Our Work
For over 20 years, the Learning and Innovation team at Wesleyan Impact Partners, in collaboration with Texas Methodist Foundation, has engaged thousands of church and nonprofit ministry leaders to ignite imagination toward the renewal and empowerment of a Spirit-led Wesleyan movement of love, generosity, and belonging.
Over that time, several approaches and key strategies have emerged — all toward the goal of inspiring and nurturing creative, innovative leaders.
Here’s what we’ve learned about nurturing innovation, connection, and Courage
Generative Conversations are the currency of change
- Offering safe, generative spaces for conversations stretches the edges of participants’ familiarity and knowledge – of God, of themselves, and of the world.
- Asking catalytic questions opens new directions and new possibilities.
- Learning Journeys ignite imagination and offer opportunity for leaders to engage around a common hunger and energy for change.
Innovative and adaptive leaders regularly exercise Five Muscles that are essential to change
- Tending grief
- Discerning purpose
- Walking alongside
- Distributing power
- Expanding imagination
Spiritual formation and depth are critical to effective leadership
- Intentional spaciousness allows souls to show up unreservedly.
- Transformation and justice happen — individually and in community — when we create an environment that nurtures soulfulness.
Friendship and community are powerful instruments of transformation
- Friendship is sacred for its own sake, worthy of our reverence and care. It’s also a necessary instrument — for developing human and spiritual wholeness, and for healthy, grounded, attentive change.
- Bringing people together to honor and cultivate friendship and life in community expands imaginations and the capacity for creative thinking.
The Spirit’s activity is sometimes most visible at the edges of where we have been before
- Exploring the boundaries of faith’s institutions, structures, and practices opens up the possibility of discovering new ways of seeing and joining God’s creative work in the world.
- Valuing and resourcing people who are discovering unconventional paths of faithfulness and encouraging their exploration — beyond personal and institutional comfort zones — is critical for the church in this time.
Experimentation moves us one step forward at a time
- Environments where both successes and failures are respected as part of the learning and growth process are essential to innovation.
- Cultivating a culture that encourages risk-taking makes incremental learning both possible and productive.