Who We Are

In many ways, that's up to you.

We are a new-ish community in flux. We have ideas of what we hope this community will be (see below), some starting values, and some clear boundaries, but we really want the community to be shaped by the people who feel called to show up to create this new thing.

 

At it's heart, the Community of Spiritual Practice is an attempt to create the world we want in the here and now. We strive to be a justice-oriented spiritual community by & for people who often haven't felt like they fit in traditional religious communities, people who find value in ritual (both ancient and new), and people who want to engage in spiritual practice as a way to root ourselves as we act for justice and equity. We aim to create a fractal of the kind of world we want to live in.

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We're a wheel with many spokes.

The hub of the wheel is love, lived out through our values of liberation, connection and transformation. The spokes are both the many ways of entry into the community and the ways we take those values into the world. We have spokes for people rooted in Christian practice, faith, and/or tradition, spokes for people who are trying to figure out what spiritual practices and cosmology works best for them, people who have experienced religious/spiritual trauma trying to find their path, and people who have their own practices but want to also have community.

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CSP is a community centered in love, and you can't have love without justice*.

A lot of American spiritual life in the 21st century seems to be shallow, self-centered self-improvement and/or judging others on the basis of individual morality (and a fair amount is white people stealing practices from indigenous cultures around the world). We want to be something different: a community that challenges one another to be transformed by love while transforming the world through love. Not passive "love and light" love, but love that shows up in the streets, at city council meetings, in mutual aid collectives and in the many other ways we all work together for justice in this world. .

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CSP is a community that engages in practices to connect to self, neighbor, nature, and something bigger than themselves.

It's for people trying to figure out who they are, folk just trying to get by, people who need encouragement connecting their spirituality to the world and activists and organizers who need fuel for their work. It's for people who want to be transformed through connection and, in turn, to transform the world.

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CSP is a mission start of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which may make a lot of the above sound like bullshit. Some people in the ELCA recognize the church is going to die (or possibly is already dead) and want to nurture communities that support the needs of people whose needs aren't being met by the church, and to live into our belief in resurrection.