Not because AI is going to suddenly replace pastors or because robots are taking over worship services, but because we are entering a moment where people are genuinely trying to figure out where truth, trust, wisdom, and belonging come from.

And increasingly, many people are turning to AI to answer those questions. When I interact with Gen Z and Gen Alpha students, I notice two reactions happening simultaneously.

Some are already using AI for everything. They ask it questions about relationships, identity, morality, theology, vocation, politics, mental health, spirituality, and what they should cook for dinner. AI is becoming a kind of formation engine for them. Not because they are lazy or naive, but because it is immediate, personalized, nonjudgmental, and always available.

At the exact same time, I also meet young people who are deeply suspicious of AI-generated spirituality. I had one student tell me, “If I go to a church and I find out the prayers were written by ChatGPT, I’m never coming back.”

That tension is fascinating to me.

Young people are not simply asking whether AI is useful. They are asking what is authentic. What is embodied. What is human. And honestly, I think those are deeply theological questions.

I am not anti-AI. I think AI can become an incredibly useful tool for ministry. It can help generate ideas, organize information, create visual assets, summarize resources, build systems, increase accessibility, and connect people with meaningful content they might not otherwise discover.

I even think AI can help churches become more creative. But I do not think AI can become our discipleship pathway. That is where I start getting nervous. Because discipleship is not simply information delivery. It is relationship. It is practice. It is accountability. It is discernment. It is becoming.

And becoming always happens in community.

One of the dangers of AI is that it can slowly train us to believe we no longer need one another for wisdom. Why wrestle with a difficult conversation when an algorithm can give me an answer instantly? Why sit in ambiguity, grief, or uncertainty when I can generate clarity on demand?

But spiritual maturity has never worked that way. Some of the most transformative moments in my own life have come through wrestling, disagreement, confusion, slowness, and relationships that forced me to grow beyond my own assumptions.

AI can simulate conversation incredibly well. But simulation is not the same thing as covenant. And I think younger generations can feel that difference intuitively. That is why I think the church has a really important opportunity right now, not to reject technology, but to model a healthier relationship with it.

We can use AI without surrendering our humanity to it.

We can let AI support creativity without outsourcing discernment.
We can use AI-generated images without replacing pastoral presence.
We can use technology to connect people while still teaching the importance of embodiment, accountability, and community.

I think that distinction matters deeply moving forward. Because Christianity is fundamentally incarnational. God did not send humanity a document, algorithm, or language model. God became present.

That does not mean digital ministry is somehow less real. I spend large portions of my life building relationships, teaching, organizing, and learning online. Digital spaces absolutely matter. People encounter belonging, transformation, support, and healing there all the time.

But even digitally, we are still embodied people. When I show up on Zoom, I am still bringing my exhaustion, grief, joy, stress, humor, history, and full humanity into that interaction. The other people on the screen are too.

We cannot lose that. I think the danger is not AI itself. The danger is becoming so accustomed to frictionless convenience that we forget formation usually requires patience, vulnerability, accountability, and real human presence. Churches do not need to compete with AI on efficiency. We will lose that battle immediately.

But the church has always offered something different.

Presence.
Community.
Embodiment.
Discernment.
Shared ritual.
Care.
Meaning.
A place to wrestle with what it means to become more fully human together. Ironically, I think those things may become even more valuable in an AI-shaped world. The future of digital discipleship is not deciding whether technology is good or bad. It is learning how to remain deeply human and committed to Jesus while using these tools wisely, creatively, and faithfully.

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Should we use TikTok?
Should we start a podcast?
Should we create a Discord?
Should we stream worship differently?

Those are fine questions, but I honestly think they are secondary ones.

The deeper question is: what are we trying to form people into?

Because if we do not know what discipleship actually means in our context, digital tools will just amplify our confusion faster.

I have worked with churches where discipleship meant volunteering. Others where it meant Bible literacy. Others where it meant justice work, prayer, accountability, spiritual disciplines, or belonging to a supportive community.

Before we talk platforms, we need clarity about formation itself. Here are some observations from dabbling in the world of digital discipleship:

Layered Commitment Works Better Than One-Size-Fits-All

One thing I learned while church planting is that not everyone can or should engage at the same level.

We created Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 groups around discipleship, leadership, and service. Each had different levels of commitment, vulnerability, and intensity.

Some people needed a low-barrier entry point. Others were ready for deeper accountability or leadership formation.

That flexibility mattered.

Churches sometimes unintentionally create discipleship systems where the only options are either casual attendance or complete burnout. Digital spaces actually give us more flexibility to create layered forms of engagement that people can grow into over time. Let’s use the technology for what it is good at, namely, engaging folks where they are and on their terms.

Shared Reflection Is More Powerful Than Expert Teaching

I think one of the biggest shifts digital discipleship requires is moving away from expert-driven models where one person delivers information to passive listeners. Some of the healthiest digital spaces I have experienced distributed leadership instead.

In one online cohort I joined, leadership rotated every week. Different people facilitated discussions, guided reflection, or held space for prayer. Nobody had to carry the entire weight of the community alone. That changed the tone of the group completely. People became participants instead of consumers. I have also become increasingly convinced that good questions matter more than polished content.

