Beyond Tradition: How Spiritual Leaders Innovate Around the World

Angie Thurston, a lifelong student of The Urantia Book, conducted a global study called Illuminating Spiritual Innovation with a nonprofit she co-founded, Sacred Design Lab. She and her colleagues interviewed more than a hundred spiritual innovators in 37 countries. This is an edited and condensed version of a talk about her research that she gave to the Urantia Society of Greater New York in October 2024.

In a few hours’ time in Yokosuka, about 20 miles south of Tokyo, Reverend Soin Fujio will get ready for work. 

As a younger man he would put on banker suits and go into the office. But today he will don a monk’s robes and prepare to meet the many who come to his temple seeking solace. 

Fujio was moved to begin crisis care after he lost three of his friends to suicide. So many come to him now that he says he doesn't leave his temple for more than 24 hours. Because if he stops for one day, he might lose someone. There is a vigil-like quality to his work. 

When they come, he starts by asking them questions to help them feel their bodies. He asks them if they need heat or water, then he takes them to walk Zazen together, sometimes for three hours. 

“I don't let them leave until their battery is recharged. And then I recharge my own,” he says.

To do this work well, he's innovated within his tradition, which is called Rinzai Zen, a form of Zen Buddhism. He’s combined this practice with Tai Chi to support embodied healing, as well as inviting people in his meditation groups to share out loud how they're feeling after each meditation. He’s also trained young priests in counseling and co-chairs an association of monks dedicated to suicide prevention. 

Since COVID, he has led the practice of Zazen—sitting or walking meditation—in the metaverse, a virtual reality environment where people from all over the world can use avatars to practice together. All this is fairly radical within his 400-year-old temple’s traditions. But these are the kinds of changes that allow him to be an effective leader and spiritual care provider. 

Japanese Buddhist institutions can be perceived as detached, unconcerned and reserved for funerals and sightseeing. In the midst of this, Fujio is one of a number of Buddhist spiritual innovators actively trying to address the spiritual wellbeing of their neighbors and placing themselves in service of their needs. 

Motivation from The Urantia Book

The research we carried out asked who are the innovators, like Reverend Fujio, around the world? What drives them? How do they sustain themselves? And how might we help to further their work? How might we address the spiritual longings of our time? 

Two quotes from The Urantia Book provide a window into my motivation:

“The religious challenge of this age is to those farseeing and forward-looking men and women of spiritual insight who will dare to construct a new and appealing philosophy of living out of the enlarged and exquisitely integrated modern concepts of cosmic truth, universe beauty, and divine goodness. Such a new and righteous vision of morality will attract all that is good in the mind of man and challenge that which is best in the human soul. Truth, beauty, and goodness are divine realities, and as man ascends the scale of spiritual living, these supreme qualities of the Eternal become increasingly co-ordinated and unified in God, who is love. 2:7.10

“Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus’ religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men. And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world. 195:9.4

Both of these quotes emphasize the need for spiritual leadership in our time that is going to align with the highest truths, the greatest beauty and the most profound goodness available to us. I’m motivated to try and support the spiritual leaders of our time, especially those who are open to innovation that goes beyond their religious traditions, and who care for the souls and spiritual growth of others. I'm also motivated to try to learn how to be one of these leaders myself.

The Crisis of Spirit 

Sacred Design Lab has now written six reports about the changing religious landscape in America. We’ve gotten to know hundreds of innovators and institutional leaders of religious life. We’re trying to support the process of contending with all the disruption and change going on in the religious landscape, especially among young people. They’re less and less religiously affiliated, yet they’re up against the twin crises of social isolation and spiritual longing.  

The Urantia Book talks overtly about the crisis of spirit underpinning the crises of our world. Our technological and economic advancements often neglect our spiritual well-being; we’ve pursued material innovation while under-resourcing spiritual, moral, and ethical development. The book talks about a world rich in ideas, but impoverished in ideals, and that's often the case with our leaders these days. I see the consequences of this very directly in the rise in loneliness, environmental degradation, and social division.

Toward Light and Life

My hope is to help support these spiritual leaders who might help us rebalance. How do we, as individuals and as a society, place spiritual imagination at the center of our creative lives and ground our material progress in spiritual depth? What are spiritual longings? What do our souls need in order to grow? At Sacred Design Lab, we describe the longings of the soul in three dimensions:

Belonging: Knowing and being known, loving and being loved;

Becoming: Growing into the people we're called to be;

Beyond: Experiencing ourselves as part of something more.

The Urantia Book talks a lot about meanings and values, how they grow together through our relationships with each other and with God. There’s a whole field of people working on “flourishing”—our physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being in relation to our broader context. A state of flourishing would be one in which all aspects of our lives, our communities, and our world would be good. To my mind, the ultimate version of flourishing would be Light and Life.

So the question is, how do we take steps toward Light and Life? 

What is Spiritual Innovation?

Spiritual innovation is located in three different places on a spectrum: Some of it is happening inside religious traditions and helping them to evolve. Some of it is happening on the edge, maintaining connection to traditions, but also branching out. (Jesus shattered traditions while constantly saying to the apostles, Do you not know the scriptures, the teachings of your spiritual forebearers?) And then there are innovations happening totally outside religious frames of reference. 

