Dear Pastor and Church Leadership Team,

We heard you! In conversation after conversation across our conference, you have told us the same thing: the pipeline of pastoral candidates and emerging leaders is not what it once was, and the churches you love need leaders who understand them from the inside out. That is why we are writing to invite your congregation into our RISE initiative.

Too many congregations are searching outside their walls for pastoral leadership while the person God has already been preparing is sitting in the third pew. RISE was born out of a simple conviction: the leaders your church needs are often already among you, they simply lack a clear, accessible path toward serving in ministry. RISE closes that gap. It is the Conference's commitment to give your congregation a defined, Conference-supported process for naming, forming, and sending leaders from within your own community of faith.

A single traditional track no longer fits every calling we see in our churches today. RISE offers four paths, one calling: traditional ordination, an alternative path to ordination, licensure, and lay ministry, so that wherever someone's call is leading them, there is a road built for it. Every RISE candidate will work alongside our Unified Committee on Ministry Authorization Support Team, which walks with both congregation and candidate every step of the way.

RISE is more than a name. Each letter offers a real, tangible commitment we make to your congregation and your candidates:

Those sensing a call in your congregation do not need a seminary education to be a leader in ministry, and you do not need to wait for someone to find their own way to us. This is why we need you to help us in actively taking steps to identify future pastoral leaders. Here are a few practices for helping to “rise” up new pastoral leaders that might work for your congregation:

• Look at your congregation and ask who has gifts for leading and serving. Have a conversation with these people about what you see in them and encourage them to attend a Discovery Day.  
• Use the forthcoming media packet for RISE to plant seeds for people wondering about a call to ministry.  
• Let the Authorization Support Team walk with your congregation through discernment, formation and authorization. process. 

This path does not require your candidate to leave your congregation to be formed. RISE is built so the forming happens right where the calling was first noticed: at home, among you.

We have heard you, IKC, and we are doing our best to faithfully respond to your needs for equipped and well-trained pastoral leaders for the 21st Century. Here is where we really need your help. We hope you’ll share this initiative with your board so that you can all be praying about who might have the gifts and graces for ministry that you will want to encourage. As part of this initiative, the Indiana-Kentucky Conference is hosting a Discover Day on November 14th 2026 on ZOOM. You can encourage those in your congregation interested to sign up for Discovery Day by contacting Monica Ouellette, Izzy Harbin, clicking here, or scanning the QR code above. If they are unable to make the event, we would still love to sit down with them or your church leadership and talk through what RISE could look like for your congregation. If you have any questions or want to find ways to encourage someone in your church to rise up to serve, please reach out to us in the ways below. The leaders your church needs may already be there; let's name them, form them, and send them out together!

Grace and peace,

Rev. Dr. Monica Ouellette

m.ouellette@ikcucc.org

317-995-4082



Rev. Dr. Izzy Harbin

i.harbin@ikcucc.org

317-995-3434