I have seen wildly successful discipleship programs based in three question when looking at the biblical text:
What stood out to you?
Why did that stand out to you?
What are you going to do about it in the next 24 hours?

That is deceptively simple. But over time, those questions help people notice God, interpret their lives, and practice obedience in ordinary ways.

Digital Spaces Can Lower the Barrier to Honesty

This surprised me. People often assume digital environments automatically create shallow relationships, but I have sometimes found the opposite to be true. For some people, speaking through a screen feels safer at first. A voice memo, direct message, or Zoom room can create enough emotional distance for honesty to emerge.

I have watched people share grief, addiction, loneliness, fear, and spiritual questions online that they had never spoken aloud in a church building. That does not mean digital relationships are automatically healthy. It just means vulnerability can emerge there too when spaces are designed intentionally.

We Need More Curators and Fewer Performers

I honestly do not think churches need more content right now. The internet is overflowing with content. The deeper challenge is helping people discern what is healthy, trustworthy, liberative, thoughtful, and life-giving within the flood of voices constantly competing for attention.

Pastors do not need to become exhausted content machines trying to outproduce the algorithm. We need leaders who can contextualize, guide reflection, amplify wise voices, and help communities practice discernment together. That feels much closer to discipleship to me.

That is where churches still have something incredibly important to offer. We know our people. We know our neighborhoods. We know the griefs, fears, histories, tensions, gifts, and questions shaping our communities. We know what language resonates and what wounds people carry. We know the difference between what sounds good online and what is actually life-giving in a particular place among particular people.

That is contextual expertise. Digital discipleship is not about pastors becoming influencers or churches becoming media companies. It is about helping people faithfully interpret their lives, relationships, and communities in a world overflowing with noise.

Technology can distribute information instantly. But communities still need wise people who can help others ask:
What is true?
What is healthy?
What is forming me?
What kind of person is this shaping me into?
And what might faithfulness look like here, in this actual place, among these actual people? That work still feels deeply human to me. And honestly, deeply sacred.

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As if formation happens in sanctuaries, classrooms, and retreats while online spaces exist somewhere off to the side as distractions to manage. But digital formation is already happening. Every day people are being shaped by podcasts, algorithms, influencers, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds, group chats, political content, and online communities. The digital world is already forming how people think, react, belong, fear, and imagine.

The church is not deciding whether digital discipleship exists. The church is deciding whether it will participate in it intentionally. Churches have spent too much time treating digital spaces primarily as places to broadcast content rather than spaces where real formation and transformation can happen.

But also, digital discipleship should be radically different than simply consuming content. The problem with society is that we’re just so obsessed with our phones and just consuming things. And discipleship is different. Jesus walked into the disciples’ everyday lives and said what you’re doing doesn’t make sense. There’s another way. A better way.

That distinction matters.

Christian content is not automatically discipleship. A livestream is not necessarily formation. A podcast is not the same thing as community. Churches can upload endless material online without ever actually helping people practice the way of Jesus together. You’re not really a disciple if you know more. You’re a disciple if you’re applying it, if you’re reflecting it in conversation and community, if you’re trying it out.

That shift from consumption to participation changes everything.

Digital content is a part of discipleship. I know of one church plant that asked participants to listen to a podcast during the week and then gather together for coffee to discuss it. What resonated? What challenged them? What did they disagree with? How might they live differently because of it? That’s digital discipleship because it is more than consuming content.

Digital discipleship requires the same things healthy discipleship has always required: reflection, accountability, community, and practice. And surprisingly, some of the practices that make digital discipleship meaningful are actually very old.

Ritual matters online too.

At my former church plant, participants created covenant practices together. During a Wesley Covenant Service, members placed thumbprints onto a shared image as a sign of commitment to one another and to the community they were building together. In another online discipleship group, participants lit candles together over Zoom. Leadership rotated weekly, so no single person controlled the space. The group established shared expectations about how they would show up for one another while utilizing digital content for conversation.

What’s our covenant to each other and to God? What does respect look like in our digital space? Those questions are not technological questions. They are discipleship questions. And they matter deeply in a digital culture increasingly shaped by disconnection and disengagement. So, how do we create brave spaces where people can show up and know what to expect of others and themselves? Not just that we’re keeping our promises, but that some part of your life is transformed.

In the end, we are an embodied faith. Even digitally, we’re real people behind screens. This may be one of the central discipleship challenges facing the church in this moment. We cannot abandon the digital world because people are already living there. But we also cannot allow digital life to flatten people into passive consumers disconnected from relationship, accountability, and presence.

Christian faith has always been incarnational. God did not remain distant. God entered human life fully and relationally. Digital formation is already happening. The question now is whether the church will enter those spaces faithfully enough to help people become fuller disciples in it.

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That language has stayed with me. And confirmed why the crafting of my podcast, In the Processor: Where Grief is Re-imagined, is necessary. Why it is a sacred and holy act.

People are looking for community -- places where they can be fully themselves. For Black women and other marginalized communities, that need is even more urgent. We are searching for spaces where our lived experiences are honored, our voices are amplified, and our truths are received without policing or dismissal.

To tell the truth about our lives and hold one another’s stories with care is its own kind of rebellion, especially in public spaces that reward performance, sharpen critique, and leave so little room for our full range of emotions. Truth-telling, in that kind of world, becomes its own form of resistance.

