2026 Kingdom Ecosystem Summit Reflection: The Power of Dreaming Together
By Partner Amber Dowd
When was the last time someone truly listened to something stirring deep in your heart?
One of the highlights at the Kingdom Ecosystem Summit was a simple but powerful exercise: sharing dreams in groups of three.
We were invited to consider a quiet but profound truth — every person in the room carries stirrings from God within them. Some of those dreams are fully formed. Others are still quiet, barely articulated. They all matter.
And so we were encouraged to give them voice.
In my triad, the exercise wasn’t just about the content of my partners’ dreams. It was about witnessing the process of reconnecting with them. I could see it happening in real time– the remembering, the naming, the courage of saying something out loud that perhaps hadn’t been spoken before. All three of us felt a tinge of emotion attached to the sharing.
Too often, we live in spaces of shallow interaction. We may appreciate one another, but our relationships tend to center around tasks, roles, and outcomes. Dreaming with others presses us to slow down. Pause. And focus on what is coming alive deeper within.
The exercise at the Summit centered around two simple questions:
What is a dream you carry? — Each of us shared something stirring in our hearts.
What moment felt alive to you as you listened? — Each of us reflected on the life we saw in one another’s dreams.
My group agreed that the experience of calling out the life we saw in each other’s dreams offered a profound sense of affirmation. God is at work in each of us.
This reminded me of Jesus’ many parables about seeds. There’s a bit of mystery to how something fruitful can come from something small and seemingly insignificant. When we put voice to our inner stirrings, we’re saying, I’m holding this seed, and I’m willing to place it in soil to see what happens.
Every seed carries the possibility of life. Not all come to full growth. But why not see which ones take root and begin to flourish?
At the heart of all this is hope.
Many participants in the Kingdom Ecosystem Summit interact daily with stories of hardship and challenge. That’s the nature of the nonprofit world. Most life-giving efforts are birthed from a dream — initially carried in hope — that a difference can be made in a hurting world.
But work in the Kingdom can be really hard. When isolation, discouragement and setbacks set in, hope is easily overshadowed and forgotten.
That’s why an exercise like this is so important in a setting like the Kingdom Ecosystem Summit. It’s not a clever icebreaker. It’s a model for reconnecting with hope and cultivating a community that declares life in one another.
Relationships centered on affirming God’s good work within each of us are the ones that bring forth the fruitful life God desires for us — and for the world around us.
So I submit a few questions worth considering:
What dreams are stirring in you?
Who can you express them to, asking your listener to notice what’s coming alive?
How can you integrate hope-affirming practices in your day-to-day life and in the life of an organization you lead?
Dreaming together is an invitation — to pause, to speak, to listen, and to believe that even the smallest seeds of hope can grow into something full of life.
About The Author: Amber Dowd
Amber is married to Barnabas Sacramento’s Managing Partner, Brian Dowd, and cares for their children, Timothy, Caelyn, and Ethan, at their home in Folsom, California. She previously worked in the micro-finance division of World Vision. She has a Master’s degree from Fuller Seminary.