Learning
Tracks
Peace Forum breakout sessions explore environmental justice through theology, spiritual practice, advocacy, and community action. Organized into four learning tracks, Deep Roots, Expanding Trunk, Branching Out, and Bearing Fruit, participants are encouraged to move between tracks and sessions based on their interests, passions, and hopes for faithful action beyond the event.
Deep Roots
Exploring the spiritual and theological foundations that call us to care for creation.
6 Sessions
Expanding Trunk
Discovering practical ways individuals can live more sustainably and responsibly.
6 Sessions
Branching Out
Engaging public action, advocacy, and community efforts for environmental justice.
5 Sessions
Bearing Fruit
Imagining healthier communities and systems that nurture both people and the planet.
6 Sessions
Explore
Breakout Sessions
Deep Roots Track
Deep Roots for Young Hearts: Wonder, Dream, Do!
Presenters: Stassi Cramm, Janné Grover, and Bunda Chibwe
Hosted by the First Presidency, this intergenerational session invites children and the young at heart to explore God’s preferred future through story, song, and art. Our time together follows a three-storybook journey: marveling at the gift of creation, sharing in God’s dream of peace, and learning everyday ways to protect the earth. Music and thematic coloring activities weave through each story, nurturing a deep love for creation and empowering our youngest members and young-at-heart participants to take part in healing the world.
Created with young participants especially in mind.
Deep Roots Track
Prophetic Imagination: Envisioning a Just Energy Future
Presenter: North American Climate Justice Team Member
In this interactive workshop, participants will practice prophetic imagination as a spiritual and creative discipline. Together, we will envision a future beyond fossil fuels, imagining energy systems and communities rooted in justice, sustainability, and hope.
Deep Roots Track
Sacred Earth, Shared Call: Faith Perspectives in Conversation
Presenter: Matt Frizzell, facilitator
Panelists: Trudi Gunderson, Community of Christ; Bill Kriege, director of service and action, Rockhurst University; Derrick Weston, Creation Justice Ministries; Recommendation from KC Interfaith
Leaders from diverse faith traditions will engage in a facilitated conversation about how their communities understand creation and respond to climate challenges. This session invites participants to listen across differences, discover shared values, and reflect on our collective responsibility to care for the earth.
Deep Roots Track
Spirituality of Enough: Resisting Consumerism in an Age of Climate Crisis
Presenter: Wim van Klinken
Reflect on how spiritual practices and faith traditions challenge cultures of excess consumption. Participants will discuss how embracing “enough” can support ecological sustainability and economic fairness.
Deep Roots Track
Voices for the Earth: Singing Our Call to Justice
Presenter: Janné Grover
In this interactive session, Janné Grover guides participants in exploring hymns that give voice to both the beauty of creation and the call to care for it. Together, we will reflect on how music forms us spiritually and sends us into the world with purpose.
Deep Roots Track
A Whole-Life Response: Enduring Principles and Climate Justice
Presenters: Stassi Cramm and Ken Mulliken
Earth stewardship is not a secondary or secular issue. It is a core theological mandate woven into all nine Enduring Principles of Community of Christ. Caring for the planet is essential to pursuing peace, ending poverty, and living out Christ’s mission fully. This session uses “fractal history” to trace how values such as Sacredness of Creation have appeared across different parts of Community of Christ over time. This historical lens reveals that while our explicit climate language is new, the foundation for ecological discipleship has been present in our faith tradition for generations. The Enduring Principles provide the theological mandate we need to transform faith into bold, prophetically inspired climate action.
Branching Out Track
Answering the Call: Advocacy with Third Act
Presenter: Bill McKibben
Led by Community of Christ International Peace Award recipient Bill McKibben, this session introduces Third Act, a movement empowering older adults to take meaningful action on climate and democracy. Participants will explore pathways for advocacy that are strategic, impactful, and rooted in a lifelong commitment to justice.
Branching Out Track
Bridging the Divide: How to Talk About Climate Change
Presenter: North American Climate Justice Team Member
Grounded in the work of Katharine Hayhoe, this session equips participants to engage in meaningful, hopeful conversations about climate change. Participants will learn practical tools for communicating across differences, building connection, and inspiring action without increasing polarization.
Branching Out Track
Faithful Advocacy: Lobbying with Integrity and Purpose
Presenters: Stephen Donahoe and Jeffrey Jordan
Led by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, this session explores how to engage elected officials in ways that reflect dignity, respect, and the worth of all people. Participants will learn practical strategies for effective climate advocacy grounded in relationship, listening, and shared humanity.
This session is most relevant to a United States context, though it may also interest those exploring political advocacy in their own contexts.
Branching Out Track
Faithful Response: Partnering for Creation Justice
Presenter: Derrick Weston
This session will highlight resources that help faith communities understand and respond to creation justice as a spiritual calling. Drawing on the work of Creation Justice Ministries (pending confirmation), participants will explore how theological reflection, worship, and education can deepen commitment to caring for the earth.
Branching Out Track
The Land Bears Witness: Gaza, Environmental Justice, and the Cost of Conflict
Presenter: Monear Shaer
Through his documentary Gaza Is Our Home, filmmaker Monear Shaer invites participants to consider the often-overlooked environmental consequences of armed conflict. This session explores how war reshapes landscapes, threatens access to food and water, and disrupts the relationship between people and place, while also reflecting on the human dimensions of displacement, resilience, and hope. Grounded in Community of Christ’s commitment to peace and the vision of an inclusive Holy Land, participants will consider how environmental justice and peacemaking are deeply interconnected.
Branching Out Track
Voices of Courage: Public Witness and the Work of Justice
Presenters: Gina Colvin and Joshua Bennett
This hybrid session brings forward global voices engaged in challenging deeply rooted systems of oppression. Participants will hear from a leader in India advocating for Dalit communities and an Indigenous leader from New Zealand, exploring how public witness can confront injustice while honoring dignity, culture, and community.
Bearing Fruit Track
Climate Generosity as Resistance: Voices of Emerging Leaders
Presenter: Noelle Gaffka
This panel conversation brings together young adults to explore what it means to practice climate generosity as an act of resistance. In a world shaped by extraction, consumption, and inequity, this session highlights how choosing generosity, sharing resources, advocating for just systems, and caring for creation can disrupt harmful patterns and cultivate hope.
Bearing Fruit Track
Damayan: Building Resilient Communities through Faith in Action
Presenters: Astroval Aquino and Krizza ria Velasquez
Damayan is rooted in the word damay, which means to sympathize or share a burden. It is closely linked to Kapwa (shared identity), which acknowledges that another person’s joy and pain are tied to your own. It is also the emotional counterpart to Bayanihan (communal unity and cooperation), making damayan the compassionate, feeling-based side of collective action. Led by CORD, this session explores how communities in the Philippines are responding to increasing climate-driven disruptions through participatory development and local leadership. Participants will learn how community-based approaches foster resilience, dignity, and long-term sustainability in the face of ongoing environmental challenges.
Bearing Fruit Track
Eco Connections: An Interactive Game
Presenters: Carla Long and Erica Blevins-Nye
In this interactive, intergenerational session, participants will play a game that explores how everyday economic decisions impact the climate and community well-being. Through simple choices and shared reflection, players will see how their actions create ripple effects for the future. Each participant will leave with a copy of the game to continue learning and conversation at home.
Created with young participants especially in mind.
Bearing Fruit Track
From Depletion to Sustainability: Rethinking the Economy for Creation’s Flourishing
Presenter: Wim van Klinken
The predominant economic model extracts resources and labor in ways that harm both communities and ecosystems. In this session, Bill McKibben’s writing will guide participants in imagining sustainable economic practices that honor the sacredness of creation and support shared prosperity.
Bearing Fruit Track
Living the Crisis: Climate Realities from Around the World
Presenters: Laner Lefort, Jenny Chibwe, Clement Clark-Tefau, Judy Mata, and Williams Tehuiotoa
This session brings together voices from Haiti, French Polynesia, and South Africa to speak from lived experience about the growing impacts of climate disruption. Participants will hear how environmental change is reshaping daily life and community resilience in places already bearing disproportionate burdens. Through stories rooted in culture, community, and ancestral wisdom—including Polynesian understandings such as Matuatua and Te Fenua Enana—participants will explore how identity, land, and relationship shape faithful responses to environmental change across diverse cultural and geographic contexts.
Bearing Fruit Track
Welcoming the Stranger: Climate Migration and the Ethics of Hospitality
Presenter: Joey Williams
As climate disruptions force people to relocate, communities and nations face questions about hospitality, justice, and responsibility. Hosted by the First Presidency, this session will explore climate migration through the lenses of discipleship, human dignity, and global solidarity.
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Join the Conversation
Register for Peace Forum and join participants from around the world, in person and online, for worship, learning, creative expression, and community engagement. Explore breakout sessions focused on environmental justice, sustainability, advocacy, spiritual practice, and faithful action as we deepen our commitment to peace and positive change.