On a Phygital Fellows trip to Boston University, I was reminded that Howard Thurman, then, the first black dean of Marsh Chapel, used the tools of his time —chapel, preaching, writing, and radio — to carry wisdom into people’s daily lives. Podcasting offers a similar possibility in ours. It can do more than gather an audience; it can help cultivate community, one shaped by return, recognition, and care.

I’m a child who grew up watching the Today Show. When in the early 80s it was led by Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley. I still watch it to this day because it is a form of community for me. I am invested in the lives of the reporters and hosts. When host Sheinelle Jones tragically lost her college sweetheart and husband Uche of 17-years to brain cancer, I grieved with her. Prayed for her and her family. Wrote messages of condolences on her Instagram wall. And I tuned in, like a dependable friend, to listen to her tell her story of grief and change. And I felt less alone.

Dr. Melva L. Sampson, Assistant Professor of Preaching and Practical Theology at Wake Forest names the power of podcasting beautifully in her “Digital Insurgent Homiletics” lecture as part of the Presbyterian Lectures at Columbia Theological Seminary in February. She describes podcasting as a form of proclamation that creates shared language and echoes the tradition of long conversations held on porches, at kitchen tables and on late night phone calls. What makes podcasting powerful, she notes, is not only its accessibility, but its intimacy. It allows stories to unfold over time, episode by episode, much like relationships do. In a fragmented world, that kind of sustained presence matters.

It matters especially because so many people are living with the wounds of disconnection. As Dr. Yolanda Pierce reminds us in “The Wounds are the Witness Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing,” when traditional spaces of ritual and belonging have been diminished or lost, people are left asking tough questions: Where will we go to celebrate? To mourn? Who will help us hold our stories when our ground shifts and our life breaks open?

That is why this podcast feels necessary to me. It is more than just a digital platform. It is an attempt to make room – for grief, for truth-telling, for memory, for re-imagining, for the kind of listening that helps people feel less alone. It is a way of building the kind of community many of us are searching for.

And in this season, a podcast is doing that for me.

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Not long after my mother unexpectedly died in July 2024, something I could not have expected began to happen: I started meeting students who were also living through devastating loss. Some were part of our campus ministry community; others had been sent to me. They were grieving parents, grandparents, and, in some cases, friends who had only recently graduated.

The encounters felt disorienting because I was still trying to understand the loss of my own mother. I had spent years guiding others through grief. As a pastor, I had preached funerals, buried church members and family friends, and sat with grieving families in the aftermath of death. But this loss was different. It was mine. And for all my experience, I felt strangely ill-equipped to help my students.

I began to wonder whether words could really do anything for a pain this deep, or whether silence was the only honest response. That inner struggle left me exposed, wrestling with grief in a way I had never known before.

What became clear very quickly was that I could not carry this in isolation. I needed help learning how to live inside this new reality.

There is something deeply human about walking through grief, trauma, lament, and change in community. We see it in scripture: the mourners outside Jairus’s house in Mark 5 and the call for the wailing women in Jeremiah 9. We see it in cultural traditions that make room for collective lament. We even see it now on social media, where people share hospital photos, raspy voices, and heart monitor beeps with the world. What once puzzled me began to make sense. In moments of crisis, we want to know there is a community somewhere that can hold space for us. Even if we remain on the edges of it, it matters to know that such a space exists and that we are still within reach of its care.

This is how I was raised to understand grief: mourning is communal. It is a shared experience in which the community becomes part of the support that helps carry us.

This is also perhaps why poet Gwendolyn Brooks words have become both a reminder and charge: “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Because community building and gathering are not optional. It is how we survive. It is how we carry one another and ensure no one has to grieve, remember or become alone.

When I joined the Phygital Fellows cohort, I initially wondered whether I had entered the wrong room. I am not a technologist in the conventional sense. I do not code, build apps, or speak fluently in Java or Python. I am still learning the language of artificial intelligence and digital innovation. But over time, I came to understand that I do belong in this space.

I belong because I am a storyteller. And storytelling is a form of technology—one of our oldest and most powerful tools.

Storytelling preserves culture, sparks change, reshapes perspective, nurtures empathy, and transforms how we see ourselves and the world around us. A compelling story does more than transport us to another place or time; it invites us to feel, to recognize ourselves in someone else’s experience, and to imagine lives beyond our own.

Narrative allows us to share wisdom, build community, and make room for hope. It creates belonging. In that sense, storytelling is an ancient technology that continues to evolve, helping us heal, connect, and envision new possibilities for the future.

My podcast, In the Processor” was born out of this realization. I wanted to gather stories of Black grief, listen for wisdom about how we navigate loss and trauma, and change in our lives and create a space where authenticity, vulnerability, and community might help us find our way forward together.

This was not the only podcast I could have made. But it is the one this season of my life has asked me to create.

I have been out of pulpit ministry for several years now. For the last three, I have served in campus ministry. In that time, students have taught me something essential: campus ministry can no longer be defined only by Bible study, food, or as a clergy colleague reminded me, by efforts to secure professions of faith and funnel students toward pastoral ministry.

