The service was framed by Sue Phillips, reflecting on a time as a young seminarian with no religious background, finding a deep sense of transcendence while engaging with the “technology of communion” for the first time. Sue brought us to the altar many years ago, naming the actual transmission of grace and goodness that then provided meaning and direction for her studies and life.

It was a story that some of the Phygital Fellows had heard before. But like communion, familiar stories hold some of our greatest truths.

With that in the front of mind, Rev. Juana Jordan brought us to our own transcendent moment. These were her words:

“As we close out today, we do so around one of our oldest technologies of meaning-making: simple bread and juice, shared in community.

Long before screen interfaces, algorithms, and digital networks, Jesus introduced us to this ritual tool — this sacred hardware of bread and cup meant to download grace into our lives, store collective memory, and help us construct a world rooted in justice and peace and love.

In this act of communion, we align ourselves with a radical Jesus who bypassed every social algorithm of his day to sit and eat with everyone and anyone: strangers, skeptics, outcasts, the seeking, the curious, and friends alike. He took this simple bread and wine, the basic hardware’s of daily life and transformed them into tools of liberation.

He set a table that has always been open. In the United Methodist Church, this is what we believe and say. At this table there are no paywalls. No prerequisites and no gatekeepers. This is a table that welcomes us however we come and proclaims, “You belong here!”

Friends, You Belong Here!

Let us Pray:

Holy God, we bring these simple gifts of the earth to this open table.

Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and juice.

Make them be for us the body and blood of Christ, that we may be for the world the body of Christ, redeemed and liberated by his love.

​By your Spirit, make this bread — broken in our hands — a sacred technology of grace, grounding us in shared community and filling every empty place within us.

By your Spirit, make this cup — poured out before us — a stream of liberation, washing away our divisions and renewing our courage to build a world where all can move and breathe free and as your Word says, in you, have our being.

​Use these ordinary elements to transform our ordinary lives. Anoint our minds, our hands, and our creative tools, that every story we tell and every space we build may bear witness to your boundless, non-exclusive grace.

We ask all these things, through your Son Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in your holy Church, all honor and glory is yours, almighty God, now and forever.”

​All: Amen.

*Note: There are adaptations of the United Methodist Communion liturgy

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Because of my mother’s life circumstances, she never knew who my biological father was. She didn’t know his name, what he looked like, or his ethnic background. And neither did I.

Growing up, and even into adulthood now, it was always a struggle to be asked that unfortunate but fairly normal question…”What are you?”

You know the question. You know…the kind of question that might come from innocent and naive curiosity, but for someone with a family story like mine, it almost always created significant insecurity.

Well…Who am I? What am I? Where do I come from?

And for much of my life, I simply didn’t know. But then, along came technology like AncestryDNA.

Now, I always knew, because of a local United Methodist church on the corner of Park and Fisher Roads in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, that I was a child of God.

It was that church that helped save my life and gave me an alternative vision for my life. A future that didn’t have to be defined by drugs, alcohol, addiction, or overdose.

My faith taught me whose I was long before I fully understood where I came from.

But it was technology like AncestryDNA that helped me discover more about my story.

It was through that technology that I learned I’m proudly 40% West African, with deep ancestral roots in South Carolina’s Black community, and 60% Swiss…West African & Swiss, who knew!

Think about that for a moment.

A technology that can take a small sample of my saliva, analyze hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, and compare them with an enormous database of human ancestry, history, and connection…and then, spit out the answer to the question I’ve wondered much of my life.

It’s remarkable!

And I know the technology isn’t perfect. But through it, I’ve begun what will likely be a lifelong journey of discovering family members I never knew existed. Cousins. Aunts. Uncles. And perhaps one day, I’ll discover who my biological father is, or whether I have biological siblings.

Technology has helped me discover parts of my own humanity that, for much of my life, remained a mystery.

So today, I’m a proud biracial man. West African and Swiss. A husband to Hannah. A father to Lydia, with another baby girl on the way in January. A Christian. A pastor. A friend.

And I’m still discovering who I am.

It’s been my faith, technology, and the people who love me who have helped me along the way.

And here’s what I find so extraordinary about all of this.

Technology didn’t give me my identity or my worth. But it helped reveal something about the life, history, and humanity that God had already given me.

And I wonder if that’s part of our invitation as we gather here.

To recognize that the God who creates, who loves, and who brings life into being is already at work in ways we are only beginning to discover.

Which brings us to the opening words of John’s Gospel.

John, the writer of this account of the life of Jesus, begins with a story of origins, too.

Here are the words of John 1:1-5 CEB…

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The Word was with God in the beginning. Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being. What came into being through the Word was life, and the life was the light for all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn’t extinguish the light.

John opens his Gospel by echoing the words of Genesis 1, “In the beginning,” and John is taking us back before anything was made, and he tells us that before we ever made a thing, all things came into being through the Word, and then, in Jesus, the Word became flesh.

John is immediately trying to get our attention and remind us that we are mere recipients of this thing that we call life and all of the goods of life that we call technology.

Before church buildings, in-person or online gatherings, before decisions around platforms and apps, before our plans for the future, before any of us had the remarkable capacity to send a text message around the world in seconds, before any of this…the Scripture reminds us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…Everything came into being through the Word…Through the Word was life, and that life was the light for all people.”

Before we ever imagined, invented, or created anything, there was God. And every act of human creativity begins within a world we did not create, using gifts and possibilities we did not give ourselves. Before we had brilliant ideas, we are already held together by the Divine.

John helps us remember that…We are not at the center of this week’s conversation. The Divine. The Creator God. The Incarnate God. Love is at the center of our work this week.

This is humbling…but I actually think this gives us remarkable freedom and energy. This week, we’re free to be curious about the future, because the future does not depend entirely on our ability to imagine it, just as the entire created order was not a construct of our imagination or brilliance. Our work or invitation is to listen for the voice of the Incarnate God this week, and to learn from a community we did not create.

And this brings us to the heart of John’s gospel (vs 14)…“The Word became flesh and made his home among us.”

Flesh.

The God who created all things became one of us the Scriptures suggest. Jesus knew hunger, exhaustion, pain, joy, and love. He could become tired. He needed food and care. He lived among particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time. God didn’t remain distant from humanity. God entered into the fullness of our humanity.

The eternal Logos through whom all things came into being becomes sarx, flesh, and dwells among human beings.

We live in an extraordinary technological moment. We are exploring artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, digital communities, automated systems, and technologies that can extend our presence across the planet.

We are learning to do remarkable things without physically occupying the same spaces.

Yet the central Christian claim is that God chose to become physically present within the world.

What does it mean that the God who created everything chose to become flesh in a world where we are increasingly learning to transcend the limitations of our own flesh?

Think about that.

• The God who was not bound by human limitations willingly entered them.

• The God who created time entered time. The God who created humanity became human.

• The God who could have remained distant chose to draw near.

And perhaps there’s something here for those of us who are imagining the future of technology and the church.

Because the question isn’t simply whether our technologies can extend our presence, or expand our capacity to connect…

The question is whether all of these extraordinary possibilities are teaching us how to be more fully present to one another. And then I wonder…and I hope you’ll wonder with me this week…What are our practices and technologies cultivating within us?

