What We Do
We create projects that support spiritual innovation, cultivate the spiritual growth of leaders, and interpret the changing landscape of spiritual life.
Spiritual Innovation
Spiritual Growth
Insights
Love at the Center
How do you design for spiritual growth? No matter what kind of community you lead, you are forming souls when you bring people together. This guide will help you design those gatherings with Love at the center. Featuring design principles, inspiring case studies, and robust research, Love at the Center is a handbook for supporting the spiritual growth of those in your care: in their inner lives, their relationships, and through them in service.
Illuminating Spiritual Innovation
Underpinning the crises of our world is a crisis of spirit. To turn the tide toward flourishing, we need spiritual innovation. Learn about the incredible innovators from Tokyo to Nairobi who are responding to the soul longings of our time – and what they need from us now.
Design for the Human Soul
Unmet soul needs shape our time. The more we go hungry for meaning, connection, and purpose, the more we act from isolation and despair. This plays out in the way we live, love, work, and lead. The problem is soul-deep. So, too, must be our response.
A Call to Connection
A Call to Connection is a primer for leaders who want to cultivate a culture of connection. Drawing on the latest scientific research, practitioner stories, and ancient wisdom, this report illustrates that relationships are ends in themselves, vital to enhancing most every aspect of our lives and society. It also includes practical guidance on how to foster connection in your own community.
How We Gather
How We Gather maps the emerging landscape of Millennial communities that are fulfilling the functions that religious congregations used to fill. Grounded in six recurring themes — community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose-finding, creativity, and accountability — this report has been called the most important non-theological text being read in seminaries today.
Care of Souls
Care of Souls brings together four years of research and practice to illustrate seven vital community leadership roles for this moment. The Gatherer, Healer, Venturer, Elder, Steward, Seer, and Maker are all roles once held by a single pastoral leader. This report invites the reader to unbundle and remix these roles and live into new categories of spiritual leadership needed today.
Something More
Something More builds on the analysis of How We Gather but looks at innovative communities at the edge of religious traditions, most of which still claim an affiliation. We explore how these communities navigate the desire for authenticity and depth while offering very different models of gathering than they inherited from their traditions.
Faithful
Written especially for denominational leaders across traditions, Faithful considers the stark and destabilizing tensions between improving existing models of congregational ministry and re-organizing around emerging leaders and models of religious life. It illustrates the need to come alongside innovators to offer the gifts of tradition and the resources of institutions.
December Gathering
December Gathering: Notes from the Field shares insights from a gathering of spiritual innovators hosted at Harvard Divinity School. It tells the story of leaders in this emerging landscape becoming aware of themselves as a movement and realizing the profound value of connecting to one another. Across the gathering, these diverse leaders come to recognize a shared sense of purpose and a deep desire for spiritual formation that transcends traditional silos like “secular” and “religious.”
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Measuring Spiritual Well-Being
This briefing for scholars researching well-being, spirituality and social connection explains the process, conclusions and recommendations following the testing of Sacred Design Lab’s spiritual well-being assessment prototype which over 1000 respondents completed.