I do not believe these categories are equal. And I do not believe one is simply better than the other. But I do believe the tension is real. And I write this as someone who benefits and struggles with institution.

What Institution Affords

One of the gifts of this cohort has been watching colleagues leverage institutional power for good. We’ve watched some navigate denominational structures and build digital tools that extend beauty and belonging beyond the walls of the institution. We’ve watched others use institutional authority and power to protect space for experimentation in tech that serves real people. We’ve seen our friend’s life and work push institution forward again and again.

Institution affords stability. It affords distribution. It affords legitimacy. It can amplify work in ways that autonomy alone cannot. And Sue Phillips is right that denominations have functioned as the “utilities” of religious life. Without it, things break down.

And yet.

Many of us have shared the pressures that come with tethering. The pressure to institutionalize what might need to remain experimental. The frustration of asking creative questions and receiving procedural answers. The ache of wanting understanding and getting policy.

Institution stabilizes. It also standardizes. And sometimes the gauge is set by assumptions that no longer fit the world we inhabit. That dynamic has been in the room from the beginning. We have seen some stay faithful to his message and mission, staying within the institution despite transcending it in his work. Others have been pulled back and forth from institution to untethered and chosen fidelity to the work regardless of institution status. We have seen the brilliance of those who have built congregations tethered to institution in the least institutional way possible.

What Untethered Affords

Autonomy carries its own gifts. Freedom to experiment without climbing a ladder. Freedom to speak honestly without worrying about who might be listening. Freedom to pivot quickly.

I have tasted that freedom that I do not have to run ideas up a chain of command before speaking them into the world. Untethered space can create velocity. It can create imagination. It can create space for courage.

But autonomy has a cost. The hustle. The grind. The instability. Some have wrestle with that reality. No guaranteed salary. No health insurance pipeline. No built-in distribution channel. No inherited infrastructure. Sue Phillips writes about what happens when infrastructure collapses — innovators are left without docking stations, without support systems. Untethered creativity is exhilarating. It is also exhausting.

This has not been a cohort of institutional loyalists or institutional rebels. It has been a cohort of people asking: Where does the soul breathe? Sometimes the answer is inside denominational infrastructure. Sometimes the answer is in digital spaces built without permission. Sometimes the answer is in the hallway between them.

If the old infrastructure is cracking, as Phillips suggests, then perhaps what we are practicing is not escape. Perhaps we are practicing translation. Learning how to deliver ancient water through new pipes. And learning how to rest when either pipe begins to constrict the flow.

Not to abandon institution. Not to romanticize autonomy. But to remember that both need work.

Howard Thurman and the Escalator

I first had a deeper version of this conversation with one of our fellows before we went to Boston. They debated whether to write on this for their Substack project post but ultimately decided not to. They named what I had been feeling and some of the conversations I had on our trips after the first drink had settled into our systems.

Then we went to the Howard Thurman Center.

Standing in that space, I thought about Thurman’s life inside of institution. He worked within structures. He used the technologies of his day of radio, public lectures, university platforms to extend soul beyond institutional walls.

And I thought about the stories of him leaving the grind of institutional life after a day at work, changing his clothes to let his nervous system reset, and going to the mall of all places to watch people on the escalator as a space for renewal.

Institution by day. Soul restoration by choice. Thurman understood both, engaged both, and was called to both. Not all of us have that calling but so many of us can relate to his cycle of engaging institution, escaping, only to reengage.

In so many ways that feels like the metaphor of my Phygital Fellows experience. It has been a privilege to change my clothes by getting on an airplane to come see the group. I often needed the flight to let my nervous system rest. Then, getting to be together watching one another go up and down the escalators of our lives, digital ministries, institution, non-institutions, and work.

Back to the institution. Back to the algorithm. Back to the grind.

But not the same.

Because the question was never whether we would choose institution or autonomy. The question was whether we would remember how to tend our souls, our calling, and the people whose souls we serve - inside either one.

And this cohort has helped me do that.

The medium gives rise to the creativity.

That may sound backward. Most of us were formed to believe that creativity comes first and the medium is secondary. That technology is neutral. Those tools are simply tools. But that has not been our experience.

Each of the Fellows came into this cohort deeply rooted in ancient wisdom. Most of us through the Christian tradition. Many of us are in the Wesleyan ecosystem. None of us arrived untethered from history. We were already formed. We were already shaped by spiritual communities. And if we are honest, many of us were also wounded by them.

We have lived inside institutions that are waning. We have watched resources poured into maintaining structures that no longer generate life. We have felt the exhaustion of systems in decline that refuse to release themselves for the sake of rebirth. We did not come to digital ministry because we rejected tradition. We came because we love something deep within it that can feel like it gets lost in the forms of the past. And because we could not imagine letting it die quietly inside structures that could not adapt.

What I have seen in this cohort is that digital tools did not replace ancient wisdom. They created space for it. When we are forced to rethink the entire architecture of our church and digital ministry becomes the way forward, that is not abandonment of tradition. It is the heart behind tradition being allowed to breathe differently. When we build new platforms as new infrastructures for communities to stay connected across forces trying to fragment us, technology becomes the condition that allows movement. When we experiment with AI, the question is not whether tradition matters. The question is how tradition speaks in a new register.

The medium creates the creativity.

Digital space does something physical structures cannot always do. It loosens inherited constraints. It interrupts default assumptions. It exposes where we have confused form with faithfulness. You can remain rooted in ancient wisdom. You can remain deeply formed by spiritual community. You can grieve the decline of traditional institutions.

And you can still stand at the edge of what might be possible. Starting with digital tools does not mean starting without theology. It means starting with possibility. And in that possibility, creativity emerges.

Not because we abandoned the past. But because the medium gave us room to imagine again.

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Ultimately, I didn’t leave because I stopped believing in the Church. I left because I still did. I believed the Church could be and do better.

There’s no denying the deep faith and belonging that can be found in a traditional, staff-led, programmatic church. However, it’s become increasingly clear that this model is working for fewer and fewer people, especially among rising generations.

From the outside, our church appeared to be one of the “successful” ones. But in the years leading up to my departure, I became more and more aware of the downsides and compromises built into the system:

• Our church was growing, but mostly through “transfer growth”—people who were already pre-churched or coming from other churches. The reality was that the vast majority of the neighbors we were trying to “reach” were never going to walk through our doors.

• Our staff were overfunctioning and overburdened with the constant demand for more production and programming, while most attendees remained passive consumers. Were we truly making disciples, or just creating dependency?

• Despite a large budget, staff, and multiple properties, we were making little impact in matters of justice or equity in our surrounding community. Most of our time, energy, and resources went to inward-facing programs.

• On a personal level, I experienced firsthand the harmful impacts of unhealthy power dynamics that are all too common in fixed hierarchical systems.

Moreover, I began to see that these issues were all deeply interconnected. You couldn’t address one without having to reckon with other features of the system as well. The donor, membership-based business model of the church drove the need for more people, which drove the need for more attractional programs, which required more paid staff, which required more programming and content to justify those positions—which then required more and more people to sustain it all, and so on and so forth.

If, as the saying goes, “every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets,” I had to ask myself: What was this system truly designed for?

I’d already spent years trying to change the system from within. Perhaps it was time to step outside and create something new. I made the difficult decision to step down but had no idea what to do next. I only knew I couldn’t return to business as usual, and had no desire to replicate the same patterns and structures I had just left behind. So I went back to the drawing board and began asking basic questions like, “What is church?” and “What is it for?” And it was in the midst of these questions that I discovered a need, a calling—a sacred opportunity—to reimagine things from the ground up. As a result, I founded New Wine Collective, a church innovation think tank and R&D lab.

Since then, I’ve been a student of innovation and systemic change. I’ve been learning, questioning, and discovering that there’s so much more to what God is doing than what we see inside institutional structures. I see the Spirit showing up in decentralized, grassroots communities centered around love, justice, and inclusion. I see people practicing mutuality, sharing power, and building community in new and creative ways.

I didn’t leave my position because I gave up on the Church. I left because I believed the Church could be and do better. And it turns out, I’m not alone out here. These days, my spiritual imagination is being shaped by mystics, activists, systems thinkers, and other spiritual innovators like my friends and colleagues in the Phygital Fellows. Together, we’re exploring the intersections of emerging technologies, culture, and spiritual formation, and discerning what it means to show up faithfully in these new spaces.

The new wine of the Spirit is already here. We just need new wineskins—fresh approaches, bold experiments, and collaborative innovations—that can help guide the Church and the world into a more loving, just, and equitable future for all. This is the Church I still believe in, now more than ever.

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Reposted from July 17, 2025

~ Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, founder and CEO of West Co.

What made you want to be a journalist?

That was the question many used to ask me. (These days, it’s “What made you decide to become a pastor?” People ask me that, like it was solely my idea. I respond, “It was God’s, so direct the questions there! But I digress.)

My answer to becoming a journalist was simple: I wanted to tell positive, noteworthy stories about Black people. Stories that centered our perspective and our lives.

I grew up in the days of Connie Chung and Carole Simpson, then, two of the most recognizable female minorities in media. Connie Chung was the first Asian American to host a network nightly news broadcast and Carole Simpson was the first African American woman to anchor on a major network news channel. She was also the first Black woman to moderate a U.S. presidential debate.

I wanted to be like them.

They’re the reason I majored in broadcast journalism.

Back then, we did not know the phrase, “Representation matters,” but its spirit echoed throughout the rooms in my house where I watched television. And let me tell you, I watched TV a lot. Still do, although not as much news. Seeing these women report stories and bring a perspective we didn’t see often with white journalists, mattered. Seeing them assume positions and take up spaces that were, at the time, relegated to “white men only,” mattered.

I was tired of seeing stories about “black criminality” or images that presented them as the only witness to a scene they could find, who hadn’t shaved in months, had a few teeth in his/her mouth and hair that had not seen a comb or brush in days.

I was disappointed that any academic success of a young Black student – whether it be one winning a spelling bee or earning acceptance into an Ivy League institution -- was an anomaly.