We often ask what our technologies allow us to do. But I wonder if we spend enough time asking what our technologies are doing to us. Because our technologies are not simply tools we use…they are also environments and ecosystems that form us.

Do they make us more patient with people? More truthful? More willing to listen? More able to stay with someone through grief or disagreement? Do they embody a love that lingers and listens deeply, a love that makes sense for the poor, the tired, the weary, and the persons with their backs up against the wall.

Do they help people know that they are beloved and that their lives matter?

Do they move us toward our neighbors with care?

Or are they cultivating fear? Contempt? Hatred? An appetite for certainty that leaves no room for another person’s humanity?

And are we, as the leaders and co-creators of these technologies, becoming more compassionate? More generous in our spirit/personhood? More just? More like the incarnate Word, Jesus?

Our tools give us remarkable reach. We can hear someone preach from another country. We can pray with a person hundreds of miles away. We can invite people into community who have been told there is no place for them. We can engage in robust creativity with remarkably ease these days.

This is an incredible gift given to us. But what happens when our capacity to connect grows faster than our capacity to care? In the midst of all this technological progress, it’s easy to overlook the very people who make it possible.

The workers who build our devices. The communities impacted by the massive infrastructure powering our digital world. The families who can’t afford access to these technologies. And the people whose pain and suffering become someone else’s content.

Because if we’re not careful, we can become so fascinated by what technology makes possible that we forget the people God calls us to love.

Perhaps John’s invitation is to remember that our calling isn’t simply to expand our reach, but to deepen our recognition. To recognize the image of God in every person. To pay attention to the people we might otherwise overlook. And to bear witness to the light of Christ, who is already present in the world, even in places we have yet to recognize.

Because ultimately, our technology should be judged, evaluated and considered, by the love it cultivates. Our online and in-person faith communities (even our lives) should be judged by the love they cultivate.

Let me use a small example to highlight this…Christian nationalism…it has caused real harm in personal relationships, in churches, and in digital spaces. It’s part of the air we breathe in the USA today (Lord, have mercy). It can wrap the language and images of our faith around fear, exclusion, coercion, and the pursuit of power.

We know that…AI did not invent that ideology. Though, emerging technologies can make it easier to manufacture convincing messages, amplify absolutely terrible prejudices, and distribute harmful narratives at extraordinary speed. This type of technology can reinforce isolationism and tribalism and hatred globally, it can create systems that reinforce these messages when people turn to AI and emerging technologies for answers.

That matters because a message or image or app or AI thread can look impressive, it can help us move and work at significant paces while forming people to see their neighbors as threats, cultivate within us contempt for all people.

And yet, here’s what’s challenging for those of us who love to create and innovate and lead…we do not get to be the only ones who decide whether our work is cultivating love in the world.

We can talk about our intentions. We can explain what we hoped to accomplish. We can celebrate the extraordinary things we’ve created. But the people whose lives are impacted by our decisions have stories we need to hear.

The person who found belonging. The person who experienced exclusion. The neighbor whose life became more difficult because of something we created or a decision we made.

Their experiences and voices matter.

And if we’re serious about love, healing, and liberation, their stories must do more than inform our understanding. They must have the power to change our decisions, our practices, and perhaps even who gets a seat at the table where those decisions are made when it comes to technology.

And that’s difficult work. It requires humility, courage, and a willingness to hear things we didn’t expect and perhaps don’t want to hear.

Our practices and technologies and innovations should be judged by the love they cultivate.

Before any of us can show what, we built. Before we can defend a technology decision. Before we can explain why our ministry has it figured out. We are people who need the love of God, and John says that in Jesus, grace has come near.

That grace gives us the courage to examine our work honestly. So, as we enter these days together, I want us to pay attention to two things.

1. Pay attention to where the incarnate God is already at work.

We do not enter new spaces, places, or technologies to bring God where God has never been. We enter trusting that the God who became flesh is already there. Look for the signs, beautiful and wonderful signs, of the incarnate love throughout the technologies and conversations this week.

I know first-hand the beauty of technology, I’m a proud West African, Swiss man, with roots in deep the South Carolinian black community, who was raised, resides and lives in central Pennsylvania.

Pay attention to where the incarnate God is already at work bringing forth love and goodness in humanity through technology and innovation.

2. Pay attention to what is cultivating love.

Because not everything that advances technology advances humanity. And not everything that expands our reach deepens our capacity to love well.

And I wonder if there’s a challenging question for us this week.

What if our innovations and technologies are successful and impressive, and our capacity is greater than ever, but the very people we’re called to love, our neighbors, aren’t flourishing?

And perhaps even more challenging…Who gets to decide what flourishing looks like?

Is it us, the people creating and leading? Or are we willing to listen to those whose lives are most impacted by what we build? Because the measure of our innovation cannot simply be what we create, but who is flourishing because of it.

So, friends, welcome to Berkely, California…you’re an incredible group, let’s do some dreaming that is so bold where we image new possibilities.

But let’s never become so fascinated by what our technologies can do that we forget the people we’re called to love. Because the Word became flesh and made home among us.

And may our work help make that same love more visible in the world, both in the digital and physical space. Or, as we’re calling it this week…phygital!

Amen.

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So when we speak of integrated liberation, we are talking about a freedom that has integrity at its center. It is liberation from the fear of rejection, from the pressure to perform according to the metrics of domination, and from the temptation to sell pieces of the self in exchange for safety, access, or legitimacy. Integrated liberation refuses the constraints that come from needing to be affirmed by the very systems that diminish life. It is a way of living that believes so deeply in the power of love that it does not need violence to prove itself. It knows too much about God, too much about truth, and too much about the kingdom to mistake domination for freedom.

In my opinion, one of the limitations in the conversation around integrated liberation is the cost of having it. And it is not primarily a financial cost. It is the cost of identity, illusion, and false security. People are afraid to feel shame. They are afraid to grieve. They are afraid to tell the truth about the ways they have been complicit in the very systems they claim to want to change. So they avoid the conversation, or they talk around it. They intellectualize liberation without undergoing the slow, painful work of integration.

The limitation, then, is not that integrated liberation is too abstract or too difficult to define. The limitation is that it costs us something to embody it. Integration requires time. It requires slowness. It requires the experience of emotions and feelings that make us less productive, less composed, less “on our Ps and Qs.” It may cause us to act in ways that seem out of character because the character we have been performing was never fully free. The process of grief, healing, and integration is messy. The process of death and dying is messy. It is smelly. It is gross. It is not clean, efficient, or marketable. So instead of entering the mess, we often pretend. We choose performance over healing because we want to avoid the chaos that comes with becoming whole.

This is why Jesus’ picture of integrated liberation is so disruptive. He does not offer us liberation without cost. He asks, again and again, “Can you drink this cup?” He withdraws by himself. He experiences deep pain, grief, abandonment, and anguish. Scripture describes him as acquainted with sorrow and grief. And yet, there is also a joy in him that cannot be reduced to comfort or ease. His integrity does not exempt him from pain; it allows him to move through pain without being ultimately defined by it. As my friend Tommy Garvin says, all pain is not suffering. Integrated liberation does not mean we will never hurt. It means we no longer have to betray ourselves, deny the truth, or cling to false securities in order to survive the hurt.

