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The Urgent Need for the Liberation of Everything in 2026 and Beyond

Friday, November 13, 9:00am to 12:30pm at Edmonds United Methodist Church

  • Rostered Ministers are invted to this fall convocation gathering featuring Dr. Joerg Rieger
  • Co-sponsored by the United Methodist Church of the Greater Northwest and the Northwest Washington Synod, ELCA
  • More details and registration link coming soon
About This Gathering

Liberation movements have transformed the world for the better, but in many places, the pressures against them are only increasing. Liberation theologies, now more than five decades old, are being called to evolve. In this keynote and workshop for pastors and deacons, Dr. Joerg Rieger, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University and author of Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God, brings a working constructive theology, developed across his published work, in which questions of anthropology and ecclesiology are never far from the center: what does it mean to be human, and what is the church for, in an age that still hasn't figured out solidarity across lines of labor and class?

Rieger names what isn't working on either side of the church's usual divide. The conservative path, he argues, is a dead end. But the liberal alternative isn't automatically the answer, too often it has settled into a self-congratulatory mode, content with gestures of inclusion, especially to marginalized identities, that stop short of the deeper, structural transformation those gestures were supposed to represent. Protests that “speak truth to power” without building power, tables that welcome “marginalized voices” without turning the tables, “diversity” celebrated without disturbing the system beneath it, these are the deficient approaches Rieger has spent his career naming.

The real question, he insists, is how we build solidarity, genuine, costly, cross-class solidarity, and what it would take for the church itself to be reshaped by that work rather than merely to sponsor it from a comfortable distance. That's a harder question than either the conservative or the liberal church has been willing to sit with.

This day is offered specifically for those who carry pastoral and diaconal responsibility for leading congregations and/or diaconal ministry, and serves as a professional-track companion to the following Saturday's retreat on November 14, in which Dr. Rieger takes up these same questions with churches and lay leaders.

About our presenter

Dr. Joerg Rieger is Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor's Chair in Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University. Born and educated in Germany before completing his doctoral work in the United States, he holds an M.Div. from the Theologische Hochschule Reutlingen, a Th.M. from Duke Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in religion and ethics from Duke University. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, he spent over two decades on the faculty of Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University before joining Vanderbilt. Rieger is the author or editor of 27 books and more than 200 academic articles on theology, economics, and the misuse of power in religion and public life, including Jesus vs. Caesar: For People Tired of Serving the Wrong God (2018) and Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity (2022). His work has been translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, German, Malayalam, Korean, and Chinese, and he lectures widely across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe on faith, solidarity, and justice.