I was frustrated by the absence of diverse stories, which I attributed to a lack of diversity among television producers.

Black people were invisible – our glories and triumphs, and most definitely our pain.

Our stories and our lives did not seem to matter.

Our Story Matters

The truth is that narratives shape the identity of communities. I mean this is what the late George Gerbner, a communications professor meant when he pioneered the “cultivation theory.” It’s the thought that media exposure “cultivates” or shapes our worldview. He was the guy who said, “You know, who tells the story of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it’s a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.”

He puts in perspective what I heard Evan Sharp, the co-founder of Pinterest and now the founder and CEO of West Co., say, that “storytelling has always been a technology.”

The way we craft and tell stories can change and shape things. Storytelling has the power to preserve cultures, inspire movements, challenge perceptions, foster empathy, and ultimately, redefine our understanding of the world and our place within it.

On the bookcase in our campus ministry gathering house, is a decorative wall hanging that simply reads, “Your story Matters.” A former church member gave it to me at my first church appointment. When I got it, I kept repeating, “Yes! Yes! Our stories matter.”

It made me think of a dedication message to the Rev. Dr. Nancy Lane that I read in one of my novels. She said, “Telling our stories is a holy work.”

And for those of us whose voices have been historically silenced, dismissed, or disregarded, the telling becomes an act of courageous defiance and healing at the same time – not only for the teller, but those of us who bear witness.

The art piece on our bookshelf sits between N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian and our student bibles because we live and work at these intersections – of our own story and those of our belief systems and faith. Sacred texts and personal experience shape who we are. They ground us in a world that is beautifully complex, often chaotic, and constantly inviting us to discover meaning and connection.

Making Room for Grief

On July 25, 2024, chaos erupted in my world. My mother, who had never been seriously ill, (she had no hospitalization footprint), unexpectedly died, abruptly adding a profound and personal dimension to that chaos. I am an only child and in losing my mother, I lost my anchor. All that tethered me to this world. Let me just say none of my pastoral training kicked in. I had walked with so many others through their loss, but struggle – even now -- to walk through my own. I have had trouble “processing” her death.

One college homecoming weekend, several of my classmates and sorority sisters gathered me and told me their stories of losing their mothers. They offered wisdom about navigating grief: Own all your feelings. Cry when you want. And talk about your mother as much as you want. I did all those things. It was cathartic.

Shared experiences connect us.

As I left to return home, it hit me: I wouldn’t have that kind of support. I needed processing partners, a support group, and a space that welcomed my grief. Seldom do Black people, especially Black women, have the room or feel they possess the agency to grieve as they ought. This has fueled the creation of a podcast.

Grief, change and transition demand sacred space – a curated harbor for the ancient technology of storytelling, because in the face of such sudden loss, like the unexpected death of my mom, the intersections of story, faith and community become not just points of understanding, but vital anchors.

At my core, I am a storyteller. A story collector. A harbor. And I believe technology—whether in the form of podcasts, livestreams, or digital sanctuaries—can extend those harbors. These are places where people do not have to worry about somebody policing their thoughts, words, or language. Places where grief and pain can be named, and in the naming, we find each other.

Finding Our Way Home

There is a story the late theologian Howard Thurman tells. He is picking berries in Florida when lightning starts to flash. For a moment he loses his bearings and cannot figure out where he is. Then, he remembers the words of his grandmother: “Do not panic. Stand still.”

So, he does. The lightning flashes in front, behind, and on both sides of him. Each flash, he recalls, lit the way just enough to remind him where he was.

Sometimes the storm is what helps us find our way home.

That is my hope: that the stories about our storms—stories of grief, resilience, and community—will help us all find our way home. Maybe even a new way.

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This is reposed from September 11, 2025

Phygital Fellow’s Substack

Storytelling as Technology: Crafting Community in Times of Loss

"Storytelling has always been a technology…

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8 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Phygital Fellows and Juana Jordan

How do I become a healthy pastor?

Have you ever met a clergyperson who is overworked, overstressed, and overeating, overfunctioning while struggling with their marriage and their finances? A pastor whose ministry is informed more so by anxiety, ambition, or anger, as opposed to a sustained quiet joyful union with God?

Recent Barna studies will show you most likely have.

Allow me to testify.

Not only did I fit the unexaggerated characterization above, most of my clergy colleagues did as well.

So I sought counsel.

I met with a mentor of mine — one of these published author types in the latter years of life. We had a Conference-paid coaching session coming up.

After an hour-long discourse on vision casting, managing millennial staff and volunteers, and crafting a narrative sermon arc, I got to the real question burning in my soul.

“Dave, I think I can do all this. Please send the invoice to our administrator. But, I have a much more urgent question now: how do I become a pastor who is healthy… and you know… happy?”

He smiled.

Took another sip of coffee.

Looked slowly into my soul, and said with a disarming simplicity,

“Mike. That’s easy. You already know this. To be happy, you sleep 8 hours a day, exercise, eat well, pray, and spend quality time with the people you love.”

Well, damn.

The present system by which I was serving the church was the very thing keeping me from my family, my God, and my own well being.

Also, this was the early 2020s.

And I wasn’t keeping up with inflation.

So I set out to solve for three things:

Financial Health.

Mental Health.

Dignity.

I began to prayerfully and imaginatively ask:

What systems of revenue generation will allow me to not only provide for my family, but allow my preaching and teaching to be detached from a co-dependent relationship with bureaucratic hierarchical systems that subsequently affect my family’s future well-being as well as the integrity of my call? Was tentmaking an essential part of Paul’s courage and unentangled devotion to building up the church?

What weekly rhythms of life and ministry will allow me to sleep and eat well, while being fully present with my daughters and my spouse? How might prayer be both a joyful ongoing communion with Spirit, and a designated time to smile and enjoy God each day? Maybe to be still and know God is as serious a scriptural imperative as the call to make disciples.

And finally, what lifestyle will witness to my own soul that my faith and my actual life are congruent? Do I really believe in the work I am currently doing in the name of God? Do I really truly believe holding 60-minute Sunday morning worship services and seasonal midweek small groups over the next 30 years of my life will result in the cultivation of joyful enemy-loving Christians who are differentiated from the cultural logics of a bipartisan America primarily focused on geopolitical victories and capital accumulation in my given mission field of Middle to Upper Class Suburbanites?

These were dark questions. They demanded unearthing a thousand assumptions.

To answer them beyond theory and armchair theology would require significant, painful, costly changes.

But (and with apologies to the anti-melodramtic readership of this substack) my marriage and my soul were at stake.

I mean. I probably would’ve made it out with my marriage intact, and I would’ve likely appreciated a 2049 Annual Conference with an edited-down 30-second video summarizing my ministry with a humorous anecdote or two, but I knew — ineffable regret and stress-related health issues would’ve been buried deep inside my bones long before any tax-advantaged clergy pension plan would annuitize.

So I stayed with the questions. And I processed for months with my wife.

Slowly, I began to imagine new ways of being a pastor.

Not in a prescriptive manner for others, but for my own soul, for my own family, for our own sense of faithfulness to God.

Might this holy vocation, allegedly born outside man-made systems, be lived out in ways that truly nourish souls including my own?

Thus emerged my present co-vocational life. And Oikon Studios.

Oikon Studios is a living digital resource for spiritual formation. Each week, we offer a poetic liturgy, reflection, and song.

Wesleyan, contemplative, and rooted in a modified take on James Fowler’s faith development theory, Oikon is an on-ramp for seekers of God’s Presence. Given the nature of its founder, it lends itself to those who are unpacking past experiences in the church.

Some of our readers go through these liturgies with loved ones or with a group of friends. Others read them over breakfast, in line at a grocery store, or in bed. Some will share them as devotionals for church small groups. As with other Phygital Fellows who have shared, the best ministry often takes place in direct messages to the inbox.

As with all expressions of God’s Kingdom, this work is emerging. Retreats, albums, visual liturgies, and contemplative prayer guides are ahead, but the most important thing for me is this:

This ministry is not born of anxiety. It is not dependent on donors. My family’s future is detached from its perceived success.

I’ve always maintained that the measure of a pastor’s success is not worship attendance but the happiness index of their spouse.

Of course, success ultimately is hearing the Master say well done, but when the persons who know you in secret are proud of the work you are doing, and rejoice in the way you live, that is about as close a measure of integrity as you can get.

For me, leaning into a digital platform for ministry was the pathway towards my own sense of congruence as a pastor, father, and husband.

I am by no means a champion of digital ministry or innovation. But I do believe Jesus meant what he said – that his yoke is easy, and his burden is light. So perhaps the better question isn’t how do I become a healthy pastor? But Whose yoke am I carrying today?

In a world shaped by algorithms and AI, faithful presence will take many forms – online and off. For me, leaning into digital liturgies and co-vocational life brought a new kind of wholeness. Not productivity. Not prestige. Congruence.

I wonder what congruence might look like for you. Ask the darkest of questions buried in your soul. Let them disturb and delight you. May your life and ministry, in whatever shape they take, reflect the quiet joy of walking with God.

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Reposed from September 9, 2025

This comment, in 2007, was from Ray, a leader in my local church college ministry. It was the first time I began thinking about digital ministry.

Second Life is a 3D virtual world launched in 2003. Users create avatars to explore, socialize, build, and trade virtual goods. It has no set goals—just an open-ended, user-created digital society. At its peak, it attracted millions, including schools, companies, and churches. It remains a vivid early example of real people gathering in digital space. Ray was an active Second Life user. They intrinsically connected their digital life with the faith community and sense of spiritual purpose.

I remember thinking for the first time, if there are people—actual people—gathering somewhere, even in a digital space, shouldn’t we be there with the gospel and community?

Second Life—and so many other platforms—have come and gone since 2007. But looking back, what Ray was advocating for feels, at its core, deeply biblical. It reminds me of Mark 1:38 when Jesus says, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” There were people—actual people—and he was convinced that his presence and message needed to show up wherever they were.

That was the first time a digital environment really came into view for me—as something that mattered. It felt like an imperative: we needed to create meaningful space and connection in digital settings like Second Life. Even though I still don’t fully understand that platform, I know there are people who do—and who find real meaning there.

