Leadership Now

We resist spoonfed Christianity!

Leadership Now: Spiritual Formation with Youth (the youth ministry program of Lancaster Theological Seminary and partly funded by the Lilly Endowment) is a strong program that includes year round opportunities for engagement with theological inquiry, gifts discernment and leadership development. We create safe space for young people to explore question of meaning and vocation. Space for struggling, thinking, exploring, learning and seeking deep faith.

Leadership Now opens possibilities for connecting faith with action in the world. We offer youth a larger context for examining what it means to be part of the Body of Christ, tying together practices like prayer and peacemaking. We enable students and teachers to construct communities where dialogue encourages the expression of faith in action. We hope that the skills and enthusiasm of young people will bring new life to their faith traditions.

Leadership Now offers a range of programs for junior and senior high youth that vary in duration, intensity, age group, size and theme. This provides youth with opportunities for different levels of participation:

• Short events, such as Confirmation Days and Youth Events, introduce students to the seminary, and allow them the opportunity to explore their gifts and how to use these gifts within the life of the church. The youth events also have an emphasis on spiritual practices and issues of justice within church and society.
• The next level of events includes our weekend retreats. These thematic retreats (Justice Summit, Girls Gathering, Girls and God, Guys and God, and Finding Your Fit: a Weekend of Discernment) offer youth opportunities to explore theological issues more deeply with seminarians and members of the faculty.
• Our summer programming, including the Leadership Academy and Summer Global Experience, are our most intensive programs.   These provide theological education, leadership skills, and a supportive community to youth as well as encouraging youth to claim their faith as their own.
• Our most important accomplishments include developing a program that is helping young people to discern their call to ordained ministry or to ministry in the church as lay leaders.

Please following any of the links above if you are interested in more information about Leadership Now.