North Park Theological Seminary, the seminary of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) in Chicago, has received an $8 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to launch One Covenant Community, a five-year collaborative project to cultivate pastoral leadership across the denomination. The award comes through Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, which supports theological schools in the United States and Canada, and was one of 45 grants made in a competitive round focused on large-scale collaboration among seminaries, colleges, and church-related organisations.
The scale of the partnership is notable: One Covenant Community brings together nearly every major Covenant entity involved in forming and supporting congregational leaders — the regional conferences, Serve Clergy, Serve Locally, the Centro Hispano de Estudios Teológicos (CHET), Alaska Christian College, Minnehaha Academy, the Midtown Leadership Institute, Covenant camps, the Mosaic Commission, and the Association of Covenant Spiritual Directors. Together they aim to support the full arc of a leader’s development, from vocational discernment through theological education and credentialing to lifelong support. For a free-church denomination facing pastor shortages and open pulpits in many of its conferences, the project represents a structural response rather than a programmatic one. “We aren’t getting money to create a bunch of new programs,” said Hauna Ondrey, dean of faculty at the seminary. “The goal is to create deep and broad infrastructure, so that what we build in five years is self-sustaining the minute that grant funding is over.”
The project organises its work around four emphases: leadership wells and pipelines, pastoral well-being and effectiveness, institutional capacity and sustainability, and sustaining Covenant identity and belonging. It officially launched on 30 January 2026, after the Covenant Midwinter Conference, when more than forty leaders from Covenant camps, schools, conferences, and boards gathered in Chicago to begin the work. ECC president Tammy Swanson-Draheim called the launch an unprecedented moment of collaboration across the Covenant, saying she believes “this is going to shift who we are.” North Park is now hiring three staff roles to carry the project forward, including a grant coordinator and a continuing-education administrator.
Source: Evangelical Covenant Church / Covenant Companion — covchurch.org
