Image: The Bee Experience

According to a recent survey, most U.S. adults (86%) say small businesses have a positive effect on the way things are going in America. In fact, small businesses receive by far the most positive reviews of any of the nine U.S. institutions asked about in the survey, outranking the military and houses of worship.

The 2024 Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Business Report stated between 2019 and 2023 the number of women-owned businesses in the United States increased at nearly double the rate of those owned by men; and from 2022 to 2023, the rate of growth increased to 4.5 times. Further, an astounding 17% of Black women are in the process of starting or running new businesses. That’s compared to just 10% of white women, and 15% of white men.

Yet despite these positive trends, small business owners and leaders, especially from marginalized communities, are all too often left to face a workforce infrastructure that was not built to support them. Only 3% of Black women are running a business surviving past five years. Moreover, Black female founders earn an average revenue of $24,000, compared to an average of $142,900 among all women-owned businesses. Critical services like accessing capital, insurance, healthcare, childcare, and retirement are hard to navigate alone.

Melina Higbee founded The Bee Experience in response to this broad lack of support, specifically in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. "I am primarily seeking to support women of color entrepreneurs as we have not always had a seat at the table. I'm inspired by the women who may not even call themselves or see themselves as entrepreneurs because how they are currently serving or innovating is simply what they have been doing to care for their families, neighborhoods, and communities."

"I am primarily seeking to support women of color entrepreneurs as we have not always had a seat at the table. I'm inspired by the women who may not even call themselves or see themselves as entrepreneurs because how they are currently serving or innovating is simply what they have been doing to care for their families, neighborhoods, and communities."

When asked about the importance of localized support and attention, Melina drew it back to the mission of impacting and connecting with the people you know and care about. "In my other work [supporting entrepreneurs], every day has taken me all over the United States and the world. I'm connecting with entrepreneurs and innovators remotely and I've been so grateful for the experience of meeting with others this way. But it occurred to me that I didn't have the same knowledge or awareness of the entrepreneurs and innovators even in my own backyard. The place where I grew up and have come to live and be. I believed there was an opportunity. An organization should be more involved with the local community; making decisions that affect the people you care about, and the work that you're in, the business that we're in, if done only remotely can become very disconnected."

"But it occurred to me that I didn't have the same knowledge or awareness of the entrepreneurs and innovators even in my own backyard. The place where I grew up and have come to live and be. I believed there was an opportunity."

And the opportunities have continued to reveal themselves. Melina shared a recent chance encounter with someone who shared a mutual interest and investment in supporting local entrepreneurs. "I went to an event and saw someone who looked familiar. We realized I'd known her since I was five years old, her sister was my sister's best friend in elementary school and her grandmother used to keep us but I had not seen her since I graduated from the sixth grade. We exchanged contact information and it turns out she is in leadership at the local community college center for entrepreneurs and needed new instructors. Things have been falling into place."

Melina’s intention to remain focused on the local community in Cleveland mirrors her big vision for how to spark change in an individualized, relational, and deeply personal way. “For The Bee Experience, it really is about pollinating the community one entrepreneur at a time. I want to be able to give people that personal attention and experience. There are many people who facilitate larger group coaching and I think that's important but I also want this to feel different, because I'm here. I'm right here in the community. We’ve been in a Zoom world and we're going to remain in a Zoom virtual world, but that human connection means a lot. How else will we feed one another and share ideas if we’re not together?”

To learn more about Melina and The Bee Experience, email info@thebeeexp.com  | website coming soon.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck and Dr. Angela Gorrell explore big questions around belonging and how we can all play an impactful role in reweaving the social fabric and rewriting narratives.

Listen to the podcast episode: YouTube

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

image: Wix

“Yangti yoga in sanskrit, is a profound form of thögal meditation which engages the experience of darkness to transform our relationship to the way we experience appearance and directly understand our true, awakened nature.” 

Justin Von Bujdoss, an American Buddhist teacher, chaplain, and START alum is helping to bring this centuries-old tradition to modern audiences by establishing a Yangti Yoga Retreat Center to offer sanctuary for those seeking respite from the demands of the modern world and to help them reconnect with their inner wisdom in a radically unique way. We sat down with Justin to learn about the origin and development of Yangti Yoga Retreat Center, located in Buckland, MA. 

For those unfamiliar with Yangti Yoga and Dark Retreats, can you provide an overview of this ancient practice and its traditions?

Yangti Yoga, often referred to as "dark retreat," is a deeply esoteric practice within the Nyingma lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, one of Tibet’s oldest schools of thought. The origins of this practice are somewhat mysterious, possibly dating back to the 6th or 7th century. However, hagiographic references, while not always historically reliable, place it firmly within the sacred meditative traditions of Tibet.

In essence, Yangti involves meditating in complete darkness for extended periods—anywhere from a few days to 49 days. Historically, great Vajrayana lineage holders, such as Ayu Khandro and Shukseb Jetsun Chonyi Zangmo, spent significant time in dark retreats. Ayu Khandro is said to have spent the last 40 years of her life in total darkness. Shukseb meditated in darkness for six months each year.

I’ve personally completed about seven dark retreats, the longest being 49 continuous days. The experience is intense and transformative but requires thorough preparation to ensure one’s mental and emotional stability. Traditionally, texts from the 19th century cautioned practitioners about the risks of destabilization. 

This being said, it’s worth noting that just because the risk is there doesn't mean it will necessarily play out that way, which is why a preparatory curriculum is essential. This has always been part of my vision for the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center: to create a space not only for Yangti Yoga practice within the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition but also for training in prerequisite meditation techniques. This preparation ensures that when participants enter Yangti practice, whether for one, two, or three days, they have a stable experience. From there, we can progress to longer retreats as appropriate.

This has always been part of my vision for the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center: to create a space not only for Yangti Yoga practice within the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition but also for training in prerequisite meditation techniques.

How did the idea for your dark retreat center emerge? What were the initial conversations that led to this vision?

The concept of the retreat center began during the COVID-19 pandemic, but its roots reach back to a personal connection I had with an important spiritual teacher, Pathing Rinpoche, who practiced under Shukseb Jetsun Chonyi Zangmo. He gave me a rare manuscript detailing the visions one experiences during dark retreat. While I didn’t receive direct instructions from him before his passing in 2007, this text ignited my curiosity and commitment to the practice.

At that point in time, I went to all of my other teachers in India and showed the text to them and nobody had either any experience with this practice or wanted to talk about it because it's considered such a secret practice. In 2016, I met my current teacher, Dr. Nida Chenagtsang, who is both a meditation master and a doctor of traditional Tibetan medicine. It wasn’t until 2020 during lockdown when I asked Dr. Nida about his knowledge of the practice to which he said, “yes, I'll give you instruction on this and provide you the transmission for the practice, but you'll need to train thoroughly before you can engage in this kind of retreat.” 

Image: Yangti Yoga | Arising from the vision of Dr. Nida Chenagtsang and Lama Justin von Bujdoss, the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center is envisioned as a place for spiritual practice and awakening rooted around the practice of Yangti Yoga, or dark retreat.

I was able to get access to a small cottage and spent a few weeks light-proofing it, and then had to come up with a system to have food delivered through a light-proof pass-box that I constructed. I had to arrange for people to cook meals and bring them every day so that I could do a seven-day preparatory dark retreat and then a couple of weeks afterwards, do the full forty-nine day dark retreat. 

Afterwards I had the chance to check in with Dr. Nida – were able to meet by Zoom during which time he tested me and checked my experience. And then he asked me what I thought of the practice, and I told him that I loved it and wanted to really focus on this. And he said, “good, you should develop a retreat center for this”. From that moment, in late June 2021, I started to envision this project and consider what would this take pull this off? What would it be like? Where should it be? These kinds of questions were at the fore of my mind. There are very few places like this in the United States, and so how would this fit into the Vajrayana Buddhist world?

On your website, you emphasize the transformative healing power of contemplative traditions. How do you see dark retreats addressing challenges posed by the modern "attention economy" as an example?

Dark retreat allows a profound opportunity for a reset. When you come out, one of the most basic aspects of the experience is that you see things anew.  For example, when I first experienced my initial preparatory dark retreat, which was seven days long, I entered into this experience of sensory deprivation – complete darkness. I did not see anything, could not interact with any kind of visual culture, and I was completely solitary. After emerging from the dark retreat cottage in upstate New York during the summertime, I was struck by the different shades of green—the greens of various plants—and I saw movement in a new way. I heard people speak as if for the first time, with a sense of fresh openness. As humans, we express emotion, concepts, personality, and energy, and after spending seven days with very minimal interaction with these things, re-entering the ‘world’ feels like a kind of rebirth.

