Educational Galas provide space for us to deepen into our Sacred Story by exploring theological and practical topics together. This next month we will be offering two workshops. Please RSVP with Pastor Ben and let us know which workshop you would like to attend.

Accommodation & Trajectory

At Pearl Church, we say that we are “shaped by a sacred story,” which casts our vision—it shapes our language, orients our hearts, and directs the ways that we mark our days and live out our lives here on earth. With this in mind, this seminar seeks to provide a practical orientation to the nature and function of the Bible so that it can meaningfully give shape, orientation, and direction to our lives. By simplifying and combining content from previous Ed Galas, this seminar will focus on accommodation, which offers us a lens to appreciate difficult and often violent texts in their ancient context, and trajectory, which can help us to appreciate the progression of human consciousness in the Bible. Going further, trajectory will then move us beyond the Bible, to try and discern the movement(s) of the Divine in the world today. Facilitated by Pastor Mike.

Path(s) to Integration: The Enneagram in Christian Spirituality

At Pearl Church, one of our core values is Integration—to discover how, by Divine Love, everything belongs. And yet our personal experience is often of fragmentation and disintegration. The early desert mothers and fathers spoke of nine logosmoi, thoughts or passions that obsess our attention and turn us against the imago dei within us. While one tradition of the church hardened these into seven deadly sins, an older wisdom was preserved in the tradition of the Enneagram, which helps us discern: what questions, passions, and even strengths tend to lead me to disintegration, and how does the Gospel bring integration into my particular personality? The Enneagram explores how our God is inviting us to relax into a whole, integrated self. In this workshop we’ll explore the history and use of the Enneagram, get a sense of how it speaks to us personally, and discuss particular practices that help each personality move toward integration with God. Facilitated by Pastor Ben.