What does corporate America have in common with church? Sue Phillips, a co-founder of the consulting firm Sacred Design Lab, told attendees of Andover Newton’s inaugural Bauer-Broholm Lecture on March 20 that without religious traditions to turn to when facing life’s biggest questions, the unchurched are seeking support and answers elsewhere–including the workplace. As a result, CEOs of major corporations and nonprofits alike are reaching out to Sacred Design Lab for help meeting their workers’ “soul needs.” In her talk, “Designing for Soul in Secular Work,” Phillips shared with a Zoom audience of more than 50 participants some of Sacred Design Lab’s key learnings about bringing “soul-centered insights” to work as well as what churches can learn from the corporate environment.

 

Phillips, an ordained minister and former denominational executive in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, began with the story of her first meeting at Pinterest headquarters in San Francisco’s Innovation District with co-founder Evan Sharp. The company had recently gone public, and its stock was trading at $78 a share, making its founders and backers tech billionaires. But instead of feeling excitement at being entrusted with some of the company’s deepest concerns for its employees, Phillips found herself asking, “What in God’s name am I doing here?” It wasn’t just that she was at least 15 years older than everyone at Pinterest. What made her feel even more out of place was the fact that she was “an explicitly religious person [there] to talk about explicitly religious things.” That often uncomfortable juxtaposition of religion and the secular is at the heart of everything Phillips and her colleagues and co-founders Casper ter Kuile and Angie Thurston do. 

 

The statistics on declining church membership and decreasing religious affiliation, which Phillips said is expected to reach 50% for Generation Z, are by now well known. “The demographic freight train has already left the station, and it doesn’t care who’s still walking on the tracks,” she told the Andover Newton audience.  Quoting Unitarian Universalist theologian and activist Theodore Parker, she noted that religious institutions are “perishable,” and change is a constant. At the end of her lecture, during the Q & A session run by campus minister Emily Bruce, Phillips was asked if she believes churches are still the place for identity formation. “I think that’s probably not true,” she said, her brow wrinkling with compassion as she delivered what she knew to be difficult news.

 

Nevertheless, God’s good news is everlasting. While Phillips doesn’t see a way back to the pews of old, what she does see, every day, is “the longing human hearts everywhere that generate endlessly renewable questions about what life means and why we’re here.” Like Parker, she believes these needs will never change. Younger generations are still searching for spiritual meaning, just not in the same ways as previous generations. If that change is going to happen, Phillips wants to be out in front of it. In fact, she wants everyone out in front of it. “This is the reality I really want us to start designing for,” she told participants. 

 

This forward-looking work was a fitting subject for the brand new Bauer-Broholm Lecture, named for the series’ benefactor, Dr. Bradley P. Bauer (DMin ’16 and a current trustee), and Richard “Dick” Broholm, an Andover Newton graduate (BD ’54). The pair had a long-running friendship, becoming what Bauer, who introduced the Zoom lecture, called “conversation partners,” supporting one another along a shared journey toward helping people live their faith into the world. Both men believed that “not just clergy, but all people of faith hold the capacity to try to serve as best they can as God’s hands and feet in this world,” Bauer said. 

 

Sacred Design Lab’s mission is to support that very work. Through its “soul-centered design” for clients in education, health care, philanthropy and tech, Sacred Design Lab attempts to bring religious ideals like care, intention, kindness and love into the secular workplace. With her colleagues, Phillips is “playing a critical role in trailblazing a path so that more folks can do the kind of work that she does,” noted Sarah Yang, a third-year MDiv student, in her introduction. 

 

As trailblazers, Phillips admits that she and her colleagues are still exploring the limits of the work they’ve undertaken. Among the lessons Sacred Design Lab has learned so far is that distinctions between sacred and secular have blurred, a shift that has only accelerated during the pandemic. And while the content of workplace spirituality may not be the same as in worship, many of the “containers” are. Among them, Phillips named small groups, multigenerational connection, singing, rites of passage, text reading, formation questions. “The world needs what we know,” Phillips said. “We just have to get so much better at translating it out there.”

 

The consultants have also learned that pre-packaged programming just won’t do, Phillips said, because every social and work setting is different. In addition, the group realized early on that the key to meaningful discernment about a company’s soulful direction is trust. One important element of establishing that trust, Phillips said, is speaking the right language: a lexicon that delivers religious ideas without “so much as a whiff of evangelism,” relying instead on academic models via Sacred Design Lab’s relationship with Harvard Divinity School. 

 

Phillips sees the learning going in both directions; there are lessons for the church from corporate America as well. Phillips told the Andover Newton audience she has been “blown away by the creativity and rigor of the busines world,” citing “nimble structures, learning from failure, letting go of ideas that don’t work. I mean, can you imagine if the religious world let go of ideas that don’t work?” Phillips asked, her hands pressed to her face in wonder. “What would happen? Imagine if denominations and even congregations empowered innovators to create new stuff really fast. It’s astonishing what we could do if just a few of the basic fundamentals of business innovation were applied.”

 

The work of Sacred Design Lab presents its own challenges. Workplaces are often ill-equipped to handle the emotional and spiritual challenges that arise when doing deep, soulful work. Phillips cited as an example the many “pastoral letters” sent by CEOs last spring in response to reckonings about social injustice and systemic racism. “It’s a very rare CEO who can make a believable claim of moral authority, Amen?” Phillips asked to nods and hands raised in witness. Questions arise in the workplace like, Can you have a mutual covenant among people if some of them are in a position to fire others? Can you do soulful work if the impetus behind it is improved employee productivity and the bottom line? “Our jury is still out about how deep we can go in some of these secular environments and still be responsible in our work,” Phillips said.

 

One tangible demonstration of the difficulty of translating the sacred into the workplace was a New York Times article last summer that appeared on the front page of the Business section. Phillips cringed as she talked about the piece, which she and ter Kuile and Thurston felt failed to articulate Sacred Design Labs’ work. The group lost a major foundation grant as a result of the coverage. 

 

With so many questions and challenges remaining both for church leaders and CEOs, Phillips called upon William James’s definition of the value of religion: “immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.” Armed with this list, Phillips said she is willing to stake her own work life on attempting to build a world filled with people who embody these values, whether they’re gathering in a place of worship or a place of work.