From Campus Ministry to Digital Campus Ministry

Around 2014, after we started a new campus ministry, we began to recognize that students were increasingly engaging online. They were encountering culture, people, and content in digital spaces—and those experiences were meaningful. Sometimes generative, sometimes harmful or even tragic, but undeniably real. So our campus ministry launched a blog, which eventually grew into a digital campus that sat alongside our physical ones. At first, I tried to replicate the traditional multi-campus model: take what we did at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville University, and Flagler College, and just do that online. But it quickly became clear—that approach didn’t work.

The digital space wasn’t just another campus; it needed its own focus, its own strategy, even its own team. We couldn’t treat it like a copy of our physical ministries. It was something altogether different.

There’s always talk about funding and capacity, but beneath that is a deeper question: What are we even doing? What does ministry look like in digital spaces—and how do we do it in ways that are healthy, ethical, and theologically grounded? For me, one of the most important questions is about how to maintain the soul of the preacher or practitioner while using these tools. I’ve realized, for example, that even though I used to do eight in-person back-to-back meetings with students in a day, I can’t do eight Zoom meetings. It’s just not a one-to-one exchange. The digital format asks something different of us. So we must ask: What does that mean for how we minister, how we care, how we show up? Some of these are deeply practical questions, and others are theological and ethical. But they all matter.

One of the most critical questions we have to keep asking is a social one: Who is this technology really for? Are we being honest about who it serves? I remember a previous project, with funding, where the original plan was to explore VR and AR technologies. But when I looked around at the students I was serving—mostly working-class, on scholarships, juggling jobs while attending school—it became clear that none of them were meaningfully engaging with the metaverse. They weren’t in those digital spaces; they were just trying to get through the day. So, I ended up using the funds differently because pursuing that technology just didn’t make sense for our context.

That experience reminded me that digital ministry isn’t just about what’s possible—it’s about what’s relevant to the people we’re serving. That’s why we also need space for the practical questions: What platforms do we use? What tools or equipment serve our mission? These are the questions I’m excited to explore—not just as someone helping to lead the Phygital Fellows, but as someone who’s still learning and listening along the way

The tools and technologies of all ministry

For me, the full-circle moment in this work has been realizing that all of our ministry tools—digital or otherwise—are just that: tools. They’re gifts we have stewardship over, but sometimes we baptize them too quickly, treating them as sacred in themselves rather than as means to an end. I keep going back to something our cohort learning journey facilitator, Sue Phillips, said in one of our cohort learning journeys;

“Communion is a technology”

That stuck with me. If communion is a technology, then as a campus minister, I am a kind of technologist. And so the question becomes: how do I faithfully steward the sacred tools I’ve been given today?

For instance, there are many tools to use to understand the Bible. For many, small group bible studies help them connect with the scriptures, provide a community of insight, and help them grow. But that is not true for everyone. So we have to adjust our tools for the people God calls us to serve.

Or take the church bulletin—once just a practical printed guide, but for some, it’s a tactile memory anchor, something to hold onto when the world feels chaotic. At the right moment, it’s more than paper.

Or the group text thread: in one ministry I served, that thread became a sacred space—prayer requests, check-ins, even liturgy shared in real time. It wasn’t fancy, but it was faithful.

Or the church potluck. We know it as one of our most effective tools for community building and pastoral care. People linger, and they tell the truth over potato salad. Grudges soften. New folks feel seen. It isn’t flashy, but it is eucharistic in its own way—people bringing what they have, blessing it, and making a sacred space out of ordinary food.

These are tools, and they work for certain types of people, and when they don’t work, we are technologists who find other ways to serve. Each moment calls for discernment. We aren’t just asking, “what tools do we use?, but also “what tools do we need?” And how can I, as a pastoral technologist, use these tools in the service of love, truth, justice and good news?

My friend Ray and my colleague Sue Phillips have helped me reimagine all our tools: scripture, story, theology—not as fixed artifacts, but as living technologies that can carry the gospel in different ways, in different places, for different people. The Phygital Fellowship, in addition to leading it, offers me the space to ask questions about appropriate tools for different people. This is incredibly important because I have a passion to serve the college students who will lead our churches and communities in the future.

So yes, we need to be where the people are. But just as important, we need to ask: What is the right tool to carry the gospel into that space? I’m so energized by the chance to keep asking that question. I really believe this kind of reflection can spark deeper faithfulness.

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Reposted from July 15, 2025

Phygital Fellow’s Substack

Be Where The People Are

“Derrick, we need to be blasting out this service—especially your sermons—into Second Life…

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10 months ago · 15 likes · 6 comments · Phygital Fellows and Derrick Scott III

I don’t see it that way anymore.

Part of that shift has come from paying closer attention to how people actually engage with ideas. We don’t just respond to what is being said. We respond to how it is presented to us. We notice when something is confusing or hard to follow. We feel it when something lacks intention. And we are drawn in when something feels clear, thoughtful, and carefully made. That difference is not accidental. It is the result of someone taking the time to think about the experience of the person on the other side.

I have started to realize that clarity is not just a communication goal. It is an act of care.

When something is well made, when it is easy to follow and free of unnecessary distraction, it communicates something beyond the content itself. It says that the person receiving it matters. It says that their time, their attention, and their understanding were considered in the process. That kind of care lowers the barrier to entry. It invites people in rather than making them work to stay. And for many people, that is the difference between engaging with something meaningful and moving past it entirely.

This has changed how I think about the role of creativity in the work I care about.

There are so many people doing important, meaningful work in the world. They carry insight, wisdom, and lived experience that others need to hear. But many of them are not trained in creative production. They are not videographers, editors, or designers. That is not their calling, and it shouldn’t have to be. But without those skills, their work often doesn’t travel as far as it could. Not because it lacks depth or truth, but because it’s harder to access.

That realization has helped me see creative work differently. It’s not about making something look impressive but about helping something be received. It’s about reducing friction, removing confusion, and shaping an experience that allows the core idea to come through clearly. In that sense, creativity becomes a kind of translation. It takes something meaningful and helps it move across distance, across difference, and across the many distractions that shape how we pay attention.

It also has me thinking differently about calling.

We often name certain roles as spiritual. Pastors, teachers, and leaders are easy to recognize as people who carry something meaningful into the world. But there are others who are doing that work in less visible ways to institutional religion. The person behind the camera, the one editing audio, the one shaping a story or designing a space, is also participating in how meaning is carried and received. They are helping create the conditions where something can actually reach people. That is important and meaningful work. Without it what do we have? Some people feel called to speak and lead, and there are people who feel called to make things clear. I believe that both are equally necessary.

When clarity is missing, even the most powerful ideas can be overlooked. When something is difficult to follow or engage with, people move on. Not because they don’t care, but because they cannot access what is being offered. The work of making something clear is not small or secondary. It’s a way of honoring both the message and the person receiving it. A way of saying that this matters enough to be understood.

That has reframed how I think about my own work.

I don’t feel called to be a pastor in the traditional sense. I’m not the one standing at the front delivering a message. But I do feel called to help shape how that message is experienced. I feel drawn to create something thoughtful and intentional, something that makes it easier for people to engage with what is being shared. There is a kind of care in that work, a kind of attention that focuses not just on what is being said, but on how it will be received.

In a world where people are constantly overwhelmed and distracted, that kind of care matters. It creates moments where people can slow down, where they can actually hear something, where something has the chance to reach them. It turns communication into connection.

I’m beginning to see creativity not as an extra layer, but as part of the foundation. It is one of the ways the work becomes real in someone else’s life. It’s one of the ways meaning moves.

And maybe that’s what a spiritual gift looks like in this context. Not just the ability to speak or lead, but the ability to make something clear. To shape an experience that helps others see, understand, and engage. To create something that carries meaning with care.

Something that feels worth paying attention to. Something that feels intentional. Something that, in its own way, feels like love.

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A rose window.

If you’ve ever stood inside a cathedral and looked up at one, you know the feeling. The glass is intricate, layered, full of color. Each piece on its own is interesting, maybe even beautiful. But it’s not until the light comes through that everything changes.

The colors shift. The patterns come alive. The whole space is transformed. It’s not just the window anymore. It’s what the light does through it. That’s the image I keep coming back to when I think about what we’re doing.

There are a lot of ways to describe collective work. People talk about tapestries. About weaving. About bringing voices together. And I think those metaphors are helpful, but they don’t quite get at what I’m experiencing. Because simply gathering stories isn’t enough.

You can collect voices. You can group ideas. You can put people in the same space. And still, something can feel flat. The rose window reminds me that it’s not just about what is gathered. It’s about what happens when something moves through it.

Light.

Without it, the window is just glass. With it, something new is created—something that didn’t exist before.

What I’m beginning to understand is that this work is not just about telling stories. It’s about how stories are held, shaped, and shared so that something larger can emerge. Some voices haven’t been heard. Some ideas haven’t been explored. Some people carry insight, wisdom, and lived experience that hasn’t been fully seen.

And when those voices are brought together with care. When they are listened to, respected, and thoughtfully presented, it creates the possibility for something more. Not just information, but meaning, connection, or even transformation. It’s like the light doesn’t belong to any one piece of glass. And the image doesn’t come from any one story.

It only happens together.

Media as a Kind of Sacred Space

I’ve also started to think differently about where this happens. Historically, the rose window lived in a cathedral—a clearly defined sacred space. But that’s not where most people encounter meaning today. Now it might be your phone, living room, car, or pair of headphones.

The spaces have shifted. But the need hasn’t. People are still looking for something that helps them make sense of their lives. Something that connects them to something deeper. Something that feels true.

And so the question becomes, what does it look like to create spaces, digital or physical, where that kind of illumination can happen?

Not just content to consume. But something that invites reflection. Something that holds weight. Something that feels like it was made with care.

One of the things that keeps coming up for me is respect. When someone shares their story, their perspective, their lived experience—that’s not a small thing. It carries weight. And I think people can feel the difference between something that was captured casually and something that was created intentionally.

