Invite Michelle
Make room for encounter.
Speaking, teaching, and retreats with Dr. Michelle Winter invite curiosity, imagination, reflection, and yes, encounter.
Whether gathering for a conference, classroom, workshop, or retreat, Michelle creates experiences that help people make meaningful connections, discover new possibilities, and engage the Sacred in ways that are thoughtful, creative, and alive.
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how might we work together?
Speaking
Ideas that invite people to question assumptions, make unexpected connections, and see differently.
Teaching
Learning experiences where curiosity, imagination, play, and reflection become ways of knowing.
Retreats
Space to slow down, pay attention, create, and make room for something to shift.
Consulting
Thoughtful partnership for communities and organizations imagining what might be possible next.
A Few Places We Might Begin
SPEAKING · WORKSHOP · RETREAT SESSION
FORGIVENESS: IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK IT IS
What if forgiveness isn't about excusing what happened—or even primarily about the person who hurt us?
In this thoughtful and deeply human exploration of forgiveness, Michelle considers forgiveness as a spiritual practice: a way of tending the wounds we carry without allowing them to define or distort us. Drawing together Scripture, story, embodied experience, imagination, and spiritual practice, she explores what happens when forgiveness becomes less about forgetting, excusing, or forcing reconciliation and more about releasing the burden of a wound.
Participants are invited to consider forgiveness as a process—one that makes room for grief, anger, boundaries, lament, choice, and ultimately, the possibility of greater freedom.
WEEKEND RETREAT · MULTI-SESSION SERIES · SCRIPTURE & SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
The Questions Christ Asks us
What happens when we allow Jesus' questions to move us?
The Gospels record Jesus asking questions that disrupt assumptions, uncover desire, challenge exclusion, and invite deeper relationship. Participants enter the Gospel stories as fellow disciples, slowing down enough to encounter Christ's questions with curiosity and honesty.
Through Scripture, story, reflection, imagination, silence, and conversation, we practice reading with relational immediacy—allowing ancient questions to become living ones. Rather than rushing toward the “right” answer, participants are invited to notice resonance and resistance, make unexpected connections, and discover what may be unfolding between themselves, God, and one another.
WEEKEND RETREAT · MULTI-SESSION SERIES · SCRIPTURE & SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
The Silences of Christ
What might we hear if we stopped rushing to fill the silence?
We often read familiar Gospel stories quickly, moving from one word or action of Jesus to the next. But there is space between the lines: pauses after questions, moments of waiting, uncomfortable silences, time for something to take root.
The Silences of Christ invites participants to slow the Gospel stories down and enter those spaces. Through Scripture, imaginative reading, journaling, reflection, and conversation, we linger with Christ around questions of desire, perspective, fear, and love, and our need for one another.
Rather than rushing toward explanation or resolution, participants practice staying in the pause—paying attention to resonance and resistance, listening for what may be emerging, and allowing silence itself to become part of the encounter.
WEEKEND RETREAT · MULTI-SESSION SERIES · CREATIVE & SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
PLUNGING DEEP INTO GOD'S HEART
What becomes possible when we risk going deeper?
Plunging Deep into God's Heart is an invitation to move beyond knowing about God's love toward exploring what it means to receive it. Participants journey together through Scripture, story, imagination, reflection, creative practice, and conversation—paying attention both to experiences of God's love and to the places where woundedness, fear, anger, or sadness can make that love difficult to receive.
Each gathering makes room for settling, teaching, practice, and sharing. Participants remember, journal, create, collage, pray, and reflect together—not to force a particular outcome, but to notice what may be emerging as they explore the depth of God's heart for them.
Along the way, the journey moves outward: from receiving love and acceptance ourselves toward learning to accept, accompany, and receive care from one another.