2026 Pastoral Innovation Network Symposium

Description

This one-day symposium, hosted by Hartford International University and the Hartford Institute for Religion Research on Monday, June 8, brings together clergy, congregational leaders, and judicatory leaders from across New England to explore how ministry is evolving in a time of profound disruption. While the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated change, many of the shifts we now face — declining institutional trust, changing participation patterns, and broader social instability — continue to reshape congregational life.

Keynotes

Our keynote speaker, Rev. Cameron Trimble, will offer an address titled Leading in the Age of Collapse. Many of the systems that have sustained congregational life for generations are no longer holding. We are living through a period marked by deep political instability, rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, and institutional decline across nearly every sector of society. Patterns of participation are shifting. Trust in public, civic, and religious institutions continues to erode. For those in ministry, this can feel disorienting, even overwhelming. But collapse is not only an ending. It is also a threshold.

In this keynote, Cameron Trimble invites leaders to face our current moment with clarity and creativity. Drawing on futures literacy, congregational research, and years of work alongside faith communities navigating profound disruption, she will explore what it means to lead when familiar maps no longer apply. Together, participants will examine the difference between managing decline and cultivating emergence and consider the inner and outer shifts required to lead faithfully in a time like this.

This is not a call to fix what is breaking. It is an invitation to become the kind of leader who can remain steady, imaginative, and grounded in purpose as new forms of spiritual life begin to take shape.

In addition, the Hartford Institute for Religion Research will present new findings from its national study on congregational life in the wake of the pandemic, offering fresh data and analysis to inform ministry in the years ahead.

Workshops

The day also includes dynamic breakout workshops led by clergy from the Pastoral Innovation Network of New England. For the past two years, these leaders have gathered regularly to experiment, reflect, and innovate in their ministry contexts. The 2026 PINNE Symposium workshops showcase creative, justice-centered ministry experiments emerging across New England — from faith-based responses to the housing crisis and disability theology reshaping belonging, to congregational reckoning with histories of racism, creation justice organizing, and innovative children’s ministry in aging churches. Together, these sessions offer practical tools and theological imagination for cultivating courageous leadership, sustainable change, and deeper participation in congregations, campuses, and communities.

If you are a pastor, lay leader, congregational volunteer, or denominational leader in New England, this event is for you.

The symposium will be held at the The Lyceum Resource and Conference Center, 227 Lawrence Street, Hartford, CT 06106. Free parking is available.

Thanks to generous funding from the Lilly Endowment, attendance is free and includes lunch catered by Fire by Forge.

For questions, please contact Allison Norton at [email protected].

About the Pastoral Innovation Network of New England (PINNE)

Hartford International University’s five-year clergy grant program, Thriving in Poor Soil: Creating a Pastoral Innovation Network of New England (PINNE), fosters and sustains clergy excellence by enhancing the creativity and leadership skills of innovative pastors. Early career clergy who are three to ten years into their ministries and who are engaged in innovative congregation-based ministries build and sustain relationships with peers and mentors where they can explore challenges of ministry in New England, share creative ideas, and receive support from each other. Through regular gatherings, coaching, ongoing virtual communication, and the voluntary undertaking of a project of congregational change this project hopes to increase the level of creativity and spiritual energy of participants while also disseminating the learnings to clergy and denominations across New England.

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Host or Publisher Hartford Institute for Religion Research/HIU