2024 Ministry Highlights
2024 included some financial anxiety as we worked to transition from a new church start to a sustainable church. As a new(er) church, we don’t have savings accounts or generational wealth through investments or endowments.
We have a checking account that is a revolving door of income and expenses. There were times this year where funds got uncomfortably tight. And also, we made it through the lean moments. We went after funding to launch new ministries and opportunities to live out our faith and values, and in turn, resources came when they were needed. We faced this financial anxiety together.
We formed a fundraising team and strengthened our fundraising skills. We applied for and received grants and funding from new sources, expanding our view of what is possible and who might come alongside us in ministry. And even though we’ve been fundraising our way forward in entrepreneurial ministry every year, in a way, it feels like we are just getting started!
How You Can Help
By donating today, you’re not only supporting our current ministries—you’re investing in the future of a more inclusive, justice-oriented faith community. Whether you set up a monthly donation online or make an annual contribution towards Juniper Formation UCC’s audacious, Spirit-driven ministries, every dollar brings us closer to a world that embodies the love, justice, and liberation into which Jesus calls us. In addition to online giving, you may write a check out to “Juniper Formation,” and mail it to: Juniper Formation, PO Box 19541, Denver, CO 80219.
Thank you for being part of the Juniper Formation family. We are endlessly grateful for your partnership, and we can’t wait to see what we will accomplish in ministry together in the coming year.
Sustainability has been one of our top goals this past year, and closing out the year, we can say that we are making it with your support!
The Spirit of God has moved through us and provided for us for five years and we expect for many more to come. We have loads of gifts and talents, and more people joining us who want to be a part of our church in active ministry who are bringing new gifts and talents and ideas for ministries.
We are adaptable, flexible, and pivot as needed. We survive and learn from so-called "failures," which are really just trying new things, and pivoting, changing, and learning from and letting go when things don't work out.
We do amazing ministry, and also, we are still figuring things out as we go. We are still young and establishing ourselves and shouldn't expect to be like long-established institutions in terms of how much money they have or how they operate.
This can be hard sometimes because being comfortable is comforting, especially when our personal lives, families, communities, country, and world feel increasingly unstable. The future seems increasingly scary on so many fronts.
We trust that God is with us, and we do the work. There are times that we fervently watch for the movement of the Holy Spirit, because we don't have the answer yet, we've done all we can do, we feel like we've exhausted our relationships, resources and capacities—and every time, every damn time, the Spirit moves.
God comes through always beyond our imagination, always better than we expect, always above and beyond what is needed or hoped for. Not always in the ways we are looking for—but when we pay attention we see that God is responding to the need, the gap, the unknown, the fear, and the unclear path.
This is the still anxiety-producing, yet, life-giving pattern of entrepreneurial ministry.
Keep looking for the Holy Spirit at work—be open to new opportunities, relationships, resources, and capacities when they arrive because they most likely won't look exactly like what you are expecting, but they will illuminate a new, even better path.
We hope you enjoy reading some of our ministry highlights from 2024. Here are some updates in our ministries together and our efforts to transition from a new church start to a sustainable church together:
Bi-Monthly Leadership Coaching
Our Leadership Team has been meeting bi-monthly with coach Joy Persall through the support of our national UCC New Church Grant. This is a change from the typical individual pastor coaching model. Recently, these coaching sessions have helped us name what is unique about our church culture. You'll see some upcoming blog posts from various leaders writing about how culture works within Juniper Formation.
Fundraising Team Formation and Updates
Two of our members attended a two-day grant workshop led by Eleanor Downing, Board Member of the Rocky Mountain Conference UCC. Members of our fundraising team continue to seek out and enjoy fundraising learning opportunities. The team has identified a number of new-to-us grants that we are pursuing.
Progressive Christian Artificial Intelligence
We launched a new custom progressive theology ChatGPT model, called Faith in Progress. A progressive Christian guide offering compassionate insights into faith, theology, and spirituality, grounded in open-minded exploration of Christian values.
Try it out by asking Faith in Progress a question here.
Gender + Sexuality Liberation Ministry Collab with the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment
We applied for a $500,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), and while we did not get the grant, we built relationships and received a lesser grant to start cocreating LGBTQIA+ affirming spaces and offering comprehensive sexual education as two of the most critical ways to prevent youth suicide and drug and alcohol abuse according to research. This is the first time that CDPHE has partnered with a religious organization/church, and they are excited about the uniqueness of our ability to work directly with churches, where harmful theology is the primary cause of harmful understandings and treatment of LGBTQIA+ youth and people, with direct causation to suicidality and drug use. We’ve been invited to apply for a large grant in Q1 of 2025 to continue this work. We are grateful for the UCC Genesis Fund and the RMC UCC In the Mud grants that are getting us started and seeding our ability to partner with CDPHE for larger funding to continue and grow our Gender and Sexuality Liberation Ministry.
