Spiritual Emphasis Week 2023
What does a Spiritual Emphasis Series mean?
Rockway recognizes that students, faculty and staff benefit from opportunities to explore important conversations – particularly ones that relate to students’ spirituality and personal journey. This is what inspired us to reimagine Rockway’s annual Spiritual Emphasis Week (traditionally, a week where students were challenged to dig more deeply into a relevant topic, through a guest chapel speaker, discussions and reflection) and turn it into a four-part Spiritual Emphasis Series, returning to our topic in four different chapels throughout the school year. This year, the conversation continues with our focus on Micah 6:8
“DO JUSTICE, LOVE KINDNESS, WALK HUMBLY: Finding our calling in an uncertain world”
Who am I? What is unique about me? How do I live this out in the world?
This year, our guest speaker Leah Reesor-Keller, a Rockway grad of 2003, will lead students, staff and faculty in a four-part chapel series throughout the school year, and challenge us to think about those questions and what it means to find our calling.
Chapel 1. Looking back – Tuesday, October 17, 2023, 9:20 am
Our physical and spiritual ancestors have shaped who we are today, and how we have each come to be sitting in this room together. We can ask ourselves, “What values, beliefs and practices do I want to take with me on my life journey, and what do I want to leave behind?”
Chapel 2. Walking Together – November 2023
Even as individuals seeking our own calling, we are interconnected with others. What does it mean to seek our calling as a community together with others? How can justice, kindness and humility shape how we come together in community?
Chapel 3. Living with hope – February 2024
Thinking about calling is an exercise in dreaming about the future. In a time when we’re experiencing grief and loss at the impact of climate change on the world, what does it mean to cultivate hope as we seek our place in an uncertain future?
Chapel 4. Looking forward – April 2024
The small choices that we make add up over time, and shape who we become and are becoming over our lifetimes. Instead of asking the question “what should I do?” We can re-frame it into “what kind of person do I want to be? How am I living into my values in the choices I make?”
Meet our Guest Speaker
As a leader and facilitator, Leah cares about listening deeply, asking reflective questions, fostering relationships of mutuality, and holding space for new dreams and visions of a better future for people and the planet to emerge. Interconnection, inclusion and anti-oppression are grounding themes for her approach.
Over the past 18 years she has worked with churches and nonprofits in Canada, Haiti, Jamaica and Nepal seeking to make positive social change. She has an MA in Development Studies and a BA in Political Science and Peace & Conflict Studies as well as training in Anabaptist theology. Leah has been a qualitative researcher, a community development practitioner and a faith leader in denominational leadership with the Mennonite church.
From leading humanitarian work in Nepal after major earthquakes to leading a participatory re-visioning process to set new strategic priorities for the Mennonite Church Eastern Canada regional church body, Leah thrives on building webs of connection and relationships to inspire hope for new possibilities even in challenging and uncertain times.