The question I keep asking across my work—as a scholar and professor, as a pastor and spiritual guide in my city, and as a public theologian developing curriculum that moves people from podcast to pilgrimage—is this: Do we believe we can be free? More specifically, do we believe Jesus? Do we actually believe that the kingdom is something we can experience in this life, not merely inherit after death? This question sits at the center of my work because integrated liberation is not just an idea to be studied; it is a life to be risked. If we believe Jesus, then we cannot be governed by the fear of what must die in us. We cannot cling to false selves, false securities, or false forms of belonging simply because they have kept us comfortable. If we are people of resurrection, then death is not the end of the story.

And if death is not the end of the story, then we can tell the truth, grieve what must be grieved, release what must be released, and become free.

For more insights check out:

The New Evangelicals Podcast, “Discovering Better Logics in a Binary World” (Episode 434)

Tim Whitaker talks with Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms about how race, queerness, whiteness and the kingdom of God intersect. Their conversation makes the case for a radical, love-centered faith.

Wellness Within, “Grief Without Formulas: Creating Space for Grief and Loss” (podcast)

Elizabeth Klein and therapist Patti Brown push back on formula approaches to grief and explore the many kinds of loss people carry. They offer rituals like storytelling and art as ways to honor grief and stay alive to it.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
https://aalbc.com/books/9780060959470
hooks argues that love is a practice and a choice rather than a feeling, built on care, commitment, trust and respect. She shows how a culture that has lost touch with love can learn it again.

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Infrastructure is the set of systems, including utilities, transportation, and financial networks, that connect people and enable resources and information to flow. These systems operate mostly in the background, and we tend not to think about them until one of them fails.

We turn on the faucet and expect clean water. We flip a switch and expect light. We use a credit card and expect our payment to go through. But when the power grid goes out, a bridge closes, or when a water main bursts, we suddenly notice how much of our lives depend on the infrastructure we seldom pay attention to. The same can be true of our spiritual lives.

What We Mean By Spiritual Infrastructure

The life of faith has infrastructure too. Spiritual infrastructure is the set of systems that support spiritual life and community. Denominations, seminaries, publishing networks, credentialing processes, camps and retreat centers, and even church buildings all play this role. They form leaders, move money, share ideas, gather people, and hold communities together across distance and time.

For generations, this infrastructure worked well enough that most of us have simply taken it for granted. But that may not be the case for much longer. Church affiliation and funding are in decline. Seminaries are closing or merging. Many denominations and institutions are struggling to adapt to a fast-changing world. Like a power grid built for a different century, much of the Church’s infrastructure was designed for a world that no longer exists. We are noticing it now because it is showing signs of failure.

Sue Phillips builds this case more thoroughly in her article, “The Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future.”

Living In A Phygital World

The word phygital is a portmanteau of physical and digital. It names what most of us are already living: there is no longer a clear separation between online and offline life. Digital technology and the internet have reshaped how we work, learn, organize, find community, and even form our sense of self. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many congregations discovered almost overnight that ministry could happen through screens as well as in sanctuaries. Most of our lives now are an inescapable amalgamation of the physical and digital, which has already had profound implications, and the Church still seems to be catching up.

Technology and the internet have disrupted nearly every industry, making possible things we could not have imagined 30 years ago. Oceans of information, content, and even connection with others are available at the touch of a screen anytime, anywhere. Yet phygital ministry is not just about replacing physical community with digital tools, nor does it mean merely adding a livestream to Sunday services as usual. It recognizes that people’s lives now move fluidly between embodied and digital spaces, and that ministry must meet them in both.

The question is: How can we design and build the spiritual infrastructure we need in light of this new reality?

One way to answer is to turn to the image of an iceberg.

Diving Below The Surface

Systems thinkers often use the familiar iceberg metaphor to understand complex problems. Most of an iceberg’s mass sits below the waterline. In a system, likewise, the presenting problem visible above the water is only a small part of what is actually happening. Seeing the rest requires a deeper dive below the surface. The iceberg can also help us understand the deeper work required to design and build the spiritual infrastructure needed for a changing world.

The classic iceberg model divides a system into four tiers. At the surface are events: the observable, one-off occurrences we can point to, such as a pastor burning out. Just beneath the waterline are patterns: recurring trends that reveal a single event isn’t an anomaly but part of something larger (e.g., many pastors reporting emotional exhaustion). Below those are structures: who holds power, who makes decisions, what incentives are at play, and what channels resources flow through. At the very bottom lie our mental models, or paradigms: the underlying beliefs and assumptions so deeply embedded that we seldom question them.

Many change efforts stay at the surface or just below the waterline, focusing on individual events and patterns. We give the burnt-out pastor a sabbatical, or open a counseling center for ministry leaders. Short-term solutions can be necessary, yet they often treat the symptoms while ignoring the root cause. Donella Meadows, the pioneering environmental scientist and systems thinker, argued that the greatest leverage for meaningful change lies in the deeper layers: our underlying structures and the assumptions that drive them.

This is the deep work needed today: to go beyond quick fixes and surface-level solutions, and critically examine the mental models we have inherited. Then reimagine the Church’s structures not from the top down, but from the bottom of the iceberg up.

Put simply, infrastructure work is systems work. It requires seeing the whole picture and the connections between all its parts, especially in light of our new cultural and phygital realities.

Structure Is Belief Made Visible

In the iceberg model, structure relates to the channels through which people connect, make decisions, and move resources and information. But structures do not appear out of nowhere.

Every structure is a mental model made concrete. A church building assumes that ministry happens mainly in one place, at set times. Most seminaries assume ministry is primarily a knowledge-based profession requiring credentials granted by an institution. Institutional hierarchies assume that power, authority, and resources are to be consolidated at the center before being distributed outward. These assumptions made sense for a certain time, and they have produced much good. But the world is changing, and these assumptions are being challenged like never before.

This is why infrastructure work must examine the paradigms beneath it. Otherwise, we may simply reproduce the old system in new packaging. Streaming a Sunday service can be a valuable addition to a church’s programming. At the same time, it places a physical-era paradigm onto a digital tool: one leader on a stage or screen, an audience watching, and a single weekly gathering at the center of community life. The delivery method is new, but the underlying assumptions are not.

New infrastructure for the Church will need more than upgrading the old system with digital tools. It will come from asking deeper questions at every level of the iceberg: What is the Church, and what is it for? Then we must design accordingly with all the wisdom, tools, and resources at our disposal.

A Critical Moment

The time to do this work is not when our systems collapse, but while the warning signs are still only warnings. The opportunity is now, while the Church still has the resources to compost toward nourishing new experiments.

In a way, building new infrastructure is always an act of faith. It’s investing in a future we cannot yet fully see. But as the saying goes, we plant trees whose shade we may never sit in. And the season for planting is now.

Questions To Consider:

Events and Patterns

• What signs of infrastructure breakdown or obsolescence are you seeing in your own context? Which feel like isolated events, and which are part of a larger pattern?