It must become something more expansive and more attentive to the realities students are actually living.

When we asked students what they needed, their answer was clear: campus ministry must help tend to their emotional and mental well-being too. In other words, they were asking whether ministry could be a place of spiritual care broad enough to hold the full weight of their lives.

Their question sounded deeply Thurman-esque to me. In Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman asks what Christianity has to offer those whose lives are lived with their backs against the wall. What Thurman shared stays with me still: until we can respond to what is most pressing in people’s lives, our proclamation will ring hollow. If our hearts do not break for what breaks God’s heart, we cannot faithfully embody the Jesus we preach.

Isn’t that what so many of us are looking for—points of connection, understanding, a way to be seen and known, and have some kind of compass for when the path ahead is unclear?

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Against other people. Against productivity. Against popularity. Against efficiency. Against influence. Against the impossible standards of whatever curated version of life happens to be flooding our feeds that day. Even wellness technology often quietly operates this way. Optimize yourself. Improve yourself. Track yourself. Perform yourself.

But Christian formation has never primarily been about comparison. It has been about alignment.

That distinction sits near the heart of Plumbline, an app I am developing with Christian young adults in mind.

The image itself comes from an ancient construction tool. A plumb line is nothing more than a string and a weight, and for millennia, builders have used it to determine whether something was true, straight, and trustworthy enough to last. Before levels and laser instruments, builders would hang a weight on a line and allow gravity to reveal what was actually aligned and what was not. It is a simple tool, but an essential one. Structures depend upon it. A foundation footing or a wall slightly off at the beginning could compromise everything built upon it afterward. The plumb line was not a tool for decoration or performance. It was a tool for alignment, helping builders construct something sturdy enough to endure over time.

One place this ancient technology appears in Scripture is in the book of Amos, where the prophet describes a vision of the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line in hand. In the vision, God is not simply inspecting for perfection or measuring performance. The plumb line serves a symbol of alignment, integrity, and faithfulness. This prescient imagery is echoed in the New Testament as a means of understanding God dwelling among God’s people in Christ, and later, the Holy Spirit. The metaphor matters spiritually because it reframes the spiritual life away from comparison with others and towards alignment with the life, love, and way of Jesus.

The Christian life is not ultimately about constructing an idealized version of ourselves. It is about aligning ourselves with the life of Christ and the movement of the Spirit within us and around us.

That is a very different posture.

It is why the mechanics of Plumbline matter as much as the philosophy or theology behind it.

What strikes me most about the app is that it is not infuse users with more content, easy answers, or three-part solutions to life’s difficult questions. It simply supports rhythms of attentiveness to one’s life and to God’s presence along the way. The structure itself gently redirects users away from the fragmentation of modern life by slowing them down long enough to notice what is happening within them and around them in concert with God’s movement in the world.

The app centers three daily invitations to pray and reflect.

The first is to Awaken, which engages the daily Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary. Rather than treating scripture as disconnected inspirational content, for a spiritually pithy dopamine dose, it roots users inside the shared rhythm of the Christian calendar. Users are not reading and praying alone. They are joining Christians around the world who are moving through the life of Jesus together across seasons, weeks, and holy days, year-round.

The second rhythm, Sustain, engages the Psalms in the middle of your day. There is something reassuring about returning to the Psalter amidst ordinary life. The Psalms subvert superficial spirituality. They make room for grief, joy, confusion, anger, hope, exhaustion, praise, lament, and longing. They connect us with our neighbors almost instantly. The Psalms also connect us with the essence of the human experience as we hear the echoes of struggle and flourishing, fear and triumph, verse after verse. They remind us to bring our actual lives before God instead of a curated versions of ourselves.

In the evening, users are invited to Reflect. A process rooted in the Ignatian Prayer of Examen. They pay attention to moments where they sensed God’s nearness or absence. Their own brokenness and gratitude. Seek grace, and anticipate God’s direction for the day ahead. Then they capture those reflections in the simple architecture of the space provided within the app.

None of these practices are new. They are ancient spiritual tools and technologies if you will that millions of people who have aligned their lives with Jesus have trusted to help them discern The Way. That is the point. How can we lean into the wisdom and witness of the past to discern God’s presence in our lives today, and tomorrow, and the next day?

Plumbline is not trying to invent a new spirituality. It is attempting to recover ancient Christian practices of reflection inside a world increasingly hostile towards reflection and the intentional life. What makes the app especially interesting within the larger Phygital conversation is that it does not reject technology. It redirects it. It appropriates it for human flourishing and nurturing the emergence of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

Most digital spaces are designed to fracture attention. Plumbline instead attempts to cultivate attentiveness. That is a fundamentally different vision for technology.

Perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in the “Let Your Life Speak” feature.

Over time, the user captures their reflections, prayers, dreams, hopes, and self understanding. These reflections become their own journal of spiritual maturation in their own language and idiom. After weeks or months or even years, users can click the Let Your Life Speak button at the center and their reflections for a certain period of time are distilled into a word cloud. An artfully cast image of their collected reflections keyed to high-frequency words or themes. The effect is subtle but powerful. Users begin to see patterns in their own lives reflected back to them. What themes keep surfacing? What fears? What hopes? What griefs? What celebrations? What desires? What prayers? What joys?

