Pandemic Spiritual Leadership: A Trans-national Study of Innovation and Spiritual Practices

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced disruption that crossed sectors, borders, and disciplinary boundaries. Among faith communities and religious leaders, numerous commentators have observed technological innovations in response to physical gathering disruptions. We outline a form of pandemic spiritual leadership that supports faith communities beyond digital innovation by combining original empirical research and a novel conceptual framework.

Our project examined innovation through a comparative study of how faith leaders adapt religious practices during a time of disruption. While existing research on congregational responses to COVID-19 has documented sustained technological innovation, our research argues that technological innovation is only one feature of a broader catalog of innovative practices.

To generate a trans-national sample, we used purposive sampling in two distinct locations, Pacific Northwest United States and Aotearoa New Zealand. Although separated by culture and geography, a purposeful sample across these two contexts illustrated how spiritual leaders in post-Christian contexts similarly responded to the pandemic crisis. The research involved semi-structured interviewing of nineteen faith leaders from seventeen communities we observed undertaking creative adaption. A trans-national selection deepened understandings of the dynamism of the unfolding pandemic and how limits, experienced differently in diverse contexts, can be generative.

Our study identified six organizing practices: blessing, walking, slowing, place-making, connecting, and localizing care. We demonstrate how the presence of God is cultivated amid local letterboxes and neighborhood crossroads and argue for an intensification of the local as markers of pandemic spiritual leadership. These interrelated spiritual practices express features of Michel de Certeau's "pedestrian utterings," Joseph Schumpeter's "creative recombination" and Pierre Bourdieu's social theory. Working with Certeau, we describe pedestrian utterings as historic church practices reframed as everyday local practices. Working with Schumpeter, we describe how the six practices and the language of innovation used by participants express creative recombinations. Working with Bourdieu, we consider how disruption realigns social fields, including between individuals, congregations, and broader communities. Finally, amid social distancing, congregations proved to be an anchor in resourcing this pandemic spiritual leadership.

These four theoretical foci and six localizing practices provide a conceptual framework for future research into spiritual practices and religious leadership in the wake of a crisis. Confinements in space and movement can be generative of spiritual practice. For religious leaders and organizations, the research informs the cultivation of concrete practices that can encourage communities of care as part of crisis preparation. For scholars and religious practitioners alike, while pandemics enforce social separation, pandemic spiritual leadership combines attention to the local and the particular, as new forms of in-place practice emerge to sustain faith communities.