There’s a difference between:

“Let me just grab this video quickly,” and “We made space for this because it matters.”

That difference shows up in how something is filmed, edited, or shared. It shows up in whether the person feels seen. And whether the audience can feel that they were seen. To me, that’s part of the work. Not just gathering voices, but honoring them.

Another part of the rose window that stays with me is the color. It’s not meant to be one thing. It’s not one perspective, one tradition, one way of understanding the world. It’s many.

Different stories. Different backgrounds. Different ways of naming what is sacred.

And when those differences are held together, not flattened, not forced into sameness, but allowed to remain distinct—something richer happens. The light doesn’t erase the differences. It reveals them. And somehow, that makes the whole image more beautiful.

I think what I’m learning is that this work is both simple and complex. Simple, because at its core it’s about listening, gathering, and sharing. Complex, because how we do that changes everything. It’s not just about having something to say. It’s about creating the conditions where what is said can actually be received.

Where people can see it. Feel it. Engage with it. Where light can pass through.

I don’t know that I have this figured out. But I do know that I’m starting to see things differently. I’m paying more attention to what’s being illuminated and what isn’t. To what feels flat and what feels alive. To where light seems to be moving and where it feels blocked.

And I’m wondering, what would it look like for more of us to think this way? To not just ask what stories are being told, but how they are being held. To not just gather voices, but create something where those voices, together, can become more than they were on their own.

Something like a window. Something like light passing through. Something that helps us see.

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I have spent a lot of time in church and work in a rather large one. A well-resourced one. The kind many people would recognize as “mainstream.” And I had never heard of hush harbors. I did what most of us would do. I went looking.

I searched YouTube. I searched Google.

I tried to find something that would help me understand the work of my new colleague. What I found were grainy videos. Zoom recordings. Clips that felt unpolished and hard to follow. And somewhere in that moment, something subtle happened.

My brain told me: maybe this topic of hush harbors isn’t that important.

Not because I believed that. Not consciously. But because most of us have been trained by a culture where:

• clarity signals authority

• polish signals credibility

• High-quality production signals importance

So we begin to trust what looks good and question what doesn’t. That realization unsettled me. Because I noticed how easily I had almost overlooked something deeply meaningful simply because I hadn’t been trained to recognize it.

What We Fund, We Believe

The more I sat with it, the more I began to see the pattern: the ideas that feel safe or sellable get funded. The ideas that get funded get produced. The ideas that get produced get attention. And the ideas that get attention start to feel like truth.

And the ideas that don’t get funded or produced?

They remain harder to find. Harder to engage. Easier to overlook. Not because they lack truth. Not because they lack depth. But because they lack resourcing. That’s when it clicked for me:

Production quality is not just an aesthetic issue. It’s a justice issue.

Because when certain stories don’t get produced, they don’t get heard. And when they aren’t heard, they aren’t valued. In many of our spaces, especially in the church, we’ve come to trust what looks official, credible, professionally produced. Well-designed Bible studies. Polished websites. High-quality video series.

And if I’m honest, those platforms often elevate the same kinds of voices, the same kinds of perspectives, the same kinds of ideas. Not always because they are the most faithful. But because they are the most fundable. The most marketable. The most familiar.

Over time, that shapes what we assume is central. It starts to feel like: this must be what matters most. But what if that’s just what’s been most sellable?

What Gets Left Behind

What I encountered in that first search for an explanation of a new topic wasn’t a lack of substance. There were stories. There was scholarship. There was a lived experience of deep, embodied, and real passion. What was missing was investment in how those stories were shared.

And that matters more than I realized. Because when something is harder to access, the burden shifts. Instead of the system making the story available, the audience has to do the work to recognize its value. Most of us don’t. Not because we don’t care but because we’ve been trained to trust what’s easy to find and see.

This is where something shifted for me. I’ve always cared about creativity. About making things and how something looks and feels. But I hadn’t fully named it as part of justice work.

Now I do.

Because production is not just about aesthetics. It’s about access. It’s about removing distractions so people can actually hear what’s being said. It’s about honoring someone’s voice by presenting it with care. It’s about making space for stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

When something is thoughtfully created, when the audio is clear, the visuals are intentional, the experience is considered, it signals to the audience: this matters.

And I want more of these often overlooked stories to be received that way.

A Different Kind of Calling

I’ve also started to think differently about calling. Some people are called to preach. Some are called to teach. Some are called to organize, to lead, to build. And some of us are called to make things clear. To tell stories that shape experiences that help others see and understand. For a long time, I think I saw that as secondary.

Now I don’t. Because without that work, so many important voices never reach the people who need them.

In that moment, searching and almost dismissing something changed for me. I can’t unsee how much production shapes what we believe. I can’t unsee how credibility is often assigned before content is even considered. I can’t unsee how many important stories are still sitting just outside of what feels legitimate.

And I can’t unsee my role in that.

I don’t think the answer is complicated, but it is costly. We have to start naming that production is not neutral. It never has been. And then we have to decide what we’re going to do about it.

What are we willing to invest in? What stories are we willing to elevate?

What would it look like to bring the same level of care and attention to voices that haven’t historically been given space or funding?

Because justice is not only about what is said. It’s also about what is seen. What is heard. And what is given the chance to be received.

Now, thanks to Tamice, I know all about Hush Harbors and their importance. And because of the work we are doing together producing their podcast, so many others will too. They are a part of our history and Tamice’s work in the world. And both are so important that it needs the highest level of production and care.

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I relearned that lesson recently through a project in the Nooma Community that, on paper, seemed straightforward. Nooma is a fully digital spiritual community, and at some point it felt natural to ask what it might look like to gather in person, to take it from purely digital to phygital. I imagined a single retreat where everyone would travel from wherever they lived to meet for a long weekend of shared practice, conversation, and rest. I pitched dates. I asked logistical questions. I assumed interest would follow.

It did not.

The responses I received were quiet but clear. Some people did not want to travel that far. Some physically could not. Others named family, financial, or accessibility barriers that made long-distance travel unrealistic.

And then something else happened. A few people said, almost casually, that they would love something closer to home. A couple of them even offered to help coordinate it if that were possible.

That was the moment the project shifted from my idea to the community’s idea.

This is something I have had to learn over and over in ministry. Programs tend to work best when they grow out of the lives of the people already engaged, not when they are imposed from above, even with good intentions. The role of leadership is not to decide what should matter. It is to notice what already does and help make space for it.

So instead of one centralized retreat, we tried something different. We followed the energy where it showed up. Our first in-person gathering took place in the Kentucky area, organized and supported by members of the community who lived nearby. My role shifted from planner to participant, from organizer to guest.

I will admit I carried a quiet concern with me going into that weekend. Digital community is real, but it is also easy to underestimate how much of relationship lives in physical presence. I wondered whether people might feel awkward, like they were on a retreat with strangers they only knew through screens and usernames. I wondered if there would be a period of polite small talk while everyone tried to figure out how to relate in person.

That concern disappeared almost immediately.

From the moment people arrived, it was obvious that these relationships were already deep. These were not strangers meeting for the first time. These were people who had been supporting one another through difficult seasons, exploring spiritual practices together, wrestling with questions of faith, and sharing the ordinary details of their lives. They knew each other’s stories. They knew each other’s pets. They had prayed for one another before surgeries and checked in afterward. They had laughed together and sat with grief together.

Seeing each other in person did not create connection. It revealed it.

What struck me most was how quickly the retreat moved into depth. There was no long warm-up period. The trust was already there. The conversations were honest from the beginning. The shared practices felt grounded rather than tentative. The digital space had already done the slow work of relationship building, and the physical gathering simply gave that work a new dimension.

The weekend itself was beautiful. Not because it was perfectly programmed or tightly scheduled, but because it felt like a natural extension of the community people already inhabited. Meals felt like continuation of conversations that had been happening for months. Silence felt shared rather than awkward. Laughter came easily. The retreat did not feel like an experiment. It felt like a reunion.

What we learned from that experience is now shaping the future of this project. Rather than trying to replicate one large retreat over and over, we are planning multiple gatherings in different regions, led by different members of the community. Each retreat will reflect the people hosting it and the needs of that local group. Over time, we are also exploring how to invite people from outside the community to participate, offering a gentle and embodied entry point into what Nooma already is.

This model requires something that traditional church programming often struggles with. It requires leaders to loosen control and trust the community they are serving. It requires listening before acting and being willing to let good ideas go when better ones emerge.

The Kentucky retreat reminded me that digital community does not weaken human connection. When it is practiced with intention and care, it can deepen it. And when people who already know how to show up for one another finally share the same physical space, the result is not awkwardness. It is recognition.

We did not create something new that weekend. We simply allowed something that already existed to take on flesh.

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What surprises most people is how wrong that assumption is.

What I am doing now is not a break from the last 28 years of my life in ministry. It is a direct continuation of it. In many ways, it is the most in-the-box version of ministry I have ever practiced. The box is just digital now.

For nearly three decades, my work has looked essentially the same: teaching from ancient texts. facilitating conversation, walking with people through grief, doubt, joy, and crisis. It’s been helping communities form around shared practices and shared care. What’s changed is not the substance of the ministry. What’s changed is the medium.

Nooma Community exists because the ways people gather have changed, not because the needs of people have.

Every church has a front door. For Nooma, that door happens to be on social media. Daily posts and videos give people a sense of what I believe, how I think, and how this community approaches faith. It is not all that different from visiting a church website, skimming the bulletin, or listening carefully to how a pastor speaks from the pulpit. People are paying attention to tone and posture. They are deciding whether this feels safe, honest, and worth stepping into.

Social media is not the church itself. It is simply where people first encounter it.

When people do step further in, what they find is surprisingly familiar. Our sermons, for example, are livestreamed gatherings on social media where teaching happens in real time. But the medium brings with it the expectation of interaction. So, at the end instead of a benediction followed by coffee hour chatter, the teaching opens into questions. People respond live. They push back. They ask for clarification. They disagree, and ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask. It feels less like a performance and more like the best version of adult Sunday school: the kind where people were actually allowed to talk.

