2025: Hope Does Not Disappoint: Wrestling with God in a Groaning Creation
We invite you to save the date and join us as we return to Chicago for our annual Gathering.
Dates: Thursday, July 10 - Saturday, July 12, 2025
The Gathering begins Thursday with registration in the morning and lunch at noon. The closing worship service and announcements will end Saturday at around noon.
Location: Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, Illinois
Registration: the Eventbrite registration page will be posted here shortly.
Theme
We are assailed by a multitude of griefs: a collapsing global climate, savage wars crushing life and communities, exploding hatred against the vulnerable at home and beyond our borders, the chosen blindness and complicity of a church enamored with power. Following wave after wave of crushing sadness and death, where does the resolve to care and persevere come from? From where does hope that does not disappoint arise? Which voices and experiences have been absent from our shallower constructions of hope and what might it mean to receive the wisdom of these saints?
Because we have so often lost our ability to lament and attempt to find hope in false things, our gathering will foreground disciples and communities from outside the mainstream North American church. We desire to have their witness challenge and encourage us in living by the hope of the Cross.
Building on last year’s Gathering Bearing Witness to Grief: Climate Collapse, Resistance, and Grounded Hope, the 2025 Gathering will explore questions surrounding grief and hope:
What is a theological account of hope?
How are grief and hope related and what role does lament play in holding these together?
How do we account for the pain of God’s silence and apparent inaction?
Where and how are Christians concretely experiencing and enacting hope flowing from the “Christ pattern”—death and resurrection—at work in their lives?
We are guided in this exploration by a few convictions:
Lament and grief are essential to the Church’s hopeful witness.
Against our trust in technology, lament is not and cannot be instrumental, a technique for acquiring hope.
Lament is not mere sentiment, a cry of pain. It is wrestling with and vulnerably trusting God to intervene out of the fullness of love.
Hope is not optimism, internally-generated resilience, or a path to escape our creatureliness. Rather, hopeful discipleship receives human frailty as a gift.
Hope comes because of the intervention and solidarity of the crucified God in Jesus Christ into this groaning creation; the Church is hopeful because, even now, God is birthing something new.
Plenary Speakers
Ruth Padilla DeBorst
Ruth yearns to see peace and justice embrace in the beautiful and broken world we call home. A wife of one and mother of many, theologian, missiologist, educator, and storyteller, she has been involved in leadership development and theological education for integral mission in her native Latin America for several decades. She teaches at Western Theological Seminary (https://www.westernsem.edu) land serves with the Comunidad de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios (CETI – www.ceticontinental.org, a learning community with students across Latin America), and with INFEMIT (International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation –www.infemit.org). She serves on the board of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies and the American Society of Missiology. She lives with her husband, James, in Costa Rica as a member of Casa Adobe, an intentional Christian Community with deep concern for right living in relation to the whole of creation (www.casaadobe.org). Her studies include a Bachelors in Education (Argentina), an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Wheaton College), and a PhD in Theology (Boston University).
Stan Chu Ilo
Stan Chu Ilo is a Catholic priest from Awgu diocese, Nigeria; and Research Professor of World Christianity, African Studies and Global Health at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois (USA). He is also an Honorary Professor of Religion and Theology at Durham University, Durham, England, and Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Nigeria. He is the Coordinating Servant of the Pan-African Catholic Theology and Pastoral Network (PACTPAN). He is the winner of the 2017 winner of the Afro-Global Award for Global Leadership Impact. He is one of the editors and Board Member of Concilium, International Journal of Theology and serves on the editorial boards of numerous other journals including, the Journal of Global Catholicism, and the Journal of African Christian Biography and Journal Christian Ethics. He currently serves on the senior advisory board of Templeton Religious Trust grant project on global spiritual formation for religious leaders. He is the principal convener of the Pan-African Catholic Congress, the third edition of which is taking place in Abidjan from August 4-10, 2025. He is the author or editor of 17 books including the forthcoming, Where is God in Africa? A Theology of Suffering and Smiling (with Orbis Books, 2025), Journeying Together in Hope for a Synodal Church in Africa (2024), Daily Walk with Jesus: African Biblical Reflections 365 for a Good Christian Life (2023) Someone Beautiful to God (2020), Wealth, Health and Hope in African Christian Religion (2018), Pentecostalism, Catholicism, and the Spirit in the World (2019)Handbook of African Catholicism (Orbis, 2022), Ecological Ethics for Cosmic Flourishing (Cascade, 2022); Under the Palaver Tree: Post-Vatican II African Ecclesiology (2023); A Poor and Merciful Church (2019), Church and Development in Africa (2014); The Church as Salt and Light (2011).
Terry LeBlanc
Terry and his wife, Bev, are in their 53rd year of marriage. They have three adult children – twin daughters and one son. Jennifer and Jeanine are completing their PhD studies in Indigenous cultural studies/ethnomusicology at Queens University, and Indigenous studies/gender studies in arts-based research at the University of Alberta respectively. Jeanine is also Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Ottawa. Matt leads iEmergence, an Indigenous community development NGO, which focuses on holistic community work including land-based camp programs, sustainable economic development, and Indigenous Asset-based approaches to community facilitation and development.
Terry and Bev are members of the community of Abegweit First Nation, a Mi’kmaw community in Prince Edward Island, Canada, where they serve at the request and acknowledgment of nieces, nephews, as well as Chief and Council, as elders with the Abegweit Mi’kmaw Wellness Centre. Together they have the privilege of teaching in a variety of cultural and traditional skill areas, overseeing culturally framed healing circles and programs, and providing one-on-one support with community members.
In June of 2023, in a planned succession to the next generation of leadership, Terry stepped down as Founding Director of NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community, and Executive Director of Indigenous Pathways, the umbrella charitable organization under which both NAIITS and iEmergence are situated. In addition to 50+ years of community-based work, a broad educational training, as well as a practical and non-traditional education, Terry holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Asbury Theological Seminary, specializing in Theology and Anthropology, as well as two conferred D.D. (h.c.) degrees. Terry is also certified in Appreciative Inquiry from Case Western Reserve University’s Global Excellence in Management program.
We will again engage in the circle process of the Restorative/Transformative Justice movement for some of our conversations.
Like other recent Summer Gatherings, participants will need to secure their own housing.
We hope to offer creative childcare and will have more information to share soon.
We will have a virtual registration option for those who can’t be present in person, and we will livestream the plenaries, liturgies, and lectio divina sessions. We will use Zoom breakout rooms for guided conversation after the plenaries.
If you have more general questions about the Ekklesia Project, email us at info@ekklesiaproject.org.
We hope to see you in Chicago in July!
Gathering Planning Team
Sharon Huey, Johnny Tuttle, and Doug Lee
CATHOLIC THEOLOGICAL UNION
5416 South Cornell Avenue ▪ Chicago, IL 60615
Grief Braid created by the 2024 Gathering participants under the direction of Gathering Artist Patti Fong