Keynote Speakers Share Their Stories

A Paperless People

Lauren Lisa Ng

In his second letter to the Corinthian church, Paul challenges the Roman practice of commendatory letters and argues that the proof of who we are and how God is working through us cannot be summed up on a piece of paper. We are so often bound by the types of paper we do or do not carry, so often defined by where we do or do not appear on the printed page, and so often regarded by the documents we do or do not possess, as if they determine our identities, our significance, and our worth. Friends, I invite you to consider with me that as living, breathing testaments of Christ’s love inscribed with the ink of the Holy Spirit, we are a paperless people, unbound and unlimited by the page. Loosed from constructs and constrictions of empire, who then will we be? As faith leaders committed to serving our communities, what stories will we tell?

Rev. Dr. Lauren Lisa Ng is Senior Program officer at Berkeley School of Theology where she directs the Arc Initiative that seeks the thriving of Asian American congregations and leaders through the power of stories. She is one of the 2026 Space for Grace & Spiritual Caregivers Conference keynote speakers.

The God of Surprises

Harold Recinos

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes that one of the most significant aspects of the human condition is that “we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” For me, this one life began unfolding on Home Street in the South Bronx.  A tough place.  A crucified place.  I lived surrounded by the sound of gunfire in the neighborhood ending the lives of Latino men, women, and children on the block. The neighborhood I grew up in was not lacking in church presence, but congregations were not scandalized by the stench of death around them.  By the time I was ten years old, my Puerto Rican mother and Guatemalan father divorced, and when I was twelve, my mother abandoned me to New York City streets. Churches in the neighborhood did not notice, since they had no public witness, no real engagement with the real world of suffering people, no heart-wrenching identification with what was lived by Latinx families in the slums of New York to awaken them from sleeping through the reality of dehumanized existence.   I will focus my storytelling on the God of surprises that called me one night in an abandoned apartment with these words I read from a pocket Bible: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1).

Dr. Harold Recinos is professor of church and society at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. He is one of the 2026 Space for Grace & Spiritual Caregivers Conference keynote speakers.

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

Jim Somerville

My son-in-law recently turned forty. When I first met him, he was still in his twenties, working as a chef in New York City—definitely on his way up. In those days, he confided to me that before he turned thirty, he wanted to be an executive chef and have a really nice sports car. I watched him over the next few years. I watched how hard he was working and what kind of toll it was taking on his life. But he was determined, and he would not give up. When he turned thirty, he was the executive chef of one of the trendiest restaurants in Savannah, Georgia, and drove to work in a BMW M2 (a really nice sports car, indeed). But it was killing him, and he knew it.

When I saw him a few weeks ago, just before his fortieth birthday, he was driving a delivery truck in Sydney, Australia, and coming home at a decent hour to have dinner with his beautiful wife and two adorable children.

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Jesus once asked. That’s a good question. Let’s talk about it in Cleveland.

Rev. Dr. Jim Somerville is senior pastor of the First Baptist Church in Richmond, Va. He is one of the 2026 Space for Grace & Spiritual Caregivers Conference keynote speakers.