It is not AI predicting their language. It is a representation of their actual life experience reflected back to them in support of their growing self-understanding and life-inspired discernment. It captures the user’s own language and behavior. It is truly a reflection of what is real and not a prediction or projection of what could be.

That is important because so much of modern life conditions us to listen outwardly before we ever listen inwardly. We are expected to absorb everybody else’s expectations before we ever pause long enough to notice the deeper currents shaping our own souls and discern a life of meaning and significance from within.

The Quaker phrase behind the feature, “Let your life speak,” captures this beautifully. The question is not simply whether your life appears meaningful from the outside or signals virtue to others. The deeper question is whether you are listening closely enough to hear The Truth your own life is already speaking, your True Self, given from Above, artfully and wonderfully made, when you were knit together in your mother’s womb. Most likely, it is already telling you who and whose you are, and what you’re meant to do.

That kind of reflection and soul-level listening is increasingly rare. But it remains one of the most necessary spiritual practices for our flourishing in this present age.

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Most of us carry the layered fatigue around without even noticing anymore. Our phones vibrate in our pockets with notifications, texts, alerts, headlines, breaking news, reminders, reels, podcasts, DMs, updates, and recommendations. Algorithms compete endlessly for our attention while institutions, employers, schools, peers, influencers, and advertisers all continue ANSWERING variations of the same question: What should you buy, be, believe, or do next?

Young adults, especially, are navigating a relentless flood of directions and expectations. Sometimes, the advice and information are conveyed through leading questions as much as actual advice or information. What are you majoring in? What internship are you pursuing? Who are you dating or marrying? Who are you voting for? Who do you want to be? How are you building your résumé? How are you positioning yourself for the future? How are you going to afford anything?

Underneath all of it sits a quieter and more difficult question that far fewer people seem equipped to answer:

How are you discerning a life worth living? Who are you called to become?

Not simply a successful life. Not simply a productive life. Not simply a marketable life. But a faithful one. The good life. Also known as the virtuous life of integrity and meaning.

One of the things that has become increasingly clear to me is that modern life offers virtually no built-in space for reflection anymore. We are surrounded by content, information, commentary, and stimulation, but very little invitation to actually examine and reflect on the value and significance of all of that content and information, much less the support or imperative to reflect on what Mary Oliver calls, “Our one wild precious life.” Even fewer opportunities exist to do so prayerfully, under the careful guidance of the Holy Spirit and a nurturing Christian community.

Christian spirituality has always assumed reflection.

Jesus repeatedly withdrew from the crowds. Before major decisions. After public ministry. In moments of grief. In moments of exhaustion. Again and again throughout the Gospels, Jesus steps away from noise and urgency to pray, reflect, listen, and commune with the Father.

That rhythm was not accidental. Reflection has always been part of healthy human formation.

The Christian tradition developed practices around this reality long before smartphones and social media complicated, even confounded, the discovery and discernment of our authentic selves. Practices like silence, examen, contemplative prayer, Sabbath, lectio divina, retreat, and journaling were never merely spiritual accessories for especially religious people. They were ways of paying attention. Ways of learning to listen attentively to God’s benevolent speech beneath and between the noise of the world. An essential means of aligning one’s life with God.

The world is noisy. Not just technologically noisy, though it is certainly that. The world is spiritually and emotionally noisy too.

The loudest voices in our lives are often not the truest voices. Anxiety is loud. Fear is loud. Comparison is loud. Performance is loud. Consumer culture is loud. Outrage is loud. Ambition is loud. Shame is loud. The endless demand to curate ourselves into more successful, desirable, informed, productive, and optimized versions of ourselves is loud.

But the Spirit rarely shouts, or insists on its own way.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that one of the great spiritual crises of our time is not immorality or disbelief. It is the inability to listen carefully and discern wisely. We are losing the capacity to sit still long enough to notice the goodness, truth, and beauty of our own lives. Not the externals of having a cherished family member or friend, a beautiful city or farm to observe, or a lovely church or school to attend. Appreciating those things is expected in order to be perceived as an appropriately grateful person. The particular deficit I’m touching one is the simple capacity to listen attentively to the integrity and authority of our own, inner, sacred, God-given self.

When we stop listening to our lives, we lose touch with deeper realities. We forget what we actually love. We forget what brings lasting joy. We forget who we are becoming and sometimes who we have already become. We also forget the myriad means by which God has already spoken to us through our own life already. That memory loss renders us nearly deaf to the voice within, the Logos, that is trying to remind us who and whose we really are.

Instead, we become reactive.

We move from notification to notification. Crisis to crisis. Opinion to opinion. We absorb other people’s desires before we ever discern our own. We inherit other people’s fears before we ever name our own. We mistake constant input for wisdom. We lose our capacity to sift and winnow all that is coming at us and hold onto what is true.

Information and knowledge are not the same thing as wisdom, any more than decisions are discernment.

One of the lines that has stayed with me recently is the idea that “the world is just a noisy gong and rarely does love cut through.” That feels painfully accurate some days. We are flooded with voices competing for our attention, but precious few spaces, places, or processes are actually helping us become attentive people.

And yet attentiveness sits near the center of Christian spirituality.