Image: Yangti Yoga

Even though one is in a dark, sometimes confined space, it feels as if the space being occupied is infinitely vast. When I say infinite, it can feel like there are thousands of miles in every direction, even though cognitively you know you're in a room that might be 12 by 12 feet or something similar. I’ve done retreats in rooms of various sizes. I even completed a nine-day retreat in an eight-by-eight-foot room, and I’m a little over six feet tall. Normally, an eight-by-eight-foot room would feel relatively small in a lit world, but in this kind of dark experience, I was often convinced I was in an enormous, vast space.

I believe we experience our minds differently during these retreats. In this context, the mind feels different, and awareness shifts. The depth of what it means to simply be becomes very pronounced, and this shift is quite profound. I would argue that concerns about the erosion of personal data control become irrelevant in the context of practices like dark retreat because they offer a rare opportunity to exist outside the grasp of the attention economy.

The depth of what it means to simply be becomes very pronounced, and this shift is quite profound.

In today's world, our lives are deeply entangled with algorithms—businesses like Amazon, Facebook, and Instagram are not only studying our responses to stimuli but actively shaping them. This economy revolves around our attention, commodifying every interaction we have.

Dark retreat allows us to step away from this entirely. By disconnecting from the algorithmic pull of modern life, we return to a natural state of being that feels deeply therapeutic. And it's not necessarily the length of time spent in darkness that matters most—it’s the experience itself. Even a retreat of just four or five days can create a radical shift, offering profound mental clarity and a renewed sense of presence for the practitioner. These retreats break the cycle of constant engagement with external demands, allowing us to rediscover a potentially more pure and grounded way of living.

This economy revolves around our attention, commodifying every interaction we have. Dark retreat allows us to step away from this entirely. By disconnecting from the algorithmic pull of modern life, we return to a natural state of being that feels deeply therapeutic. And it's not necessarily the length of time spent in darkness that matters most—it’s the experience itself.

What have been some of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of creating the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center?

From a structural standpoint, some of the hardest parts of this venture have been interesting to observe. Visioning came easily, but fundraising was initially a challenge. I worked with a friend from the startup world to see if this project was feasible and where to begin. We set up weekly meetings, sometimes with action items, and over time, this process helped focus our vision and clarify what we were fundraising for.

At first, it was difficult to find the right fundraising strategy, but eventually, the pieces fell into place naturally. A conversation with Dr. Nida helped me recalibrate my approach. He advised against forcing things and instead suggested observing the dynamics at play, which allowed me to adjust and approach fundraising more realistically.

We held a fundraising dinner attended by notable figures, including Father Francis Tiso, Professor Robert Thurman, representatives from the Rubin Museum, Tricycle magazine, and even the publicist of the Dalai Lama. Although we raised only $300, the event generated invaluable in-kind support, such as a collaboration with the Rubin Museum that allowed us to run dark retreat workshops for a larger audience.

These workshops almost always sold out, attracting participants from across North America and even Europe. Tricycle and Lion’s Roar published several essays I wrote, further building cultural support, which often proved more valuable than capital. This support gave our project momentum and helped position me as a thought leader on dark retreat in the West.

This cultural backing also led to a collaboration with a prominent Bhutanese Buddhist teacher, a lineage holder of dark retreat. He and I are in the process of collaborating on a kind of East/West exploratory religious cultural dialogue about dark retreat that is yielding a pilgrimage tour that we're offering at the end of this calendar year to Bhutan to visit several sites in that Himalayan kingdom that are very prominent and important for the practice of Dark retreat. 

How would you describe how the START program aided you in developing this project?

The greatest benefit for me was the opportunity to workshop my idea and gain permission to explore my vision freely. I needed to ask myself: how do I want this to look? What are my hopes and dreams? The START program helped me translate these aspirations into actionable steps while providing valuable insights into the marketplace.

In the Buddhist tradition, it's easy to overlook the business side of things, as many organizations operate as nonprofits and struggle to function effectively. The program allowed me to envision a healthy organizational structure—financially sound, strong HR practices, and fair compensation for work well done.

In the Buddhist tradition, it's easy to overlook the business side of things, as many organizations operate as nonprofits and struggle to function effectively. The program allowed me to envision a healthy organizational structure—financially sound, strong HR practices, and fair compensation for work well done.

From a multi-faith, inter-religious, and inter-spiritual perspective, I enjoyed observing and learning from participants from diverse backgrounds. This experience encouraged me to critically examine my own practices in relation to others, leading to a deeper understanding of my vision. I am grateful for the program's support in developing my elevator pitch and presentation deck, even though we ultimately revised it.

Access to Pew research on religious organizations and trends among spiritually dis/affiliated individuals was also invaluable. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been able to participate in the START program and I am happy to see it thriving.

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Justin Von Bujdoss is an American Vajrayana Buddhist teacher, writer, and is a co-founder of Bhumisparsha an experimental Buddhist sangha along with Lama Rod Owens. He is the author of Modern Tantric Buddhism: Authenticity and Embodiment in Dharma Practice published by North Atlantic Books, and a contributor to Buddhism and Whiteness: Critical Reflections published by Lexington Books.

Image: Claire Nelson

A recent study by Pew Research reveals that the "Nones"—those who identify their religion as "nothing in particular"—now represent the largest religious cohort in the U.S., surpassing both Catholics (23%) and evangelical Protestants (24%). This is a dramatic shift from 2007, when the Nones made up just 16% of the population. Pew's latest survey of over 3,300 U.S. adults underscores the growing trend of religious disaffiliation.

When it comes to generational differences, Pew’s findings show that Gen Z is the least religious generation in the U.S., with about a third identifying as having no religion. This mirrors the proportion of Nones among millennials, but stands in stark contrast to older generations—23% of Generation X, 17% of baby boomers, and just 11% of the Silent Generation report no religious affiliation.

However, the question arises: Is Generation Z truly less religious or spiritual than previous generations? According to a 2022 survey by Springtide Research, 68% of young people ages 13-25 consider themselves at least somewhat religious, and 77% say they are at least slightly spiritual. While fewer young people may be attending traditional religious services, these figures suggest that religion and spirituality remain an integral part of their identities, with many actively exploring and developing their faith in non-traditional ways.

While fewer young people may be attending traditional religious services, these figures suggest that religion and spirituality remain an integral part of their identities, with many actively exploring and developing their faith in non-traditional ways.

As younger generations redefine how they engage with faith, traditions, and spirituality, the focus should shift from tracking religious disaffiliation to understanding the evolving spiritual needs of young people. Listening to their perspectives and supporting their search for meaning may be more important than ever, as they grapple with the same complex and profound questions that religious and spiritual traditions have addressed for centuries.

To gain further insight, we spoke with religion journalist Claire Nelson, a Gen Z member herself, about her personal experiences with faith and spirituality, her interests as a religion journalist on this beat, and how she sees opportunities for reimagining the narrative beyond disaffiliation and decline.

How would you describe your personal faith tradition, spirituality, and/or belongings? 

I’ve grown up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a Christian denomination that prides itself on being non-fundamentalist and queer-affirming, which has been invaluable to me as a contemporary person with an interest in religion.

What draws you to write about religion and the changing landscape of how people are connecting to their faith and spiritualities? Are there any specific connections and bridges you are hoping to make with your writing that you'd like to see more of in the landscape of religious journalism? 

Much has been written about the decline of institutional religion, yet less is known about the practices contemporary people independently engage in pursuing meaning, connection, and welfare. As a journalist who covers this beat, I am most interested in stories that explore religion/spirituality as a mental health tool, as I feel this angle most resonates with the experiences and needs of everyday people. Some pieces I’ve recently enjoyed in this beat include Jordan Kisner’s recent Atlantic feature, “Reiki Can’t Possibly Work. So Why Does It,” Jessica Grose’s New York Times opinion piece, “Are We In The Middle of a Spiritual Awakening,” and Glean’s own Elan Babchuck’s piece, “American Religion is Not Dead Yet” in the Atlantic.

Glean Network focuses on supporting spiritual innovators -- those who are inspired by the rituals, values, and beliefs of their wisdom traditions to create all new models of faith and hope in action. What are some examples of spiritual innovation you have seen and are most excited about? 

The spiritual innovation I am most excited about is that taking place within the discipline of psychology. Practices derived from religious traditions like meditation and yoga have emerged as leading empirically-validated treatments, and spirituality has come to be understood as a valuable psychological tool in an age with unprecedentedly high rates of anxiety and depression. Some of my favorite thought leaders in this field include Dr. Lisa Miller, Dr. Peter Levine, and Dr. Jim Tucker.

