A Formation Ministry for Curious Believers
These are my rough notes as I develop this over time.The Argument
The word tekton, translated in the Gospels as "carpenter," means something rougher and broader than that. Builder. Craftsman. Someone who works stone and wood both, who knows how materials fail and how to make them hold. Jesus of Nazareth spent the majority of his life not preaching but making things. This is not incidental biographical detail. It is the shape of an incarnation: God choosing to know the world through the resistance of matter.
The church has largely forgotten this. We have built a faith of words and stillness, of Sunday mornings and correct belief, and then wondered why people — especially young people, especially queer people, especially people who learn through their hands and bodies rather than their ears — don't stay. Thoughts and prayers are not enough. They have never been enough. Christ did not model a faith of beautiful sentiment. He modeled a faith of showing up, with your whole self, accountable to the people in the room.
Tekton Circle is my attempt to build that faith into the life of a congregation.
Where This Comes From
I grew up poor in rural Virginia, learning early that you make what you need because nobody is going to hand it to you. My queer community taught me the same thing at a deeper level — build chosen family, build culture, build shelter and beauty and resistance out of whatever is at hand. That is not just survival. It is theology. Queer people have been making something from nothing for as long as we have existed, and that practice is sacred whether or not the church has had the sense to say so.
I am an artist, a designer, an educator, and a maker of curricula. I am also a lesbian in recovery, entering seminary at fifty-four to pursue ordination as an Episcopal priest. Everything in my life has pointed toward this: a formation ministry that takes making seriously as spiritual practice, that shows up in actual bodies with actual tools, and that rebuilds the church through relationship rather than program.
What It Is
Tekton Circle is a traveling parish ministry and open-source formation curriculum built around craft-based learning. The core theological claim is simple: making and repairing things with your hands is a form of spiritual formation, not a program activity. It is prefigurative practice — hands in reclaimed materials as embodied resistance to extractive consumerism, to the isolation of modern life, to a faith that has retreated entirely into abstraction.
The enemy is brittleness. In faith, in people, in ideology. The cure is contact with the real.
The formation model is explicitly democratic and apprenticeship-based. Everyone teaches what they know. Everyone admits what they don't. The material does not care about your credentials, and neither does a broken pew joint. That same democratic quality is native to parish life, where a retired carpenter and a teenager and a seminary student can work side by side on the same problem, each bringing something the others lack.
Formation Across the Lifespan
Tekton Circle is designed to scale across the entire congregation.
Tekton Circle's children's curriculum begins outside, in play clothes, in the actual world. Children plant things and watch them die and come back. They hold insects. They mix colors and break clay and learn what wood does when it gets wet. They walk and talk about God the way you talk about someone who is present — because God is present, here, in this, in all of it.
This is also where the sciences enter — not as a separate subject but as a way of paying attention. A child who learns to look at a leaf under a magnifier, who understands that everything alive is made of the same cellular architecture, who grasps that the same light bending through a prism bends through a raindrop — that child is being formed in a theology that cannot be small. The universe is incomprehensibly vast and intricate and interconnected, and God made all of it, and we are part of it.
That formation has consequences. A child shaped by genuine encounter with creation's complexity and interdependence does not grow up believing that some people are outside God's care. The logic doesn't hold. You cannot learn that slime mold solves problems and mycelia networks communicate across miles and quantum particles are entangled across distances we cannot measure — and then turn around and build a theology of exclusion. Creation won't support it.
Radical welcome begins here. Not as a lesson. As a formation.
Tekton Circle offers something else: real skills, real questions, real stakes, and real community. You learn to fix things. You learn that you are capable. You learn that your hands are not separate from your spirit, that the thing you make with your neighbors is also a prayer, that competence and creativity and service are not secular activities you set aside on Sunday.
This is also where we go deeper into the questions. Quantum physics tells us that the observer affects the observed — that reality at its most fundamental level is relational, participatory, not fixed. Social theory tells us that systems produce outcomes, that injustice is structural, that the world as it is was built and can be rebuilt. Ecology tells us that we are not separate from creation but embedded in it, responsible to it, accountable to it.
These are not threats to faith. They are faith, pursued honestly. A teenager who can hold evolutionary biology and the creation narratives together — who understands that a poem can be truer than a fact — has a theology strong enough to actually use. Strong enough to resist. Strong enough to welcome.