Our Bible study also follows a recognizable pattern. Instead of gathering in a classroom on a weeknight, the teaching happens through a podcast. Listening replaces sitting in a circle of folding chairs. The conversation continues in a Discord thread rather than around a scratched table with bad coffee. People ask questions, share insights, and wrestle openly with the text and with one another. The location is different, but the communal engagement with scripture is exactly the same.

The same is true of our small groups. They meet on Zoom instead of in living rooms, but the rhythm is familiar to anyone who has ever hosted a group in their home. People show up from different cities, states, countries, and time zones. They share stories, hold space for each other, process life, and build trust over time. The screen does not eliminate intimacy any more than a church basement ever did. It simply removes geography as a barrier.

Pastoral care is completely in-the-box as well. Conversations happen over Zoom and are scheduled online through Calendly. That may sound modern, but functionally it is no different than calling the church office and asking the secretary to put your name on the pastor’s calendar. People reach out when they need support. We meet face to face. I listen as we name what is happening in their lives. The care itself remains deeply personal. Only the scheduling has been streamlined.

Between all of these structured spaces, community life unfolds in the same organic ways it does outside a church among members, just on a platform called Discord. In the text channels there, people talk about scripture and theology. They also talk about television shows they are watching, books they are reading, and the ordinary details of daily life. They ask for prayer before surgeries. They check in afterward. They celebrate milestones and sit quietly with loss. Anyone who has ever lingered in a church hallway after worship or met for coffee with a Sunday school classmate during the week would recognize this immediately.

The only real difference is that none of it requires a shared physical location and only some requires engaging at the same exact time.

Calling this digital ministry sometimes makes it sound like a novelty. In reality, it’s ministry that takes seriously how people actually live now. Many people in Nooma would never walk back into a church building. Some live in places where there is no safe or affirming spiritual community available to them. Others carry religious trauma that makes traditional church spaces inaccessible. The digital space allows them to participate fully without first having to overcome fear, geography, or exclusion.

Nooma is not an attempt to replace church with content. It is an attempt to translate what church has always been at its best into a form people can actually enter.

I did not leave the box. I brought it with me. I just set it down somewhere more people could reach it.

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But make no mistake. This cohort was about soul. It always has been. And I am guessing it ends that way.

When we gathered in Atlanta for our first time together, I came ready for a different kind of conversation. I had questions. I wanted to chop it up about algorithms, platforms, strategy, and audience growth. I had no one in my life to talk “digital ministry” with.

Instead, we were asked something slower. Something more vulnerable. The beginning was awkward for me. I felt restless. Even in a small inner circle that was supposed to understand the process, I felt frustrated. But what was forming beneath that frustration was not strategy. It was connection. Not connection in the networking sense. Connection on the level of soul. That early awkwardness set the tenor for everything that followed.

Our trip to San Francisco and Silicon Valley could have easily been a tour of innovation and disruption. Instead, it became a conversation on ethics. A soul conversation. On the human cost of these platforms. A soul conversation. On what technology is doing to humanity. A soul conversation.

We looked at a soulful startups and asked not just what they build, but what they shape in us. We felt their soulful creativity and the unmistakable weight of the soul-sucking trappings of the industry.

We encountered complexity. Because soulful work in the world is complex. Doing soulful work in technological ecosystems is complex. The skepticism within the fellowship has mattered. It has not been cynicism but discernment. Some fellows stand at the edge of the group’s dominant traditions and keep pulling us back to what matters beneath the structures and language we are comfortable with. Others are building digital expressions of community through podcasts, online gatherings, completely virtual church, and hybrid spaces that move between screens and rooms. Some are experimenting with digital spiritual direction, contemplative practices shared online, and small circles that gather across geography.

Others are curating conversations, storytelling platforms, and learning communities that connect people who might never meet otherwise. Still others are asking deeper questions about technology itself: how it shapes attention, identity, and belonging. Together their work is exploring not only what can happen in digital space, but what the soul of these emerging spaces might be. By focusing on soul, everyone found a voice at the table even in our diversity. It allowed us to learn from one another and the individuals are now collaborating across geography, theological tradition, and tech expertise.

There is no surprise that when each of us explained our projects in on Substack, we returned again and again to the same gravitational center.

Soul.

The Wesleyan tradition is the theological foundation for most of our group. We realize that we do this cohort in the shadow of John Wesley. One of his most prevalent questions was, how is your soul?

There may have been an expectation that this cohort would discern the future of digital ministry. But I am not convinced this was ever about the future. I think it has always been about the present. About how the soul can be tended now. About how we can do soulful work in the present climate. Many of us have been critical of how technology has not been used in the spaces we’ve inhabited. Churches are clinging to structures in decline. Resources poured into maintaining what is dying. Communities are afraid to release what was for the sake of what could be.

We have felt the pain of that.

And yet here, in this cohort, we did not wait for the institutions to catch up. We practiced soul now in unique phygital ways. If John Wesley were alive in the digital age, I suspect he would still ask the same question. And I wonder, if one of our fellows could create an AI algorithm that absorbed all of our writing, all of our work, all of our experiments, would the summary come back as something surprisingly simple?

How’s your soul?

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The Ember Gathering is not simply an event. It is an ecosystem of relational capital. It is a living archive of conversations, shared rituals, intellectual inquiry, spiritual reflection, and curated encounters. It exists because authenticity scales. When you are deeply yourself—unapologetically aligned with your convictions, your culture, your calling—you become magnetic. And magnetism gathers people. But it also exists because there is an entire population of people who have been magnetically repelled from institutional religion and who still carry fire in their bones. The nones, the dones, and the exiles—people who left the church not because they lost their faith but because the church lost them—are among the most spiritually alive people I know. They are not apathetic. They are unhoused. And they deserve a gathering that does not ask them to re-enter the structures that harmed them in order to access the sacred.

Digital community organizing is not about algorithms; it is about alignment. It is about creating spaces where people from across the country—sometimes across the world—feel invited into coherence. My relational capital is versatile because it was built on truth-telling, not performance. It allows me to convene mystics and strategists, pastors and artists, technologists and healers, believers and skeptics. The versatility is not random. It is the byproduct of being rooted. And the Hygital Fellows experience sharpened my understanding of what it means to root that work in digital soil—to recognize that the screen is not the enemy of sacred space but a portal to it when the presence behind it is real.

The Ember Gathering embodies this principle. An ember is a small, steady source of heat—often overlooked, but capable of igniting something much larger. That is what authentic presence does. It sustains warmth long enough for others to come close. It creates conditions for ignition. And when people gather around a shared ember, they do not have to perform; they simply have to be. This is what I mean by a clearing—a space where the undergrowth of expectation, performance, and institutional gatekeeping has been burned away so that something new can grow. Black clearings, specifically, are spaces where Black people can encounter the sacred without navigating the anti-Blackness embedded in so many of the institutions that claim to steward it.

That commitment to Black clearings is what led to the creation of the Black Sacred Lounge, a pre-conference experience within the Ember Gathering. The Black Sacred Lounge is not a breakout session or a diversity add-on. It is a dedicated space—curated with intentionality and love—where Black nones, dones, exiles, mystics, and seekers can gather on their own terms before entering the wider conversation. It is built on the conviction that Black people need spaces where our spiritual complexity is not flattened into a single narrative, where our grief and our joy and our theological imagination can coexist without being translated for consumption. The Lounge is a hush harbor for the post-institutional era—a clearing where the tradition of sacred refusal meets the present hunger for something that actually heals.

Authenticity produces harmony because it eliminates fragmentation. When you are not contorting yourself to fit into rooms, you attract rooms that fit your shape. And when people gather in a space curated by authenticity, the event itself becomes harmonious. Differences do not threaten the space; they enrich it. The common denominator is not sameness—it is sincerity. This is especially true for the nones, the dones, and the exiles, who have spent years in spaces where the price of belonging was self-erasure. The Ember Gathering—and the Black Sacred Lounge within it—offers a different economy: one where your wholeness is not a problem to be managed but the very thing that makes the gathering possible.

The Ember Gathering demonstrates that being true to yourself is not isolating; it is generative. It creates a national pool of connection because people are starved for spaces where they do not have to split themselves to belong. When authenticity leads, harmony follows. And when harmony is cultivated intentionally, events become more than programming—they become moments of convergence. They become clearings.

My passion built a platform. That platform became a gathering. And that gathering became a bridge—between the churched and the unchurched, between the wounded and the hopeful, between the Black sacred tradition and the people who thought they had been exiled from it permanently. That bridge proves something essential: authenticity is infrastructure. And the clearing it creates is wide enough for everyone who has been told there is no room for them.

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In conversations about technology, intelligence is often reduced to machines, data systems, and formal infrastructures. But Black communities have always operated with alternative intelligence systems—networks forged in exclusion, surveillance, and prohibition. If resurrection technology is the spiritual engine, alternative intelligence is the circuitry. One generates life; the other distributes it.

When you are denied literacy, you cultivate orality. When you are denied formal institutions, you create informal ones. When language is policed, you innovate new tongues.

Black people were uniquely severed from linguistic continuity. Enslaved Africans were intentionally mixed across ethnic groups to prevent communication. To look a white person in the eye could invite violence. Legally, Black bodies were defined as three-fifths of a human being. Every structural tool available was deployed to assert that there was “nothing there”—no intellect, no soul, no culture.

That narrative was necessary to justify capitalism and white supremacy. Dehumanization was economic policy.

And yet—just as the hold of the slave ship became the unlikely womb of a new collective consciousness—Black communities built counter-systems of intelligence from the very materials of their oppression. Spirituals encoded escape routes. Barbershops became information hubs. Beauty salons became political think tanks. Churches became organizing headquarters. Call-and-response became democratic rehearsal. Vernacular became encrypted communication. Humor became psychological armor.

These were technologies.

They were adaptive networks designed for survival in hostile terrain. They were decentralized, relational, embodied systems that could not easily be confiscated. You cannot outlaw memory. You cannot seize rhythm. You cannot patent communal trust. These systems operated on the same principle I identified in season one: that the most essential things about a people cannot be stripped away, only driven underground—where, as I said before, they do not disappear. They germinate.

