About This Cohort

The Holy Presence Cohort welcomes women and men who are committed to pursuing and strengthening their calling as contemplative pastors in the company of like-minded pilgrims.

While pastors face constant pressure to reduce our callings and become “shopkeepers” leading religious enterprises for religious consumers, the Spirit beckons us to reclaim our vocation, to return to the vows we’ve made to be faithful to God, to the church, and to this noble work. We need to encounter God once more. And we need conversation partners who will help us renew our pastoral imagination so we can see and hear and have courage to serve God’s people with fidelity, compassion, and integrity.

Attentive pastors are intimately familiar with the many seductions which lure us from our calling and tempt us away from humble presence, attentive prayer, and the cure of souls. We’re asked to be experts in management, leadership, preaching, administration, fundraising, corporate vision (the list goes on), but there’s little help or incentive encouraging pastors’ slow, lifelong commitment to deep pastoral formation. And our institutions offer few resources or spaces for likeminded pastor to pursue substantive, sustained study and conversation in the context of spiritual friendship. Our current predicament reveals idolatries and temptations—and potent possibilities—which make Eugene’s pastoral theology as needed and hopeful as when he first began his work.

Eugene believed the pastoral life must be lived and experienced in the context of relationships. If one’s theology could not be lived with another, then it was not a theology grounded in the gospel of the Triune God. Eugene’s writings offer pastors the gift of a mentor who takes us and our vocational calling seriously. And Eugene’s witness unfolds how pastors can become more rooted in the Scriptural story, integrating theological reflection, friendship, and serious attention to the heart and the soul.