Soul of Aging

The Center for Courage & Renewal’s “Soul of Aging” Formation Leadership Training

May 11-14, 2026 at Camp Allen

“A powerful training for a wonderful discipleship model focused on the spiritual journey of aging and senior adults.”

The Offices of Formation in the Diocese of Texas and the Diocese of West Texas hosted a leadership training in partnership with the Center for Courage & Renewal.

The training focused on getting certified to lead the Soul of Aging model using Circles of Trust principles as developed by Parker J. Palmer, and it specifically prepared leaders to engage in discipleship with senior adults in their congregations and communities through building capacity as Christian practitioners and skillful facilitators.

*Training provided by creators of Soul of Aging

Circles of Trust is Formation

Soul of Aging is Discipleship

Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman

As I visited with many of you during our week together, I heard questions about integrating Circles of Trust and the Soul of Aging model into your formation and discipleship programs in your congregations. So, I just wanted to take a moment and reflect with you on how important this work is for Christian formation and discipleship.

For me, a good definition of formation is consistency over time. This is how geological formations take shape, and this is how humans take shape. It is why we are shaped by the Book of Common Prayer with its consistent liturgies and cycles of prayer. These consistent patterns form us into who we become through the power of habituation and the guidance of God’s grace.

A good definition of discipleship is living and learning into the shape of Jesus’s life and teachings…together. Specifically, Jesus calls us to a Beatitude-shaped life that is formational through its goal of peacemaking and bridge building. Each beatitude is a step towards living a life of peace in community and in relationship with everyone and every thing around us.

Through this formation and discipleship, we are invited to come alive. In fact, is this not the question that guides each of Jesus’s parables and teachings…what makes you come alive? Each story is an invitation to awake from the slumber of busy-ness and distraction so we might see the world differently, see ourselves and others differently, and see God differently. You see, our churches are meant to be communities of practice, and we are meant to be Christian practitioners. We are Living and Learning Communities who are waiting for that spark of God’s own aliveness, and this is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. We are on the path to becoming fully human and alive within the movement of God’s Spirit.

And isn’t this what our time together invited us into as well? Soul of Aging invited us to come alive in some new and powerful ways. For each of us, this model of discipleship called us into deeper relationships with one another and also called us to discern together what the shape and trajectory of our lives looked like as disciples of Jesus. And part of this process was showing us how to communicate in healing ways with one another – through the Touchstones and Open and Honest questions – rather than in divisive ways.

And in this process of discovering our hidden wholeness, we are also walking the Beatitude path towards peace. In the first three beatitudes, we focus on healing our inner divisiveness. In the next three beatitudes, we focus on healing our outer divisiveness, which brings us to a purity of heart. This is a wholeness of heart that offers us a clarity, which can only come from discovering our hidden wholeness in God. From there, we move to peacemaking and resilience for our work of reconciliation in the world. Part of the beauty of circles of trust is that they are a model for us to follow a Beatitude-shaped life.

It is this model and process that invites us to practice healthy and healing communication. To practice building meaningful relationships. To practice creating trust in order to foster spaces of belonging. To practice mending divisiveness and fragmentation. To practice the path of peacemaking.

Last week, as we came to trust this process, we all began to realize how significantly it cultivated trust among us. We all began to see the changes in our relationships with one another. We all began to notice the healing that was occurring among and within us. This, my friends, is discipleship. This is what it means to live and learn our way into the shape of Jesus’s life and teachings. This is what Jesus taught his disciples…follow me, follow my model, trust my process, do what I do, walk the Beatitude Path…and try it out for yourself…

If any of us is still wondering…we all practiced discipleship with one another during this training…and we all came alive just a little bit more…