Get Proximate Online Cohort 2026

Build a Justice Immersion in your own city

Fridays, 10–11am EDT | Aug 28, Sept 25, Oct 23, Dec 4, Feb 27, 2027

The Gospel of John declares that through the birth of Jesus, “God moved into the neighborhood.” That is the whole story of the incarnation, and it is the starting point for everything called "getting proximate." Jesus got close to lepers, tax collectors, the woman at the well. Up close, hands on.

Since 2015, Get Proximate Immersions have taken Vineyard leaders into cities like Anaheim, Yakima, Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Columbus, and Cincinnati. These experiences help leaders wrestle with the complexities of hot-button issues, as well as learning from creative practitioners on how to practice radical hospitality and the kind of biblical mercy that leads to biblical justice. Leaders have also learned what it means to “pray with your hands and feet.”

This Get Proximate cohort exists to help you do that in your own city.

Over four online sessions, Kathy Maskell will coach you, with your own context in mind, through the three building blocks of a Get Proximate Immersion.

What you will be coached to:

1. Root it in prayerful listening. Before you plan a single stop, stop and listen, to God and to the community you're moving toward. What is he already doing there? Who was in that neighborhood before your church ever showed up?

2. Find your guides. You don't know this community the way the people who live in it do. Learn how to find the ones already doing the work, and how to follow their lead instead of showing up with your own agenda.

3. Reflect to respond. Experience without reflection is tourism. We will walk through helping your people process what they've seen and turn it into one concrete step, not just a good memory.

By the October session, you'll walk away with a design and plan for your Get Proximate immersion. In February, we’ll gather to share how it went or check in with where you’re at in your planning.

Galatians 2:10: "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor—the very thing I had been eager to do all along." At the one-year, ten-year, 30 year, 50 year  mark of your church's life, what if there is only one question on the exam: Did you remember the poor?