Much of your work so far has focused on the relationship Gen Z has with faith and spirituality. What is something you'd like to see talked about more with regard to this topic? What are some of the "blank spaces" and areas that haven't yet been explored that you'd like to go deeper on? 

There is a quote I cite frequently in my work from David Hempton, Dean of Harvard Divinity School, that reads, “[T]raditional denominational Christianity is in terminal decline in the United States. The future belongs to networks of independent churches that emphasize direct supernatural engagement. Religious beliefs and practices will become increasingly experimental; religious authorities will devolve more to individuals than institutions; religion will become more oriented to practice than theology.” Trends in young people’s beliefs identified by the Springtide Research Institute and others do not foreshadow the end of religious/spiritual expression, merely that, as Hempton argues, the future of religion has more to do with practice than theology. I look forward to writing more about the ways contemporary people experience states traditionally associated with religion in nonreligious contexts.

[T]raditional denominational Christianity is in terminal decline in the United States. The future belongs to networks of independent churches that emphasize direct supernatural engagement. Religious beliefs and practices will become increasingly experimental; religious authorities will devolve more to individuals than institutions; religion will become more oriented to practice than theology.”

What are 3 things that are bringing you inspiration and spark these days? 

I am a huge fan of the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and his podcast, House Calls. I enjoyed his recent episode with Sebastian Junger, journalist and author of “In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.”

I really enjoy the work of Dr. Lisa Miller, a Columbia professor of psychology who is widely regarded as the leading authority on the mental health benefits of spirituality. Her book, “Awakened Brain: the New Science of Spirituality and our Quest for an Inspired Life,” was a captivating and extraordinary read.

My understanding of contemporary religion has been heavily formed by the Springtide Research Institute, with whom I’ve worked. They regularly release new reports and content, and I always learn something new and interesting from them. I consider their findings centrally important for anyone interested in reporting on or working in religion.

How can folks stay connected with you and read more of your writing? 

You can find my work and writing on my linked-in! You can find me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairenels

__________________ Claire Nelson is a religion reporter whose writing has appeared in Christianity Today and the Pioneer Press. She works with Springtide, a research institute that possesses the largest dataset in the nation on the mental health and spirituality of Gen Z, and the Bible for Normal People, a theology and spirituality podcast.

“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

I hadn’t read these words in a long time. 

However, I developed a new and urgent relationship to this statement after four days in Alabama. I was in the Yellowhammer State on an immersive Civil Rights learning experience led by Ben McBride and his team at the Empower Initiative. Mr. McBride, Empower’s CEO and the author of Troubling the Water: The Urgent Work of Radical Belonging, centered our discussion around the following: 

“The wrong question is, ‘What do we do?’ The right question is, ‘Who are we becoming?’”

And, “What purpose are we called to with our gifts, skills, and station?”

Although 61 years separates Dr. King’s meditation on the relationship between time and justice from Mr. McBride’s questions on becoming, they are linked in lived experiences of Black, Brown, and other marginalized people in the United States.

As a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. scholar at New York University, I was encouraged and expected to become familiar with Dr. King’s writings, ministry, and advocacy. By the time my undergraduate studies concluded in the mid 90s, his words and the civil rights movement faded in my memory like the black-and-white images I had seen in books and documentaries, as many believed that we were finally beginning to realize some of the gains promised by the movement. However, we realize that our post-George Floyd nation continues to experience racial violence and unrest and aggressive attacks on the advances of civil rights efforts.

King’s exhortation to become “tireless… coworkers with God” is as relevant today as when he wrote those words in a Birmingham cell in 1963. I meditated on the Letter from Birmingham Jail as part of a pre-work exercise assigned to participants of the Alabama Learning Lab this past April. The Alabama Learning Lab is a four-day exploration into the meaning of othering and belonging, examined through the stories of the Civil Rights Movements in Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham. More than just a documentary review of civil rights activity in Alabama, the Lab was an opportunity to peer into the deeper stories of the movement, in some of the actual places where it happened. 

As a representative of the Glean Network, I was invited to join over 30 faith, nonprofit, and business leaders from around the country on this journey. Among others, I broke bread and got to know ministers from California, a nonprofit ED from Minnesota, a foundation leader from San Antonio, and a management consultant from New York City. Each person with a unique perspective on belonging, but all being invited to process belonging through the stories of the freedom movements in Alabama and the spaces that have been built to commemorate them. Each of the sites and markers we visited were meaningful to me, but three stops in Montgomery and Birmingham resonated deeply.

In Montgomery, as we moved through the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, we were asked to reflect on how extreme othering was taking place at the institutional level. How were the inhumane practices of enslavement, lynching, and segregation justified and condoned by the political, social, religious, and educational systems of the day? 

It was initially difficult to think about these questions in a detached and academic way. The Legacy Museum immediately and viscerally walked me through dramatic reimaginations of the slave trade, Jim Crow segregation, and other aspects of white society’s brutality against Black people. But its purpose wasn’t simply to shock. It was to shake any complacency I might have had because of time and distance.

It’s one thing to intellectually know that Northern states were complicit in the slave trade. It’s another to see my two home states of New York and Rhode Island thoroughly indicted as two of the economic engines that fueled this horrible practice for hundreds of years. It forced me to rethink my strolls through downtown Manhattan or a sunny afternoon in Newport. Who built these cities? Whose narratives are included in the story of their development and whose are left out? These sites are potent and necessary markers for the important history that is left out of school curricula and performative Black History Month observations. As an educator who longs for a more complex treatment of the American story in schools, I’m deeply grateful for the clarity and creativity with which this history was presented.

In Birmingham, we visited Kelly Ingram Park. This was the site where the infamous use of water hoses and police dogs against young demonstrators shocked the conscience of the nation. The park is also across the street from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where four girls lost their lives in a reactionary bombing by white supremacists. I’ve seen these images of children being attacked with hoses and dogs in numerous documentaries and books, but while walking through the park, I was struck by two things. 

First, the relatively small size of the location. Kelly Ingram Park is only about four acres and the thought of waves of children flooding this park and being attacked by police with few places to hide is chilling. Second, and more importantly, could I have done it? Every teenager wants to be involved in something important as they grow into adulthood and many even go through that well-known rebellious phase. I was always eager to be a part of something significant. However, as someone who grew up in the shade of hard-won Civil Rights battles, I’ve never had to experience the blatant racial animus that the youth of Birmingham endured.

Would I have submitted to the rigors of nonviolence training, risked physical harm, and spent days in jail without knowing my fate? I think about young people who are making similar choices today in our nation’s ongoing racial reckoning moment. I pray not only for their safety and success, but for the manifestation of justice that will make ongoing protests unnecessary.

Four days of sitting with this history naturally led us to ask about how we and the institutions that we’re a part of are responding to the challenges in our communities. Our discussion rooms were filled with both deep reflection and inspired discussion about future possibilities. 

It is easy for those of us called to service and ministry to be focused on solving the problems of the world around us. What I appreciated about this trip was the reminder that our service is most effective when it flows from the deeper well of purpose. When I’m consistently wrestling with Mr. McBride’s question of “Who am I becoming?” Our becoming invites others to become the best versions of themselves and in so doing, can create the possibility of greater belonging. I see this as part of the “persistent work” that Dr. King called us to do.

Rodney Eric López is an accomplished educator and non-profit leader, with a passion for using social dance to create connection, community, and confidence. He supports people in developing generosity practices and is a proud member of the Glean Network’s program team. Rodney loves his wife, his children, and his Goldendoodle.

Image: Wix

Environmental professor Jessica Eise had gone to Colombia to study climate change’s impact on the lives of rural farmers, but upon listening to their stories, she was struck by something else entirely: “At times, each farmer seemed to speak of his or her land with a kind of poetic mysticism. As if it were more than composite pieces of dirt and trees and air and water, but rather something sacred,” she writes in a Sierra Club article. The farmer’s spiritual disposition, she came to believe, was not only beautiful but also much-needed. “Having completed a couple books on food security, agriculture, and communication, I understood with ironclad certainty that we have the technical solutions to climate change. The pieces, I’m confident, are all there; we know what we need to do. What we lack, however, is broad enough social willpower and consensus. We are missing a united front built on compassion and connection and courage to do something big enough and amazing enough,” she wrote.

Below are five individuals and groups rooted in their spirituality and innovatively responding to the changes in our climate and natural world.

Networking Training and Movement Building - Blessed Tomorrow 

Image: Blessed Tomorrow

Blessed Tomorrow brings together 29 faith-based organizations committed to climate action. “Through Blessed Tomorrow, faith leaders work to reach 100% clean energy, prepare for a changing climate, and engage their communities, while maintaining the distinct voices of their traditions,” the organization writes. The organization provides faith communities with extensive resources to support effective climate action and conducts research about impactful climate communication. In 2024, Blessed Tomorrow convened over 1,400 participants for the National Faith + Climate Forum and created a list of recommended actions anyone can take to support the climate movement, including educating yourself on climate change and taking the lead on climate action in your community.

