Keynote speakers are announced for National Older Adult Conference

The keynote speakers for the 2025 National Older Adult Conference (NOAC) have been announced. The event takes place Sept. 1-5 in Lake Junaluska, N.C., a Spirit-filled gathering of adults 50 and older. This year’s theme is “Alive in the Spirit!” (Romans 15:13).

Find out more at www.brethren.org/dlf/noac.

Keynote speakers

Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet. She is the author of New York Times bestsellers This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us and Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. Her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, Guernica, and The Washington Post. Cole is also the creator and writer of Black Liturgies, a project that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body.

Ken Medema is a creative and authentic artist who for five decades has used music as a vehicle for creating conversation through storytelling and reflection. He custom designs each performance, integrating new and old music with his gift of improvisation to suit the occasion. With an ever-growing circle of friends around the world, his vocal and piano artistry and imagination have reached audiences of 50 to 50,000 people in 49 US states and more than 15 countries on four continents.

*NOAC 2025 keynote speakers are (clockwise from above left) Cole Arthur Riley, Ted Swartz, Dominique DuBois Gilliard, and Ken Medema.*

Ted Swartz is a playwright and actor who has been “mucking around” in the worlds of the sacred and profane for more than 20 years. He fell in love with acting and theater on his way to a traditional pastorate in the Mennonite Church. Coupling theater and seminary education, he became a theologian of a different sort and discovered that at the intersection of humor and biblical story we often find new or different understandings of scripture. He is an accomplished speaker and teacher, melding theater and comedy with issues of creativity, theology, and faith in a profound and engaging presentation.

Dominique DuBois Gilliard is director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation for the Evangelical Covenant Church. He is the author of Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores, which won a 2018 Book of the Year Award for InterVarsity Press and was named Outreach Magazine’s 2019 Social Issues Resource of the Year. His latest book, Subversive Witness: Scripture’s Call to Leverage Privilege, won Englewood Review’s 2021 Book of the Year Award. He is an adjunct professor at North Park Theological Seminary.

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