To follow Jesus requires learning to notice. To notice God. To notice our neighbor. To notice our own souls. To notice what is actually shaping us. To notice what is deforming us. To notice where grace is already present and whether we are resting in it or resisting it.

That kind of reflection does not happen accidentally anymore. It requires great intentionality. It requires practice. It requires protecting space from a world designed to fragment and consume every ounce of our attention before we ever have the chance to hear the still, small voice beneath it all.

What if there was a means by which we could protect time to reflect and space to capture our own reflections whenever it was convenient within our own busy schedules? There just might be…

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Ironically, months after the group had formed, in a completely unrelated set of (spring break) circumstances, I experienced an incredibly holy moment in my life, and I made a pact with God that if anyone ever invited me to participate in the group, I would swallow my pride and participate in humility and gratitude. The night I returned from that momentous spring break experience in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, while preparing for the upcoming week, in walked my next-door neighbor from just down the hall. Bernie came into my room, closed my dorm room door behind himself, and sat down on my bed. He sort of mumbled a mild greeting and a few other things, and then told me he was leading the Bible study that Tuesday night, and said he would appreciate it if I would join them. I said I appreciated him inviting me, and that I would be there. He nodded, stood up, and walked out of the room. It was one of the oddest and unnatural exchanges Bernie and I have ever shared. It turned out to be a bit supernatural, or at least Providential. To this day, there is nothing anyone can do or say that will convince me it was not God’s loving hand that reached out to me that night through my friend Bernie’s simple invitation. It was the most peculiar interaction we had ever had. It was as if he was literally directed, Old Testament Jonah-style, to come and invite me to join the fold, despite not really wanting to do so of his own accord.

Over the course of the next 10 weeks, we went through Blackaby and King’s, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing God’s Will. I grew by leaps and bounds in my Christian faith and in my friendship with the men in that group. To this day, I speak to two or more of those guys at least once every other week. But the six weeks after we finished that small group experience were spiritually dry as a bone. I didn’t maintain much of a consistent prayer life, absent the small-group accountability, and the rhythm of the book/study guide that held our spiritual hands and led us in The Way. Shortly thereafter, I experienced another “first,” my first spiritual letdown and emotional plateau. I longed for Christian community and accountability, conversation with fellow strugglers, and the keen insights and rich wisdom from Christians farther down life’s path. I prayed for the self-discipline and consistency I believed I needed to continue to grow and mature in my own emerging sense of self as a newly committed disciple of Jesus. Yet I often found myself flailing about and struggling to find any consistency or devotion. At least it seemed paltry compared to the season of spiritual flourishing I had just passed through.

Over the years, I have participated in scads of small groups as a leader, or a participant, or both. I have weathered nearly as many seasons of spiritual dryness and complacency, though the two are not always related. Every single time I have participated in a small group, I have grown. Not all have been mountain-top experiences, nor should anyone expect small-groups to be mountain-top experiences. But there is always room to grow. That’s part of why now, nearly 20 years into my work as a collegiate minister, our organization continues to offer small-group formation experiences every semester. But a real mystery has remained: how best to support students, faculty, staff, family, friends, and myself, between (and during) those immersive communal, formational experiences, and curbing the more polarized cycle of spiritual mountain top and dry valley.

In our quest to address this mystery, our ministry is creating Plumbline, a Christian journaling app that incorporates scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in equal measure. I was inspired years ago by this passage in the Book of Hebrews, Chapter 8 that quotes Jeremiah 31:

The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant

with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they did not remain faithful to my covenant, and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. This is the covenant I will establish with the people of Israel and Judah after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.

But how in the 21st-Century-heck is it still happening? How is the Holy Spirit seeding faith and cultivating forgiveness in our lives? How is Jesus fulfilling his ministry of incarnate grace and perpetual reconciliation among us for two millennia now? What is ours to do in faithful response as co-laborers in the New Creation? How is God’s word being written in our minds and on our hearts? If we aren’t to remain dependent upon a priestly class of leaders to teach us the precepts and laws of God, how are we to discern it in our own hearts, minds, and souls? While I won’t pretend to understand the gravity of all these questions, or the further questions they point us towards, I do believe that there are clues all around us and within us, pointing towards the Author and Perfector of our faith. One such clue was given in 1968 by Paulo Freire, the Brazilian author and educator, who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, he articulates the critical importance of praxis - the perpetual cycle of acting in and upon the world, and then reflecting upon that action and its impact on the world and those around you. He emphasizes the importance of reflection because it opens up a space for wisdom, insight, and epiphany to emerge. That’s exactly why we are creating Plumbline, a journaling app that helps people protect time to reflect on their own life experiences and capture their reflections forever. And we have the Wesleyan Impact Partners and the Phygital Fellows to thank for helping make this dream a reality.

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I was invited to write a piece about Oikon Studios. I asked Jess Bielman if we could have a conversation around ministry, creativity, and sustainability instead. He asked insightful questions, and I rambled on. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. For context, I am an ordained elder of the United Methodist Church on honorable location. I work in finance and write weekly liturgies. I am fortunate to be a part of the Phygital Fellows cohort. I am happy.

