This year’s Inhabit Conference 2026, hosted by Lawndale Christian Community Church on Chicago’s South Side, felt less like a conference and more like a homecoming—an embodied reminder of what it means to live, love, and witness in the Way of Jesus, together, in place.
There are gatherings that inform, and there are gatherings that form. Inhabit continues to be the latter.
From the moment we arrived in Lawndale, it was clear: this was not about extracting ideas, but about inhabiting presence. Not about platform, but about proximity. Not about spectacle, but about shared life.
At each main session, Karen Wuest offered reflections drawn from the four seasons of her farm. With quiet wisdom, she named what the land already knows: there is a time to plant, a time to tend, a time to harvest, and a time to let go. Her words felt like a gentle but clear invitation to the Church in this moment—especially in a season when so much is shifting and unraveling. What if we trusted the seasons? What if we released what we can no longer carry, and made space for what is being born?
So grateful for my wise guide, Ken Alvarado of New Life, who graciously walked a small group of us through streets of Little Village. But it was more than a tour—it was a reorientation. Ken didn’t just show us a neighborhood; he invited us to see it. To notice the murals, the markets, the movement of people and story. To recognize beauty where dominant narratives often refuse to look. It was an act of resistance—this insistence that every place holds wonder, that every neighborhood bears the image of God, that to love our neighbor we must learn to love their place.
And then there was Friday evening.
Around a dinner table, in the kind of conversation that cannot be programmed or produced, I found myself alongside Willie James Jennings, Michael Mata, Majora Carter, Rosa Lee Harden, and Tim Soerens. It was one of those holy collisions of wisdom, story, critique, and hope. No one was performing. No one was posturing. Just a shared longing—for a more truthful Church, for neighborhoods to flourish, for a faith that can hold both lament and imagination.
In many ways, that table held the heartbeat of the entire conference.
Because Inhabit is not ultimately about content—it is about conversion to a ever more Shalomic imagination. A re-turning to the Way of Jesus as WITH-ness. A reimagining of Church not as a destination or event, but as a people rooted in place, attentive to their neighbors, responsive to the Spirit already at work in the everyday.
I was able to offer a workshop titled, Another Way… Collective Parish Action in an Era or ‘christian’ Nationalism. Follow this link for my slide deck and handouts.
One of the most sacramental moments of the weekend came on Saturday afternoon, gathered around tables for a soul food lunch. The food itself—rich, generous, rooted—told a story. But more than that, it was the being together that lingered. Plates passed. Laughter shared. Stories exchanged. It felt like the Kin-dom—no rush, no pretense, just the holy ordinary of community. A table where dignity is tasted, not just discussed.
On the South Side of Chicago, hosted by a community that has long embodied this kind of faithful presence, we were reminded again: the future of the Church may not be found in scale, speed, or strategy—but in depth, rootedness, and love.
In a time when so many expressions of Christianity are entangled with power, fear, and exclusion, Inhabit offered a different witness. One marked by humility. By listening. By shared tables. By neighborhoods named and loved.
A glimpse of the Kin-dom.
And perhaps, an invitation:
To go home.
To pay attention.
To stay.
To love our place—together.
Peace, dwight
