Your ministry’s next step.
We help ministry leaders and teams discern what comes next—and bring it to life. Whether you’re starting a new ministry initiative, facing a pressing need, or trying to clarify vision and direction, we begin by getting to know you and discerning together.
A clear direction. A plan for your ministry.
Collective discernment gives you and your ministry team space to step back, name what matters, and find a shared direction. You leave with a high-level plan you can take forward with your team, with us, or with another partner.
Clarify your ministry’s calling.
Explore the need in light of your gifts, identity, and calling. Discern what your ministry is called to pursue—and what may need to change, wait, or be set aside.
Give your team a plan.
Turn shared direction into a high-level plan. Your leaders and team can see the next steps and carry the plan into the work ahead.
Find the support you need.
When further support would help your ministry, we shape it together—from strategy and design to building, piloting, and learning with the people you serve.
Starting a new idea. Leading one forward.
You may know what needs attention without knowing how to respond. Bring the need, the unfinished idea, or the project your ministry team is trying to move forward.
Discern the ministry you’re called to begin.
You see a need and feel drawn to respond. We help you discern your calling, understand the people you hope to serve, and shape the first steps of a ministry rooted in who you are.
Find a way forward with your ministry team.
Your team is already serving people, but a pressing challenge, unfinished project, or new season needs attention. We help you clarify your ministry’s direction, align your team, and decide what to do next.
Deeply known. Deeply seen.
As a ministry leader, you bring more than a project. Your story, relationships, gifts, and calling shape the ministry you lead.
We take time to know you and your team. Every partnership begins with discernment, listening together for how you are called to serve.
You are accompanied as a whole person, with support that helps you and your team grow in clarity and confidence.
Every partnership begins with discernment.
Your ministry’s needs shape the work we do together. First, we get to know you and your team through shared discernment. When the direction is clear and further support would help, we work alongside your team to plan, design, build, pilot, and learn.
Discern
Understand your calling, your team, and the people your ministry serves.
Plan & Design
Give your ministry a practical plan and a clear expression of its mission.
Build
Create the tools, resources, and programs your ministry needs.
Pilot
Help your team try the first version with the people you serve.
Learn
Learn from the experience and equip your team to carry the work forward.
Discern your calling. Align your ministry.
For ministry founders, discernment helps clarify what you are called to begin. For ministry leaders and teams, it creates space to understand a pressing challenge, revisit your direction, or consider a new initiative.
We get to know you and your team, exploring your charism—the gifts God has given you—and your vocation, the calling you are invited to live. Together, we discern how your ministry is called to respond to the people and needs before you.
Our discernment engagement is free. You leave with clear direction and a high-level plan for your ministry. The next step may be to act, refine the idea, pause, or take another direction.
From discernment to a shared mission.
Msgr. Shea and his team came to Glass Canvas for a sprint to discern together. They returned home and wrote From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, giving expression to the direction they had discerned.
A clearer sense of true north.
Discernment helped Life Restoration articulate its direction with greater confidence. Jake describes the shift from a spinning compass to a clear sense of where the ministry is going.
Renewed confidence in their calling.
A sprint helped the Brothers clarify their vocation, identity, and mission. With renewed confidence in their calling, they went on to work with an external partner to develop their new missional website.
Plan your next steps. Express your mission.
Your ministry team needs a shared plan and a way to communicate its mission clearly. Building on discernment, we work with you on strategy, identity, communications, and event planning—so your team knows where it is going and the people you serve can recognize the invitation.
Unleash the Gospel
For the Archdiocese of Detroit’s missionary renewal movement, we developed a brand and campaign system that carries a bold vision for evangelization into everyday ministry.
Saint Paul’s Outreach
Saint Paul’s Outreach forms young adults in Christian community on college campuses. We refreshed its identity to express its mission and support its next chapter of growth.
Proclaim
An evangelization movement equipping disciples in Vancouver to share their faith. We shaped a welcoming visual identity to help people recognize the invitation and take part.
Build the tools. Bring the ministry to life.
Your ministry has a direction. Now your team needs the tools to put it into practice. We build websites, digital platforms, resource libraries, and formation programs with you, shaping each around your ministry’s mission and the people you serve.
Companion
A discipleship platform designed for the local Church. Companion brings formation pathways, prayer and reflection, shared group journeys, and pastoral direction into one experience—connecting digital resources with the people and ministry already on the ground.