Healing and Spiritual Care at the Intersection of Racial and Environmental Justice - Eco Healing Project

Image: Aliyah Collins

Before pursuing her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, Aliyah Collins personally experienced the cost of climate change. While she was an undergrad in Nashville, a series of tornadoes ripped through North Nashville, a historically Black area. “I started to think about my own community. We really didn’t have equal access to a lot of green spaces, and that impacted our mental health whether we knew it or not,” Collins said. She then founded the Eco Healing Project which provides students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities with resources to start and tend their own gardens.  “I want people to understand the healing benefits of nature, and how important nature is for our holistic health.” Collins was recently awarded $20,000 to support the work as part of Tom’s of Maine Incubator, a program that seeks to elevate BIPOC climate leaders. 

Accompanying and Engaging Activism - Eco-Chaplaincy and Climate Conscious Chaplaincy

Image: The BTS Center

The Sati Center for Buddhist Studies defines eco-chaplaincy as, “work to support people in developing healthy, compassionate, and mutually supportive relationships with each other and with the natural world.” This type of spiritual care can look like mindfulness practices in nature, nature-based rites of passage, and faith-based environmental activism, and it is not relegated to one tradition. Rev. Alison Cornish, coordinator of the Chaplaincy Initiative at the Bangor Theological Seminary, prefers the term “climate-conscious chaplaincy,” to underscore that all contemporary spiritual care takes place against a backdrop of the climate crisis. In an email, she writes “I actually started thinking about chaplaincy to/for/with Earth back in 2011, at an intensive workshop with the Buddhist deep ecology teacher Joanna Macy. I had some ideas about engaging both chaplaincy skills/presence with healing and Earth, but the idea stayed that … an idea … which was further germinated during my ministry with multi- and interfaith organizations, faith-and-climate work, and parish ministry. I tried some experiments – like re-casting holidays and ceremonies – with attention to our planet’s dire condition.”

Empowering Advocacy at Local, National, and Global Levels - Interfaith Power and Light

Image: Interfaith Power and Light

Interfaith Power and Light is a faith-based climate advocacy organization that operates at the local, national, and international levels. The organization “mobilizes people of faith and conscience to take bold and aggressive action on climate change,” working with 40 state affiliates, 22,000 faith communities, and 6,500,000 people of faith. Their values statement reads, “Because we embrace faith and spirituality, we are grounded in the interconnectedness of the sacred, the natural world, and one another... Because we embrace hope, we are empowered to live into our vision for the world for present and future generations… Because love is central to who we are, we are committed to ending the suffering caused by climate change.”

Centering Indigenous Wisdom, Values, and Rights - Center for Earth Ethics

Image: The Center for Earth Ethics

The Center for Earth Ethics, a Union Theological Seminary Initiative, “works at the intersection of values, spirit, education and civic engagement.” They define earth ethics as “the discernment of how to live in relationship with the living planet,” and hold “Indigenous Wisdom, Values, and Rights” as a core area of focus. “We amplify and engage with Indigenous wisdom to reorient society back toward nature and shape a more eco-centric world,” the group writes. The group convenes global advocates, conducts grassroots dialogue, and engages in lobbying.

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We want to learn about the spiritually innovative projects and initiatives that focus on the world's most pressing and complex problems. Are you an emerging or established spiritual innovator seeking a generative and actionable space to build and launch with like-minded peers? Learn more about START: The Design Thinking Course for Spiritual Innovators

Image: The BTS Center

Rev. Alison Cornish first began thinking about climate-conscious chaplaincy at a workshop with Buddhist scholar and environmentalist Joanna Macy. Later, in her role as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Affiliate of Interfaith Power and Light, she saw the spiritual toll climate change had on her congregants. “While I was ED of PA IPL, I did quite a bit of preaching, and invariably someone would approach me following the service to talk about their private despair about the climate crisis. Often they were working on the issue – as an academic, or government employee – and had no one to talk to about watching the date scroll by.”

She began to think there was something here. “I tried some experiments – like re-casting holidays and ceremonies – with attention to our planet’s dire condition,” she said. This led to Cornish’s interest in climate-conscious chaplaincy, an emerging field centered around pastoral responses to the climate crisis. “I’ve created ceremonies for trees that are about to be cut down, and blessings for waters contaminated by floods. Re-casting of holidays, such as an Earth Day Tenebrae service for the crucifixion of Earth,” Cornish says.

“I tried some experiments – like re-casting holidays and ceremonies – with attention to our planet’s dire condition,” she said. This led to Cornish’s interest in climate-conscious chaplaincy, an emerging field centered around pastoral responses to the climate crisis.

She partnered with the Bangor Theological Seminary to found the Climate Conscious Chaplaincy initiative. Cornish sees the initiative as a landing pad for chaplains engaged in this work and hopes for it to hold space for “the possibility of some kind of life-affirming future to emerge.” The Initiative has held several “conversation circles” for chaplains seeking to utilize a climate-conscious pastoral approach. “We intend for these groups to offer support for personal well-being and community-building in the midst of all the ways in which long-held practices, worldviews, and intertwining crises — materialism, colonialism, racism, and radical individualism, to name just a few — have given rise to a climate-changed world where humans, disconnected from the sources of Earth’s sacredness and generativity, have created the conditions for Earth’s desecration and destruction,” the BTS website reads.

“We intend for these groups to offer support for personal well-being and community-building in the midst of all the ways in which long-held practices, worldviews, and intertwining crises — materialism, colonialism, racism, and radical individualism, to name just a few — have given rise to a climate-changed world where humans, disconnected from the sources of Earth’s sacredness and generativity, have created the conditions for Earth’s desecration and destruction.”

Reflecting on how her time in Glean’s START program supported this work, she said, “START really helped me with discernment, structure, and confidence.  In terms of discernment, I was trying to better understand what was this venture – was it an independent, entrepreneurial enterprise, or a partnership? A curriculum, or a broader initiative? A business, nonprofit, or an extension of my work with the BTS Center?  START offered examples, conversations with peers (one of whom became an ongoing conversation partner/supporter/reader), and tools to do the “landscaping” of the field I needed at this point.  Questions from [START Coach Adele coach Anderson] were very rich and helpful, and added to my discernment.  The opportunity to make a presentation to peers pushed me to articulate ideas that had been amorphous.”

"The opportunity to make a presentation to peers pushed me to articulate ideas that had been amorphous."

When asked about any relevant calls to action, Rev. Cornish responded, "I am often encouraging people I work with, or encounter, to "foreground climate change," whatever that means to and for them in their particular setting. Many, many of us have the privilege of being insulated from the effects of our changing climate (just as many of us are insulated from the effects of racism, sexism, etc.). So how do we stay aware, awake, and poised to respond to the many calls the climate-changed world is sending forth?"

"So how do we stay aware, awake, and poised to respond to the many calls the climate-changed world is sending forth?"

To keep up with Rev. Cornish and the pioneering work in climate conscious chaplaincy, check out the BTS Center’s climate conscious chaplaincy website and programming here.

Interested in learning more about cutting-edge faith based environmental initiatives? Check out our piece spotlighting five individuals and groups rooting into their spirituality and innovatively responding to the changes in our climate and natural world.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck and Dr. Wendy Cadge were featured in The Atlantic's podcast "Good On Paper," discussing Arthur Brooks's insights on religion's role in happiness. Brooks highlights the rise of the "Nones" and suggests that, despite this trend, religious community involvement can enhance well-being through connection and self-transcendence. Listen to the podcast episode: “Can Religion Make You Happier?”

In the interview, Arthur Brooks discusses the simultaneous occurrence of the rise in people identifying as having no religious affiliation (“Nones”) and the distrust in institutions influencing the emergence of more personalized spirituality in place of traditional religious practices and norms. Brooks goes on to share that while traditional religious practices may not resonate with everyone, the core human need for connection and transcendence of self remains. 

While “happiness” may not be the metric that religion has always been in the business of measuring, religious traditions have long served as a site for practicing and witnessing together in a community. Whether through faith, community groups, or personal pursuits, finding ways to connect beyond ourselves and onto something bigger is crucial in combating the loneliness epidemic. 

