The Rev. Lucy Waechter Webb and Nicole Bauman, who facilitate Weaving New Ritual, a yearlong community of practice designed to help people from white Christian lineage reclaim ritual fluency, were the guests on a recent episode of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast.” Listen to their 48-minute conversation with hosts Simon Doong and the Rev. Lee Catoe here.
Bauman, who has a background in farming, intentional community, yoga and doula work, told the hosts they grew up in “a social justice-oriented Anabaptist community” that “reckoned questions in their own way,” including this one: What does it mean to show up for collective liberation as Christian people?
While Bauman told the hosts they find themselves “stepping away from institutional church spaces,” for Bauman the question is, “How can I find ways to reclaim the heart of these stories and the liberatory potential in these stories and practices?”
Weaving New Ritual completed its initial cohort late in 2025 and is forming another for 2026. “One thing we’re up to is inviting folks to practice holding more and more complexity and contradictions,” Waechter Webb said. “One of the phrases we say over and over is, can we keep feeling for the blessings and the burdens?” Among the tasks for cohort members is “being able to withstand receiving feedback that I had impact in the world in a way that was harmful and I want to be open and receive that without losing my dignity and with capacity to be in the work of repair,” she said.
Part of Waechter Webb’s emphasis is on reaching back toward “pre-Christian ancestors and pre-Christian practice,” which “flattens the complexity of who we are and what has made us today.”
“When we continue to distance ourselves from our people, we cede that ground and we give up the power of institutional spaces like churches to be in the work on non-compliance inside the rise of authoritarianism in this country,” she said. The work is “a political project just as much as it is a spiritual project. We hold the fight for material change and cultural change all at once.”
“I want to name explicitly that our project holds a very expansive invitation for how people relate to their Christian lineage,” she said. “This is not a project to try to get people to practice Christianity or start a new Christian community. We’re specifically saying, ‘this is part of your lineage. … What’s your relationship to this lineage now? How do the blessings and burdens of that lineage keep transforming you?’”
According to Bauman, members of the initial cohort wrestled with questions including “how do we not stay separate from our people who are also of Christian lineage but have a different theology and politics than we do?”
The cohort was “a theologically diverse group of people” and included pastors, seminarians and others active in their churches. “We had people who grew up in the church and left 25 years ago and people who grew up in atheist homes who didn’t know the story of Jesus,” Waechter Webb said. “We are a scrappy group of people trying to figure out how to make this kind of work happen in the world.”
“I think the work they’re doing is so important,” Doong told Catoe as the podcast came to a close. “It’s important for white folks and folks with white Christian lineage to think about the ways our ancestry, faith and traditions come together and ways we can reshape that if we want to.”
Learn more about the cohort of Weaving New Ritual here. Listen to previous editions of “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” here.
Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
Sarah Sullivan, Assistant General Counsel, Legal & Risk Management, Administrative Service Group
Carla Sutton, Operations Admin, Operations, The Presbyterian Foundation
Let us pray:
God, we thank you that you are always a step ahead of us, preparing us through our circumstances for ministries of which we are yet unaware. Help us to trust you even when we are unable to trace you. Amen.
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