Future of Faith Blog
FoF Newsletter 001: Belonging, Environment and Faith
12/21/2023
The "Future of Faith" newsletter explores the intersection of faith, spirituality, and modern societal issues. This issue highlights the Belonging Project by KidSpirit, discussing the influence of family on spiritual beliefs and identity among young contributors. It features Gopal D. Patel's perspective on integrating spirituality with environmental activism and examines Pew Research data on the declining trend of religiousness in the U.S. The newsletter also emphasizes the importance of local data over national datasets for impactful youth ministry.
For a detailed view, you can read the full newsletter here.
You can see our full newsletter archive here.
No Strings Attached
12/21/2023
The response since we launched Future of Faith and started sharing the Sacred Listening Tools has been overwhelming. We couldn't be more grateful. We're inspired every day by the amazing people who are doing such wonderful and innovative things to breath new life into congregations, churches and other religious groups by leading with relationships. It is our sincere hope and design that Future of Faith helps you not only with concrete tools, but also to find a community of people who are doing the same kinds of things as you. We want you to know that you are not alone.
We will use this blog as a space to answer questions and provide some longer form thoughts about the intersections of this project with listening, ministry and action. As always, though, we'll try to stay in our lane as social scientists. We don't make any claim to be theologians or ministers.
One of the questions we've been getting a lot right at first is, "Why? Why did you create Future of Faith?" The answer to that is actually pretty simple. It's just a gift to all those who work in ministry settings. We feel like we've learned some things along the way and wanted to share it. Our job as researchers is essentially to be a professional listener. As educators, we know what it means to translate expert learning into easy to follow steps and guides. We put those two things together to create the Sacred Listening Tools at the heart of Future of Faith. They're free. No strings attached.
We hope you find them as useful in real-life as we have taken joy in making them.
Thanks, as always, for everything you do to build the future of faith.