Ever since Glean Network was founded in 2016, we aimed to unpack the significant shifts in American religion with curiosity and wonder, rather than judgment and fear. As we equip faith and spiritual leaders with tools and skills rooted in empathy, deep listening, and design, we continue to ask ourselves: are traditional religious structures the only answer to building community and fostering togetherness? Could it be that people are seeking connection and meaning in new ways that better align with their personal beliefs and values? How might we meet them where they are?

Faith communities can answer by opening their eyes, ears, hearts, and doors. There is not one village, town, or city where people aren’t suffering from loneliness; while some of them regularly attend services, the majority do not. Look for them. Engage them. Serve them. Point your community’s greatest resources — its people and the care in their hearts — to your community’s greatest needs, and witness how healing happens. Don’t wait for them to come to you.

— Babchuck and Cadge, America has a loneliness epidemic. How about religious groups as part of the solution?

Both Rabbi Babchuck and Dr. Cadge’s op-ed as well as the podcast interview with Brooks invite us all to rethink how we as humans connect, find meaning, and transcend our individuated experiences into belonging to something greater than ourselves as a path to a happier, more connected, less lonely way of being.

Listen to the podcast episode: “Can Religion Make You Happier?” 

Read the op-ed: America has a loneliness epidemic. How about religious groups as part of the solution?

 by Sue Phillips

This article was originally published by The Harvard Divinity Bulletin for the Spring/Summer 2024 issue.

THERE’S AN OLD STORY, part legend and part truth, that the “exceedingly odd” 4-foot-8.5-inch standard width of modern-day railroad gauge in the United States derives from the width of Roman war chariots. The story goes that the first roads in Europe were laid by empire-hungry Romans to serve imperial expansion. Ages of travelers then followed these roads and ruts or risked damaging valuable wagon wheels. The trams and railroads of succeeding generations relied on tools already calibrated to the shape and size of these wheels and axles. The newer U.S. system imported tools and tradespeople from Europe, who did what they knew in the way they knew how to do it, and the rest is history.1

This story survives because it tracks how infrastructure develops across landscapes and centuries. But there’s more to technologies of connection than ruts and rails. Immigration pathways, guild lineages, resource stewardship, colonization, industrial competition, entropy, empire, and innovation all tread these tracks too. Infrastructure has always both reflected and created human relationships in all their complexity.

To understand what this might mean for the future of religion and spiritual life is to explore relationships among legacy systems, imperial economics, emerging technologies, and changing social realities. It is to explore how humans make way—and fail to make way—for what is emerging.

We tend to think of infrastructure in technical terms and via physical structures like cisterns, aqueducts, canals, highways, electric grids, telephony, international space stations, and data centers. These physical systems are created to produce broad public benefit by helping households, communities, and commerce function. Because they are so capital intensive, governments or public-private partnerships often build, own, and maintain them.

Infrastructure uses standardization and access protocols to connect disparate places and people even as local customizations flourish. Japan’s interplanetary research missions are independent, but its spacecraft modules connect to the International Space Station (ISS) using shared docking specifications. Same with the Michigan Public Services Commission’s autonomous maintenance of an electrical grid that interconnects with those in other midwestern states. Infrastructure enables relationships, but it also impedes them, on purpose, to control access and flow through the system. Only countries that have agreed to certain commitments are allowed to dock at the ISS, and only paying Michigan consumers are allowed to tap into the MPSC’s electrical grid.

Infrastructure doesn’t necessarily change the things passing over or through it, but it might create new markets or constrain the size or format of what it carries. Consider how the Union Pacific Railroad opened up Eastern markets for Western beef, or how APIs sitting between iOS applications and Amazon Web Services require credentials to pass data through.2 There tends to be mutual adaptation between the “cargo” and the systems that carry it.

The mechanics and motivations of mutual adaptation are easier to understand when driven by market economics. But what happens when the purpose of the infrastructure is to serve souls? And what happens when it breaks down?

RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES GROW, disperse, diversify, and evolve just as other communities do. Many have designed and built infrastructure to create, collect, distribute, and control resources traveling through complex systems. From canonizing texts to blessing pilgrimage paths, from creating monastic communities to establishing portable credentials for leaders, religious communities of all kinds have clarified and codified the pathways across which their wisdom, authority, and practices travel. These have been no more benevolent, benign, or effective than other human creations, so let’s not assume religious infrastructure is good just because it is “good.”

Softening the infrastructure analogy a bit, I’m going to explore a specific example of how religious communities, especially in the West, have chosen to distribute wisdom and resources: through denominations and related organizations.3 Looking at these networks provides clues about how religious communities have organized themselves, using what means, and to what ends, because they do an astonishing number of jobs.4 Denominations

• Establish and enforce creeds and statements of belief

• Standardize and sacralize liturgies and rites of passage

• Canonize texts, create hymn and prayer books, design education curricula

• Identify and amplify elders, saints, and wisdom teachers

• Commission and proliferate imagery, icons, songs, and stories

• Establish and enforce community standards, accountabilities, and consequences

• Authorize leaders

• Financially subsidize religious life in otherwise unsustainable areas

• Build website templates, marketing campaigns, and branding

• Build, own, and maintain physical plants; fund the expansion and care of buildings

• Credential professionals and create mechanisms for the portability of those credentials

• Create professional associations for networking, continuing education, and accountability

• Sponsor theological education, chaplaincy, and clinical pastoral education programs

• Train lay leaders and offer leadership development programs

• Support monastics and religious orders

• Organize collective social justice and policy efforts

• Gather member communities and leaders at local, regional, and national events

In short, denominations have done what individual members and congregations could never do for themselves. From the prayers in the prayer book to training for the synagogue treasurer to the logo on the website, almost everything congregations do relies on help from denominations and related organizations. In mainstream U.S. Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, and Unitarian Universalism, these resources are the water, electricity, and recycling plant of religious life. Denominations are the utilities.

The problem is that, like railroads, many of these functions depend on odd track sizes derived from outdated assumptions, needs, and technologies. While religious communities still need help, as they always have, the solutions being delivered are increasingly unhelpful. At best, there are mismatches between form and function. At worst, the assumptions around which denominational services were built are now mostly out of date.

Consider these assumptions: That religious communities are local, neighborhood based, and have physical buildings.5 That congregations are the basic unit of denominational membership, and that individuals want to access religious experience through congregations.6 That clergy have a single job, and that it is housed at such congregations.7 That religious leaders are paid enough to support a family and pay off debt from theological education.8 That there’s a pipeline for and surplus of educators, liturgists, and religious professionals, and that they need a denominational hub to find and get jobs.9 That religious identity is transmitted generationally and that beliefs are inherited.10 That age-segregated classroom-style education models work well for spiritual formation.11 That institutional mediation and leadership is essential in religious landscapes.12 That it is desirable for authority to be held by a few on behalf of the whole.13

Of course, some of these assumptions are still sometimes true in some places, and of course, some communities defend against change as a matter of theological principle. But almost every one of these assumptions is severely challenged in the religious marketplace of younger generations. Sociology scholars write that the hallmark attribute of infrastructure is that it only “becomes visible upon breakdown.”14 Infrastructure is very visible right now.

There seems to be a death spiral going on in many religious communities, where declining membership reduces available resources, diminishing resources can no longer serve the needs of members, and local groups weaken and collapse, thus further reducing resources.15 Political schisms, abuse scandals, and changes in how people access information and experiences all contribute. So does the growing mistrust in institutions, suspicion of authority, aging local congregations, time-bound services and “in real life” meetings, static messaging, and long-format everything—all of which fail to attract and even repel youngers. While there is much anxious studying and speculation about why membership in religious communities is collapsing, in a way the causes don’t matter. We don’t have to share the same diagnosis of the causes to observe the unmistakable results.

We are accustomed to thinking about infrastructure as enabling flow and connection, but the primary reason religious infrastructure is failing is because it impedes the nimble dissemination of wisdom in formats that younger generations receive and share every other kind of information. The old, timeworn responses to this reality—that religion is countercultural by design, and that forcing people to engage in the old ways is good for them—don’t work that well anymore. This isn’t about youth group leaders learning to use social media. It’s about wholesale disruption in how people engage other people.

Many have written about the propensity of younger generations to “unbundle and remix” the jobs of traditional religious organizations. Instead of looking to their local synagogue, Millennials and GenZers tend to assemble strategies like apps on their cell phone home screen, one function at a time.16 They get encouragement to meet their goals from their YMCA, teaching from Headspace, connect with friends on Discord, and experience transcendence in nature. People are doing old things in new ways.

There’s a concept from landscape architecture that might help us understand what’s going on. “Desire paths” are unplanned trails that are trampled as people navigate routes between where they are and where they want to go. These are often the shortest or easiest routes, even in the presence of other, deliberately planned paths that have been laid out by official path-makers. Even when these new routes wreak havoc, they can teach planners where people want to go and how they want to get there. The makers of official paths can complain all they want about the unauthorized routes, but they can’t deny that’s where the trampled dirt is.

