Ending with Grace
A self-paced course for faith leaders walking with a congregation
toward a faithful close
You already sense what's ahead.
Maybe someone said it first at a council meeting. Maybe you've been carrying the thought alone for months. Maybe the congregation already knows but is waiting for someone to name it with care.
Walking with a congregation toward closing is one of the most sacred and demanding things a pastor can be asked to do. There is grief in it. Legal decisions. Practical ones. And underneath all of it, a question that keeps surfacing: Where is God in this?
This course gives you guides who have walked this ground and a map drawn from what they learned.
What you'll explore
Ending with Grace moves through six sessions, beginning with a short documentary about a rural congregation's closing, which provides a way of seeing before you start asking what to do.
From there, the course works along two tracks that every closing pastor navigates at once. The head tasks: the steps and sequence of closing, voting, and decision-making, what happens to the property, the cemetery, and the legacy. The heart tasks: the grief that doesn't follow a schedule, the conflict that surfaces, the theological questions that keep a pastor awake, including the one underneath all the others: Where is God in this?
Woven through both are voices from people who have made this walk. Gail Cafferata, author of The Last Pastor, brings her research on what helps and what hurts when a congregation closes. Deacon Erin Power shares her experience accompanying congregations through closure. And two pastors, one early in her ministry and one with decades behind him, tell the story of the congregations they walked to a faithful close. Their congregations were different. Their paths were different. Together, they give you a wider picture of what this work actually looks like.
This course gives you companions who have walked this ground. And walking with others is how sacred work gets done.
The course covered the heart and head aspects of ending with grace. It felt like we were walking with them. I've heard several of the same comments from churches we are talking to now. It gave me the ability to build empathy with people who are making the decision to close.
Lori Whalen
Synod Authorized Minister and Director of Finance
Northern Illinois Synod, ELCA
Voices In This Course
I am Rev. Peter Soli, an ELCA Lutheran pastor, conflict transformation consultant, and the founder of Dialog Works. For thirty years, I've worked with congregations navigating hard moments, helping leaders find their footing when the path isn't clear. My training in mediation and conflict transformation includes work at Eastern Mennonite University, the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, Mitchell Hamline School of Law, and Duke Divinity School. In this course, I serve as your instructor and as the interviewer who gathered the voices and resources that make up the material.
Gail Cafferata brings a rare combination of scholarly rigor and pastoral experience to this course. She earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and spent twenty-two years as a medical sociologist, producing more than twenty-five academic and government publications. In 1997, she received her MDiv from Episcopal Divinity School and served a Northern California congregation for nine years before walking with it through its own closing. That experience became the foundation for her book The Last Pastor, which draws on her research with pastors who have accompanied congregations through their closures. Gail appears in three sessions of this course.
Deacon Erin Power serves as Director for Evangelical Mission in the Eastern North Dakota Synod of the ELCA. Her work has brought her alongside congregations navigating closure across rural North Dakota, giving her firsthand knowledge of what this work looks like in small and rural communities. Erin shares what she has learned from walking with those congregations.
You will also hear from two pastors who share the stories of the congregations they walked to a faithful close.
The details
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Format: Self-paced and async. Work through the material on your own schedule, in the time and space that fits your life.
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Office hours: Enrollment includes a scheduled conversation with me. If you need to continue the conversation, we'll find a way.
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Cost: $125
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Dialog Works practices graceconomics. You'll be invoiced for the full amount and asked to pay what you can afford.
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A note about CEUs: Continuing education units are available for the cohort version of this course, offered periodically throughout the year. If CEUs matter for your professional development, let me know, and I'll make sure you hear when the next cohort is scheduled.