Faith250 – a non-partisan, multi-faith, nationwide initiative with a local Chapel Hill area cluster – will be bringing together people from across our diverse faith communities for an evening of food, conversation, and connection. This is our community launch: a chance to meet new neighbors, share a meal, and begin exploring what it looks like to build civic life together across difference.
We’ll eat together, talk together in small groups, and hear about what’s coming next: a series of community study gatherings on democracy in America this spring, and a public celebration leading up to July 4, 2026.
ABOUT FAITH250
What Is Faith250?
Faith250 is a collaboration among Chapel Hill-area faith communities, grounded in a simple but countercultural idea: that the work of building a more perfect union begins not with strategy or policy, but with relationship.
Since November 2025, clergy and lay leaders from across our community have been gathering, getting to know one another, and asking a shared question: What does it look like for people of faith to engage public life together — across difference, across tradition, while cultivating hope? Now we’re ready to open that question to the wider community.
What We’re Doing
This spring, Faith250 will gather neighbors from diverse faith communities for shared meals, small-group conversations, and study of four of America’s foundational texts — documents that have shaped our nation’s story and continue to call us toward its unfulfilled promises. We’ll read them with openness and inquiry, wrestle with them together, and use them as a doorway into conversation about our hopes for this country.
Our spring study series will run from late April through early June, exploring:
The Declaration of Independence
Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus”
“America the Beautiful”
Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
The season will culminate in a public civic ritual connected to Juneteenth and the lead-up to July 4, 2026 – a gathering designed to celebrate freedom, invite honest reflection, and renew our shared commitment to the common good.
Why This, Why Now
We are living in a moment that makes it tempting to retreat into what is familiar and safe. Faith250 is a wager that the opposite is called for — that this is exactly the time to cross the street, share a meal with someone whose tradition is different from our own, and discover what we hold in common.
We don’t come to this work naively. We know our nation’s history is complicated, that our communities carry real differences, and that trust takes time. That’s precisely why we’re starting here: with relationship, with listening, with the long and patient work of learning to know one another.
We believe that’s what faithful civic engagement looks like. And we think Chapel Hill is exactly the kind of place that can show what it means.
Who’s Involved
Faith250 is a collaboration among faith communities in the Chapel Hill area, organized through the Chapel Hill Cluster of the national Faith250 initiative. Participating communities include University Presbyterian Church, University Baptist Church, Kehillah Synagogue, Chapel of the Cross, Holy Trinity Lutheran, Chapel Hill Friends, Church of Reconciliation, Presbyterian Campus Ministry, Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and more.
Faith250 is explicitly nonpartisan. All are welcome.