ANGIE THURSTONPart III

T h e C l i n i c f o r W r i t i n g a n d t h e P u b l i c G o o d

The first step to creating an effective project plan is to set a

baseline. The baseline is the foundation on which the other

project elements will be built on. This must include a scope

statement.

49%

Well, I think part of what's been a real challenge, and I find it to be

an exciting challenge but nonetheless it is definitely a challenge,

with my work is that it doesn't really have a category or a

field. There is no easy language that I've found to talk about what

it is that I do, especially not in a single word or like three words.

Usually I end up having to say a sentence or two in order to even

begin to sort of categorize the project, and I think that's actually

going to be true for more and more people given how many of the

structures and organizations and categories we inherited no longer

feel fit for purpose. You know how we have so much. We kind of

bow. There's a lionizing of entrepreneurship amongst we younger

people and just around like, oh we have to disrupt every industry

that we inherited because it's all broken. I feel like a lot of us are

gonna end up doing work and, you know, doing writing and other

things that are that, you know the word intersectional is such a big

word because so much of it is happening at the junctures and

intersections of the categories that we used to take for granted.

That's just that's a bit of a conceptual thing to say but that's one

thing that's just been an ongoing challenge as well as opportunity

is attempting to find that niche. I feel a certain amount of

compassion for my younger self when I was trying so hard to figure

out what I was supposed to do with my life because when I look at

what I actually am doing it's like, oh yeah that's not just an easily

identifiable thing. It’s kind of this fascinating intersection of a few

different areas.

ANGIE THURSTONPart III

T h e C l i n i c f o r W r i t i n g a n d t h e P u b l i c G o o d

The first step to creating an effective project plan is to set a

baseline. The baseline is the foundation on which the other

project elements will be built on. This must include a scope

statement.

49%

So that's one piece is just a kind of openness to this call for

creativity that I think our generations are being asked into. There's

their newness to be discovered. Then I think the other thing is just

that I've ended up in surprising partnerships. There has been

resistance to my work, but there's so much change happening,

especially with religious institutions that sometimes the deep

skepticism of some of these organizations that we're lifting up as

promising. You know, that tension always lives in the conversation

about change, I think right, is what's being lost and what's being

born. It's been a surprise to me that so much of my work has ended

up being about the conversation between ancient wisdom and

emerging communities and innovation. This bridging between the

ancient and the emergent has ended up being at the heart of the

work, and I didn't see that coming necessarily, and so if you took a

look at the “How We Gather” website, we have five reports that

we've written. I think it's the fourth one called “Faithful” we ended

up co-writing with these two leaders of the United Methodist

Church who were helping us to understand this question as it lives

inside of big denominational bodies.

This is the last thing I ever would have seen myself doing, well either that or like

speaking on a panel with the founder of CrossFit. Both of those felt equally

unlikely. I'm now doing work where I'm being advised by a group of Catholic

nuns. You know it’s all this stuff that I couldn’t have seen coming. I don't think

it's been characterized so much as resistance, but it's required a certain

openness from me to actually embrace the possibility that there could be fruitful

collaboration in these unlikely places, and I've had my own resistance to get

over when it comes to either CrossFit or the Catholic Church.