This article examines the challenging history of the Religious Education Association (REA) beginning in 1929. A membership survey, a new policy statement, and local consultations were urgently needed at that time, 25 years after the foundation of the Association, in order to clarify ideological differences on the inside and in order to deal with the challenges from the outside to the association, such as the worldwide economic crisis and the shifting world order. In the years to come the REA found itself in very stormy weather, financially, organizationally, and ideologically (Schmidt 1983, 56-67). The article then reflects upon the challenges of the 2018 annual REA meeting in Washington, DC. The author states the irritation on the working floor of the meeting was not only a re-flection of the deep divides in the American and global society. It contained an invitation to re-act as well: to change ideas about leadership and to bear witness to new ways of being a "religious" and "educational" association in the American and global society.