Over the past few years, Equip has been privately partnering with the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis to help them equip their community. Together, we developed a training sequence for priests and school principals, with the hope of eventually training everyday Catholics to embrace and teach God’s wisdom for sexuality and gender in ways that lead to thriving for everyone.
Dr. Ed Hogan, the Academic Dean of Kenrick-Glennon Seminary, recently endorsed Equip. We’re grateful for his encouraging words and join him in praying for compassion and conviction in Catholic archdioceses across our country:
Our relationship with Pieter Valk and Equip has been an extraordinary blessing for the Archdiocese of Saint Louis.
Equip served as the perfect coach and mentor for a small team that worked to craft training for our parish and school leaders.
Pieter and Equip never tried to do the work for us. We knew that we needed to do the work to guide our own community! But Equip provided structure to get us started, asked key questions to allow us to think through our assumptions, and offered an insider’s perspective to keep us real. Equip’s coaching was perfectly pitched both to challenge us and give us confidence.
Equip was flexible and adaptable with balancing in-person and remote communication. Much of our work was done in person. But we were also able to use video conferencing to extend Equip’s availability to us, which allowed us to maximize our budget and their time.
We could have done something alone, but the training we put together was vastly richer because of Equip’s involvement. It is bearing good fruit for our parish and school leaders.
Equip’s faithful and balanced consulting ensured that our team developed the expertise and game-plan needed to train parish and school leaders for LGBT+ ministry with Christ’s love and wisdom. I recommend them to anyone who’s looking for some help in training parish and school leaders to engage in this important area of ministry.
Dr. Ed Hogan
Academic Dean, Kenrick-Glennon Seminary
Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis
