By Paul Massari

Students used to come into Varun Soni’s office and ask, “How should I live?” Now they ask, “Why should I live?”

As the dean of religious life for the University of Southern California, Soni is on the front lines of a mental health crisis that he believes afflicts up to one-third of the school’s 65,000-person community. Beyond campus, the nonprofit, independent news site The Conversation reports that “from 2009 to 2017, major depression among 20- to 21-year-olds more than doubled, rising from 7 percent to 15 percent,” according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Survey on Drug Use and Health. “Serious psychological distress, which includes feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, jumped 71 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds from 2008 to 2017.”¹

Soni works closely with the university’s mental health professionals. As someone with a PhD and a JD—and someone married to a doctor—he has a healthy respect for medical science. At the same time, he believes the spike in serious mental illness among young people goes beyond brain chemistry. It’s an epidemic of loneliness.

“Historically, it’s been the oldest generation in the United States that has been the loneliest,” Soni says. “But studies now show that the loneliest generation in the United States right now are post-millennials, our youngest.”²

For ministry innovators Sue Phillips, Casper ter Kuile, and Angela Thurston, the crisis Soni describes is one of disconnection—personal, social, environmental, and, most of all, spiritual. It affects not only college students struggling with depression and anxiety at unprecedented rates, but also middle-aged white men in the heartland, where opioid and alcohol abuse have spiked; immigrants and their children, searching for a sense of meaning in a new culture; and people of color, who cope each day with racism and with the “daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities” of microaggressions.³

“People are cut off from each other and their communities in the deepest sense,” Thurston says. “At the same time, they hunger to tap into a deeper sense of meaning and purpose—to connect themselves to something greater. These crises are completely intertwined, and we can’t achieve meaningful change in our society until we address the spiritual problem at their foundation.”

To treat the “soul sickness” at the root of the country’s social ills, Phillips, ter Kuile, and Thurston have launched Sacred Design Lab (Sacred), an organization that explores the changing landscape of community and spiritual life, addresses isolation and spiritual longing, and partners with organizations across sectors to apply ancient wisdom and practices to contemporary problems. In so doing, ter Kuile says that the trio is uncovering an “exciting, hopeful story” about the new ways that people are coming together to find meaning, work for justice, create beauty, and experience the transcendent.

The project began with ter Kuile and Thurston. After earning her undergraduate degree from Brown University, Thurston became curious about the organizations to which millennials flocked for a sense of belonging. About the same time, ter Kuile, a climate activist from the United Kingdom, developed the same interest. The two enrolled at Harvard Divinity School in 2013, where they met and embarked on a process of “naming and framing” the changing landscape of community and spiritual life.

In 2015, ter Kuile and Thurston published How We Gather, a report looking at secular organizations that provided an experience of community traditionally associated with religion. Across 10 very different groups—from worldwide workout phenomenon CrossFit to The Dinner Party, which brings together young adults dealing with personal loss—the duo found common themes that included community, personal transformation, social transformation, purpose finding, creativity, and accountability.

“These are communities that are helping people aspire toward goals, transform themselves, and work toward change while holding each other accountable to make things better,” Thurston said in a 2015 interview. “They are inspiring creativity and inspiring people to find their purpose and mission in life. All [of these are] key functions that a community can serve.”⁴

Even as ter Kuile and Thurston chronicled the growth of secular communities, they were impressed by the innovation going on within traditional religions as well. They chronicled this work in Something More and, joined by colleagues Lisa Greenwood and Gil Rendle, Faithful, two reports that stressed the importance of cultivating nontraditional models of ministry and religious life within traditional faiths and denominations.

“We are offering a challenge, and this is more of a challenge to the world of religion,” ter Kuile said in 2015. “If you think religion is dying, we are saying religion is changing.”⁵

The group leveraged the common themes that they identified among the secular organizations of How We Gather and said that religious traditions offered “something more”: language, imagery, ritual, and, most of all, ways to experience the transcendent. They presented case studies of organizations that represented Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and several Christian denominations that “bring people together to hold each other accountable, discern purposeful work, stimulate creativity, participate in mutual growth, change the structures that bind—and fully and deeply experience Something More.” These included a pop-up restaurant inspired by the Jewish tradition of Shabbat; a Christian program of “spiritual growth, theological education, and community building” that bridges “the gap between the ancient mystics and our contemporary context”; an online Buddhist community that offers meditation, teachings, and retreats.⁶

“Angie, Casper, and Sue’s work is done with deep respect and helps reframe the mission of the church rather than the institution,” says Greenwood of the Texas Methodist Foundation (TMF) and an ordained Methodist minister. “They’re talking about a different way of understanding leadership that helps inform how we can ask questions of ourselves around our own discipleship and engagement.”

Joined by the Reverend Sue Phillips, a Unitarian Universalist minister, the group moved from diagnosis of America’s soul sickness to prescriptions for recovery. At the end of 2016, they brought 80 community leaders—both religious and secular—together at Harvard Divinity School for “The December Gathering.” Over four days, participants discussed practical matters like funding, scaling their operations, and mobilizing their communities; reflected on inclusion and innovation; and developed spiritual practices to prevent burnout and foster renewal.

“Over the course of the conference, leaders of the secular communities began to use, unbidden, the language of faith,” Thurston says. “Usually people would name the things they were hopeful [for], afraid [of], and proud of. Person after person replaced the word ‘hope’ with ‘faith.’ ”⁷

The group’s capstone report, Care of Souls, leveraged four years of research to identify seven key roles needed for modern-day spiritual life—Gatherer, Seer, Maker, Healer, Venturer, Steward, and Elder—providing a mission statement, rationale, and risks for each.

“We’re looking at the intersection of belonging and becoming,” ter Kuile explained after the report’s release in 2018, “the ever-interconnected questions of human flourishing and community depth. The form it takes is wonderfully broad and will go far beyond the seven roles we illustrate in the report, of course. . . . So much of soul care is as old as time[. It] is really the context that has changed so drastically.”⁸

Phillips, ter Kuile, and Thurston’s research and recommendations have attracted attention from mainstream media outlets, including PBS, The New York Times, NPR, and The Boston Globe. It’s also attracted support from funders such as TMF and the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer Program Officer Michelle Scheidt says that the trio’s work advances understanding of the new ways in which people across the country are coming together to pursue spiritual growth and make meaning.

“Casper, Angie, and Sue have a finger on the pulse of the culture,” she says. “And not just the millennials and younger, but the culture more broadly. People are seeking new ways of connecting, belonging, and thinking about their purpose. Whether it’s connection with self, with others, with the divine, with the planet, the universe, people still embrace mystery and awe and wonder and the idea that there’s something larger than us.”

Phillips, ter Kuile, and Thurston’s “naming and framing” work revealed both the acuteness of existential malaise in the United States—particularly among millennials—and the value of religious resources as a remedy. At the same time, the group started to feel that even the connections of the December Gathering and the prescriptions of Care of Souls were insufficient to address the problems identified and as an expression of what the team could offer.

“While there was enormous value to bringing people together and to staying abreast of these changes, we also wanted to do what we could to intervene in the landscape, seeing as we did that these crises were big and mounting,” Thurston explains. “So, the prototyping really came out of that energy. We decided: let’s actually try and create a lab environment to respond to the very call to creativity that we keep issuing.”

The result was The Formation Project, a year-long initiative to develop spiritual leadership. Launched in October 2018, the project’s participants are mostly millennials from a range of religious traditions—and from no tradition at all—who have an interest in deepening their spiritual lives. Because the group is spread across the country, much of the program is online.

Thurston says that the prototype’s design was drawn from several influences, religious, secular, and spiritual.

“The project is based on all of these containers for formation that we’ve learned about,” she says. “One is the novitiate experience of Catholic women religious. Another is the way that the army cultivates an honor culture. Twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous bring together shared practice and recovery. All have something to offer in designing a formation experience for people from a wide range of perspectives and practices.”