Sue Phillips and Spiritual Infrastructure
Seminal Texts of the Phygital Fellows
Before the Phygital Fellows traveled to San Francisco for our Learning Journey, we were given Sue Phillips’ essay, The Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future, from Harvard Divinity Bulletin (cover image taken from article).
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.