The panel begins with David De La Fuente's "Urbi et Orbi." The paper argues that Pope Francis' ecclesiology is ad intra dependent on Henri de Lubac and his sense of the past, and ad extra oriented to the future by way of Michel de Certeau.
Moving our focus from the Catholic church to a feminist church, Kathryn Common and April Blaine's "From Preservation to Flourishing" introduces and extends four marks of the feminist church to reimagine it as a living organism, enabling a different kind of ecclesial future.
Sheryl Johnson's "Challenging the Myth of 'Change Resistance'” reframes the view of ecclesial conflict from a sign of communal resistance to a sign of communal grief.
Finally, Carmen Landsdowne's "Competent to Implement, Unable to Imagine", contends that ecclesial futures for North American churches cannot be funded into existence. Rather, they require a prior act of prophetic imagination.
Pope Francis’s ecclesiological vision is best understood as a prophetic ecclesiology of dreaming for the church as well as for the city and the world—urbi et orbi. To explore the future of Francis’s vision, this paper argues that his ecclesiology is ad intra dependent on Henri de Lubac and his sense of the past, and at the same time ad extra oriented to the future by way of Michel de Certeau. Out of these (and certainly other) influences, Francis envisions a future consisting of sharing dreams. In this exchange, the guidance of the Good Spirit becomes manifest. Of note, this paper deliberately focuses on de Certeau, not to downplay Francis’s Argentine sources in la teología del pueblo, but to bring to the foreground his commitment to the plurality of voices who are called to dream, and to facilitate a more thoroughgoing North American reception of Francis’s entire project.
This paper engages feminist ecclesiology as a critical resource for prophetic imagination and ecclesial futures. Drawing on one co-author’s forthcoming publication, the first half of the paper introduces the four marks of the feminist church, holistic, incarnate, utopic, and apostolic, which function as prophetic counter-visions to patriarchal and colonial ecclesial history. The second half extends these feminist marks toward an ontological re-imagining of the church as a living organism embedded within an interconnected ecosystem. Engaging feminist, womanist, queer, and decolonial perspectives alongside living systems theory, the paper argues that futures-oriented ecclesiology requires not merely new strategies, but a fundamental shift in how the church understands its being, knowing, and purpose. Rather than preserving institutional life, a vision of church as a living organism within an ecosystem calls the church towards practices of humility, relationality, and collective flourishing amid planetary crisis.
Churches often frame conflict as “resistance to change,” casting younger generations as disruptive and older generations as entrenched. This paper argues that such framings misdiagnose the problem and constrain the church’s prophetic imagination. Instead, what is labeled as resistance is more accurately grief over loss, of status, meaning, tradition, or belonging, and that prophetic futures depend less on argumentation than on pastoral practices that engage story and emotion. Bringing Walter Brueggemann’s prophetic imagination into conversation with adaptive leadership scholarship that identifies the power of narrative in change management, the paper challenges technical approaches to change that bypass empathy, lament, and other affective dimensions. It argues that storytelling, ritual, and pastoral care are not ancillary but constitutive of prophetic ecclesiology. Through case studies from congregational contexts, the paper shows how narrative-based pastoral practices can transform conflict, foster intergenerational and intercultural connection, and open space for more just and imaginative ecclesial futures.
The Lilly Endowment's Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative represents the largest institutional investment in North American theological education in living memory. This paper argues that its structural limits illuminate, with unusual clarity, what Walter Brueggemann means by prophetic imagination. Drawing on Charles Taylor's account of the secular age, a proposed mixed-methods research agenda measuring Lilly's outcomes across denominations, with my own denomination as a primary ecclesiological case, the paper contends that the ecclesial futures North American churches most urgently need cannot be funded into existence. They require a prior act of prophetic imagination — one that institutional investment is structurally incapable of producing. That imagination, the paper argues, is most powerfully provoked by communities the North American church has persistently positioned as recipients of mission rather than as teachers: Indigenous and other marginalized communities whose wisdom has never been organized around the assumptions of Christendom.