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God’s Promise Fulfilled

APPLICATION

Here are the pieces necessary for your completed application to the God’s Promise Fulfilled program:

  1. Cover letter/Responses to application questions
    The personal information cover sheet and application questions below can be downloaded into Microsoft Word here.
  2. Recommendations (2)
    Along with contact information for your two references, please have them write recommendations addressing the following:
    1. Your readiness and aptitude for this program;
    2. Your emotional and spiritual maturity;
    3. Your preparation to enter this program; and
    4. Your new areas of growth as well as your demonstrated gifts. One of these people should be a member of your home meeting or church, a spiritual director or mentor, or some other member of your spiritual community. Recommendations sent by e-mail to admissions@schoolofthespirit.org are acceptable.
  3. Application Fee ($50, non-refundable)

Your $50 application fee can be made with a check, credit card, or PayPal account. Please make your check payable to The School of the Spirit Ministry. If accepted into the program, this fee will apply towards your tuition. If your application is not accepted, the fee is non-refundable.

Other fees:
The 2025 God’s Power Fulfilled program costs $2,876 for on-line participation or $3,998 for on-site residency attendance. There are generous scholarships available, and your ability to pay will not be a factor in your acceptance into the program.  No one has ever been rejected from a School of the Spirit program for lack of funds. See “Money Matters” for more financial information.

Application deadline:
Applications received by December 31, 2024 will be reviewed in January 2025 with an eye to assembling a cohort ready for spiritual growth and balanced by gender, age and theological orientation.  If there are spaces left, we will accept applications until the class is filled.  However, several of the scholarship sources we can help you work with have earlier deadlines, so please apply as soon as you reach clarity.  We can begin work with you on seeking financial assistance, pending acceptance.

Submission of Application
Your application may be submitted electronically (preferred) to admissions@schoolofthespirit.org.  Or you can print out the PDF version and send it by postal mail to 4 Long Shoals Rd. Ste. B484 Arden, NC 28704.

(For time considerations, we would prefer written responses. However, if written responses are a challenge for you, we are open to receiving an audio file or having a one-on-one conversation with you.)

Application Questions

 
  1. What draws you to consider this program?  What hopes do you hold for our work together?
  2. When we’re pulled to something, it’s good to honor the parts of ourselves that aren’t so sure.  What part of yourself finds this possibility iffy, or even alarming?  How can you imagine owning, respecting, and managing that push-back?
  3. For this cohort to become a community, we all need to be able to rely on each other to attend all the residencies, participate in the video conferences and work with Spiritual Companion Groups between residencies.  How will you make space in your life to honor these commitments? What supports would help you do so?  Anything you need to ask us for?
  4. School of the Spirit programs work from an understanding of the Christian grounding of Quakerism and use Christ-centered language.   At the same time, we expect participants to use their own heart language to describe the ineffable and to practice the spiritual discipline of welcoming Truth through others’ divergent language.  What experience do you have with working through others’ language when it differs from your own?  What helps?
  5. Growth of the kind we intend to undertake together can have deep impacts on one’s life – healing hurts, owning gifts, calling for courage and trust.  What experience do you have of making significant changes in your life, and what have you learned about how you do change?
  6. How has your spiritual experience of the Divine/Spirit/God/Mystery unfolded?  How would you describe your current relationship?  What part of God’s Promise calls you further?
  7. We’ve subtitled the course “Encountering and Embodying Grace in the Shadow of Empire.”  What most discourages you about the ascendancy of evil and the domination system in our current world?  How do you aspire to respond?
  8. The course has two halves: “Inhale” (taking in God’s Promise) and “Exhale” (living it out in the world).  Where are you most drawn in that sequence?  Why?  Are you considering joining 2025-26 (Inhale)? 2026-27 (Exhale)?
  9. We plan to deliberately build our capacity to listen appreciatively, constructively, and respectfully to each other’s stories.  What has helped you let others in as witnesses to your work/struggles/growth?  What helps you be a trustworthy witness to another’s work?  What stands in the way for you to do this?
  10. Tell us [and yourself] about a time when you asked yourself to summon courage.  What happened?
  11. What else do we need to know about you in order to work well with
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What does it mean to be “A Successor to the On Being A Spiritual Nurturer program”?