On Sustaining Weekly Creative Work

Jess:
Oikon Studios devotional or liturgical work comes out weekly. Week-to-week consistency can become a grind for creatives. How do you keep your heart, mind, and creativity moving over a long period of time?

Mike:
Most of my mornings start with coffee and emotional regulation (lol).

I’ve been doing this for well over a decade now. Not to be creative. Just for my own sanity.

Usually that involves journaling. Lots of journaling. Sometimes it’s gratitude journaling. Sometimes it’s an Examen practice. Sometimes I’m reflecting on Scripture.

Mostly I’m just processing my own stuff!

Every once in a while, as I sit down to pour out my thoughts, reflections, and curiosities on paper, something worth sharing spills out.

A phrase. A prayer. A reflection. A perspective. An observation of humanity. An incongruence of life.

This has always been a reservoir for sermon writing and creative work.

And Oikon’s Liturgies have a pretty clear structure. Scripture. Poetry. Blessing. So I’m just funneling and editing raw journals into a digestible work.

I suppose I also have some values around the type of liturgies I hope to create — more poetic than didactic, more human than abstract, etc.

So honestly, the weekly rhythm doesn’t really feel like a grind. It’s mostly just my way of coping with life.

On Making Spiritual Work Public

Jess:
What was your hope in making this public and sharing it online?

Mike:
Oikon as it currently exists emerged from many different soils.

My family and I were transitioning away from traditional congregational ministry and exploring other ways to offer our gifts and graces to the world — other ways discipleship and spiritual formation might happen outside a normal American church model.

So Oikon shifted from being a local faith community into more of a resource for spiritual formation. The mission stayed the same — making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world — but the modality changed.

But you know, church is public. Ministry is public. So part of me just assumed this would also be public.

But I also remember posting some of those first reflections and physically feeling this insecurity crawl up the back of my neck.

The first time I hit “Post” on some reflection piece on prayer, this voice came over me like a wave:

I remember thinking, what the hell is this?

But that’s why I do all that emotional regulation work each morning!

I had to bring that into prayer and conversations with people I trusted. And my friends and mentors, they pushed back on me and said, “Who do you think you are not to share it?”

That was important for me.

I also think creatives and clergy are often deeply insecure people. So having relationships that counteract those voices is really important. Shout out to Phygital Fellows.

On Process, Journaling, and Editing

Jess:
What does the actual process look like for you? Are you writing these late at night? In journals? Coffee shops? What’s the rhythm?

Mike:
Messy. Very messy.

I’m forty years old now and I’ve been journaling since I was thirteen. So that’s… twenty-seven years?

I’ve used every possible modality. Apple Notes. TextEdit. Notion. Evernote. Dotted journals. Right now I’m into graph paper and drawing charts and diagrams all over everything.

There’s not really a strict regimen.

Usually when something feels worth reflecting on, I get it down using whatever’s nearby. Laptop. Phone. Notebook.

If I go to a coffee shop, I’ll always have all three with me anyway — laptop, notebook, phone.

I do think handwriting accesses a different part of the brain for me. But whenever I try forcing myself into one particular system or modality, I eventually get bored with it.

So mostly I’ve just learned:

Then later, there’s usually some kind of structure that emerges.

Reflection. Prayer. Blessing.

A lot of the editing process is actually subtraction

And filtering!

Earlier in ministry, especially growing up in evangelical Korean-American Youth Group cultures, my instinct was to write in ways that convicted people. The underlying assumption was always: “How can this challenge someone? Correct someone?”

Over time, I started realizing that kind of writing can become harsh without meaning to.

So now I try filtering everything through different questions:

How can this be lighter?
More beautiful?
Less judgmental and more inviting?

When I read Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver, their writing can be deeply convicting, but they’re not yelling at you. They’re offering observations about the world that slowly move you toward a different way of being human.

That’s closer to what I want now.

On Poetry, Beauty, and Formation

Jess:
Why poetry and prayer instead of more traditional teaching or theology?

Mike:
That’s a really good question.

I sat under brilliant theologians at Duke Divinity School. Willie Jennings. Randy Maddox. Kate Bowler. Those classes genuinely changed my life. So I don’t want to downplay the importance of theology or teaching.

But personally, my soul tends to move most deeply through beauty. Music. Photography. Poetry. Film. Art. Nature.

Discipleship involves orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. Right belief. Right practice. Right affection.

I think my work probably lives most naturally in that third category.

After fifteen years of pastoral ministry, I’ve also realized people are rarely transformed by arguments alone. Most folks tend to seek intellectual echo chambers reinforcing what they already believe.

I used to think persuasive theological arguments were going to really move the needle in Methodist spaces (lol). Honestly… nobody cared… unless they already agreed.

But if something moves the heart? That’s different. That stops you and forces you to pause and listen.

At this point, I’d rather write three honest lines of poetry than another argument about atonement theory.

On Optimization and Faithfulness

Jess:
Do you think much about audience growth or reach?

Mike:
Honestly, not that much.

I mean, maybe these words are driven by a subconscious ego that thinks I’m more elite by not caring about such matters. Like, probably, there’s some part of me that wants growth or influence. I don’t know. I try to stay honest about that.

But I’m just so deeply uncomfortable with capitalist visions of ministry that revolve around maximizing reach, optimizing engagement, scaling influence, monetizing everything. It makes me want to puke.

