Formation
The Beloved Community is partnering with our sending parish, The Church of the Nativity (Raleigh) to offer various opportunities for formation. Below are some helpful links to resources about the Episcopal Church, Inclusion, and Faith. If you would like to register for any of our upcoming formation opportunities or would like more information, please contact us.
It is our belief that no one should miss a formation opportunity due to a lack of resources. If you need assistance purchasing a book for any of our book studies, please let us know. If you would like to donate to help provide for those who may need assistance, you may do so through our financial donations page.
You can find information about our previously held formation opportunities here.
Upcoming Formation Opportunities at The Beloved Community
Migrant God: A Christian Vision for Immigrant Justice
Zoom Book Study
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
September 2- 30, 2026
Led by Anthony Bishop
From Tijuana, Mexico, to Douglas, Arizona, across North Carolina and beyond, Isaac Villegas cuts a new path through worn-out talking points and bears witness to loving solidarity among Christians—both with and without US citizenship. Along the way, he offers a theologically astute and politically rich vision of beloved community.
Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God
Zoom Book Study
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
October 7- 28, 2026
Led by Eileen Morgan
Lauren F. Winner—a leading writer at the crossroads of culture and spirituality and author of Still and Girl Meets God—joins the ranks of luminaries such as Anne Lamott and Barbara Brown Taylor with this exploration of little known—and, so, little used—biblical metaphors for God, metaphors which can open new doorways for our lives and spiritualities.
There are hundreds of metaphors for God, but the church only uses a few familiar images: creator, judge, savior, father. In Wearing God, Lauren Winner gathers a number of lesser-known tropes, reflecting on how they work biblically and culturally, and reveals how they can deepen our spiritual lives.
Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament
Zoom Book Study
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
November 4 - 25, 2026
Led by Rev. Phillip Bass
With sound scholarship and her own vivid translations from the Hebrew, Old Testament professor Ellen Davis teaches us a spiritually engaged method of reading scripture. Beginning with the psalms, whose frank prayers can be a model for our own, Davis reflects on the stories of the patriarchs and the pastoral wisdom of the book of Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs in helping us cultivate those habits of the heart that lead to a rich relationship with God.
To Speak a Defiant Word: Sermons and Speeches on Justice and Transformation
Zoom Book Study
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
January 6 - 27, 2027
Led by Carolyn Kreuger & Kerry Phoenix
Pauli Murray from 1960 to 1985 by the Black, nonbinary lawyer, poet, and Episcopal priest whose legal thinking shaped the work of Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Edited by Anthony Pinn, it restores a voice that refused to separate racism from questions of class and gender, and shows Murray's religious imagination as inseparable from her activism.
The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage
Zoom Book Study
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
February 3-24, 2027
Led by Deacon Dan Laird & Libby Carroll
Rohr's most personal book, and his first major work since The Universal Christ. He reads the Hebrew prophets as a map for living compassionately in a violent age, tracing how their rage and accusation matures into lamentation and grief — outrage as a starting point rather than a destination.
Even This Is Holy Ground
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
March 10 - 31, 2027
Led by Nikki Colby
A poetry collection written from inside the tension between belief and lived experience, where the language of faith meets the ordinary and the unbearable. The poems wrestle, celebrate, lament, and pray on the conviction that sacred ground
How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
April 7 - 28, 2027
Led by Kerry Phoenix & Libby Carroll
The Episcopal Bishop of Washington writes about the junctures that shape a courageous life: the decision to go, the decision to stay, the moment that chooses us, the accumulated weight of small daily choices, and the willingness to begin again. Drawing on scripture, the lives of others, and her own hard passages, Budde treats bravery less as temperament than as something learned in the crossing. The updated edition adds a new preface and the full text of her January 2025 inauguration prayer service sermon — the one The New York Times called an extraordinary act of public resistance.
We Can Be Brave: How We Learn to Be Brave in Life's Decisive Moments
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
May 5 - June 2, 2027
Led by Carolyn Kreuger & Jodi Belcher
Using her own translations, Wilda Gafney offers a midrashic interpretation of the biblical text that is rooted in the African American preaching tradition to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. This unique and imaginative work is grounded in serious scholarship and will expand conversations about feminist and womanist biblical interpretation.
Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
June 9 - 30, 2027
Led by Anthony Bishop
Evangelicals have long claimed their opposition to homosexuality is inherent to the faith; Stell upends that. He recovers a network of authors, ministers, and professors in the 1970s and '80s — all products of major evangelical institutions — who worked to persuade churches to affirm gay and lesbian members, showing the antigay majority was far more contingent than the standard story allows.
Outside the Lines: How Embracing Queerness Will Transform Your Faith
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
July 7 - 28, 2027
Led by Jodi Belcher
A Presbyterian minister writes about how becoming aware of her queer sexuality moved her closer to Jesus rather than away from him. Kim-Kort argues that God in Jesus is oriented toward us in a queer, boundary-breaking way, and that a queer spirituality keeps crashing through the categories we make for ourselves and each other.
How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
August 4 - 25, 2027
Led by Amanda Harrison
A Black autistic pastor and disability scholar argues that ableism — the idea that certain bodies are better than others — is a root cause of racial bias and injustice in American culture and in the church. Drawing on historical records, biblical interpretation, and disability studies, he invites congregations into a conversation about race by way of disability.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
September 1 - 29, 2027
Led by Rev. Phillip Bass
The first complete English translation from the original Coptic, with line-by-line commentary. Leloup reads the text as restoring the divine feminine to the center of Christian tradition, and Mary — the first witness to the Resurrection — as a founding figure rather than a redeemed sinner.
Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
October 6 - 27, 2027
Led by Eileen Morgan
Thirty years of Homeboy Industries distilled into two principles: we are all inherently good, no exceptions, and we belong to each other, no exceptions. Boyle offers a village that cherishes in place of a tribalism that excludes and punishes — as one Homeboy member puts it, "love is our lens; it is how we see things."
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Wednesdays from 7:00 - 8:30PM
November 3 - 17, 2027
Led by Rev. Phillip Bass
Rohr's classic on the shape of a spiritual life, revised with a foreword by Brené Brown. We can't understand "up," he argues, until we have fallen "down" — and maturity arrives not with age but with the turn from the outer task to the inner one.