Black people defied the logic of their own erasure. And that defiance is instructive now, as we watch the ideological foundations of exclusion and supremacy strain under their own contradictions. The same logics that once insisted there was “nothing there” are revealing their own emptiness.

Alternative intelligence systems remind us that legitimacy does not originate from recognition by power. It originates from communal coherence. Black communities have always known how to build parallel structures when denied access to dominant ones. The hush harbor was not only a site of resurrection—it was the first alternative intelligence network, a decentralized system for preserving and transmitting what mattered most when every formal channel had been seized or destroyed.

That is our hope in this moment.

If resurrection technology taught us how to conjure life in confinement, alternative intelligence teaches us how to sustain life in contradiction. Both are rooted in authenticity—the refusal to internalize a lie about who you are. And both follow the same bread crumb trail I described in the first piece: the trail that leads away from systems that demand your self-abandonment and toward the dangerous, generative work of knowing yourself in community.

And perhaps that is the deepest technological insight of all: the most disruptive system is a people who know themselves.

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I did not arrive here in a straight line. My theological formation began in spaces that demanded conformity—spaces where faith was synonymous with compliance and where the cost of belonging was the surrender of critical thought. Over time, I followed bread crumb after bread crumb: encounters with womanist theology that gave me language for what my body already knew, liberation frameworks that named the violence I had been trained to spiritualize, and Black thinkers who insisted that the tradition I inherited was not the only tradition available to me.

Each bread crumb was a small act of truth-telling that loosened the grip of what I had been taught and drew me closer to what I actually believed. Eventually, those bread crumbs led me out of the house entirely—not away from Jesus, but away from the systems that had domesticated his message.

My sacred refusal was not a rejection of faith. It was a refusal to keep practicing a faith that required me to abandon myself in order to belong. And that refusal is inseparable from the commitment to authenticity that animates everything this podcast does.

Season one of the podcast explores a concept I call resurrection technology—a spiritual and cultural innovation forged in the most violent conditions imaginable. I believe this technology was birthed in the holds of transatlantic slave ships, in the darkness where people from different regions, languages, gods, and customs were thrown together, unable to communicate and yet forced into proximity. In those suffocating spaces, something extraordinary happened.

Disparate cosmologies collided and rhythms from many regions blended. On the slave ships my ancestors’ memories became their medicine. Out of terror and dislocation emerged a new collective consciousness that we now call Black America. What was meant to annihilate identity actualized it. That wretched torture chamber that trafficked us away from the motherland became a womb of something unprecedented.

A new people.

Black Americans are proof of the ability to conjure life where death is intended. We have collectively proven the capacity to create coherence in the absence of shared language. We are the witnesses to the spiritual instinct to assert our humanity when it has been officially denied. Black America was not an accident of history—it was a creative act of conjure under duress, and the fact that it endures is not a testament to resilience alone but to a deeper technology: a refusal to abandon what is true about oneself even when the world demands otherwise.

This technology first appeared in the hush harbor, where we created music, language, theology, aesthetics, democratic imagination, and the civil rights frameworks that have shaped the moral and cultural backbone of America itself. If there is anything luminous about America, it has been illuminated by Black creativity.

The hush harbor was a laboratory of soul, a site where people who had been stripped of everything external discovered that the most essential things could not be stripped at all. My real tradition is born of sacred refusal—the refusal to accept death as final, the refusal to surrender interiority to the oppressor—that gives Black Modern Mystic its roots and its reason for existing. And it is the same tradition that caught me when my own refusal left me without a religious home but not without a faith.

Resurrection technology arose from authenticity. It was the insistence of a people to hold onto fragments of who they were while forging something new together. Authenticity was the raw material. Without it, there is no resurrection—only performance, only survival without substance. The enslaved could have adopted the full posture of the oppressor’s imagination. They could have internalized the lie completely. But they did not. Something in them insisted on remaining true, and that insistence is the engine of resurrection technology.

I know this because I have lived a smaller version of the same pattern. Every theological bread crumb I followed was a choice between comfort and honesty. Every sacred refusal cost me something—community, certainty, legibility within the institutions that had shaped me. But each one also returned something to me that I had not realized I had given away. Authenticity is not something you arrive at once. It is something you practice, and the practice is costly, and the cost is worth it because the alternative is a slow death dressed up as faithfulness. That is what the hush harbor ancestors understood. That is what resurrection technology demands.

That is why I created this show—because authenticity is not merely a personality trait or a self-help buzzword. It is a survival strategy. It is a way to keep clarity and integrity in the midst of a deluded and death-dealing society. In a world that profits from our fragmentation, choosing to be whole is an act of resistance. In a culture that rewards performance over presence, showing up as who you actually are is a form of spiritual warfare. This podcast exists to name that warfare, to honor the tradition it comes from, and to invite listeners into the daily practice of activating resurrection in their own lives—not as abstraction but as embodied, lived reality.

I frame this through a theological conviction: that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. If that is true, then truth is not abstract—it is embodied. To live authentically is to align with truth. And if the kingdom of God is built on truth, then authentic living is not optional; it is the only pathway to its realization. Resurrection technology and authenticity are not two separate ideas—they are bound together. You cannot have resurrection without truth, because resurrection is truth’s refusal to stay buried.

The enslaved did not survive by becoming what the oppressor imagined them to be. They survived by retaining interior truth. They built churches, songs, codes, and communal systems rooted in a belief that death would not have the final word. Resurrection was not metaphorical—it was daily practice. Every spiritual, every coded song, every whispered prayer in the hush harbor was an act of alignment with a truth the slaveholder could not access or destroy.

Authenticity, then, is sacred. It is participation in divine order. It is alignment with truth that cannot be legislated out of existence. Resurrection technology teaches us that when truth is buried, it does not disappear—it germinates. And what germinates from truth, no empire has ever been able to permanently uproot. That is the rupture and the possibility this podcast holds open—the conviction that Black faith and spirituality, across America and the diaspora, still carry the seeds of new ways of being, and that those seeds are activated every time someone chooses to live from what is true. This podcast is my proof of concept. The bread crumbs led here. The sacred refusal made it possible. And authenticity is the only fuel that keeps it alive.

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The late theologian Phyllis Tickle suggested that roughly every 500 years, the institutional Church undergoes a massive upheaval — a “rummage sale” in which it keeps what is healthy and useful and lets go of what is harmful or no longer working. The Protestant Reformation, the Church’s most recent great rummage sale, happened almost exactly 500 years ago. We seem to be right on time.

The Reformation was ignited, in part, by a technological revolution. Gutenberg’s printing press, invented just decades before Luther nailed his theses to the door, meant that for the first time in history, ideas could be reproduced and distributed at unprecedented speed. Scripture could be placed in ordinary hands. The printing press didn’t cause the Reformation, but it made it more possible.

The internet came online in the early 1990s and, in just a few decades, has transformed the way we do nearly everything, from commerce to community, from education to entertainment, and yes, the way we practice our faith. We are living through a major technological disruption far greater than the printing press in both scale and scope, followed by major spiritual and ecclesial upheaval. If history is any guide, we shouldn’t be surprised that the ground is shifting beneath us.

The Big Question

Tickle argued that one pivotal question sits at the center of every major ecclesial upheaval: Where is the authority?

At the time of the Reformation, authority was concentrated in the institutional Church, embodied in papal power. The Reformers’ motto, sola scriptura, was a massive decentralization. Authority shifted from Rome to the canon of Scripture. But following the currents of the Western Enlightenment, knowledge became power. Biblical scholars and theologians became the new gatekeepers and interpreters of that canon, sparking fierce conflicts and debates.

Five hundred years later, that decentralization has run its course to its logical conclusion. We now have over 45,000 Christian denominations worldwide, each claiming, in some sense, to have the correct interpretation of Scripture.

And now, the question arises again: Where is the authority? Or, “Who can we trust?”

Trust in institutions of all kinds is at historic lows. In part, because we’ve seen corruption, abuse, and cover-ups become familiar stories. The Church has been on the wrong side of history more times than we care to count — on science, slavery, race, gender, sexuality, mental health, etc. And, globalization and pluralism have shown us that truth and wisdom don’t belong exclusively to any one tradition. A simplistic, single-point-of-authority model no longer holds up in a world full of diversity and complexity.

So again: Where is the authority? Who can we trust?

Wikipedia and the Wisdom of the Whole

Recent research has found that Wikipedia is now roughly as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica, with comparable error rates. However, Wikipedia covers a much broader range of topics and can be updated in real time. Britannica relies on credentialed subject-matter experts, while Wikipedia crowdsources knowledge from its contributor community. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and of course, expertise still matters, but one thing is clear: we no longer regard expert opinion as the only valid source of knowledge.

The New York Times food editor may have genuinely excellent taste and expertise. But when I’m hungry in an unfamiliar city, I open Yelp or Google Reviews. I want to know what hundreds of ordinary people with different palates, budgets, and expectations actually experienced. A critic’s opinion is just one data point. The crowd’s collective experience is usually more relatable and far more diverse. We engage with information this way instinctively now, in almost every area of life. Yet the Church is still largely asking people to simply trust the expert at the front.

In a complex world, no single vantage point can see the full picture. Experts are only human — subject to bias, shaped by limited traditions and contexts, and often missing the view from the ground. Our best hope for navigating complexity isn’t to find better experts. It’s to cultivate better collective intelligence.

The Body, the Internet, and Emergence

The Apostle Paul imagined the Church as a body of many parts, an interconnected organism where “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you’” (1 Cor. 12:21). Every part sees and contributes something the others cannot. The body doesn’t work when only one part does all the talking.

For decades, computers were capable of complex operations, but they were isolated and limited to whatever data they held locally. Information was shared through slow, clunky means: printed documents, floppy disks, and person-to-person transfer. Then came the internet. Suddenly, millions of computers connected into a network, and learning accelerated exponentially.