Seeking people are trampling a lot of dirt these days.

There is no evidence that people’s fundamental soul needs have changed. If anything, collective awareness about the importance of belonging, mental health, and connection to deeper meaning is growing, and the democratization of access has hugely expanded available spiritual and religious content. It turns out folks still want to visit landscapes of religious and spiritual wisdom. They simply aren’t following the old paths.

We need only look to yoga, meditation, and psychedelics to see how ancient religious practices are thriving beyond traditional religious communities. TikTok is replete with creators who teach about “manifesting.” Instagram meditation teachers have hundreds of thousands of followers. Headspace and Calm each have valuations of more than two billion dollars. Spiritual innovators are creating new efforts to meet very old needs.

The problem is, none of the old infrastructure jobs are getting done. There’s almost no one to form new leaders, help innovators access health care, subsidize services in struggling areas, commission art, authorize leaders and hold them to account, uplift the wisdom of elders, or develop new physical spaces for new purposes. The community of communities—denominations and organizations—used to hold this center and provide these services, but there is no center in this new world. People still need water, electricity, and recycling, but the utilities are working with legacy systems. The infrastructure has broken down.

APPS LIKE HEADSPACE and Calm may be thriving, but spiritual innovators trying to operate outside capitalist markets struggle to survive. Of the hundreds of spiritual innovations that have arisen in the United States in the last 10 years, only a small handful have survived beyond 5 years, partly because there is so little infrastructure to support them.17 There’s virtually no training, no mentors, few examples of success, and almost no peers. There’s no incubation and acceleration pipeline, virtually no access to spiritual formation, little writing about the field, and no comprehensive systems to identify promising people and ideas.

Basically, innovators have a choice either to enter theological education, graduate business education, or commercial markets, each of which may require shearing off vital strategic or vocational elements. For-profit sectors enjoy a mature and dynamic ecosystem to cultivate up-and-coming entrepreneurs, much of which is funded by investors looking for disruptive ideas that will return 100x on their initial investment. Social innovation tends to be well supported within academic institutions but not beyond.

Even in the rare instances where individual leaders overcome these challenges and create something promising in the real world, there are few sustainable business models. Spiritual innovators face a tough choice. They can market themselves as entrepreneurs in for-profit sectors and hope that well-meaning venture capital will support them. Or they can create nonprofits and hope to be supported philanthropically. Or they can go the coaching/consulting route and hope to generate enough income to keep themselves afloat by selling their time to solve recognizable personal or business problems.

If this sounds grim, it is. The few cases of genuine spiritual or religious innovations surviving at any kind of scale over the long term tend to do so because they are generously supported by the dominant foundations within their tradition.

There are few shared docking stages in the religious world. And there’s virtually no money. The world of religious funding is siloed by tradition; almost no one is willing to fund innovations beyond their own tradition. Meanwhile, nonreligious funders hoping to avoid political fault lines remain cautious about supporting even vaguely spiritual efforts even as they embrace other well-being strategies. And individual consumers expect social interactions to be free and tend not to understand the value of spiritual support.

Unlike many traditional religious communities, consumer markets are generally not designed to offer services free of charge. They are definitely not designed to provide social service safety nets, a traditional function of religious communities that even the federal government relies on. An estimated 40 percent of social services in U.S. cities are provided by faith-based organizations.18 The volunteers upon which many of these organizations rely are aging out, and their denominations are withering.19 What happens when the infrastructure behind those services collapses? People are literally dying from despair and loneliness,20 but there is no market for the care and community formation that could help remedy this.

Six years ago, Sacred Design Lab gathered more than a hundred innovators within, beyond, and on the edge of traditional religious communities.21 About a third were active within their tradition through ordination or lay leadership, a third were active as children and youth but left the tradition behind in young adulthood, and a third were unaffiliated. They ran maker spaces, led grief groups, offered Bible study at brewpubs and fitness studios, hosted sober raves, sang sacred songs, and convened small groups to reflect on beloved texts. They fostered social connection, hosted meals, sought meaning, connected intergenerationally, offered rites of passage, and helped people grow strong in spirit. In short, they did “religious” things.

But most didn’t know it. Many wept when we told them there was a name for what they were doing and that it was called spiritual leadership. Most literally had no idea that there are hundreds of years of human wisdom about building and supporting meaning-oriented communities. Or that this wisdom is their birthright too.

Denominational websites are chock full of content about everything from running small groups to dealing with crises among members to setting professional boundaries. There are elders from every religious tradition who have entire careers of experience to share, and there’s a staggering range of professional literature on meaning making. There are a thousand strategies for opening and closing gatherings and reflecting on texts in groups. In short, there’s wisdom awaiting translation into new languages, but there is no distribution system to deliver that wisdom to these spiritual innovators. There is no infrastructure to deliver those resources to our bruised and hurting world.

THERE MAY BE LIBERATION underneath this breakdown. The old docking stations are broken, and along with them the old protocols and specifications. We can already see signs of the breach. Secular entities like app developers are doing some of the jobs religious entities used to be good at. Chaplains are among the most engaged religious leaders; almost all work in secular settings.22 Technology has reduced barriers of entry into “religious” spaces—the API between a person’s mobile phone and YouTube might be the only threshold they cross on their way to synagogue. When billions of people can access meaning-oriented content from their homes, the line between what is “spiritual” and what is “secular” becomes thin.

Gone are the days when a queer youth in a small town had to choose between going to the local Pentecostal church or not going anywhere to live their spiritual life. An elder in Indonesia can watch livestreamed Tawaf at the Kaaba in Mecca any time of the day or night on YouTube. The primacy of physical space and presence has been broken. Video now allows asynchronous access to billions of stories, songs, and teachings. Syncing in time is no longer essential, and wisdom is no longer as trapped behind institutional walls or as controlled by gatekeepers. Access has exploded and barriers have fallen. Anyone with a phone or computer can access virtually anything, anywhere, anytime. The fundamental links of the old religious infrastructural chains have become obsolete. Desire paths are everywhere.

New technological infrastructure is agnostic about identity, time, and physical location. People of course still look for, practice, and develop all possible particularities in their seeking lives, but tech infrastructure doesn’t require people to forgo particularity to access the grid. Unlike religious infrastructure of old, tech platforms like Pinterest are trans-religious, trans-local, and trans-synchronous. They platform content from distributed networks of networks. And they are agnostic about the content being distributed.The religious infrastructure of the future will be too.

These platforms will not care what content is passing through them. Instead of being afraid of this inevitability, faithful stewards of religious assets should run toward this problem as if our collective vocational lives depend on it. Because they do.

We need to stop being paralyzed by the existential threat and start taking our faith seriously enough to believe it will survive in the wild.

Yes, there are a million hard questions to address. Polity will need to adjust. Theology will be in play. Authority will be questioned. But religious people thrive on these questions and always have, no matter how painful the process can sometimes be. We need to stop being paralyzed by the existential threat and start taking our faith seriously enough to believe it will survive in the wild.

There are success stories in this wilderness, like the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), Glean Network, and Wesleyan Impact Partners.23 They’ve each deployed context-sensitive strategies that are unique to their traditions but have also managed to achieve escape velocity from many of the constraints. They use design-thinking principles to explore emerging opportunities, refresh existing commitments, and inspire funders to do new things.

The LCWR does so in part by acknowledging that the ways twentieth-century Catholic women religious organized themselves is coming to a close, and by knowing in their collective soul that they are called to usher in God’s new ways. Glean Network integrates design thinking and product innovation theory to support entrepreneurs who believe their “purpose is too powerful to be left in the past.” And Wesleyan Impact Partners has the audacity to partner in Spirit-led movements toward love, generosity, and belonging beyond United Methodism. They are delivering identifiably Wesleyan water through other people’s pipes.

Religion is the greatest distribution mechanism for meaning making in the history of the world. These stories, songs, images, relics, holidays, wisdom texts, artifacts, architectural styles, rites of passage, teachers, commandments, saints, spells, and icons have transmitted meaning since the dawn of human time. And they still can, if only we refit the old systems to carry the gifts of God to the people of God where people actually are.

Sue Phillips is on the founding team of the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology, a tech startup working to help people live more meaningful lives. After serving as a denominational executive for the Unitarian Universalist Association, she co-founded Sacred Design Lab, a nonprofit that interprets innovation to the religious world and ancient wisdom to the world of innovation. Clients and partners have included Pinterest, Google, Logitech, the Obama Foundation, and the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General.

