Angie Thurston, MDiv ’16, and Casper ter Kuile, MDiv ’16

“The concept of meditation that I have is of there being a spark of God within, and so meditation for me is communion with God. And so, that’s something that I do on a daily basis in a set aside way, but is also something that I strive to do all day every day.”—Angie

“We want to tell a different story about American culture, really. There seems to be so much decline, grief, and loss, particularly from a religious perspective, and actually, what we’re saying is there’s a really exciting, hopeful story about how people are being creative in how to come together and find meaning with their lives and engage in questions of social justice or create beauty or do all of these fabulous things. It’s just happening in a slightly different way.”—Casper

Angie Thurston, MDiv ‘16, is a fellow at On Being, a ministry innovation fellow at HDS, and, along with Casper, the co-author of “How We Gather,” a cultural map of millennial communities. She is co-founder and past president of the HDS Religious Nones and associate trustee of the Urantia Foundation.

Casper ter Kuile, MDiv '16, is a ministry innovation fellow at HDS and a co-host of the popular Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast. With Angie Thurston, he is the co-author of “How We Gather.” He is also the co-founder of the UK Youth Climate Coalition and Campaign Bootcamp.

Background and Upbringing

Angie:

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Both of my parents were very intentional about cultivating a spiritual home life for me and my two younger siblings, and so we were constantly in creativity mode around the way that we celebrated holidays and the way we had family meetings. Every evening at the dinner table we would go around and tell our days and talk about what we were grateful for. That practice wasn’t necessarily as part of a larger religious community, but it was in conversation with other Urantia Book readers. That was the broader social fabric of my upbringing.

The Urantia Book is a 2,000 page book published in 1955 that tries to harmonize science, philosophy, and religion. I call it a textbook on the universe, because it goes from macro to micro about the way the universe is organized and the meaning of words like God, deity, divinity, reality, pattern, meaning, and value. Then it goes down to the micro of the life and teachings of Jesus, which it spends 700 pages on. It presents religion as the individual’s relationship to God and striving to become more useful to others.

Casper:

I was born and raised in England, but both my parents are Dutch, and I had a secular upbringing. In all sets of my grandparents, no one went to church. It was not part of our family’s history, even. But I went to a Waldorf-Steiner school. It’s a holistic education model that really stresses the arts and a learning community that sticks together over eight years with one teacher, so you keep a main lesson teacher you have every day in the morning, and you learn to read later because you’re learning to act out the letters and all this kind of stuff. I went to that school until I was 10, and it was a very rich home life in lots of rituals and nature-based celebrations around the calendar.

The seasonal calendar was really important and is still really important to me. But then I left and went to a very posh English prep school and then a boarding school, which are obviously both Anglican in their heritage, and I learned the Lord’s Prayer and hymns. I joined the Christian Union group when I was 13 because we got a Kit-Kat, and some physics teacher was there and we sang songs. But then it was made clear that that was not cool to be gay. So, I was very anti-religion for a long time, but I was very involved with activism, particularly environmental activism. And then I just kept engaging religion in a different way. First, it was a strategic place of “Look how good they are at telling stories. We can learn from that.” Then wondering, “Oh, the bond here that’s most engaged are often the more religious ones. What’s that about?”

How We Gather

Angie:

I was working on “How We Gather” in a very lonely and meandering way until Casper came along. I was trying to keep track of communities that seemed to be offering people some sort of meaningful experience or belonging, and I was looking specifically outside of organized religion. That was in response to the significant disaffiliation trends that I was learning about and that I felt part of. It made me wonder: Where are all these people congregating if not religiously, and are they congregating at all?

Once we started working together, we had about 25 conversations with leaders in various communities around the country, and by around person 22 or 23 it got to the point of hilarity, because they were doing such different things functionally. This is everything from fitness communities to arts-based community development to you name it, and they were all using the same language to talk about the work they did, and they were all expressing these strange fanatic strands that ran through it. It got to the point where it was almost comical to us, and also seemingly a problem that they didn’t know each other and that they didn’t understand that they were, in some way, working on the same thing. That was what compelled us to write “How We Gather”—as a sort of invitation to them and to others to notice what we were noticing and to start a conversation about it.

Casper:

We want to tell a different story about American culture, really. There seems to be so much decline, grief, and loss, particularly from a religious perspective, and actually, what we’re saying is there’s a really exciting, hopeful story about how people are being creative in how to come together and find meaning with their lives and engage in questions of social justice or create beauty or do all of these fabulous things. It’s just happening in a slightly different way. We try to see ourselves a little bit as storytellers and to shift the spotlight from congregations that are getting smaller to non-religious communities that are growing.

Angie:

The thematic commonalities that we found boiled down to six things that we saw over and over again. The umbrella was community as the priority and the way that all of this happened, and then underneath that was both personal transformation and social transformation, and then activating creativity, engaging in purpose-finding, and a big one was accountability—holding each other accountable. A large part of our work has been trying to notice and foster that kind of thematic consistency across very diverse, functional organizations.

Personal Spiritual Impact

Casper:

Doing this work has made me want to take my spirituality more seriously. It’s been interesting for me to think about my cultural Christian heritage, and an unexpected gift of this has been meeting all these fabulous bishops and Catholic or Jesuit brothers, religious leaders, or all these just amazing individuals who I have such respect and admiration for, who really model so much of what I want to live out in my own way.

Angie:

Something that I grew up with intellectually and carried here was the idea of seeking truth wherever I could find it. That has been a really imperative part of my spiritual life in large part due the work we’re doing together, where we’re getting to participate in so much of the religious and spiritual lives of others and to join in that. The invitation has been so open in a really beautiful way—from across a spectrum of belief and non-belief. So, to get to be invited into a community over and over again in different ways and with people, but with a kind of shared spirit of generosity and intention has been surprising, just because every time it happens something new unfolds that I couldn’t have predicted. So, that has just been a really fun discovery process and has definitely enriched my own spiritual life.      

On a daily basis I guess my version of the millennial cliché with regard to meditation is just in my own language, because the concept of meditation that I have is of there being a spark of God within, and so meditation for me is communion with God. And so, that’s something that I do on a daily basis in a set aside way, but is also something that I strive to do all day every day.

Me striving to live love in my daily life is my religion. There is a very cohesive understanding of that and a commitment to this sort of everyday religiosity among Urantia Book readers—at least among those who have decided to sort of attempt to apply the teachings that are in there.

Moving Forward

We’re focused on three areas. The first is supporting these innovators, these people who are trying to foster communities—both religious and secular. The second is supporting the transformation of religious institutions. We’ve been surprised by the level of interest from denominational leaders who are seeing a need for change within their structure and who are coming to us and expressing interest in understanding the landscape that we are studying. We’re working with them to try to adapt to what’s happening and to be able to basically give their gifts to the people who are yearning for them. At the moment there is kind of disconnect there that we’re hoping we can help to bridge. Then the third thing is sort of public storytelling and a bit of culture change around some of the language that we use to describe religiosity.

What’s your favorite thing about doing this work?

Casper:

That we get to do it together.

Angie:

Definitely. We say that every week. I would not be doing this alone.

Photos by Laura Krueger