Structures

• Where do resources, information, and decision-making flow in your community or network right now? Who is left out of those flows?

• Which parts of today’s spiritual infrastructure are still life-giving and worth carrying forward? Which need to be composted?

Mental Models

• What assumptions about church, ministry, leadership, and community are built into the structures we have inherited? Which come from the way of Jesus, and which come from a particular time and culture?

• What would change if we treated digital spaces not as a broadcast channel for physical gatherings, but as places where real community and formation happen?

Redesigning For A Phygital World

• What is already emerging at the margins, in small communities, networks, and experiments, that might point toward the infrastructure of the future?

• If we were designing spiritual infrastructure from scratch for a phygital world, what would it need to connect, and what would need to flow through it?

For more insights check out:

Sue Phillips, “The Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future” (Harvard Divinity Bulletin)
https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/the-spiritual-infrastructure-of-the-future/
Phillips argues that denominations work like utilities for religious life, built on assumptions that no longer match how people look for meaning. She calls on religious leaders to redesign those systems to support spiritual innovators, not resist them.

Dee Hock, “The Nature and Creation of Chaordic Organizations” (The Systems Thinker)
https://thesystemsthinker.com/the-nature-and-creation-of-chaordic-organizations/
Hock, the founder of Visa, argues that rigid, top-down institutions from the industrial era are failing at the very goals they were built for. In their place he proposes “chaordic” organizations that people join by choice and that hold together around a shared purpose and principles.

David Ehrlichman, “Fostering Self-Organization” (Stanford Social Innovation Review)
https://ssir.org/books/excerpts/entry/fostering_self_organization
In this excerpt from Impact Networks, Ehrlichman says self-organizing networks still need leaders. Their job is to share leadership, encourage connection and experimentation, and build resilience through relationships.

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That’s what October is for. Four tracks, each one a question a few of us have been living inside. I’ve been asked to host the one closest to my own strange calling: “Digital-First.”

Let me tell you what that means, who I am, and why I think it’s worth your time.

Who’s talking

I’m Nathan Webb, “Nerd Pastor Nate” if you’ve run into me online. I’m the founding pastor of Checkpoint Church, a United Methodist congregation for nerds, geeks, and gamers whose sanctuary is a Discord server and whose pulpit is a YouTube channel.

I’m not an academic who studied digital church. I’m a practitioner who’s been doing it, in public, long enough to have the scars.

What “digital-first” actually means

A digital-first church isn’t a brick-and-mortar congregation that happens to stream Sunday worship. It’s a community whose *primary* gathering space is online.

Most churches treat digital as overflow: the camera at the back of the room for the people who couldn’t make it. Digital-first flips the center of gravity. We meet, pray, study, and serve *in* digital spaces. Our foyer is a welcome channel. The goal is never to funnel viewers into a building. It’s to be the Body of Christ right where people already live.

If that sounds like a novelty, it’s older than you think. In Acts 2, the first believers gathered in homes *and* in the temple courts. Two spaces. Both real. We’re just extending a pattern the Church has redrawn a hundred times: homes, then cathedrals, then pulpits, now Wi-Fi and webcams.

Discord isn’t just an app; it’s a church building. That reframe is the whole track in one sentence.

How this fits the phygital thing

You already know the word: physical *and* digital, held together instead of ranked against each other. Two years taught us the “and” is real.

It’s important to name that digital-first isn’t a rejection of the church that came before it, but instead a posture inside it. Most of the phygital conversation starts with a physical church and asks, “How do we add digital?” My lane starts from the other end: *what if the digital is the front door, and the physical is where some of us meet later?* Checkpoint has gathered in person in Colorado, and Texas, and in more than one conference hotel lobby. But nobody found us there. They found us because the door was already open, and the door was a link.

Phygital says *and*. Digital-first just asks which one you build first — and what changes when the answer is the screen.

What the track will be about

Not theory. I’ve already written the “is this real church?” essay. I’m not going to re-argue it for a weekend. Digital-First is for practitioners who’ve stopped asking permission and started asking *how.* We’ll get concrete:

• Planting a community whose front door is an invite link, not a parking lot.

• The question underneath all of it — **access over aesthetics.** Not “does it look good,” but “can people actually get in?”

• What to measure when you’ve stopped counting bodies in pews.

• Sacraments, presence, and “holding hands through the screen.”

• How to do this for years without burning out, because the platform never sleeps, and you have to.

I’ll bring the receipts. You bring the ministry you’re already half-building and haven’t named yet.

Continue?

The digital-first church isn’t a substitute church or a side-dish church. It’s just church. And the door is already open.

If you’ve felt the pull toward that door, if you’ve suspected you might already be a digital minister and just haven’t said it out loud — this track is your invitation.

Come and see what happens online. I’ll save you a seat.

For more insights check out:

Watch The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Netflix)
https://www.netflix.com/title/81759420
This documentary is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man with a degenerative muscle disease. After he died, his family found out how deep the friendships he’d built in World of Warcraft really were. It’s a moving case for online friendships being real friendships.

Twelve Theses on Attention (The Friends of Attention)
https://friendsofattention.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/TWELVE-THESES-ON-ATTENTION-2019.pdf
A short manifesto arguing that real attention shows us the wonder of things and people, and that market-driven technology has put it in danger. It calls for shared spaces and an ethics that protect attention.

Nathan Webb, “No to What, Exactly?” (Pixel & Pulpit)

Pixel & Pulpit

No to What, Exactly?

I’d like to take a stab at the Christianity Today article “Just Say No to Online Church” by Brad East, a critique of Michael Huerter’s book The Hybrid Congregation…

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a year ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · Nathan Webb

Webb responds to Brad East’s Christianity Today critique of digital church. He argues that online ministry is real ministry, and that asking online participants to prove they belong goes against the Gospel’s call to make disciples.

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There are different types of content and different types of creators.

Some content creators are primarily responding to the world of things happening around us. They provide perspective, understanding, and guidance. Lord knows we need all of that. And that feeds the algorithms. It gets views, clicks, likes, and the wide array of comments. The algorithm rewards outrage and activity.

Plenty of people are doing the work of digital content in that area.

That seems to be leaning into the content first.

There are those who lead with creator.

Creating often starts with what does not exist rather than what is already in the ether needing a thoughtful response. Creators create. The creating happens outside of the algorithm. The created needs to be born into the world regardless of whether the algorithm will assist it.

And perhaps this is one of the challenges of ministry in a digital landscape. Reaction has a built-in audience. Creation requires something else. Creators say something that needs to be said and make something that needs to be made even when there is no guarantee that anyone will notice. Soulful content creation isn’t measured by what it generates, like engagement, reach, or potential to go viral. It is measured by what it costs the creator to make and whether it still feels true once the algorithm has had its say.

That raises a different question about what we are actually doing when we create. Are we creating for the algorithm? Or are we creating something that happens to live inside the algorithm?

This conversation has real edges worth naming. A lot of content lives somewhere in between, responding and building at the same time.

It also assumes a kind of freedom many ministry leaders simply don’t have. The ability to create outside the algorithm sounds good in theory, but it overlooks how much visibility, funding, and even a basic sense of being heard often depend on that same algorithm. Soulful creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens inside real constraints, and pretending otherwise risks romanticizing content creation.

