time: volatility is countered by vision, uncertainty by understanding, complexity by clarity, and ambiguity by agility.
Thursday afternoon’s keynote from Kristina Gonzalez centered on intercultural competency, where she shared ways to identify and learn your own cultural place and evaluate the cultural sensitivity of your congregation. She offered strategies for expanding understanding and creating a more culturally welcoming community through universal design, or designing for the person who will need the most support with the added benefit of providing potentially unacknowledged support for the wider community.
Friday’s closing worship offered a celebration of sanctifying grace, with Bishop Sandy Olewine preaching from Colossians 3:12–17. Her message lifted up the West African principle of Sankofa, or bringing grace forward to close the gap between what we say we are going to do and what we actually do. Making the Leap served as a launchpad of courage, challenge, and community for those daring to lead in complex, creative, and Christ-centered ways. As clergy returned home, they were encouraged to reach out to their neighbors to care for one another, to share ideas, and collaborate on new iterations of ministry.
