How Millennials and women religious are revitalizing the church.
The
Nuns & Nones origin story is almost disappointingly practical. In
2016 Santa Fe-based minister Wayne Muller visited retreat centers of
women religious in the Midwest shortly after he led a retreat for 25
Millennials involved in social justice work—a growing group of young
adults who considered themselves spiritually oriented but not affiliated
with a specific religion (aka “Nones”).
One
of the women religious told Muller that their site was most likely
doomed to be torn down, the land sold. “I thought about the people I had
just been with and said, ‘There’s somebody you should talk to before
you do that,’ ” Muller says.
Muller
consulted with Adam Horowitz, a Philadelphia-based activist he met at a
Millennial-focused interfaith project at Harvard Divinity School.
“Let’s bring them together—let’s see what happens,” Horowitz remembers
Muller suggesting.
In
late 2016 a group of women religious and religiously unaffiliated
Millennials met at Harvard Divinity School to explore the concept of the
two groups regularly meeting, working, and perhaps one day cohabitating
in the spirit of service and community.
Other
investigative meetings around the country followed, and now Nuns &
Nones convene regularly in the Bay Area; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Grand
Rapids, Michigan; Philadelphia; St. Louis; and other parts of North
America, with field trips to one another’s homes and work spaces,
weekend retreats, and video-conference discussions of shared readings.
From
an unlikely pairing—Muller is a minister in the United Church of Christ
and Horowitz, who is Jewish, professes to have never met a sister until
“two years ago”—sprang a connection between women religious and
religiously unaffiliated Millennials that surprised everyone involved.
“Both sides fell in love,” says Horowitz. “There was this sense of
seeing and being seen. From there, everyone asked ‘How can I meet the
nuns near me?’ ”