The School of the Spirit Ministry was born as “a ministry of prayer and learning.” Three founders, Kathryn Damiano, Fran Taber, and Sonny Cronk felt a call to deepen the contemplative capacity in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Kathryn explained:

This ministry arises from … a recognition that God is leading some Friends to a life centered in prayer as an active witness in the world. (This leading parallels the way in which God calls certain Friends to work in such areas as peace and social justice.) … Many Friends have also expressed a need for doing serious reflections and study on ministry and the call to live in faithful relationship with God. They would like to do this work within the context of a community of prayerful commitment.

Eleven classes of participants over the 30+ years since have experienced the transformation possible when one sets aside time for cultivating the inner life, for becoming part of a cohort who undertake study and prayer together, for prioritizing relationship with Spirit, and for supporting each other in faithfulness. Click to view a video of previous participants sharing their experiences.

As the course got further in time from the vision that had inspired it, the governance board seriously entertained the possibility that this call had run its course. Over the next three years, prayerful discernment convinced the School of the Spirit board that they were not, in fact, released from the concern for nurturing spiritual vitality and depth at an individual level. Instead, two complementary programs have emerged:

  • This offering, “God’s Promise Fulfilled: Encountering and Embodying Grace in the Shadow of Empire,” (which begins in 2025) is designed to accompany participants through establishing a robust relationship with the Divine, listening for guidance from one’s Inner Teacher, aligning one’s outer “doing” with that inner “knowing,” and discerning from that grounded place what constitutes one’s unique work in the world.
  • Participating in God’s Power (whose second cohort begins its year-long work in February of 2024) is designed to explore, identify and dismantle barriers to faithfulness that keep us from being fully responsive to what we know is ours to do, when we worship with our whole selves – body, mind and spirit.

We understand both these undertakings to be offspring from the original call felt by the School of the Spirit founders, and we hope that they would recognize the shared core commitment to “study and prayer.”

In case you wonder ...

What does it mean to live “in the shadow of Empire”?

When the Church was born in the heart of the Roman Empire, it was situated in a civilization at the height of its power.

Rome’s superpower status was evident in its military might, as the feared Roman legions marched on three continents, defeating, enslaving and dispersing native populations that dared resist. Its engineering prowess was unmatched, manifesting itself in innovations of architecture and infrastructure – roads, temples, stadiums, aqueducts – that still stand to this day. Its cultural sophistication in philosophy, drama and religion were exceptional, enriched as they were by the tension between Rome’s ancient traditions and the fresh perspectives constantly being assimilated through conquest and trade. It was a monument to human ingenuity and creativity. It was a monument to human power.

But at the core of that monument was rot.

Because the soul of the Roman Empire, and of every system of Empire, is a vicious dynamic of domination and control. Empire’s economy relies on extraction, creating fabulous wealth for a small class of people by subjugating the masses and Creation itself to an existence marked by exploitation, abuse, and inevitable exhaustion. Relationships in Empire are characterized by predation, with the powerless – children, elders, the poor, the fragile, those unprotected by status – used up for the pleasure and enrichment of the powerful until they have no remaining value, then discarded. Recreation in Empire tends away from the useful and creative and toward the violent and degrading, as its subjects seek distraction from their increasing sense of misery and futility. The logic of Empire is the logic of the pillager or the unfettered marketplace, with nothing so sacred that it cannot be stolen, destroyed or corrupted by greed. And the smooth functioning of the Empire system is guaranteed by the power of the sword.

Empire is not a specific time or place but a spiritual reality that reasserts itself periodically in human history, as knowledge, power and appetite detach themselves from compassion. And right now, that reality is where we live. But what could it look like to live in the shadow of the Empire but nevertheless to reject its deadly logic?