Registration is Now Open!

Chaplaincy for the Long Haul: Creating Sustainable Practice

The 2024 Alliance of Baptists Endorsement Retreat will include time for community building, self-care, and support in the morning.  In the afternoon we are pleased to have presentations from two of our own Alliance of Baptists endorsed folx – Keith Menhinick and Drew Bongiovanni.  Both presentations are models that provide skills to foster resilience for both care responders and care recipients and communities. (More details below.)

Due to the nature of morning activities, the Online/Zoom participants will begin at 1pm ET. Log on information for the afternoon sessions will be sent to registrants.   

All participants may utilize 3 hrs for continuing education.

Community Resiliency Model (CRM) Presentation by Rev. Dr. Keith Menhinick

The Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® trains community members to not only help themselves but to help others within their wider social network. The primary focus of this skills-based, stabilization program is to re-set the natural balance of the nervous system. CRM’s goal is to help to create “trauma-informed” and “resiliency-focused” communities that share a common understanding of the impact of trauma and chronic stress on the nervous system and how resiliency can be restored or increased using this skills-based approach. CRM skills can be used for self-care by those who are in front-line roles responding to crisis situations or who live in highly traumatized and/or marginalized communities. These skills are also valuable resources for religious and community leaders committed to shaping healthy and healing organizations and communities. 

The Rev. Dr. Keith A. Menhinick is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spiritual Care and Pastoral Theology at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Keith is a scholar of lived religion and practical theology, with a focus on trauma resiliency and queer spirituality. Keith is also a progressive Baptist minister, trauma chaplain, and certified teacher of the Community Resiliency Model (CRM)® through the Trauma Resource Institute. Keith enjoys poetry, cartoons, back porches, and an active, outdoors life. 

Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health Presentation by Rev. Drew Bongiovanni

CCSH (Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health) is a program to bolster the wellbeing, resilience, and compassion of spiritual care providers and those they provide care to. CCSH augments spiritual health education and best practices with CBCT (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training), a program developed at the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics at Emory University. CCSH is a research-based approach to spiritual health consultation that provides a framework for spiritual health encounters based on the four stages of any consultation: the preparation of the care responder, the attunement to the relationship between care responder and care seeker, accessing the personal resources and natural compassion of the care seeker, and entrustment of the care seeker to access those resources beyond the end of the encounter. The framework of CCSH is based on common human spiritual needs and allows for reliance upon the faith tradition – if there is one – of both care seeker and care responder.

Rev. Drew Bongiovanni (she/her) is an APC Board Certified Chaplain and an ACPE Certified Educator Candidate at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. She was ordained at Glendale Baptist Church in Nashville, TN and endorsed by the Alliance of Baptists in 2020. She is currently a member of Alliance partner congregation Oakhurst Baptist Church.