New Belmont Fellowship Program to Connect Students with Faith Community Mentors

Supported by national NetVUE grant, Worship and Witness Fellowship will help Belmont students explore vocation, leadership and service through mentorship with local faith community leaders

For students weighing whether church leadership might be part of their future, one of the hardest things to find is a low-stakes way to try it on. A new Belmont University program is designed to fill that exact gap, providing access to a mentor already doing the work, a small group of peers asking the same questions and enough structure to make the exploration feel real rather than theoretical.  

Belmont received a 2026 Grant for Fostering Leadership for Communities of Faith from the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), a program of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC). The grant will launch the Worship and Witness Fellowship, a new mentorship program connecting Belmont juniors with leaders in local congregations as they explore what a calling to church leadership might look like.  

Belmont is one of 23 institutions nationwide selected for this year’s cohort, which together received more than $1.2 million in funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. This is the third year CIC and NetVUE have awarded these grants, bringing the total number of Grants for Fostering Leadership for Communities of Faith to 64 since the program began. 

Christina Ananias laid the groundwork for the Worship and Witness Fellowship through Belmont's original grant application, and Dr. Sally Holt is now leading the program into its first year. Holt said the fellowship will fill a gap she noticed in her own path to ministry. 

“This kind of structured framework, where students can lean on each other's experiences while also building a real relationship with a mentor in the church, is rare at the undergraduate level. I didn't have anything like it until I was in seminary myself, and I think it will give our students a real head start in discerning whether this path is right for them," Holt said. 

The fellowship is open to students across Belmont, not just those in the School of Theology & Christian Ministry, which is intended to reflect how many different roles a calling to church leadership can take. 

The inaugural cohort, launching this fall, will pair eight Belmont juniors with eight mentors serving in local faith communities. Over the course of the year, students will: 

• Participate weekly in the life and worship of their mentor's congregation 

• Meet monthly with their mentor 

• Join six to seven cohort-wide gatherings hosted by Holt and program collaborators 

• Give a final presentation at the end of the year 

Mentors will also introduce students to other leaders within their faith communities and will take part in a training workshop designed to set clear expectations on both sides of the relationship.  

Belmont is now identifying students and mentors for the program's first cohort. Students interested in participating, and church or ministry leaders interested in serving as mentors, can contact Dr. Sally Holt to learn more. 

More about CIC and NetVUE

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) is an association of over 600 nonprofit independent colleges and universities, state-based councils, and higher education affiliates that works to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of independent higher education’s contributions to society. CIC provides members with ideas, resources, and programs that help institutions improve their leadership expertise, educational programs, administrative and financial performance, and institutional visibility.

The Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE) is a program of CIC with over 350 members. The purpose of NetVUE is to increase the capacity of independent colleges and universities to support their undergraduate students as they explore and discern their many callings in life. The process of vocational reflection is an interdisciplinary endeavor, bringing together theological, philosophical, ethical, historical, and affective approaches, and implementing the theoretical reflections of these fields in vocation related practices. Campuses are encouraged to support students in this work through a variety of academic departments, pre-professional programs, and campus offices. NetVUE is governed by a principle of subsidiarity: individual member institutions are encouraged to shape their work related to vocation and calling— including the vocabularies that they use to describe this work—in ways that are best suited to their own missions, teaching philosophies, student demographics, and other matters best known to those who lead and guide this work on campus.