Four big themes emerged from the research.

Technologies of Spirit

The first theme is Technologies of Spirit. “Spiritual influencers” use technology to share their messages. An Egyptian Muslim preacher named Amr Khaled, one of the most famous television preachers in the Arab world, talks about creating a hybrid digital program that takes some of what Islam says about how we grow spiritually and combines it with what he's learned from other programs. He’s built out a whole digital series supporting young people to become what he calls ambassadors of Ihsan, which essentially means perfection, excellence in God. His whole program is set up to explore how to grow into excellence in God. 

Others are using different technologies to engage in rituals at a distance. Our Urantia community conducting worship over Zoom is a basic version of this. There was an explosion of that during COVID. Meanwhile, a robot priest in Kyoto answers people's theological questions. Gita GPT uses AI to harvest wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita and responds to individual questions about their lives.

Resistance and Reclamation 

The second theme is about resistance and reclamation. There has been so much repression of religion throughout the world. Now there is a process of reclaiming and rediscovering what predated colonial religions in places like South America, Africa, and parts of Asia. There is an explosion of interest in indigenous spirituality and practice.

For example, my colleague and I participated in a festival in Rio de Janeiro for the goddess Yamanja, the mother of all deities in the Yoruba tradition. The story goes that when Yamanja's waters broke, she created the oceans. The Yamanja festival has now become very popular, even among people who do not identify with this tradition, to pay homage to what we might call the Mother Spirit. That's the thing about a lot of these traditions: there's a surface level interpretation and then there's the depth of what people are really connecting to, whether consciously or not. 

The Yoruba tradition was completely suppressed in Brazil and is now fascinatingly being reclaimed by the government, with a festival like this one beingsanctioned by the state because they’ve recognized its popularity. 

There's also a huge resurgence of shamanism around the world, with people reclaiming a sense of personal agency and power for healing. 

Parts of these phenomena can seem a little regressive, from an ancient background that has not reached the point of monotheism. But at the same time, there are a lot of gestures toward personal religion that can be really powerful. 

Some fascinating underground innovation is happening in China, where religions like Christianity and Islam are forbidden by the state. But in the last 40 years, Christianity has grown from a million to nearly 100 million people, through underground house churches and creative ways that people stay connected through technology. One church pre-records its worship services and then invites people to listen to them on earbuds in the park while they walk with friends, instead of gathering on a Sunday morning. You can't stop people from going for a walk in the park and listening to their earphones. 

Embodied Experience

The third of the four big themes in our report is around the idea of embodied experience, a quest for direct connection to the divine. People are increasingly drawn to community and nature-based experiences such as plant medicine journeys. There’s been a huge uptick too of people participating in pilgrimages, spiritual retreats, and festivals. 

A fascinating example in Poland is a group called the Extreme Way of the Cross. About 100,000 Catholics gather for an epic overnight hike that integrates the 14 stations of the cross. It’s a true physical challenge, where you reach your limits and “meet God” by physically embodying a taste of what Jesus went through in the final days of his life. 

The Camino de Santiago, an ancient Christian pilgrimage route in France, Spain, and Portugal, has seen an explosion of participants who seek out the Camino regardless of how they may identify religiously, especially for times of life transition such as a change in career or the loss of a loved one. These are beautiful impulses for personal spirituality. 

Secular Spirituality 

The fourth theme to emerge from the research is secular spirituality—in which nominally secular contexts act as a seedbed for spiritual innovation. These are things like leadership programs, personal transformation apps, and spiritually inclusive healthcare, all of which are addressing spiritual needs outside of conventionally religious settings. 

For large numbers of people in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and parts of Asia, there is a sense that anything religious is irrelevant, dangerous, or hypocritical. At the same time, there is a desire to  do things that are good, meaningful, and even transformative, without touching  religion. For instance, the MindFitness program for business leaders in Tokyo was designed to provide meditation and mental training within a secular frame. In Saudi Arabia, where Islam is required by the state, a group called Sangha Estimata Hub facilitates a culture of inner well-being for Saudi's future leaders without touching Islam. In Australia, the Spiritual Health Association is using scientific evidence to advocate for spiritually inclusive healthcare. In the US, Lisa Miller from Columbia University runs a master's program called the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, using brain science to talk about the need for spiritually integrated mental healthcare and healthcare in general. We found similar programs in Chile, Colombia, and Kenya. While there’s promise here, the secular frame is inherently limiting. 

Support for Spiritual Innovators

Sacred Design Lab is working to bring together a hub of entities that already support spiritual innovators. I’ve found myself in the role of movement organizer, trying to act as a field catalyst to make spiritual innovation more visible and more robustly supported, on the premise that the work some of these folks are doing is necessary but under resourced. 

Over the last 12 years that I've been working with spiritual innovators, I've seen many of them burn out from lack of support for their spiritual, relational, and practical needs. It’s very clear that there's more to be done to support these emerging leaders and their work, but it can be really hard to meet their needs when most religious life is siloed within traditions and institutions. We are trying to take steps that will help point us toward a more spiritually flourishing future. 

The full report, Illuminating Spiritual Innovation, can be read here. The illustrations are from the report, with artists from around the world responding to the prompt, “What does spiritual innovation mean to you?”