Notes:

1. See David Mikkelson, “Are U.S. Railroad Gauges Based on Roman Chariots?,” snopes.com/fact-check, for an entertaining take on which elements of this story are true and which not so much. The bottom line: the legend “has significant elements of both truth and falsity.”

2. “Application programming interface” protocols determine how (and if) applications recognize and respond to each other.

3. Similar trends may be impacting communities outside the United States, but this analysis must be considered limited to the U.S. context.

4. “Denomination” refers to a religious group with similar beliefs, typically sharing a history, organization, and leadership: think “Episcopalian,” “Presbyterian.” Branches of Judaism in the U.S., such as Reform or Conservative, are also referred to as denominations, while in Muslim communities people often talk about “branches.” By “related organizations,” I mean associated foundations, clergy groups, camps and conference centers, training and education programs, etc.

5. Michelle Boorstein, “Does a Religious Community Need Its Own Building to Flourish?,” Washington Post, November 23, 2018.

6. Daniel A. Cox, “Generation Z and the Future of Faith in America,” Survey Center on American Life, March 24, 2022.

7. Israel Galindo, “The Times They Keep a Changing: Bivocational Ministry as the New Norm?,” Columbia Theological Seminary, May 24, 2022.

8. C. Kirk Hadaway and Penny Long Marler, “What Pastors Get Paid, and When It’s Not Enough,” The Christian Century, June 19, 2019.

9. Junno Arocho Esteves, “Vatican Statistics Show Decline in Number of Consecrated Men, Women,” Global Sisters Report, March 25, 2020.

10. Tim Keller, “Inherited Faith Is Dying, Chosen Faith Is Not,” The Gospel Coalition, thegospelcoalition.org, January 19, 2017.

11. Phyllis Moen and Kate Schaefers, “Long-Life Learning and the Age-Integration of Higher Education,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, April 12, 2021, doi.org/10.48558/57FE-BQ38.

12. Pew Research Center, “Millennials in Adulthood: Detached from Institutions, Networked with Friends,” March 7, 2014, www.pewresearch.org/social-trends.

13. Michael Lipka, “Why American ‘Nones’ Left Religion Behind,” Pew Research Center, August 24, 2016, pewrsr.ch/2bOZAJk.

14. Jorg Niewöhner, “Infrastructures of Society, Anthropology of,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright (2d. ed., Elsevier, 2015), 12:119–25, doi/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12201-9.

15. Jonathan M. Pitts, “Churches Merge, Close,” Baltimore Sun, October 10, 2017.

16. See Sacred Design Lab’s reports and writings at sacred.design/insights, including How We Gather, Design for the Human Soul, A Call to Connection, and Care of Souls.

17. Based on How We Gather and then Sacred Design Lab’s experience working with spiritual innovators in the United States since 2014.

18. Jeri Eckart Queenan, Peter Grunert, and Devin Murphy, “Elevating the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sector,” Bridgespan Group, January 28, 2021, bridgespan.org.

19. Bob Smietana, “Faith Groups Are Vital to the Social Safety Net. But Volunteers They Rely on Are Aging and Their Denominations Are Shrinking,” Washington Post, November 20, 2020.

20. Elisabet Beseran et al., “Deaths of Despair: A Scoping Review on the Social Determinants of Drug Overdose, Alcohol-Related Liver Disease and Suicide,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19, no. 19 (2022), doi/10.3390/ijerph191912395.

21. For more detail, see December Gathering, Sacred Design Lab, sacred.design.

22. Lydia Saad, “One in Four Americans Have Been Served by Chaplains,” Gallup Blog, December 14, 2022, news.gallop.com.

23. For more, see: lcwr.org; gleannetwork.org; and wesleyanimpactpartners.org.

In Case You Missed It…

Here is the video of our book launch conversation with authors Rev. Kathi McShane and Rabbi Elan Babchuck. Their book, Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire, challenges us to think about a theologically based, shared approach to leadership rather than the pervasive hierarchical model.

Questions to ponder:

• What is broken about the way things are in your context?

• How can you listen more and talk less?

• Do the patterns of your leadership make room for everyone to contribute and grow?

If you are part of an innovative group whose work is inspired by religious or spiritual traditions to create social change, or have been active in the past, please complete this 10-minute survey.

For any questions about the research or your participation in the study, please contact Research Specialist Hannah Petersen at hpetersen@brandeis.edu.

The American religious landscape is in the midst of tectonic shifts: the fastest growing religious group in America is “nones” (those who identify as having no religion), nearly 2,000 faith leaders in America are leaving the pulpit each month, and thousands of houses of worship have closed each year for the past decade.

Despite these trends, there is an emergent groundswell of next-generation entrepreneurial spiritual leaders, with bold and innovative projects, communities, and ventures taking root across the country, categorically redefining the role and experience of faith and spirituality in public life.

In this context, “Spiritual Entrepreneurship” refers to a set of actors at the forefront of faith and social innovation. Spiritual Entrepreneurs creatively bring the assets of their spiritual and cultural traditions to bear, pursuing new models of faith and hope in action, generating broad-scale social and spiritual impact. Spiritual Entrepreneurs may include leaders across clergy, lay-leadership, higher education, the non-profit, social impact, and social innovation sectors, and even volunteers among grassroots organizations and local activism.

By convening Spiritual Entrepreneurs, investing in their leadership, and unearthing new insights about the impact they are generating in their communities, we can harness and amplify these efforts, yielding even greater solutions, fostering deeper coordination among them, responding to the complex challenges of human flourishing with greater strength and resilience.

In acknowledgment of these trends and to lay the groundwork for a new generation of spiritual leaders, this project makes three interventions with the guidance of an Advisory Group:

The project aims to launch three strategic interventions:

1. Conducting a national field study.

This includes comprehensive research and mapping to understand the presence and collective impact of spiritual innovation in local communities and economies as driven by the following. To date, these innovations are mostly taking place disconnected from one another without the ability to leverage their strengths and expand their collective impact:

• Congregation-supported, mission-aligned social impact ventures

• Faith-rooted-leader-founded social impact ventures

• Training and funding offerings uniquely tailored to support spiritual entrepreneurs

2. Hosting regional convenings.

We will offer a series of three to four regional gatherings exploring the successes and challenges of spiritual innovators in a collaborative, values-driven, generative space of learning, practice and connections.

3. Launching a network of networks.

We will identifying key actors in the field, deepening understanding of our respective interventions and building the networks to engage in coordinated efforts and greater collective impact.

Learn more about Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

A project by Rabbi Elan Babchuck and Dr. Wendy Cadge

June 2023-July 2024

Listen in as co-authors of Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire, Rabbi Elan Babchuck, and Texas Methodist Foundation's Director of Leadership and Innovation, Rev. Kathleen McShane, speak on Igniting Imagination, a podcast presented by Wesleyan Impact Partners.

Rev. Kathi McShane, a retired United Methodist pastor, and Rabbi Elan Babchuck, a millennial, experienced an immediate connection when they met, a spiritual connection that made them fast friends from the beginning. In this episode, they share how their friendship naturally manifested in Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire. They discuss the vision of the book, moving away from the pyramid model of leadership where power is centered around one person or a group of people and towards a shared power where every person can stretch toward the fullness of their God-given gifts, regardless of where they land on an organizational chart. Their vision of leadership, born of their friendship, shows how holy friendship truly benefits not only those in the friendship but blesses the whole world.

About the Authors

Rev. Kathleen McShane is the director of Leadership and Innovation for Texas Methodist Foundation and Wesleyan Impact Partners. She retired from active ministry as an ordained Elder in the California-Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church in 2022. She led four congregations and served eight years as the vice president for Institutional Advancement at the Pacific School of Religion. Before attending seminary, she was a civil litigator, practicing law in the San Francisco Bay Area. She co-founded the Changemaker Initiative, a small national movement of churches committed to empowering lay people to become compassion-driven changemakers like Jesus.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck is the executive vice president at Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and the founding executive director of Glean Network, which partners with Columbia Business School. He is a sought-after thought leader, having delivered keynotes at stages ranging from TEDx to the US Army’s General Officer Convocation, published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Religion News Service, has a column for The Wisdom Daily, and he contributed to Meaning Making – 8 Values That Drive America’s Newest Generations (2020, St. Mary’s Press). He also serves as a founding partner of Starts With Us, a movement to counteract toxic polarization in America, and a founding research advisory board member of Springtide Research Institute, which focuses on spirituality, mental health, and Gen Z.

Rev. Kathleen McShane and Rabbi Elan Babchuck co-authored Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire (Fortress Press, to be published January 2024). The book offers a provocation to religious leaders to exercise institutional power more generously. It speaks to leaders ready to shift from organizational patterns that demand over-functioning and instead share power so that power multiplies.

