North Park University has received an $8 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. for its seminary, North Park Theological Seminary, to launch One Covenant Community, a five-year collaborative project to cultivate pastoral leadership across the Evangelical Covenant Church.
The award comes through Lilly Endowment’s Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative, which supports theological schools in the United States and Canada as they respond to their most pressing challenges. North Park’s grant was one of 45 awarded in a competitive round for large-scale collaboration among seminaries, colleges and universities, and church-related organizations.
One Covenant Community unites nearly every major Covenant entity involved in developing and supporting congregational leaders. Partners include the regional conferences, Serve Clergy, Serve Locally, Centro Hispano de Estudios Teológicos (CHET), Alaska Christian College, Minnehaha Academy, Midtown Leadership Institute, Mission Springs and Covenant Harbor Camps, the Mosaic Commission, and the Association of Covenant Spiritual Directors. Together they will support the full arc of a leader’s development—vocational discernment, theological education, credentialing, and lifelong support.
The project organizes its work around four emphases: leadership wells and pipelines, pastoral well-being and effectiveness, institutional capacity and sustainability, and sustaining Covenant identity and belonging. The aim is durable, shared infrastructure across the Covenant. “We aren’t getting money to create a bunch of new programs,” said Hauna Ondrey, dean of faculty at North Park Theological 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.”
Many Covenant conferences face shortages of pastors and struggle to fill open pulpits with well-prepared, Covenant-formed leaders. For emerging leaders, the project will coordinate discernment resources and open new pathways from Covenant camps and colleges into seminary. Active clergy will gain a centralized hub for continuing education meant to sustain them amid rising ministry demands, and congregations stand to benefit from better-supported pastors and stronger lay leadership teams.
One Covenant Community officially launched January 30, 2026, following the Covenant Midwinter Conference, when more than forty leaders from Covenant camps, schools, conferences, and boards gathered in Chicago to begin the work. President Tammy Swanson-Draheim described the launch as an unprecedented moment of collaboration across the Covenant and said she believes “this is going to shift who we are.”
Open positions
As One Covenant Community builds out its team, North Park is hiring for three roles to support the project:
