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Sharon Pearson is currently the Christian Formation Specialist with Church Publishing Incorporated, or CPI, and supports congregations through consulting and workshops. Also an editor and writer, she brings new initiatives in formation to the wider church through publications. She has 40 years’ experience in Christian formation at the local and church-wide levels including her home parish of St. Matthew's, Wilton and for a number of years, working on the staff for the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. She is on the Mission Council and helped them develop resources for their conversations and ongoing work addressing racial justice, healing, and reconciliation.

She has a blog, Rows of Sharon: Thoughts of a Christian Educator and was a founder of the very popular blog, Building Faith, now owned by Virginia Theological Seminary. She contributes to Episcopal Teacher magazine; and has published 10 books. She specializes in teacher training and leading workshops and has experience as an Education for Ministry mentor and a Godly Play teacher; she has served on church-wide design teams and on several church-wide boards and forums.

Sharon is the go-to person for identifying, collecting, developing, curating, and distributing resources.

We started out by talking about the “Christian education” and the broader, “Christian formation.” What’s the difference? Education is about information; formation might include education as well as liturgy, engagement with the community, prayer and worship, and more. CPI, and the blogs, will have resources for both. Churches still look for “academic program year” curriculum, but a lot of them create their own, using program resources. Sharon enjoys learning about these, and shared a story about Emily Given’s program that uses storytelling with Legos. CPI is about to publish Given’s second book on this.

Then we turned the conversation about book publishing because people send Sharon ideas, and even completed manuscripts! She also discovers potential books on her own. She talked about the editing process and questions they’ll ask. (Pro tip: Work on your social network!!)  

Next we asked her about her path to her current job, which she described, and shared about a book she’s currently working on by Herbert O’Driscoll.

We jumped back to resources for parishes and she talked about FORMA, a source for Christian education/formation resources, which you can find here. She also recommends VTS’ Build Faith blog, as well as her personal blog Rows of Sharon,  both referenced above.

And we ended with a question about how her work impacts her spiritual life. Evidently having access to lots of resources is helpful!