Listen to the practices

About Ritual App

Ritual co-founder Matt Bloom, Ph.D, had a relatable experience of professional burnout in his early career as a consultant. His happiness had dwindled, his motivation was low, and his purpose was nowhere to be found. Determined to heal, Matt devoted himself to studying wellbeing, to finding out what human beings need in order to thrive.

Ritual offers an oasis of audio experiences to strengthen your wellbeing and nourish your spirit.

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Apply today. Join us for this 11-week spiritual entrepreneurship journey, learn, and launch with others in a generative and supportive container designed to move you from idea to impact.

Where do I Start? by Rev. YaNi Davis, START Cohort 04, Founder of My SupaNatural Life

So often, as people, we get stuck. Stuck in our thoughts, stuck in the process, stuck before we even get started. This is not a new phenomenon, In fact, stuckness has plagued the human condition for eons. Someone got stuck and invented the wheel, someone’s hand got stuck and…thus, the printing press. Someone couldn’t quite get a complete idea together… hence AI.

Okay, the AI example may be a little extreme, but all of these advancements speak to the power of forward movement and creating something out of nothing.

Often as people of faith, we wait for the exact moment when it’s revealed we should move forward. Sometimes we get stuck in cycles and loops of waiting and not activating that vision/dream that we’ve been given. We are waiting for the God of our understanding to say "GO," or we sit and wait for the most perfect sign to drop out of the sky.

Take a moment to assess how long you have been stuck with a powerful idea you know could change the world or at least the lives of some people in your community. How long have you been thinking a project might have the potential to make a major impact on a heart you know is in need of your work in the world? How long have you been dreaming up a plan of execution that has not gotten its due expression in this lifetime?

Stuck isn’t a bad thing…perhaps it means you are truly ready for what’s next!

Here’s where the START program comes in as a vehicle to get you from dreaming to living out your power and potential in the world. This course gives you the tools to envision, strategize and then embark upon the idea that has been stuck in your consciousness and heart for far too long. You bring the innovation-we provide proven step-by-step methods to amplify the work of leaders like you.

For our purposes, I truly appreciate this definition of innovation.

in·no·va·tion

/ˌinəˈvāSH(ə)n/

a new method, idea, product, etc.

We are ready for you to bring your new method, idea, product, or service to the START self-paced program starting NOW or join the cohort in a few months!

What you can expect:

1. To actually START moving on that idea, project, or business

2. To experience lessons and receive guidance from instructors out Columbia business school, entrepreneurs making moves in their industries, and also learn from faith-rooted leaders that have completed the program

3. A space to bring your authentic self and give every aspect of your identity room to shine through your venture

4. A reminder that you are the expert, and with some business knowledge to back you up-you can create anew every time the Spirit hits you

5. Tools for your entrepreneurial journey that will last a lifetime

This is not an ad soliciting just anyone to come join the program. This is encouragement from a spiritual entrepreneur who was stuck in 2019 but the START program was the vehicle necessary to take my love for the disabled community out into the world.

If you are sitting with a vision but know you need a strategy to see your work manifest, it's time to schedule a call to see if this might be the best way to get unstuck and simply START!

Glean Network's START is an MBA-level program that develops your skills as a Spiritual Entrepreneur and prepares you to imagine, design and launch a spiritual enterprise. Learn More.

Ask any successful entrepreneur to tell you a story about their beginnings; they will indeed have some insights to offer about the hardship and reward of getting started. It takes courage, determination, confidence, and faithfulness to make the first move, and many will fail on their first try.

The good news is that entrepreneurship is an act of learning by doing, step-by-step. Once you have taken that first step, the second and third become far less daunting, and the momentum will build. There will be times when you're forced to make a pivot and adjust your plan, but you are still in motion, learning along the way, unearthing invaluable discoveries, and making wise responses at each turn.

Identifying & Following Your North Star

In any creative endeavor where your intention is to build or make something that's never existed before, you will need to have a plan. Where will you begin? What direction will you take? What tools and companions will assist you along the way? At what point will you know you're moving at too high or low of a velocity and pace? Your entrepreneurship journey needs a guiding north star and accompanying coordinates in order for you to feel like you're on the right track.

Harnessing the Essential Skills and Tools You may think you need all the bells and whistles of a business degree or the technical background to pull off an entrepreneurial endeavor. Still, most successful entrepreneurs will tell you that resourcefulness and some essential tools helped them get their first start. By harnessing your essentials, you're inviting collaborators, specialists, and people with even more diverse experiences to join you on the journey. Entrepreneurship requires you to be open to learning like a beginner vs. an expert at everything.

Are you ready to get started on your vision? Learn about the ten proven and essential modules introduced in START, our MBA-level entrepreneurship course for faith-rooted leaders.

This article was originally published by the Boston Globe on July 28, 2023,

by Elan Babchuck and Wendy Cadge

Image: In May, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared loneliness an American epidemic. “Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows," he said, “and that’s not right.”JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

From small towns to big cities and everywhere in between, an epidemic of loneliness and isolation is sweeping across the United States. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy named this epidemic in his recent Advisory Report, which calls on groups across the country to come together to reweave the torn social fabric of America. Surprisingly, though, religion — which at one time served as the tie that bound our disparate communities together — appears just once in the 80-page report. And that one mention is part of a list of divisive topics that cause polarization between individuals and communities.

No longer the salve, faith is now the suspect.

Since Alexis de Tocqueville first expressed wonderment, in his 1835 book “Democracy in America,” at the centrality of church life in early American culture, religion has served as one of the chambers of America’s beating heart. The French historian could clearly see how religion contributed to America’s thriving economy, rich culture, and political life.

His words have continued to ring true, especially in times of national tragedy and generational transitions. Unfortunately, the surgeon general’s report fails to note the many times that religion has been a key asset in addressing national health challenges, taking instead a mostly deficit-based approach to religion’s role in the loneliness crisis. Yes, he does invite religious groups to play a part, but he sees their role as no more powerful than that of fitness centers.

Yet in the last two decades we have seen two profoundly important examples of faith networks leading national efforts to address significant health crises.

As the national director of National Baptist Convention’s HOPE Health Initiative, the Rev. Michael Minor mobilizes 31,000 churches around the country to take health- and wellness-related action for their communities and neighborhoods. Known lovingly as “the Southern pastor who banned fried chicken in his church,” Minor has a long history of using the power of the pulpit to address the crises he saw unfolding — whether diabetes, obesity, or lack of access to health care. He created a “No Fry Zone” in his church, set up a walking track around its perimeter, and used his local church network in Mississippi to be a major driver for Affordable Care Act enrollment.

And more recently, faith communities were vital in getting COVID-19 vaccinations into the arms of their parishioners and neighbors, many of whom were vaccine-hesitant or had barriers to access. The Rev. Rubén Ortiz, National Director of Esperanza, a faith-based nonprofit that works with Hispanic communities through education, economic development, and advocacy, was one of a number of outspoken faith leaders in Philadelphia who worked tirelessly to address the vaccine equity and access gaps in communities of color. Thanks to the All Faiths Vaccination Campaign and its 60 participating faith organizations, thousands of individuals around Philadelphia received the life-saving vaccine.

Religion can play a critical role in alleviating the loneliness epidemic. All that is required is that national leaders and faith communities reframe their thinking.

Our political leaders need to take stock of the assets that our nation’s faith communities offer. From new organizations that operate outside houses of worship to well established institutions, faith communities are composed of thick, trusting networks of purpose-driven people, eager to volunteer their time and talent. Many of them also come with large, welcoming buildings ready to house programs that allow neighbors to gather to combat isolation. Let them bring these resources to bear!

Faith communities can answer by opening their eyes, ears, hearts and doors. There is not one village, town, or city where people aren’t suffering from loneliness; while some of them regularly attend services, the majority do not. Look for them. Engage them. Serve them. Point your community’s greatest resources — its people and the care in their hearts — to your community’s greatest needs, and witness how healing happens. Don’t wait for them to come to you.

We are in the midst of interwoven epidemics, and the surgeon general is right to call our attention to loneliness in particular. His recommendations are sound and sorely needed; but we would miss the opportunity to save countless more lives if we ignore the faith communities that have been on the front lines of national health crises for generations.

While this epidemic of loneliness is unprecedented, our approach to solving it doesn’t have to be.

By Elan Babchuck and Wendy Cadge

Rabbi Elan Babchuck serves as the executive vice president of Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, and founding director of the Glean Network for faith leaders. He is the coauthor of the forthcoming book “Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership after Empire.”

Wendy Cadge is professor of the humanistic social sciences and dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at Brandeis University. She is also a founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.