Behold
A resource library shaped around the questions people carry: relationships, work, prayer, purpose, and more. Behold brings together articles, videos, practices, and guided pathways, giving ministry leaders resources to support real conversations and ongoing formation.
Guide Cohort Program
A program we’re prototyping to help people accompany others through meaningful spiritual dialogue. It combines human, spiritual, and intellectual formation with guided practice, shared resources, and facilitated sessions—giving participants a community in which to learn and grow as guides.
Put it into practice. Learn with your people.
Before expanding a new ministry initiative, give your team room to try it with the people you serve. We help your leaders prepare and run the first version—a retreat, gathering, conference, or program—and learn from how people respond.
Men’s Retreat Experience
With RCAV’s men’s ministry leaders, we helped run a retreat and then return for a new season informed by the first. Learning about the need for connection afterward shaped the next retreat and a model for ongoing men’s cohorts and follow-up.
Human Social
A welcoming night and five-session series where spiritual seekers explore meaning, relationships, and the lives they want to lead. Alongside the Archdiocese of Chicago, we helped form Guides to host honest conversations—giving leaders a practical setting to grow in listening and accompanying people with different worldviews.
Upper Room Conference
Upper Room helped launch Proclaim as a missionary movement in the Archdiocese of Vancouver. The conference brought Catholics together around a shared call to proclaim Jesus in everyday life—connecting practical formation and a common vision with the ongoing work of evangelization in homes, parishes, and communities.
Find what works. Carry it forward.
Your ministry team needs to know what is helping the people you serve. Together, we look at what happened, listen to their experience, and discern what to keep, change, or set aside.
We help your leaders turn that learning into clear decisions, stronger practices, and a direction your team can carry into the next season of ministry.
Opening our doors to more ministries.
Glass Canvas Ministries grew from 15 years of working alongside the Church through Glass Canvas. We bring that experience to ministry founders, leaders, and teams—helping you discern your calling, shape your ministry, and grow in your capacity to lead it.
A team alongside your ministry.
Our team brings years of working alongside ministry leaders through Glass Canvas. We get to know you and your team, discern with you, and bring strategy, design, and practical support into the work that your ministry is called to do.
What guides us.
We are a community rooted in our Christian faith, united across traditions by a shared devotion to Jesus Christ and building his Kingdom.
We have discovered our values by seeing the way the Holy Spirit moves extraordinarily in our team.
Speak the unspoken
There is freedom in leaving nothing in the dark. When we give each other — and the people we serve — permission to say the hard thing out loud, walls come down. A healthy team outperforms a smart one, every time. We try to be the kind of people others feel safe being honest around.
Co-innovation
The best idea winning isn’t enough. What we’re after is something that couldn’t have been made alone — the thing that emerges when we bring our combined knowledge, our distinct gifts, and our attentiveness to how God is moving, into the same room. We come alongside the people we serve, not in front of them.
Called and anointed
We believe every person and every organization has a God-given calling that is specific, real, and worth protecting. Our job isn’t to impose a direction — it’s to help people discern and live the one that’s already theirs. We hold each other accountable to that too.
God-centered identity
We don’t earn our identity. We receive it. That freedom — the freedom of knowing who you are before you produce anything — is what makes creativity possible without the weight of proving yourself. We try to work from that place, and to help others find it.
See the whole person
Who we are can’t be compartmentalized. Formation happens in the whole of life — in work and in suffering, in seasons of clarity and seasons of confusion. We try to hold that for the people on our team, and for the people we serve. This is how trust gets built.
Freedom to bless
We rely on the provision of God, which means we know it doesn’t run out. That security gives us the freedom to give generously — of our time, our tools, our presence — without the scarcity that makes organizations small. We want to be the kind of community that blesses freely because we’ve been freely blessed.
Ecumenical Inheritance
We believe there is far more that unites us than divides us. While we come from different historic Christian traditions and may hold differing theological, liturgical, and practical convictions, we are united in our shared faith in Jesus Christ and devotion to His Kingdom. We choose to approach one another with humility, honor, and charity, seeking to preserve the unity of the Spirit while remaining faithful to our convictions.
Let’s discern your ministry’s next step together.
Expanding a ministry, leading a team through a challenge, or trying to bring an initiative to life? Request our support. We’ll begin by getting to know you, your team, and the ministry you are called to lead.