The self-sufficiency is political. When you know how to grow food, repair tools, build shelter, make things from reclaimed materials — you are less dependent on the systems that require your compliance. You are harder to manipulate. You are freer. The church should be producing free people. That is what the gospel is for.
Ora et labora — work and prayer — not as a slogan but as a practice. Benedict knew what he was talking about. The separation of sacred and secular, of mind and body, of spiritual formation and physical competence — that separation was always a theological error with political consequences. It produced people who outsourced their lives and their thinking and their food supply and their ability to fix what was broken, and then wondered why they felt powerless.
Tekton Circle's adult formation is a reclamation. Of skills. Of agency. Of the body as a site of knowing. Of the neighbor as teacher. Of the material world as the place where God is actually encountered, not the place you pass through on the way to the spiritual part.
Adults bring everything — grief, doubt, deconstruction, rage, tenderness, expertise, weariness. All of it is welcome at the workbench. Shared work becomes shared honesty. Shared honesty becomes shared prayer. Shared prayer becomes shared worship within the full sacramental life of the church — but arrived at through the body, through the hands, through the neighbor, through the world God actually made.
This is also where we name the politics plainly. A literal reading of scripture that conveniently reinforces the concentration of wealth and the erasure of the marginalized is not theology. It is ideology in vestments. The antidote is not argument. The antidote is formation — people so thoroughly rooted in their own encounter with God's actual world that the small, punitive, extractive version simply has no purchase. They have already met God in the compost and the quantum field and the face of the stranger, and nothing that comes in a pressed suit trying to sell them a smaller God is going to land.
We are not fighting doctrine with doctrine. We are fighting impoverished formation with full formation. Haul ass. Dirty your hands. God is here.
The Queer Roots of This Work
The LGBTQIA+ community carries one of the most sophisticated and largely uncelebrated traditions of community-making in American history — not despite marginalization, but forged through it. When institutions failed us or slammed their doors, we built our own. We built mutual aid networks, health clinics, and food pantries when the government looked away during the AIDS crisis. We built the ballroom economy — a parallel world of houses, mentorship, and belonging that sustained Black and Brown queer and trans people who had nowhere else to go. We sewed the AIDS quilt, panel by panel, while we were dying. We built chosen-family networks that functioned as insurance systems, inheritance systems, and emergency rooms all at once. We shaped American art, music, theater, and design — often without credit, always with the particular vision that comes from learning to see the world sideways because someone locked the front door.
This is not a thin tradition. This is a civilization we built in the margins, with whatever we had at hand. Tekton Circle draws on that directly.
I am not building Tekton Circle only for the LGBTQIA+ community. The lesson of the margins is not that we construct better walls around our own — it is that we know something about belonging that the center doesn't. We know what it feels like when someone assesses you before they welcome you. We know that the people who showed up and worked alongside us, without agenda, without audition — those are the ones who changed us.
That knowing is the methodology. Shoulder to shoulder work equalizes from the start. You cannot maintain your hierarchies when you and your neighbor are both trying to figure out why the drawer won't close. The workbench levels everything. The repair table creates common ground you cannot fake or argue away — you are both here, both useful, both learning, both capable of surprise.
This is how inclusion actually works. Not through statement. Through showing up. Through work. Through the slow, irreversible knowledge of each other that comes from making something together.
Tekton Circle is in active development. Here is what is underway:
I am joining an established repair café in Madison, NJ this summer to learn the model from the inside, observe what works, and develop my own approach from lived practice rather than theory.
In my home studio, I am building out the first phase of the curriculum — working through the material areas myself, as my own first apprentice, developing the pedagogy through making before I teach it to anyone else.
I am documenting the entire development process on Substack, in real time. This is a public commitment to accountability, a record of the work, and eventually the foundation of the podcast I am building around this ministry.
First traveling parish sessions are planned for seminary years one and two.
The curriculum, when complete, is designed to be handed to a church and run without me. Replicable, open-source, yours to use.
Benedict's ora et labora treated manual labor as liturgy. The Cistercians built extraordinary architecture as prayer. Julian of Norwich found the whole of creation held in a hazelnut. Teilhard de Chardin understood matter not as fallen but as becoming. What these thinkers share, and what Tekton Circle tries to embody, is a thoroughly anti-gnostic faith — God is not above the material world looking down but in the grain of it.