But I think there is another limitation that may be even more important.

We can talk about the algorithm as though it is simply an external force that we have to navigate. Something that rewards outrage. Something that wants activity. Something that measures engagement. But what if the deeper danger isn’t simply that the algorithm rewards the wrong things? What if, over time, the algorithm teaches us what to want?

We don’t have to consciously chase going viral for the algorithm to begin shaping our imagination. We notice what gets attention. We begin anticipating what will perform. We learn which ideas generate comments and which ones disappear. We start trimming the strange, unfinished, difficult thing because we can already imagine how it will land.

Eventually, we may not need the algorithm to tell us what to make. And this feels particularly important for ministry. Ministry isn’t supposed to merely capture attention. Often, ministry is about cultivating attention. Those are not the same thing.

The platform asks: Will they stop scrolling?

The minister might need to ask: What is worth stopping for?

The platform asks: What generates engagement?

The minister might need to ask: What generates transformation?

The challenge, then, may not be to escape the algorithm. That is probably impossible for anyone doing meaningful work in this space. The challenge may be to become fluent enough in the digital environment that the algorithm no longer determines what we create.

So we stand at the precipice of a lot of questions:

• Where is the line between creating and feeding the algorithm?

• The algorithm rewards outrage and reactivity. How does a ministry leader keep their soul intact while working in that environment?

• What does an intact soul look like in this context? A soul that is not moved by the algorithmic cycle.

• Can something be soulful if it was designed with engagement in mind?

• What happens when we begin creating for the imagined response rather than from something we actually need to say?

• How do we know when the algorithm has become part of our creative imagination?

• What would we create if we knew no one would see it? What would we create if we knew it would go viral?

• What forms of ministry require slowness, obscurity, repetition, or failure—things the algorithm has little reason to reward?

• What are we learning about soulful content creation in a distracted world?

And perhaps the question underneath all of them:

What would it mean to create something the algorithm cannot measure, but the community can feel?

For more insights check out:

Mycal Brickhouse, “Humbly sustaining the weary with a word, post or reel”
https://thrivingcongregations.org/fandl_feed_article/humbly-sustaining-the-weary-with-a-word-post-or-reel/
A short piece for ministry leaders that uses Isaiah 50:4 to argue posts deserve the same prayer and care as sermons.

April Owens, “Simone Weil Against Distraction” (The Hedgehog Review)
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/simone-weil-against-distraction
Owens explains Weil’s idea that attention, at its highest, is a form of prayer. It’s a theological anchor for “What is worth stopping for?”

99% Invisible, “The Score” (podcast)
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/673-the-score
Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen explains “value capture,” where simple numbers slowly replace what we actually care about. It’s your “the algorithm teaches us what to want,” with a name.

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Every time we gathered, certain tensions kept resurfacing. Not the same surface-level debates the church has been having about digital ministry for the past decade, but something underneath those. Something more honest and more difficult. What does it actually mean to create in a space built to reward outrage? What makes a digital space soulful, and who gets to decide? Who builds the infrastructure, and for whom? And underneath all of it, a question about liberation: are we actually free in these spaces, or are we replicating the same patterns we said we were trying to disrupt?

Those tensions have contributed to what we are calling the Phygital Conversations.

The Phygital Conversations are four broad discussions that emerged from the curiosities and concerns that continued to surface in the gatherings and collective work of our Fellows. They speak to the full arc of what phygital ministry actually requires: how we create, where we gather, what we build, and whose freedom we are building toward. Our Fellows have begun to take up these Conversations, and a significant portion of the Phygital Gathering in Berkeley will be devoted to expanding them. But we also want to hear from our readers here on Substack how these four conversations resonate with you, your work, and your context. So we are introducing them here over the next few days as we expand the phygital circle.

CONVERSATION 1: Content Creation

What do we actually mean when we say “content creation”? Are we creating, curating, or simply commenting on what is already happening in the world? Does the distinction matter? The algorithm rewards outrage and reactivity, and ministry leaders are not exempt from its pull. This Conversation asks what it looks like to keep your soul intact while working in that environment, and whether there is a meaningful line between creating something and feeding something that already exists. The phygital bias may be toward building from the ground up. Where does reaction end and creation begin?

CONVERSATION 2: Digital-First Spaces

The debate over whether digital-first spaces are “real” community has gone on long enough. This Conversation moves past it. If we accept that these spaces are legitimate, the harder questions open up: what do mercy, justice, and spiritual formation actually look like inside them? Digital-first spaces often carry a double burden, spending so much energy proving their legitimacy that the people inside them get left behind. There is a deeper ecclesiological question here. When does formation become commission? What does social holiness require when the community gathers on a screen?

CONVERSATION 3: Infrastructure Building

Church buildings tell the story. You can look at when a congregation built its sanctuary and read the cultural moment: cathedrals in eras of artistry, functional boxes in the eighties, suburban community centers during the megachurch era. The question this Conversation asks is whether digital infrastructure is just the next iteration of that same pattern, or whether it represents something genuinely different. The phygital frame might suggest this particular posture: we build as long as it serves the people we are building for. The moment it does not, we continue to be builders rather than caretakers of what no longer serves. Can we hold that posture honestly, knowing everything we build is temporary?

CONVERSATION 4: Integrated Liberation

This is the Conversation the Fellows have been in longest. The questions of dignity, agency, and freedom have been present in our work since the beginning. What changes now is where we are taking them: not as a governing framework imposed from the outside, but as values woven through everything else we are doing. Technology follows the same patterns of capitalism and racism that need to be subverted. What does subversion look like from inside those systems? What have we already seen that tells us integrated liberation is not just possible but already at work somewhere? That is the question this Conversation is trying to answer.

—

These four Conversations are not parallel tracks. They are more like layers. Content creation happens inside digital-first spaces, which are built on infrastructure, all of which either embodies liberation or does not. You cannot fully hold one without the others.

The Phygital Fellows have held these conversations, in various forms, for almost two years. Now we are inviting you—yes, you reading this post—to join in the discussion and discovery. These are questions the whole church, established and innovating, is living inside of, whether we know it or not. This initiative is an effort to ask them out loud and gather leaders and practitioners around them.

We will share an introductory Substack post for each Conversation in the days ahead. The posts are meant to be generative, not definitive. They are meant to open the question, to make sure we are asking it well, and to consider its import to the phygital landscape. We are carrying these Conversations into the Berkeley Gathering, but we hope you will carry them with us as well.

One gathering is not enough. These conversations need more voices, more contexts, more honest friction than any single room can generate. That is why this Substack exists. The phygital world is our parish. This is our work.

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The first lesson is AWARENESS, which considers noticing how much has already happened in the realm of AI before we decide whether to use AI. Consider the drive to a new location for a community meeting. Google Maps has described using machine learning to combine historical traffic patterns with live conditions, predicting how long a journey will take. The app is making an educated forecast about your route before you set out. Follow its recommendation and a prediction becomes a physical decision to turn onto that street, pass those businesses, and encounter someone’s neighborhood through a windshield. AI can dictate where you choose to go or not go, and we might not be aware of how these small decisions, over time, shape whose story we interact with. If there are certain neighborhoods your GPS never sends you through, perhaps you will never interact with that community.

