Mapping Spiritual Innovation: Initial Findings

Citation: Lawton, Amy; Petersen, Hannah; Cadge, Wendy (2025). “Mapping Spiritual Innovation: Initial Findings: A Working Paper.” Chaplaincy Innovation Lab. https://chaplaincyinnovation.org/resources/working-papers/mapping-spiritual-innovation-initial-findings

Abstract of “Mapping Spiritual Innovation: Initial Findings”

This working paper is a first effort to describe and begin to understand new efforts emerging as traditional congregations, and in some cases broader religious institutions, are in decline. We focus specifically on groups, not individuals, started since 2008, that are inspired by the world’s religious traditions to create social change (i.e. change outside of themselves), often but not always by disrupting traditional delivery systems, providing different aspects of those traditions, and/or translating them in new ways. We understand social change broadly as efforts – regardless of content – that aim to make a contribution to the public good such as through charitable work, political advocacy, community building or in other ways. We exclude from our approach efforts focused only on creating new spiritual or religious communities absent the creation of a new delivery system or explicit intent for those communities to make some change in the world. As we did in our earlier work studying chaplaincy, we begin this conversation on the supply side, with a focus on spiritual innovators themselves. More research is necessary to understand the demand side, or the spiritual “consumer.”

We thank our multiple collaborators for their support of this work. You can read more about this project here.

You may also wish to view the webinar reporting on this project, which can be seen below and here.