Something in my spirit recoils from that.

The next step for Oikon has never really come from optimization strategy. It’s usually come from asking:

What feels worthwhile?
What feels beautiful?
What feels genuine?

And then just trying to faithfully follow that thread.

Honestly, some of the liturgies I personally think are kind of mediocre end up deeply affecting people. And some I think are really strong just like… disappear into silence.

Faithfulness is just showing up.

On Meaningful Responses

Jess:
Without those frameworks, what are some of the responses that have stayed with you most?

Mike:
Some of the most meaningful responses have been really personal and quiet.

There was someone from a church I served years ago who recently suffered a stroke and was bedridden in the hospital. She reached out and told me she had been reading these liturgies weekly, and that one of the recent prayers created an environment where she experienced God in a way she desperately needed in her condition.

Moments like that stay with you.

That’s kind of the thing with any creative work in the name of Christ.

Sometimes I reread my own work and think, “Man, this one is kind of lame,” and those are the pieces that deeply bless somebody.

And sometimes the pieces I think are actually pretty good just disappear into the void.

Praise be to God (lol)!

On Institutions, Freedom, and Finding Resonance

Jess:
You’ve operated within institutional settings for a long time, and Oikon feels much more non-institutional. How have you found the freedom and support needed to sustain this kind of work?

Mike:
What I’ve found is that whatever institution I’m located in — whatever hierarchy or bureaucracy I’m operating inside of — it’s always smaller than I think, and its always attached to a larger whole.

In the United Methodist world, for example, there’s the local church, district, conference, jurisdiction, US, global church.

Whenever I became frustrated or constrained within one particular space, if I zoomed out a bit or looked adjacent to where I was, there were usually still one or two people somewhere who I resonated with — who shared similar convictions.

That became really important recurrence for me, because I’ve always felt a little strange compared to typical Methodist clergy.

My mental model of ministry was never really about building a religious career. So whenever tensions surfaced around my convictions and institutional norms, I found myself reaching beyond my immediate environment — grabbing coffee with people outside my normal circles, building friendships outside institutional spaces altogether.

Mentors. Friends. High school friends far removed from religion.

Those relationships expanded my imagination.

And honestly, having a stubborn personality probably helped too (lol). I’ve often jumped before fully knowing where I was going to land.

But over and over again, those jumps somehow led to new relationships, new resources, and new imagination for what ministry and creative work could become.

I always say

And even now, Oikon still exists within structures of accountability. It’s a nonprofit. There’s a board. There are people committed to the work.

Groups like Phygital Fellows have also been meaningful because they create gathering spaces for people who feel slightly outside traditional ministry norms. Spaces where imagination, experimentation, and resonance can actually breathe a little.

On Guidance for Creatives and Ministers

Jess:
What guidance would you offer someone wanting to share spiritually creative work publicly?

Mike:
I shared this in a previous post, but for me: financial health, mental health, and dignity are the equations you want to solve if you want to have a sustained happiness as a minister within a capitalist society.

But really, all that points to is learning to be fully grounded in who you are and being clear in what you value as a person.

If you have those three things, you can’t really lose.

Again, for me, separating how I survive financially from ministry was deeply liberating.

There was too much internal conflict when ministry was also tied to my family’s future financial well being. Don’t get me going here (lol)!

Listen for what Thurman called the Sound of the Genuine. What path of healing is the voice of God leading you towards? Just walk it.

Then pay attention to what feels alive in you. Not because it’s useful. Not because it scales. Not because it performs well.

But because it’s your vulnerable self before God.

Something beautiful will emerge there.

Creating beauty is the work of translating what God is doing in you into something that will bless another pilgrim on their way towards salvation.

Fragmented

We live within an ecology of fragmented attention.

Open tabs.
Endless notifications.
Infinite scroll.

We consume content
faster that it can be integrated.

Spiritual content feels no different.
Briefly encountered.
Quickly forgotten.

Dissonance

Oikon Studios is a digital liturgy project.

Weekly prayers arriving in your inbox
offering Scripture, poetry, silence, blessing.

And yet.
Creating and reading these liturgies
has felt a bit ironic.

Like listening to a sermon on slowing down
at 2.5x speed.

These prayers
inviting attentiveness
are on a medium
built to commoditize
attention.

This is not wrong.

But maybe, dissonant.

Or maybe, incomplete.

As though the words
are asking the body
for something the screen
cannot hold.

Embodiment

So Oikon’s Phygital Fellows project
became a movement towards embodiment

from pixel to paper
from infinite feed to finite page
form distraction to attention.

Not as a rejection of technology
but an embrace of limitation
for the sake of presence.

A printed liturgy
has no infinite scroll.

It does not notify.
It does not refresh.
It does not seek optimization.

It simply waits.

Folded pages.
Heavy paper.
Minimal type.
Negative space.
Film photography.

All inviting
a deeper breath.

Resistance

In Chicago, during our Phygital Fellows gathering,
we shared the first run of these printed liturgies.

I felt the room slow down.
I felt an embodied practice emerge.

I felt the recovery of attention
as a quiet collective resistance to hurried living,
and a return to God.

Follow along here.

Design

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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9 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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a year 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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