Photos from Community United Church of Christ (CUCC) one of the four Pride microgrants recipients.
Gender + Sexuality Liberation Ministry and the wider Church
As a part of the CDPHE grant, Juniper Formation’s Gender + Sexuality Liberation Ministry Team offered an Open and Affirming 2.0 Gender Expansiveness and Transgender Inclusion training at the Rocky Mountain Conference UCC Annual Conference/Celebration. Juniper Formation offered micro-grants for rural congregations to have a presence at Pride events in their communities towards creating and sharing affirming LGBTQIA+ spaces in rural Colorado communities. We started mapping LGBTQIA+ affirming faith spaces in Colorado and launched an interdenominational Colorado Queer Clergy Group.
Rev. Candace Woods (she/her), Bry Brannan (they/them), and Terra Greer (he/she/they) facilitating at the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Church of Christ’s 2024 Annual Celebration
Wearables Ministry
We have expanded our Wearables Ministry, with a goal of reaching $10,000 annual revenue in 2025, while publicly promoting progressive, liberative theology in the face of increasing Christian Nationalism, violence, and fascism.
www.juniperformation.org/store
www.etsy.com/shop/JuniperFormation
Congregational Accompaniment
Rev. Dr. Jenny Whitcher worked with Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (DOC) in Fort Collins to train lay leaders in one-to-one relational meetings and coached leaders through a three-month experience of hosting and facilitating house meetings to intentionally engage relationship building within the congregation. While planned in advance of a pastoral transition, this process coincided with the preparation time before the congregation welcomed their new interim minister. Now lay leaders and the interim minister are identifying ways to integrate the relational meeting practice into the life of the church so that it becomes a regular cultural practice. One of the major outcomes of this process was that new members/attendees to the church stepped into leadership roles and built meaningful relationships that will support their long-term participation within the congregation.
Members of the Heart of the Rockies Christian Church (DOC) in Fort Collins
Planning the 2025 Prophetically Reimagining Church Conference
We are planning a national interdenominational conference for September 2025 titled Prophetically Reimagining the Church which will focus on implementation of progressive theology in the Church, new ministry/church development, and building relationships between participants. Our keynote speaker is Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, author of A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church, which we use for the Daily Ripple app. So far we have raised $20,000 of the $150,000 needed to support the planning and implementation of the conference.
Progressive & Science-based Vacation Bible School App-based Course
We’ve continued to work on finalizing a Vacation Bible School App-based course that families can use on their own with their children, or that congregations can use with children. We hope to launch in early 2025 and promote for use in Summer 2025. We consider this an experiment to see if this kind of progressive, digital theological resourcing for children/youth is useful to Christian families and churches. This course’s progressive lens is the integration of science and theology.
Daily Ripple Ministry
The Daily Ripple brings together diverse authors from all walks of life and identities with one shared goal: transforming discipleship. Our scripture-based, daily formation app (formerly ReFrame) continued to grow in 2024. There are two primary ways to access this content through our Substack (website and newsletter) and our app.
Our engagement continues to grow:
Daily Ripple Substack: 167 users, an average of between 120-140 daily readers daily, 3,500 reads per month for the last 2+ months
Daily Ripple App: 1,000 users, 300+ readers/month in the last 2 months
Daily Ripple Card Deck
The card deck is an outcropping of our progressive digital community, where we publish a Ripple every Monday through Friday with a coaching prompt to help imagine ways of acting with a compassionate and just faith in our communities. We’ve published and started selling our first edition of the Daily Ripple Card Deck to help sustainably fund this ministry and our writers. The card deck contains 62 Ripples and 10 Ritual cards.Each week, you can pick a random card to guide your practice. Then gather with others at the end of the week for a ritual to help mark your progress together. Our largest order came from the Presbyterian Church (USA), who purchased card decks for all attendees to one of their national conferences.
Addressing Chronic Neighborhood Gun Violence
We applied for and received a grant from the City of Denver’s Department of Economic Development & Opportunity in partnership with The Denver Foundation to organize to address chronic gun violence in and around Garfield Lake Park in Southwest Denver. Due to infrastructure improvements, police patrolling, and park activation, after just one month, ShotSpotter gunshot detection activations went from 12 incidents with 44 rounds detected in the month prior to 1 incident with 1 round in the first month of organized response, a 91% and 98% decrease respectively. To accomplish this work we built relationships with and partnered with neighbors, Denver District 3 City Councilwoman Jamie Torres, Denver Police Department District 4, Denver Parks and Recreation, Westwood Community Action Team, SouthWest Denver Coalition, and Bucu West Development Association.
On behalf of the Juniper Formation faith community of ministers—lay and ordained, and with gratitude for your ongoing support and care.