Not every algorithm is AI, but many familiar services use machine learning to recognize patterns and make predictions. Generative AI, which produces text, images, and other content, is one part of that larger landscape. A chatbot makes the encounter obvious. A recommendation to take one route over another could be a relatively hidden means of shaping your and your neighbor’s story filled with unforeseen unintended consequences.

There are gifts here. A person recovering from surgery can pray with a congregation through a livestream. A conversation across time zones can grow into friendship. Awareness includes noticing those possibilities and asking what makes them hospitable. Can people participate, or only watch? Is there someone to respond when they reach out? How might we recognize the person joining from a hospital room as someone whose presence changes the community?

Theologically, we should pay attention to what repeated encounters teach us to expect. The church has language for this: formation. We might begin by tracing an ordinary Tuesday, noticing what selects our routes, our stories, and the people whose voices reach us. Then ask where those selections widen our capacity to love and where they narrow it. Awareness gives us something concrete to discern together.

The second learning is RESISTANCE. Once we notice how a system works, we become responsible for asking whose life it improves. In Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson examine the persistent assumption that greater productivity will eventually benefit everyone. Their history gives us reason to question this promise. Medieval improvements in plows, crop rotation, and mills increased production while bringing little benefit to the hands doing the work. As the authors explain, wealth could rise into magnificent cathedrals while ordinary people remained poor. The church should recognize its own place in that picture.

Early British textile factories offer another example. Machinery increased output and enriched owners, while workers endured exhausting hours, close supervision, and dangerous conditions with little, if any, personal prosperity. History should make us cautious whenever someone promises that automation will free everyone for more meaningful work. Who owns the hours being freed? Does a worker receive a shorter week and greater security, or a termination notice? When wealth accumulates among those who own the systems, the distance between people with resources and people without them can grow even as the technology improves.

The church needs the courage to bring these questions into the public conversation. Our congregations include people whose jobs are being redesigned, whose creative work supplies raw material for somebody else’s product, and whose access to services depends on systems they cannot question. We must listen to their experiences, support their voice in decisions, and insist that efficiency include an accounting of what happens to them.

Resistance also reaches our own budgets. Faith communities are not immune to the pressure of implementing unquestioned efficiencies. Before celebrating the savings from a new platform, we should ask what labor it replaces, what access it requires, and who will struggle to participate. A congregation can advocate for workers to share in productivity gains and preserve a human point of contact for neighbors excluded by digital systems. Our baptismal promises to resist injustice should remain recognizable when injustice arrives with a subscription plan.

The third learning is ETHICS, which requires examining the values already operating inside the technology. Technology comes to us shaped by decisions about what counts as success, whose experience supplies the data, and which mistakes are tolerable. Bias can enter through technological platforms themselves. Before any tool reaches the market, someone has asked if the app is risky, valuable, or scalable. These words must be defined through the lens of justice. A new technology is risky for whom? To whom? What does and app’s success look like. Someone supplies these definitions, and we must consider the means through which these tools reach their audience.

A 2019 study in Science Magazine^[1] examined a widely used health-care algorithm that predicted spending as a stand-in for medical need. Because less money was spent caring for Black patients, the system underestimated their needs. At the same assigned risk level, Black patients were sicker than white patients. The choice of what to measure carried an existing inequality into a supposedly helpful decision.

Then there is the physical world beneath our digital language. Whoever coined the term, “The cloud” which holds an unbelievable amount of information, has an exceptionally good marketing team. It sounds weightless, natural, and almost out of sight to wear we forget that the cloud is a collection of data centers which require buildings, electricity, and cooling infrastructure. The International Energy Agency’s 2026 outlook projects global data-center electricity consumption rising from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 in 2030, nearly doubling. It is true that energy needed for individual AI prompts are becoming more efficient, but expanding use drives overall demand upward. The associated carbon emissions belong alongside water use in our moral accounting. We should ask whose water supplies face pressure, who pays for new power infrastructure, and whether nearby communities have meaningful authority over decisions affecting their lives.^[2]

Part of being in a faith community in this rapidly changing world of AI is to consider one ordinary encounter with technology and the name of someone affected by it. Perhaps you know someone navigating an automated application, a musician wondering if their work is being sampled without permission, or a neighbor living beside new infrastructure. Ask that person what they wish faith communities would invest their voice in. Carry their question into a faithful space. Let their story interrupt our programming and plans. Give consideration time on leadership agendas. Through awareness, resistance, and ethical exploration faith communities can offer advocacy and prophetic witness within a new and ever-growing landscape

^[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2342

^[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary

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The term phygital was coined before I joined the Learning and Innovation Team at Wesleyan Impact Partners. So when I am asked What is phygital?, I usually give two responses. The first is obvious: the combination of physical and digital. And the second is honest: I wasn’t in the room when we landed on it. After several years of Phygital Fellows gatherings and Substack posts later, to be honest I’m still not sure if I like the term. But I decided to spend less time on whether I like the word and more on what it is trying to describe.

Phygital is the space where the physical and the digital meet, overlap, and shape each other. It’s the reality that most people already inhabit, and all people are impacted. You’re at dinner with your family, and someone is simultaneously in a group chat. You walk into a sanctuary, and someone miles away is watching the same service from their living room. You’re at a high school football game in a small town on a Friday night with the whole community in the stands, and someone is using their data plan to livestream it for the grandparent who can’t make the drive.

Physical and digital are inextricably linked, and the phygital discussions I’ve been a part of over the last two-plus years have helped me understand the reality affecting all of us. We don’t stop being embodied when we go online. We don’t stop being digital people when we walk through a door. This is not a season the church can wait out. The phygital world is not a trend, it is the terrain. And faith leaders must engage it thoughtfully, because evolution continues with or without us.

The Phygital Fellows Initiative has been one of the most meaningful laboratories for exploring that question. Our 19 Fellows have gathered in Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago to sit together in the phygital conversation and consider what this reality means for preaching and Gospel proclamation across various ministry contexts. The posts in this Substack are the corpus of those conversations, experiments, learnings, and takeaways. The work we’ve done through this initiative have confirmed for me that phygital is not a niche conversation. It is the conversation of our time.

Why It Matters

This has all led to a bold, personal conviction: I have come to believe that any person in ministry in the 21st century must thoughtfully, theologically, and consistently wrestle with the ways that technology is shaping human lives. I’m not saying we must adopt it, and I am not suggesting we only critique it either.

We must, like Jacob, wrestle with it. Like Moses and Deborah, we must figure out how to preach ancient liberation into a world that speaks an entirely new language in a context nobody has mapped before. Like Nehemiah and Shiphrah and Puah, we must be willing to survey what is broken and, where the system demands death, quietly and strategically build life anyway. Like Esther, we must find a way to hold our convictions AND our people as we navigate oppressive systems for such a time as this.