Zealotry is a brittleness problem. It comes from faith that was never allowed to touch rough edges: doubt, beauty, failure, the stubbornness of wood grain going the wrong way. The repair cafe is a return loop. The teenager learning to sharpen a blade is a return loop. The elder teaching a child to read a grain of wood — these are not supplements to formation. They are formation, of the most durable kind.
Faith that has touched the world cannot be shattered by it.
Get Involved
Tekton Circle is looking for parish partners willing to open their halls, and for practitioners of every kind — woodworkers, fiber artists, bookbinders, toolmakers, sewers, builders, fixers — who want to bring their skills into the service of community formation.
If you are a rector, parish administrator, or lay leader interested in hosting a gathering, I want to hear from you.
If you are a maker who wants to bring your practice into this work, reach out.
If you are a queer person who has spent your life making something from nothing and never had a church that honored that — welcome. This is being built for you too.
Provisional Reading List
This is in development as it will be the basis for the next 3-4 years of creative pilgramage, woven around seminary. The curriculum I'm developing mirrors the Bauhaus curriculum in terms of their being an initial year of basics, then diving deep into concentration than moving outward into the world, and then finally into fully realized building.
- Daniel Fountain — Queer Crafts: Material Practices and the Making of Identity (Bloomsbury, 2026)
- John Chaich and Todd Oldham — Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community (2014)
- Daniel Fountain — Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain (2023)
Making & Craft Theory
- Richard Sennett — The Craftsman
- Matthew Crawford — Shop Class as Soulcraft
- Matthew Crawford — The World Beyond Your Head
- Tim Ingold — Making
- Gary Rogowski — Handmade
General Making & Repair
- Céline Santini — Kintsugi: The Japanese Art of Repairing with Gold
- Lewis Dartnell — The Knowledge
- Benedict of Nursia — The Rule of Saint Benedict
- Meister Eckhart — Sermons and Treatises
- Julian of Norwich — Revelations of Divine Love
- Gerard Manley Hopkins — The Poems
- Dorothy Sayers — The Mind of the Maker
- Teilhard de Chardin — The Divine Milieu
- Simone Weil — Waiting for God
- Simone Weil — The Need for Roots
- Wendell Berry — What Are People For?
- Wendell Berry — The Unsettling of America
- Sarah Coakley — Selected Works
- Linn Marie Tonstad — Selected Works
Queer Theology
- Patrick Cheng — Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology (2011)
- Elizabeth M. Edman — Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (2016)
- Marcella Althaus-Reid — The Queer God (2003)
- Linn Marie Tonstad — Queer Theology (2018)
- Robyn Henderson-Espinoza — Activist Theology (2019)
- Austen Hartke — Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians (2018)
- Pamela Lightsey — Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology (2015)
- Julie Rodgers — Outlove: A Queer Christian Survival Story (2021)
- Gregory Millikin — Being Called, Being Gay: Discernment for Ministry in the Episcopal Church (2018)
- Friedrich Froebel — The Education of Man
- John Dewey — Experience and Education
- John Dewey — Art as Experience
- Maria Montessori — The Absorbent Mind
- Loris Malaguzzi — The Hundred Languages of Children
- Paulo Freire — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
- Herbert Read — Education Through Art
- The Foxfire Book Series
Deschooling
- Ivan Illich — Deschooling Society
- Ivan Illich — Tools for Conviviality
- Ivan Illich — In the Vineyard of the Text
- Ivan Illich — The Rivers North of the Future
(Note: Illich's writings on gender are approached critically here. His philosophical tools are to be repurposed for liberation and radical inclusion, not restriction.)
Woodworking
- Christopher Schwarz — The Anarchist's Tool Chest
- Robert Wearing — The Essential Woodworker
- George Walker and Jim Tolpin — By Hand and Eye
- R. Bruce Hoadley — Understanding Wood
- Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Using Woodworking Tools
Sewing & Textile
- Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Sewing
- Helen Joseph-Armstrong — Patternmaking for Fashion Design
- Natalia Romanenko — The Geometry of Hand-Sewing
The unified theory underneath all of it is simple:
faith that has touched the world cannot be shattered by it.
The curious believer—hands dirty, questions alive, capable of psalms and joinery both—is not a scattered person. That is a whole person.
Whole people are harder to break, harder to conscript to unjust causes,
and considerably more of service to God.