The prevailing model of the Church still looks a lot like a collection of isolated CPUs. Individual congregations, denominations, and ministries that are largely disconnected, running their own programs, generating their own content, rarely aggregating the collective wisdom of the whole Body. The internet has been available to us for decades. We’ve used it to stream our content. We haven’t yet used it effectively to connect our wisdom.

Scientists and systems thinkers use the term emergence to describe how complex, connected systems produce outcomes that no single part could have planned or predicted. A flock of birds or a school of fish has no choreographer. The pattern emerges from each animal simply responding to its nearest neighbors. A forest ecosystem has no boss or manager. Resilience and abundance emerge from countless organisms interacting, adapting, and responding to one another over time.

Emergence happens when the conditions are right for the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts. It cannot be engineered from the top down. It can only be cultivated from the ground up, by creating the right environment, fostering the right relationships, and asking the right questions. There’s more to it, of course, but the point is this is a fundamentally different posture than what most ministry leaders have been trained to assume. But it may be exactly what the Church and the world need right now. And technology can offer the tools that make emergence more possible.

(Sidenote: It would be impossible to write about emergence and collective intelligence without acknowledging the elephant in the room: artificial intelligence. AI presents both extraordinary opportunities to aggregate and synthesize collective wisdom at unprecedented scale, and profound risks we are only beginning to understand. This topic deserves much fuller treatment, and I defer to my Phygital Fellows colleagues who have thought about it far more deeply than I have.)

What Does This Mean for Ministry in a Phygital World?

When I was a pastor, I didn’t always have the answers. But it was tempting to fake it, to perform certainty and position myself as the source of wisdom in people’s lives. It might have provided job security, but it would have also been dishonest. Even my training in the Bible and theology was narrow, shaped by a handful of traditions and experiences. The people in my congregation knew things I would never know. I needed their wisdom. Unfortunately, I seldom thought to ask for it.

Shifting from expertise to emergence means decentering authority — and ourselves when necessary — and learning from everyone. It’s about finding solutions together in the space between us. Where is the authority? The authority is in us, in the wisdom and consensus of the community. When an idea emerges from many people’s input and genuinely resonates with a community, the authority belongs to no one and to everyone at the same time. There’s no need for command-and-control or competition. We can collaborate to solve problems none of us could address alone.

To start moving from expertise toward emergence, here are a few ideas to consider:

Create feedback loops. Companies invest heavily in customer feedback because good leaders know what they don’t know. In my experience, most churches never ask. Every Sunday, a goldmine of insight sits silently in the seats. What if, using a simple online form, congregants were given two minutes after a service to respond to two or three questions, such as: What are you taking away from today? What questions or feelings came up for you? Was anything unclear or confusing? The patterns that emerge might surprise us — and they could fundamentally reshape the way we lead.

Involve stakeholders in complex decisions. When a community faces a difficult question about direction, values, or resource allocation, the instinct is often for leaders to deliberate privately and announce. But in my experience, solutions that emerge when diverse stakeholders are brought to the table are almost always better than what any one person could produce alone. Complex times call for a more adaptive leadership style that isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about knowing which questions to ask and who needs to be in the room. We need to move from solving problems for people (which seldom works) to solving problems with them instead.

Harvest the wisdom in the room. Use crowd-sourcing tools like Reddit to ask questions or Mentimeter to create polls and word clouds. Virtual whiteboards like Miro or Mural can help facilitate brainstorming. Collaborate on documents using Google Docs to allow people to comment, contribute, and build on each other’s ideas over time.

For smaller groups, structured circle dialogue is a simple practice that can surface extraordinary insights in a safe, trusting environment. Two tools that New Wine Collective has built into its online platform for groups are speaking queues and timers. Speaking queues ensure every voice is heard, and timers ensure each voice is heard equitably. When a group learns to listen attentively to one another, powerful things can emerge from the many voices in the room, not just the single expert in front.

Use technology to aggregate wisdom across communities. One of the gifts of digital technology is its capacity to connect people and knowledge across geography and now, even across languages. What if churches and ministries were not just disseminating content, but sharing learnings — patterns, practices, failures, breakthroughs — across a networked Body? Rather than each congregation reinventing the wheel in isolation, we could be building a living, collective intelligence together. This is part of the vision behind New Wine Collective: not one more ministry doing its own thing, but a platform that can support a whole network of ministries, weaving together wisdom, knowledge, and resources from diverse traditions and backgrounds.

We Are a Part, Not the Whole

The shift from experts to emergence requires the humble recognition that we are each a part, not the whole. That the Body of Christ, in its full diversity and breadth, sees more than any one person, tradition, or culture, and that the Spirit moves through the many, not just the few.

The phygital world gives us unprecedented tools to actually live this out: to connect across distance, to surface voices that have been systematically excluded, and to aggregate wisdom at a scale the early church could never imagine. The question is whether we have the imagination and the humility to use them that way. What would change in your community if leaders began to see themselves less as the source of wisdom and more as its stewards and facilitators? What might emerge if the whole Body were actually given voice?

Three Shifts, One Vision

Taken together, the three shifts in this series point toward a fundamentally different vision of what the Church can be in our time.

When we move from limits to liberation, we stop trying to be everything for everyone. We begin to see ourselves as part of a larger, richer ecosystem, one where diverse voices and traditions each contribute something the others cannot. We empower people to trust their own intuition to discern the pathways they need in community with others.

When we move from content to connection, we stop optimizing for the lecture or performance on stage and start designing for the relationships through which genuine belonging, healing, and transformation can happen. Love, not information, is the original technology of human transformation. Love is why the Church exists.

When we move from experts to emergence, we stop concentrating wisdom at the top and start trusting that the Spirit moves through the whole Body — that the insight we need may already be present in the people around us, waiting to be surfaced, gathered, and woven together into something new.

A Church that is liberated, connected, and relies on collective wisdom is a more fully realized one — one that is closer to the vision Paul described when he wrote that the whole Body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part does its work. (Eph. 4:16)

The rummage sale is already underway. What emerges next will be up to all of us.

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The fellowship was never primarily about technology. It has been about soulful imagination. Fellows entered the program with a ministry context already curious or shaped by digital life. Congregations gather online. Communities form across platforms. Ancient wisdom circulated through podcasts and video. Pastoral presence now happens in comment sections, group chats, and livestreams as much as in sanctuaries and coffee shops.

Throughout the fellowship, we have asked a simple but demanding question. What does it mean to shepherd souls in a phygital world?

During our time in Chicago, each Fellow has been invited to present something meaningful that has emerged from their time in the program. Some are sharing projects that took shape during the fellowship. Others are naming insights that have changed how they think about ministry, community, and leadership. Many are offering questions that continue to unfold rather than tidy conclusions.

Those emerging questions may be the most important outcome of the program. Questions about authority, presence, embodiment, formation, ethics, and community in a world where digital spaces are not secondary to life but woven into it.

This final Learning Journey is less a graduation and more of a marking of the moment. The conversations that began in this cohort are traveling outward into congregations, networks, and communities that are still learning how faith lives in both pixels and flesh. The group will shepherd a larger gathering on phygital themes this fall when they are together again.

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In that world, it made perfect sense to gather at a specific time and place, sit in rows, and receive teaching from a (hopefully) educated minister. For most people, it may have been one of the only opportunities available for religious education and formation.

Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves in the exact opposite situation. Through technology, we have access to more content and teaching than anyone could consume in thousands of lifetimes. Yet, we’re starved for connection and community. In the 1950s, advances in transportation and the growth of cities drew more and more people away from farms and into urban areas. Now, the United States is one of the most transient and individualistic societies in human history. The rise of suburbs, which were designed for privacy and separation, only deepened the isolation.

The loneliness epidemic has been well documented for the last few decades. A recent study suggests that up to 21% of Americans are suffering from serious loneliness. In addition to higher rates of depression and suicide, lonely people have a 26% higher risk of dying from high blood pressure and heart disease. Health experts say loneliness is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day! The prevailing model of church was never designed to address such a crisis of connection.

Designed to Solve the Wrong Problem

Recently, I visited a church near my home. I was greeted at the door with a “good morning,” sat down in a mostly empty pew, tried to sing along with some music, listened to a sermon and some announcements, and then went home. I did not exchange more than 5 words with anyone.

I don’t fault this church. I’m sure they were only doing what they’ve always done. The problem is technology has significantly undercut the value proposition of attending a Sunday service.

The sermon was good, but I’m sure I could have found something better and more relevant within 10 seconds of Google searching. The music was fine, but I also have Apple Music. I could have tuned in to almost any streamed service, anywhere in the world, on YouTube. This church missed the one thing it could have offered that I couldn’t find online: face-to-face, in-person connection.

A few years ago, New Wine Collective conducted a church and spiritual community survey comprised of open-ended questions. We received over 460 responses, which far exceeded our expectations! One question asked, “what would you hope to gain from participating in a church?” The word clouds below display people’s answers (the larger the word, the more frequently it appeared).

Both people who attended church regularly and those who did not had the same answer by a large margin: community! Undoubtedly, many churches would say they value relationships. Some would say community is central to their mission and strategy. But the real question is whether the design of our practices and structures actually reflect the things we value. How much of our time, energy, and resources are devoted to the attractional event on Sunday? In a worship gathering, what percentage of time do people spend facing forward vs. facing each other? How many staff and volunteer hours go toward program production versus facilitating genuine relational connection?

Rethinking Spiritual Formation in a Phygital World

I heard a pastoral colleague once say something that stuck with me: “Information is not transformation.” We have access to more Biblical and theological knowledge than at any other time in history. Yet, I am not convinced it has produced more humble, compassionate, and Christlike people. Good information matters, of course. But as the apostle Paul warned, “knowledge puffs up, love builds up.” (1 Cor 8:1) We need to shift from the western Church’s overemphasis on head knowledge toward holistic connection.

The most natural ways people experience healing, growth, and transformation are embodied practice and loving relationships—through face-to-face modeling and mirroring. Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer said, “Example is not the main thing when it comes to influencing others. It is the only thing.” We see this demonstrated throughout the ministry of Jesus as he invited his disciples to “come follow me.” Relationships have always been the original and most fundamental technology of human formation and change. From infancy through adulthood, we’re hardwired for connection.