These biblical metaphors point to the kind of values and actions that are necessary in a phygital world. I do not see a single space or place on the planet where a minister of the gospel can say, “This doesn’t affect me or my people, so I don’t need to think about it.” This isn’t a call for pastors and preachers to become tech enthusiasts. Nor is it a suggestion that faith leaders and wisdom teachers be tech-agnostic or tech-avoidant. It is a call to engagement, curiosity, and integrity.

In today’s society, people across the socio-economic, geographic, and ideological spectrums are being shaped by the invisible hand of the algorithm and the unseen influence of new technologies. From their attention to their purchases, their sense of self to their sense of belonging, the definitions of beauty to their understandings of meaning: all of it is being negotiated in digital spaces and by a digital economy.

Devices matter. Platforms matter. Artificial Intelligence matters. Influencers matter. Data centers matter. Digital footprints matter. Natural resources matter.

And our message matters. The Gospel matters. The wisdom of our ancestors and the traditions that will guide us to the future matter. People matter.

If we are not talking about this in our pulpits, our small groups, our pastoral conversations, and our formation programs, we are not actually meeting people where they are. Whether we are adopting or rejecting a new technology, it must be done with intention. This is faithful ministry in the 21st century, and that is why phygital matters.

What We’re Doing Next

So where do we go from here?

At the end of this month, we’re gathering approximately 75 preachers, spiritual innovators, and institutional leaders in Berkeley, California to expand and deepen this conversation beyond the 19 Phygital Fellows. During our time together, we will explore four conversations that have emerged from the work of the Fellows. We’ll share more about them here on Substack over the next two weeks, but what I’ll say now is this: they go deep. These are not conversations about which apps to download or how to grow your social media following. We’ll be talking about what we create, what it means to be fully present and fluent in digital space as leaders, what we are responsible for building, and how we hold our people when the world we’re navigating doesn’t share our values.

The room in Berkeley is just one or two circles wider from the 19 Phygital Fellows, and we wished we could have made it wider still. This conversation deserves more voices than any single gathering can hold, which is why this Substack will continue to be a regular space for these reflections, provocations, and questions to spill out. Wherever people are trying to make meaning, the church has a reason to be present. That has always been true. The phygital world is our parish.

This is the work.

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During our Boston Learning Journey, as we were spending time exploring Thurman’s life and legacy, Rimes McElveen invited us into an encounter with his words. But before he began reading, he gave us an unusual instruction.

Find a partner. Stand face to face. Look into one another’s eyes.

Then, as we held one another’s gaze, Rimes slowly read The Sound of the Genuine. When he reached the end, he began again. And then, a third time.

Some Fellows loved the experience. Others found it deeply uncomfortable. All of us remember it.

Perhaps that is because Thurman’s words are not meant to be consumed as information. They are an invitation.

“There is in every person something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in herself… There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself.”

Thurman goes on to describe the challenge of hearing that genuine voice. We live surrounded by “so many voices… so many noises… so many echoes,” until it becomes difficult to know which voice is truly our own. His question is simple but demanding: Can we become still enough to hear “rumbling up from your unique and essential idiom the sound of the genuine in you”?

It is tempting to hear Thurman as offering advice about authenticity or self-expression. But his invitation runs deeper than that. The genuine is not simply the self we invent. It is the deepest truth of who we are before all the competing voices tell us who we should become.

As Rimes read those words, something unexpected happened.

Looking into another person’s eyes while listening to Thurman’s invitation transformed the experience. The essay was no longer only about listening within ourselves. It also became about seeing another person beyond first impressions, roles, accomplishments, or assumptions.

Fellow Tamice Spencer-Helms reflected on the experience:

“One of my favorite experiences from our time with Howard Thurman’s work and The Sound of the Genuine was a guided meditation. We didn’t only listen to a reading of the speech; we listened while staring into the eyes of a colleague.

My colleague was an incredible person named Phil Dieke, and there’s no real way to explain what happened except to say that Howard Thurman was right. As I looked into the eyes of a white man whose social location in life is opposite from mine, I could see myself in him. I could see his pain. I could feel his pain in me. And I knew that he could see my pain and feel it, too.

There is something about being so deeply connected to your own genuine that you become able to find resonance with other people.”

I have returned to that reflection many times. In a digital world, we often assume connection begins by expressing ourselves more clearly, sharing more content, or building larger platforms. That same tension surfaced for Ryan Dunn.

He reflected:

“Can you find a way to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself?” Howard Thurman asked this question 50 years ago. The question unsettles me. I have no answer. Culturally, I feel like we have made it more difficult for people to find an answer to this question in the years since Thurman posed it. And I am more unsettled because I fear I contribute to the noise that bars people from finding their answer.

This is one of the ways in which digital technology and connectivity may harm us. Digital technology pulls us out of ourselves. It distracts from genuine encounters with ourselves and often confronts us with disingenuous encounters with others.

My question, then, is can we subvert digital technology as a means for inviting people to listen to the genuine within?”

Thurman suggests another possibility. Connection begins by becoming quiet enough to hear the deepest truth within ourselves. Only then are we able to recognize that same depth in another person. Perhaps that is why this text has continued to shape the work of the Phygital Fellows.

We spend much of our time asking how technology might foster authentic community, spiritual formation, and deeper human connection. Thurman reminds us that no platform, app, or digital gathering can substitute for the work of listening—to God, to ourselves, and to one another.

Near the end of the essay, Thurman offers one final encouragement, “the sound of the genuine is flowing through you… Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.”

That discipline may be one of the most countercultural practices available to us today. Not because it teaches us to withdraw from one another. But because, as we discovered while quietly looking into another Fellow’s eyes, the path to genuine community begins with learning to hear the genuine within ourselves.

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It is hard to imagine a better guide for that experience.

Sue has a rare ability to hold together things we often place in opposition: the ancient and the emerging, tradition and innovation, the wisdom of institutions and the possibilities beyond them. Having served at the highest levels of denominational leadership, she deeply understands the infrastructure that has carried religious communities for generations. She also understands why that same infrastructure is struggling to carry the spiritual needs emerging today.

Our time with Sue quickly became one of the defining gifts of the Phygital Fellows experience. Rarely does someone enter a room full of innovators and make everyone feel both challenged and understood. Sue did exactly that. Her investment in our community has continued far beyond our time together. Whether we are discussing spiritual technology, emerging communities, digital spaces, or our own projects, Sue’s frameworks and language continue to surface again and again.

In her essay, Phillips begins with the story of railroad tracks. Modern railroad gauge, the distance between the rails, was shaped by decisions made generations before. The details of the story are part legend and part history, but Phillips points out that the reason it survives is that it reveals something important about infrastructure: the systems we inherit shape the possibilities we imagine.

Infrastructure creates pathways. It carries things from one place to another. But eventually, tracks built for one world may no longer serve the world that emerges. Phillips invites us to ask what happens when this same reality applies not to trains, electricity, or technology, but to spirituality.

For generations, denominations and religious institutions have served as the infrastructure of spiritual life. They created liturgies, trained leaders, preserved wisdom, built buildings, funded communities, and developed pathways through which faith could move from one generation to another.

Phillips summarizes this reality simply:

“Denominations are the utilities.”

