A (Christian) Formation Playbook (Page 9)

The Old Normal: 'Networked' era defined

I'm back! This week I want to talk about how social media has changed. Lots of us are aware of many of the effects, but I want to try to flesh out the picture a bit. Let's start with the classic portrait of what it looked

Data chart of "The Four F's of Contemporary Spirituality"

'Choosing' My None Takeaways

Since religious disaffiliation has turned out to be the theme of this week's resources, I thought we could look at Elizabeth Drescher's Choosing Our Religion, which is an important and relatively early treatment of these very explosive years of the phenomenon. Here are my main takeaways

How to Do Something Like Church, Authentically

There's a great piece recirculated this week in the ECF Ministry Tips newsletter. It's about a surf club ministry run by the Episcopal chaplain at UC Santa Barbara. Especially important bit: 💡Surfing & Spirituality is not a gimmick to trick people into coming to church. Yes,

More PRRI Chatter

Here's the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast episode that got the new PRRI data on my radar: I think they almost always do a good job breaking down religion numbers on this show. My biggest takeaway was the panel's sensitivity to the importance of moderate, politically mixed congregations

New PRRI Affiliation Data

There's new data out (flew under my radar due to Holy Week & Easter) from PRRI about religious change in the U.S. A few notes on what jumped out to me: * The only group that grew from 2013 to 2023 was unaffiliated people (see graphic). * The most

News

Mission: Resources and Conversation for Faith and Faith-Adjacent Learning

Hi, I'm Kyle Oliver. I'm a priest, teacher, digital producer, and media scholar. I'm so glad you've found A (Christian) Formation Playbook. Since before I knew what the word meant, I have been a curator. For my first four years of full-time