Today, 98% of the Ethiopian public indicates that religion is “very important” to them. Nevertheless, the attention given to the role of religion in Ethiopian public life has been disproportionate to its felt impact. For example, religious leaders played an outsized role in blessing Ethiopia’s civil war and inflaming its catastrophic consequences. 

Our fellowship seeks to address the recent lack of prophetic leadership in Ethiopia. We aim to encourage Ethiopian faith leaders who have called for mutual flourishing through truth-telling, dialogue, justice, and peacemaking. Drawing on the best practices of these leaders, we put Ethiopia’s indigenous wisdom in conversation with some of the leading public theologians around the world today.

Prophetic is an initiative of The Institute for Faith and Flourishing. Based in Chicago, IFF was founded by Dr. Andrew DeCort in 2016 with the mission of inspiring young Ethiopians and people around the world to become leaders who see, serve, and love others as their neighbors. 

Everything we do is oriented and energized by our loves. Here are five that are especially significant for us: 

Deep Gratitude: We give thanks in all things and for all people.

Radical Hospitality: We build bridges and welcome everyone.

Endless Learning: We embrace a posture of humility and never stop learning.

Courageous Responsibility: We strive to do what’s right even when it’s costly and requires sacrifice.

Patient Hope: We never give up and believe in new creation.

Our Fellowship will run for approximately ten consecutive weekly 90-minute virtual sessions hosted on Teams. These sessions will likely be hosted on Saturday mornings in the US (Saturday evenings in Ethiopia). By applying to Prophetic, you are committing to attend all sessions, except in cases of emergency. 

The first 45 minutes of each session will include a lecture and interview with a leading public theologian. The second 45 minutes will be devoted to dialogue between our faculty and fellows. Each session will require short readings, which will be provided free of charge. A collection of seminal texts in public theology will also be given to all fellows. 

The fellowship requires a variety of concise, creative written assignments that will expand our fellows’ imagination, integrate their learning, and orient their practice. A certificate will be provided to each fellow upon the successful completion of all requirements of the program.

We welcome applications from emerging faith leaders, scholars, and activists who are committed to practicing our values (see above). If you do not yet consider yourself a faith leader, scholar, or activist but desire to grow into your vocation, we still encourage you to apply. In our inaugural cohort, priority will be given to Ethiopian applicants who are 45 years of age or younger. We look forward to expanding the scope of our fellowship in future cohorts. 

Public theology is a discipline that asks fundamental questions about how God, society, and politics interact. It actively engages the intersection of faith and public life. It has strong historical and theoretical dimensions. But public theology is primarily oriented toward engaging the present cultural moment through embodied practice of truth, love, justice, and peacemaking. 

While practical theology focuses on the life of faith in church contexts and political theology often exclusively concerns itself with political life, public theology refuses to see these realms as opposing binaries. Instead, it aims to inhabit this tension of caring deeply about both the church and politics, while focusing on the expansive dimensions of humanity that exceed and integrate them. 

Public theology resists behaviors, ideologies, and structures that characterize humans as enemies locked in existential struggle for survival. It begins with the affirmation that every person is our neighbor, made in God’s sacred image.

In recent decades, influential intellectuals theorized that religion would fade away. This prophecy of secularism has proven false. The world is at a pivotal moment when thousands of years of religious discourse and development are compounding, integrating themselves into our public consciousness. Religion is surging and playing crucial roles in the evolution of the democratic experiment. 

To disregard the power of faith in public life blinds us to what is actually happening around the world and overlooks the embodied beliefs of billions of people. Moreover, it leaves people of faith vulnerable to being co-opted by cultural pressures, political movements, and authoritarian leaders that often weaponize religion against “others.” 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that faith should be a thermostat in society rather than a thermometer. Faith communities are called to be the conscience of society rather than its naive cheerleaders or disengaged critics. Public theology embraces this task and gives us the vital resources we need to do this work with wisdom, creativity, and prophetic courage. 

Public theology can be practiced in a variety of ways through diverse mediums. They include academic centers, faith communities, the arts, popular culture, our streets, and intentional friendship. Some of the most prominent forms for practicing public theology have been preaching, writing, singing, and mobilizing public movements. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Desmond Tutu, Barbara Holmes, and Munther Isaac are exemplary public theologians who inspire us. Public theology combines deep intellectual rigor with refreshing accessibility that translates into culturally transformative practice. 

Here, orthodoxy and orthopraxy are equally important. Nonviolence anchors the practice and credibility of any authentic expression of public theology.

Public theology affirms our full humanity. Since the beginning of recorded history, faith has played a vital role in our storytelling, practice, and public imagination as a species. 

Today, interaction between faith and public space is inevitable. Our fellowship embraces the task of exploring how this interaction can become an inclusive, hopeful, and peacemaking presence for our mutual flourishing.

Evangelism comes from the Greek word for “good news.” In modern culture, Christians have commonly reduced evangelism to sharing one’s faith with non-Christians or proselytizing. 

This fellowship returns to an ancient, expansive understanding of evangelism. It centralizes sharing the good news of Jesus’s call to practice love, justice, and peacemaking with all people across boundaries. In this ancient path, evangelism doesn’t function through domination; it is not an imperial project. It recognizes that we have sacred wisdom to learn from all image-bearers of God. 

When Jesus commissioned his students to “go into all the world and make disciples,” he didn’t tell us to proselytize unbelievers. He commissioned us to embody what he taught in his great commandment of neighbor-love, teaching that God is unconditionally faithful even when we are faithless. This was Jesus’s good news: “Love your enemies, because God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Luke 6:35).

The first chapter of the Bible teaches that God has created all people in God’s holy image (Genesis 1:26-28). This means that each person has been endowed by our Creator with precious dignity, agency, and responsibility.

In the world that God has given us, we encounter diverse perspectives and sometimes clashing convictions. Our fellowship seeks to engage difference fearlessly through the lens of God’s image in all people.

We are committed to loving others through humility, curiosity, and absolute respect. We believe the divine belovedness of all God’s children transcends ideological, political, and religious division.

We believe that the Bible is God’s inspired gift for all people. In the Bible, God’s Spirit is breathed into the first humans and Jesus’s first followers. However, this did not cancel the gift of free will. Sadly, we see that the first humans, Jesus’s first followers, and we ourselves make mistakes that do not reflect God’s heart for humanity. 

In this fellowship, we practice nonviolence because of biblical teaching, not despite it. We look to the life and teaching of Jesus Christ as the ultimate revelation of God’s design and our calling today. 

The Apostle Paul wrote that “all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching and training in justice and every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16). We cherish God’s inspired gift of Scripture and seek to steward it on behalf of justice and every good work today.