The challenge is not that these systems failed. In many ways, they worked remarkably well. The challenge is that many were designed around assumptions that are rapidly changing and that religious life primarily happens in local buildings, that people access spirituality through congregations, that clergy serve one institution, and that inherited identity is the primary way faith is passed from one generation to the next.

But Sue argues that something important is often missed in conversations about institutional decline.

People are still seeking.

She introduces the idea of “desire paths”—the unofficial trails people create when the designed pathways do not take them where they need to go. She writes:

“Desire paths are unplanned trails that are trampled as people navigate routes between where they are and where they want to go. These are often the shortest or easiest routes, even in the presence of other, deliberately planned paths that have been laid out by official path-makers.

Even when these new routes wreak havoc, they can teach planners where people want to go and how they want to get there. The makers of official paths can complain all they want about the unauthorized routes, but they can’t deny that’s where the trampled dirt is.

Seeking people are trampling a lot of dirt these days.”

Reading Sue’s article before San Francisco, I remember feeling something I didn’t expect.

I felt seen.

So much conversation about religious change focuses either on saving institutions or leaving them behind. Sue described another category of people working outside or on the edge of institutions, carrying ancient wisdom into emerging spaces without always having the infrastructure or support traditional systems provide.

There is freedom in that space. There is creativity. There is room to experiment. But there is also vulnerability.

That is why another line in Sue’s essay has stayed with me. Describing the work of Wesleyan Impact Partners, the organization behind Phygital Fellows, she writes that they are:

“delivering identifiably Wesleyan water through other people’s pipes.”

Maybe that is the question many of us are asking. How do we carry the water forward? And what new pipes need to be built?

The Phygital Fellows have wrestled deeply with this tension. We are not interested in simply abandoning the institutions and traditions that formed us. We believe there is wisdom worth carrying forward. But we are also paying attention to the new paths already being created.

Dan Wunderlich’s Phygital work lives right in the middle of that tension. As someone deeply formed by the church and deeply invested in digital spaces, Sue’s framework named both the grief and possibility of this moment.

He reflects:

“As someone who still has great affection for the institution of which I am a part, this both saddens me and lights a fire to try to take the essential truths we are (supposed to be) centered around and find new expressions for them.”

Yet Dan also names the discernment required. New infrastructure does not automatically mean better infrastructure.

He continues:

“Perhaps, that leaves me in an in-between place: open to anything that might truly serve, while trying to be discerning in what tools we use and how.”

That in-between place may be where much of the Phygital work lives. Eugene Kim of New Wine Collective sees Sue’s framework as both an honest assessment and an invitation:

“Sue Phillips names what many of us have been feeling and seeing: current denominational structures are breaking down, unable to adapt to an increasingly complex and fast-changing world. But this breakdown is an invitation. People are already finding new pathways to ancient wisdom. Our task is to help them find each other and, together, cultivate new ecosystems designed for mutual flourishing today.”

Maybe that is the work of spiritual technologists. Not simply preserving old systems. Not simply celebrating disruption. But helping people find each other as we build the ecosystems that can carry ancient wisdom into the future.

Near the end of her essay, Sue writes, “we need to stop being paralyzed by the existential threat and start taking our faith seriously enough to believe it will survive in the wild.”

Perhaps that is the invitation before us. To trust that the Spirit has never been confined to the infrastructure we have built. To honor the systems that carried us. To courageously build what comes next.

Because the gifts of our traditions were never meant to belong to the pipes themselves. The pipes were always meant to carry the water.

And people are still thirsty.

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Likely because I hadn’t paid much attention to the information sent to us beforehand, I wasn’t expecting the evening activities.

That evening we met Dr. Filipe Maia, who introduced us to Simone Weil’s 1942 essay, Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God. Not only did Dr. Maia illuminate this remarkable eighty-year-old text, but he brought it directly into conversation with the challenges of our own day. In an economy built on competing for our attention, what has our attention? What deserves our attention? And where is God amid all the voices asking us to look, click, consume, and react?

Weil’s essay is ostensibly written to students and teachers, but its audience is really anyone seeking to live a faithful life. Her surprising claim is that the purpose of education is not primarily the accumulation of knowledge but the formation of attention. Every difficult assignment, every frustrating problem, every slow act of learning trains us to become people capable of patiently attending to what is true.

For Weil, attention is the substance of prayer. It is not striving harder or thinking faster. It is learning to suspend our need for immediate answers long enough to receive what is real. Rather than forcing our way toward truth, we learn to wait for it. That same attention, she argues, also becomes the foundation of compassion. Only those who have learned to truly attend are capable of seeing another person as they really are.

In many ways, this may be one of the defining spiritual challenges of the digital age. We live in a world expertly designed to fragment our attention, reward distraction, and keep us moving from one stimulus to the next. The question is no longer simply whether we are paying attention, but who—or what—is shaping the way we pay attention.

That question has become central to the work of several Phygital Fellows.

Abigail Browka, whose app Everyday Sanctuary explores how our phones might become places of spiritual formation rather than distraction, tells the story of sitting down with a free moment ahead of her. Without thinking, she reached for her phone—not to search for a restaurant or check the weather, but to discover what she wanted to do. Reflecting on that moment, she writes in a recent blog,

“Somewhere along the way, my phone became the place I go to hear myself. To access something that should be available without a screen—my own desire, my own knowing.

…There’s a difference between a tool that supports your inner life and a tool that replaces it.”

Rather than concluding that technology is the problem, Abigail offers a different invitation. Before turning to our devices, what if we first turned inward? She ends with a remarkably simple practice: put the phone down, listen to your body, take a breath, and pray.

In: Listen.

Out: Here.

It is difficult to imagine a more contemporary expression of Weil’s invitation to attention.

Mike Whang of Oikon Studies has likewise found Weil’s vision to be foundational for his work creating weekly digital liturgies. Reflecting on attention, he writes:

“Paying attention is literally the definition of prayer to me. I am writing prayers. What I am trying to accomplish with my work is to help people be more attentive with their lives. Prayer is learning to be more attentive to God’s activity in the world and in our inner lives.

Being attentive is the heart of a life with God. With my liturgy I am trying to create that attentiveness with myself and anyone praying. Prayer, at its heart—in silence or words—leads to a greater consciousness of compassion, ministry, and the cry for justice. The purpose of liturgy is to cultivate greater attentiveness in our lives.”

Near the end of her essay, Weil writes:

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

She continues by arguing that even the smallest acts of patient learning can become sacramental because they train us to receive truth rather than grasp for it.

That idea has stayed with me.

As I look across the work of the Phygital Fellows, I keep seeing the same conviction expressed in remarkably different ways. We are not trying to create more digital content for people to consume. We are asking how digital spaces might become places that form us differently. How might an app cultivate listening? How might a liturgy create space for stillness? How might a digital gathering teach us to notice one another more deeply? How might technology itself become a practice of attention rather than distraction?

Perhaps that is why Weil’s eighty-year-old essay felt so contemporary.

Long before smartphones and social media, she understood that our lives are ultimately shaped by what we learn to attend to. The work of the Phygital Fellows is not simply about bringing faith into digital spaces. It is about recovering attention as a spiritual practice, believing that wherever genuine attention is cultivated, there is room for God to meet us there.

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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