Pathways to Belonging

Pathways to Belonging is an invitation to an experience of community, connection, and meaning. We need belonging as much as we need air to fill our lungs. But alienation, isolation, and distrust are the everyday markers of our lives—including our faith communities. The twenty-two contributors in this book offer an engaging path forward, inviting readers to the promise and peril of Christian belonging.

Belonging matters now more than ever. Indeed, belonging is the question of this generation. Like the air we breathe, belonging is also a matter of life and death.

In an age of self-help strategies and shiny lives, the contributors to this volume are grounded in the depths of lived experience. Contextual, story-driven, and representing a global network of thought leaders, each chapter equips individuals and communities to take the next step. Pathways to Belonging points the way to the expansive, flourishing life for which we yearn.

Dustin D. Benac is a clinical assistant professor and the director and co-founder of the Program for the Future Church at Baylor University. He is the author of Adaptive Church (2022), co-editor of Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy (2021), and editor at Practical Theology, an international and interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal.


Erin Weber-Johnson is partner and senior consultant at Vandersall Collective, a faith-based, women- and queer-led consulting firm, and primary faculty of Project Resource. She is a regular contributor to Church Anew as well as other online platforms. Her co-edited book, Crisis and Care: Meditations on Faith and Philanthropy, is available through Cascade Books.






Glen Bell is senior vice president for development of the Presbyterian Foundation. A graduate of McCormick Theological Seminary, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife Anne. He has previously written for Journal for Preachers, Presbyterian Outlook, and Family Ministry.