If this is true, rethinking spiritual formation in a phygital world is about more than moving from physical pulpits to digital platforms. We have to go beyond content delivery and consider some deeper questions. How can we foster more meaningful connection and real conversation? How do we help people feel seen and known, and show up as their whole selves? How do we empower people to create the connections and community they need?

When I was in seminary, we never gave much attention to questions such as these! Most of my practical ministry training had to do with gaining and disseminating knowledge. Many of us may need to learn a whole new set of skills. We may need to shift from being the expert with all the answers to a facilitator with good questions. Or, from being the main attraction on stage to being a host who sets the table for others. What if leaders could practice decentering themselves to make room for the conversation that needs to happen in the room?

Here are a few practical ideas of what shifting from content to connection in a phygital world can look like:

• Investing in online community platforms like Circle, Mighty Networks, or Discord. Instead of ministry staff being the hub for every interaction (which creates dependency), equip and empower people to find each other and self-organize their own connections and community.

• Incorporating interactive elements in worship or community gatherings using live chats, Q&A’s and polling, and shared photo albums.

• Using social media accounts to share stories from community members can help create culture and foster a sense of belonging.

• Using surveys to match people for virtual coffee or in-person meet ups.

Whether you’re ministering to people in primarily digital or physical settings, the shift from content to connection is about a fundamental reorientation of what we believe “church” is for. The future of ministry is less about what we know and more about how deeply we belong to one another. Our challenge is to use every digital and physical tool available to us to reimagine not just what we talk about but how and who gets to be a part of the conversation. When we design for connection and relationships first, we will have no trouble finding content that is relevant, alive, and worth gathering for.

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We don’t pay sufficient attention to the fact that the very possibility of accessing and engaging with numerous spiritual traditions is a relatively recent phenomenon and a monumental shift in the way we practice faith, with profound implications. This trend is unlikely to slow down. Faith is only becoming more diverse, eclectic, and hybridized. The future of spirituality is already here. The question is whether the Church’s methods and models are ready to adapt.

Of course, this shift has been largely driven by globalization, new technology, and the advent of the information age. One can trace this evolution over the last 80 years of visual media: from single-plex movie theaters, where passive audience members consumed content at a fixed time and place, to social media, where anyone can engage anytime, anywhere, across multiple devices.

Many people will still go to movie theaters, but it’s clear we’ve already moved far beyond passive consumption of just a few limited options to an ocean of diverse, on-demand, interactive content. Yet, in a world where people can access almost any voice, topic, style, culture, and spiritual background at the touch of a screen, most churches are still operating under a uniplex theater model. It’s no wonder many churches struggle to remain relevant in an increasingly diverse and fast-changing culture.

What does this mean for the Church?

When I was pastoring a church, I was well aware that I might not be the right pastor for everyone, and that what our church offered might not be what every person needs in every season of life. On any given Sunday, I knew the sermon would miss the needs and lived experiences of the majority of people in the room, because any congregation will have people who are showing up with grief, some who are happy, some who need encouragement, and others who need to be challenged.

There’s nothing wrong with services and sermons. We just need to think beyond the model of church as an event where people mostly sit and listen, or have no input or agency regarding what gets addressed and how.

More and more people are experiencing faith and spirituality as a journey, not a static destination. Spiritual growth is not a linear process, and each person’s journey is unique, coming from different backgrounds and cultures, with different needs and ways of connecting with God. Sunday morning service simply does not work for everyone anymore. In truth, it never did.

Therefore, churches can no longer see themselves as one-stop shops for spiritual growth. We need to move beyond one-size-fits-all programming and instead empower people to discern what they need to take the next step in their journey. Rising generations, in particular, already assume agency and choice in matters of faith. Churches must adapt to this new reality and redefine their role in the changing spiritual landscape.

The shift from “limits to liberation” does not mean abandoning programs and structure. It means reimagining what our programs and structures are for. Fewer and fewer people will limit themselves to a single source, such as a single theater, restaurant, or even Christian tradition. What people need today may be more like a diverse food hall or a farmer’s market, with many options to choose from, each one good in its own way. Churches that thrive in this new landscape will see themselves as less isolated and more as part of an open ecosystem. And healthy ecosystems require biodiversity—many different species of plants and animals playing different roles, but all contributing to the whole.

Imagine if people could access not just a few but a multitude of diverse voices, traditions, and experiences in community with others. Imagine if the Church could function more like one body, made up of many parts. New technology can do far more than add a few tools to our existing toolkit. With imagination and intention, it can fundamentally reshape our ecclesiology—the way we understand the Church itself.

What might this actually look like? A few experiments worth considering:

Curate many pathways, not just limited programs. Rather than asking “How do we get people into our programs?”, start asking “How do we help people discern what they need next?” This might mean explicitly naming the different ways people in your community connect with God — contemplative practices, theological exploration, embodied worship, service and justice, creative expression — and pointing to resources, even if they exist outside your regular programming or what happens on Sunday morning.

In my work with New Wine Collective, we developed a navigation tool for the spiritual journey to help people discern where they might need to go next. Instead of prescribing linear programs, our goal is to build an online library of crowdsourced resources that anyone could both access (download) and contribute to (upload). A church could maintain a similar database of resources, both crowdsourced by congregants and curated by ministry staff.

Shift from producing content to cultivating participation. The social media revolution didn’t just multiply options; it redefined who gets to be a creator. The most transformative thing many churches could do is to take seriously the priesthood of all believers, not as a theological talking point but as an organizing principle. Who in your community is already a creator, connector, or curator of spiritual wisdom? Are you making room for them, or are they sitting in the pew consuming your content?

At a Christian college, I helped design a spiritual formation week that empowered student teams to lead diverse spiritual practices and experiences across campus at different times throughout the week. We decentralized the chapel program (one program, place, and time) into dozens of smaller gatherings exploring a wide range of spiritual traditions. It was a huge success with many students reporting that they discovered God in ways they’d never experienced before. This was facilitated by a website, online sign-up forms, and spreadsheets to keep everything organized, as well as in-person gatherings for alignment and vision. Could something similar happen in a local church context?

Design for the “phygital” pilgrim. An increasing number of people are engaging with spiritual community in hybrid or primarily digital ways, sometimes online, sometimes in person, and sometimes through a podcast, blog, or Discord server. Rather than treating these as lesser forms of belonging, map the actual ways people are participating and design intentionally for the full spectrum of people’s experiences. We have more tools than ever to bring spiritual connection and community into people’s everyday lives. How to implement them depends heavily on context and demographics. A good strategy is usually to find where people already gather online and then invite a few trusted people to intentionally cultivate community there.

We can only be liberated together.

The goal is not for any one church or ministry to do everything for everyone. It’s to begin seeing ourselves as parts of a greater whole: a diverse, interconnected body where each expression of faith contributes something the others cannot. People don’t need us to have all the answers. They need us to be willing to reimagine together what the Church can become. This requires a shift in mindset that decenters our own programming and opens up to a more expansive view of the Church that honors the unique journey each person is on.

If you’re already engaged in digital ministry in some form, you are a much-needed resource in the shifting spiritual landscape. If you’re leading in a more traditional, local church setting, your role in the spiritual ecosystem is still vitally important, and there are ministries that can help you meet your people where they are. How can we all work together to better serve the people we feel called to serve?

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How do we get the word out to people beyond our core community?

Up to that point, every Pixel Pilgrimage had been led by me for Checkpoint Church. That made sense — I was the pastor, the host, the one sharing the screen. But with each new game we played, and each new story that surfaced, I started to feel this nudge: maybe it’s time to loosen the grip.

Something this rich shouldn’t stay tethered to one person. The idea’s too good. The practice is too simple.

So we launched a thing. We call it the Pixel Pilgrimage Hub.

The idea is straightforward: if someone wants to take a group through a pilgrimage of their own, we want to make that possible. Not just theoretically, but practically.

We set up a Circle community with resources: walkthroughs, recordings, suggested games, and a full course based on our Neva pilgrimage. The goal was to create a space where folks could learn the rhythm, borrow the structure, and feel equipped to facilitate this kind of reflection in their own communities — church, friends, youth group, whatever.

The Structure We Handed Off

What we’ve given them isn’t complex. In fact, the simplicity is the point.

Pick a good game. One with story, beauty, and space to think.

Don’t rush. Slow down the playthrough.

Pause every 30 minutes. Ask:

- What are we noticing?

- What are we avoiding?

- What is delighting us?

- What is missing?

Talk honestly. Let people share what comes up. Don’t force a takeaway.

Keep walking. Let the game (and the group) unfold.

No prep guide, no theology degree, no streaming background required. Just a willingness to hold space and walk through it with other people.

I think part of why this works is because it doesn’t need a charismatic leader. It needs a guide. A host. Someone who’s willing to say, “We’re going to play this slowly, and it might stir something in us.”

That’s enough.

A Practice That’s Not Personality-Driven

Pixel Pilgrimage has felt different. The rhythm itself carries people. The questions do the work. The games do the work. The people showing up — even silently — do the work.

So when I think about the future, I don’t dream about bigger streams or bigger audiences. I dream about more hosts. More groups. More people realizing they can do this themselves — and that it’s worth doing.

If you’ve been following along and thinking, “I could never lead something like that” — I want to say this clearly:

You can.

If you’ve ever paused a game and felt something

If you’ve ever cried at an ending

If you’ve ever said “Whoa, that hit harder than I expected” —

Then you’ve already got what it takes.

This isn’t complicated. It’s just deliberate. It’s about slowing down, paying attention, and helping others do the same.

We’ll keep building the Hub, adding more courses, making the resources easier to access. We’ll keep hosting pilgrimages ourselves. But more and more, I hope we’re not the only ones doing it. I hope this becomes something people take, adapt, and carry with them into corners of the world we’ll never see.

Because that’s what a pilgrimage is — a shared journey. And journeys are meant to spread.

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