Cultivating Spiritually Grounded Community: An Overview of Fetzer’s Community of Freedom Gathering

How Fetzer’s Sacred-Centered Community Operates

Every Tuesday from 9 a.m. to noon, all Fetzer Institute staff are expected to participate in individual or communal spiritual formation and learning through the Community of Freedom Gathering. These mornings rotate between full-community and self-directed time, where staff may engage in spiritual development activities independently or in small groups. Together, these spaces are intended to support spiritual, social, and emotional development both individually and communally, foster a rich sacred-centered community, and serve as a practice space for  shaping the spiritual infrastructure of the future.

Full community gatherings are structured to be accessible for people across various stages in their spiritual journeys, and the spiritual practices offered during the gatherings are explicitly invitational (staff can choose not to engage if the practice does not feel right for them). The gatherings are crafted to nurture personal and interpersonal skills that are critical to being in healthy relationship with each other, and to stewarding Fetzer’s mission. These skills include self-awareness and self reflection, comfort with “both/and” realities, and the ability to engage across differences.

Outside speakers and facilitators are invited to design and lead roughly half of the sessions, with the other half planned and facilitated by Fetzer staff. Full-community sessions address wide-ranging topics such as: learning about world religions, building capacities such as communal discernment and visual thinking, exploring contemplative practices, and seeing the Sacred in the everyday. (More information on the specifics of full community gatherings can be found here.)

On alternating Tuesdays, staff chart their own paths. Some choose to spend the time on their own: doing artwork, exploring the network of wooded paths around the Fetzer campus, reading and researching spiritual interests, or moving their bodies or minds in myriad other ways. Others form or join small groups organized around a shared interest or activity, such as liturgical dance, improvisational music, Black and Asian ethnicity, and spiritual parenting. (More information on the specifics of small group and individual exploration can be found here and here.)

Dedicated staff and an intentional planning structure make the COFG a reality. Two full time employees, a Director of Spiritual Care and a Spiritual Engagement Coordinator, steward the community. Their work includes a mix of community engagement and spiritual care (e.g. engaging community members in the planning and leadership of specific sessions, checking on staff experiences and needs), and detailed event planning. Their efforts are guided and shaped by monthly meetings with Institute leaders who are experts in adult learning and development, as well as spiritual development and formation. This group is called the Developmental Team. In addition, an advisory group of key stakeholders and leaders at Fetzer meet twice a year to offer feedback, insight, and connections with developments in the field of spirituality.

The Institute’s sacred-centered community is embedded within a sizable suite of supports for spiritual development at Fetzer, which includes an annual individual spiritual development benefit for staff to take time away from work responsibilities and access funding to deepen their spiritual or religious practice. This is used in personal, highly customized ways, from participation in structured retreats to solitary time in nature. (More information about the full suite of elements that enable Fetzer’s sacred-centered community and culture can be found here.)

Who the Community Includes

All of the Fetzer Institute’s 65 employees participate in its Community of Freedom, including the 54 members based full-time in the Institute’s Kalamazoo headquarters (which includes both office space and a retreat center), six at GilChrist — a retreat center operated by Fetzer in nearby Three Rivers Michigan — and five working remotely. With the large majority of staff based in or near Kalamazoo, participation in the community is largely in person; 92% typically join in-person and 8% join online.

The Community of Freedom Gathering is inclusive of staff from the most junior to the most senior positions in the organization, encompassing employees in Fetzer’s full range of functions: programs, communications, partnerships, finance, facilities, administrative support, organizational culture, culinary, hospitality (for the retreat centers), and information technology.

As of late December 2025, most employees (52%) started at Fetzer after the community’s current leadership and structure were established in 2020. A third of Institute staff (31%) have been with the organization since before 2012, when the COFG was initiated.

According to the 2025 demographics survey of staff, twelve faith traditions, spiritual practices and/or worldviews are represented across the community. The most common include: Christian (44%), spiritual but not religious (26%), agnostic (13%) and nature- or earth-based spirituality (13%).

Nationwide, affiliation with houses of worship has declined over the past several decades,  leveling off in recent years as new spaces for spiritual practice and community have emerged. These shifts are reflected within Fetzer: 56% of staff consider the Community of Freedom their primary spiritual community, while 48% report having spiritual communities outside Fetzer (which may or may not be their primary community).

What the Community Represents to its Members

Fetzer’s Community of Freedom Gatherings are designed to help staff inhabit a sacred worldview, engage in contemplative practice, and tend to relationships (with self, others, the natural world, and the Sacred) rooted in love and shared purpose. Institute leadership believes this core organizational foundation expands staff capacity to support transformation within themselves, their community, the organization, and the world. Staff member perspectives on the gatherings suggest that this hypothesis is bearing out.

When community members were asked what the COFG represents to them, they described it as space to “be the work,” a communal experience of deepening into relationships, time to connect with the Sacred, and an opportunity to learn and grow with encouragement and support from the Institute.

In short, the COFG gives staff a practice space for doing the inner, and often invisible, work that makes it possible to embody Fetzer’s mission in the world.