History

Following SOCAP 2020 (the world’s most popular convening of global social entrepreneurs, foundations, impact investors, policy-makers, and activists discussing money and meaning) founders Rosa-Lee Harden and Kevin Jones initiated a vision for a convening on Faith + Finance (F+F). The goal was to shape a new conversation that will have a lasting influence on people of faith and their relationship to money and resources. The meta goal was to impact faith communities the same way that SOCAP impacted Wall Street: “We want parishioners and church members to be asking their pastors and teachers about the faithful use of money. We believe this conference can make that broadly possible in less than a decade.”

The first F+F conference was planned for May 2020 in San Antonio, but when COVID-19 hit in late March, the team, guided by Rosa Lee’s commitment, pivoted and adapted the vision into an online community where the conference content turned into provocative webinars and social networking - for which SOCAP gained its fame - transformed into an online community platform.

The Faith + Finance conference originally had five overarching themes:

+ Economic Theologies

+ Entrepreneurship

+ Impact Investing

+ Assets in Transition

+ New Economic Models for the Church / Stewardship for the 21st Century

After several planning sessions and reflection from online events, it became clear to the team that the themes ‘Entrepreneurship’ and ‘Impact Investing’ were more cross-cutting than stand-alone themes.

The Assets in Transition theme, aiming to respond to the very visible shift in church attendance, control of properties and financing issues happening in the country, set as a three-year goal “more options to assist congregations with assets in transition that give them the opportunity to reach a higher financial value and enhance and grow mission”.

In April 2020, Rosa Lee Harden, Kevin Jones, Tim Sorenson and Dr. Sara Minard started to convene people they had known as colleagues and partners working the questions of transitioning church assets. Soon, by word of mouth, and through Kevin’s journalist instinct for finding stories worth telling, the group expanded to pastors, real estate developers, social entrepreneurs, academics, local community organizers and church fund managers. The first few biweekly discussions of the Peer Group were exploratory, took time for prayer, and covered a wide spectrum of issues, from how to engage congregations in financial planning to where to access pre-development financing to how financial deals should be structured to ensure viability without compromising community cohesion. As the Peer Group met via Zoom and learned from one another, our discussions became more nuanced and evolved to focus more on the financial and property-related questions, rather than the pastoral or congregational questions, and members brought in new voices which added enormously valuable local perspective and expertise. As the group expanded, the discussions got richer and richer, and we decided that this group of experts should present to one another, so group presentations become part of the biweekly agenda. However, honoring its organic, peer to peer founding spirit, the group makes time for checking in on a spiritual level, open sharing without judgment, encouraging honest debate on hot topics, and privileging deep listening to member’s challenges as they work across the sacred-secular divide to valorize church assets in the service of the kin-dom.

In late 2021 the conversation group decided that the Studio for Placemaking, a new initiative led by Dr. Chris Elisara at Duke Divinity School’s Ormond Center, would facilitate the group. Dr. Elisara, who had joined the conversation group in mid-2020, worked with a small working committee to evaluate and design the next iteration of the conversation group. Graham Singh (founder and CEO of the Trinity Centres Foundation), Dr. Sara Minard (Mockler Center for Faith and Ethics in the Public Square), Rev. Dr. Patrick Duggan (UCC Church Building and Loan Fund), Cort Wessin, and Daniel Pryfogle (founder of Sympara) assisted Dr. Elisara in this transitional period. After a multi-month process of dialog by the working committee to develop recommendations for consideration and approval by the members, the transition to the Ormond Center was finalized in late 2021. The new 2.0 conversation group started in late Jan. 2022 and grew in size. F+F remains connected to the conversation group as an active and valued member.

In December 2022 changes at Duke’s Ormond Centre led the membership, which had grown to over 60 professionals, to decide that FPC would stand on its own. FPC, which is currently organized and hosted by its members, is a burgeoning virtual community and expanding movement of links and connections.

FPC is an unincorporated association. The collaborative is currently facilitated by Dr. Chris Elisara and Graham Singh.