From “Beauty School Drop Out” in Grease! This will make sense as you read. :)
Happy New Year to our beloved 2025 community!
Carrie spent two days at the start of the month on her annual silent retreat, envisioning the specific mission for TCL’s upcoming year.
To sum it up in a title, TCL’s 2025 mission is: Beauty School and the Math of a Journey of Joy.
2025 is set to be a huge year. Amid uncertainties, The Church Lab is focused on seeing—deep seeing. By this we mean, encountering and discovering the beauty in one another against all odds. In 2025, we’re going to “beauty school.”
This is no easy “kumbaya” task. Beauty school is justice work. Seeing the beauty in others requires us to complexify and humanize one another.
How do we plan to do this challenging work? By following God’s lead into spiritually mature, innovative community building and leadership. We commit to helping people spiritually grow through practices we offer and/or support, and to build bridges such that we better love our neighbors and ourselves.
In fact, Carrie came up with a not-super-formulaic formula. Here’s the math:
Uncertainty + (Spiritual Flexibility + Spiritual Groundedness)
= INNOVATION, CURIOSITY, WONDER, CREATIVITY, EXPERIMENTATION AND PLAY
The uncertainty speaks to our current circumstances which we cannot control. Many entered this year with mixed feelings: outrage, grief, resignation, pessimism, optimism, skepticism, anxiety, depression… you name it. Uncertainty is with us.
Combining that reality with spiritual flexibility (following the Holy Spirit’s lead as a lived priority) and spiritual groundedness (spiritual practice, learning and discovering, reflecting, writing, and sharing) we lean in to what we can control and let that be.
The “let them, let me” framing by author and podcaster Mel Robbins offers a helpful lens in which we can approach spiritual flexibility.
For TCL, the let me’s are: Let us be faithful to TCL by letting go of the things not in our control. Let us grieve outcomes and dreams lost, and let us focus on, nourish and celebrate what we do get to do here and now.
For Carrie, a very practical let me is: Let me live my spiritual priorities by ingraining them in my schedule at the start of the day.
What’s your let me for this year?
Through this formula, we prioritize sustainability of what we do best: innovation, curiosity, wonder, creativity, and the often overlooked but oh-so-important, PLAY. Only through these elements will we maintain the joy behind this work, and sustain ourselves through the difficult times.
While things may seem bleak, we are still here committing to the difficult work.
We are still here.
God is still here.
Hope is still here.
See you in beauty school in 2025.