Wagoner-Meade to explore community-building through the empowering qualities of grief

Rev. Amanda Wagoner-Meade, senior pastor at First Christian Church of Louisville, Ky., will explore how the common experience of grief can be the basis for building community during a special address on the Hanover College campus.

Wagoner-Meade will present “Becoming Familiar with Grief: How What We Share is More Powerful than What Divides Us” at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 30, in the Ogle Center. The event is open to the public, free of charge.

Wagoner-Meade has served in pastoral ministry for nearly 20 years, many of them dealing with church trauma within her own congregation and trauma associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. She has worked as senior minister at First Christian Church of Louisville since January 2022 and previously served as associate and senior minister at First Christian Church of Jeffersonville, Ind.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and poetry at Kenyon College and received a Master of Divinity from Lexington Theological Seminary. In 2005, she received the Lexington Theological Seminary’s Robert and Linda Cueni Homiletics Award. In 2009, she was a member of the first cohort of the Wabash Pastoral Leadership Program.

“Becoming Familiar with Grief: How What We Share is More Powerful than What Divides Us” is part of an ongoing campus initiative supported by a grant from Lily Endowment Inc. The project, “Building Bridges During Times of Division,” works to intentionally gather diverse voices to address and encourage dialogue on complex social, economic and political issues. The initiative is led by Bill Bettler, professor of communication, and Rev. Catherine Knott, Ball Family Chaplain.

Hero image courtesy of LifeSource.