Fabric Podcast

…the more they stay the same. The landscape Fabric emerged out of in 2006 has only gotten more clear now. More people burned & bored. More people rightfully skeptical of Church, wondering if it has anything left to offer them. As we celebrate 20 years of Fabric, let’s also affirm why spaces like this one are needed more than ever.

Ian has a conversation with Christian Ledesma, principal at Minneapolis' Roosevelt High School that wonders about humanity in the era of AI, robotics, and automation while taking stock of where we are with leadership, community, and education after living through COVID, school shootings, and the recent ICE occupation of Minneapolis. 

Katie Eckeberger (@MrsOberger on Instagram) is a queer Christian singer-songwriter and a voice from Singing Resistance MN, who sang her way through “Operation Metro Surge” with courage. Ian McConnell starts a conversation with Katie about music, faith, and showing up when it's hardest.

A live conversation with Tabitha Montgomery of Flourish Placemaking Collective, whose work reimagines what public space can be when it's built with— not just for — the people who live there. If service is what we’re called toward, how can we make it a way of living beyond simply one-off events we participate in? 

The Loose Threads podcast is a series of interviews recorded in front of a live audience in Minneapolis, MN.  Our guests are people doing real, high-impact work in our community.  In this episode, it's Joe Davis and Dave Scherer, who have been walking and working together for years with overlapping passions for music, justice, teaching, and spirituality. Listen as Chris Tripolino pulls on the threads of their passion and play to see what inspires you and maybe connects us all!

Loneliness isn't just about being alone, it's about being unseen, unwoven, unplaced. This week we name the deep human ache to belong to something larger than ourselves, and ask what it would take to become a community that tends that fire in each other.
 
LINKS:
Keepers of the Fire |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up
TRANSCRIPT:
The Ache This Week
I want to describe a feeling and see if you know what I’m talking about:
You're surrounded by people— at work, online, maybe even in a room full of friends— and you still feel somehow... unplaced. Like you're present but not quite part of something. Like everyone else knows how to belong and you missed the orientation. Literally happened to me. 
That's not just loneliness in the ordinary sense. It's something deeper. The ache to be woven in. To matter to a specific group of people who also matter to you. To not just be known, but needed. Do you know this feeling? Yeah!
Today, on this final week of Keepers of the Fire, I want to name that ache directly. Because I think it might be the one underneath all the others we've explored this summer. One thing; this is actually an ache, a yearning that has gotten a lot of attention. 
The Epidemic
Three years ago, in 2023, the United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy did something unusual; he issued a formal public health advisory declaring loneliness an epidemic. A crisis.
The statistic he cited was that about one in two American adults reported experiencing loneliness— and social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29 PERCENT. That’s comparable to the health impact of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We have entire cultural infrastructures built around discouraging smoking. We have almost nothing built around discouraging isolation.
And then to make it worse, the money-grabbing internet “manosphere” has very carefully and intentionally targeted young boys and young adult men to believe that they have no agency, and that their feelings of loneliness are the fault of others, like women or the feminist movement! I want to say outright: that’s a lie. Loneliness isn’t just an issue for boys and men, they’ve just been most successfully convinced they’re especially isolated, and then that false premise has been weaponized against others. 
To be clear: loneliness is a problem, but it isn’t isolated to a particular group of American adults. Some demographic groups seem to have more access to emotional and relational skills than others… catch my drift?
In an interview with Kate Bowler, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said loneliness is like HUNGER or THIRST— a signal the body sends when something we need for survival is missing. This is biology. We were created— literally, neurologically— for each other.
Matthew Lieberman, a neuroscientist at UCLA, found that the brain processes social pain— rejection, exclusion, being cut off— in the same regions it processes physical pain. Being unplaced from community doesn't just hurt emotionally. It hurts, the way a broken bone hurts.
So when you feel the ache for belonging— that persistent, restless sense that you're APART FROM something you were made to be A PART OF— your nervous system is telling you the truth. Pay attention to it.
Belonging vs. fitting in
Just a quick tangent here to say that belonging is not the same as fitting in.
Fitting in is when you adjust yourself to be ACCEPTABLE. You figure out what the group rewards, what gets you included, and you perform accordingly. It's exhausting. And it doesn't actually satisfy the ache— because the version of you that got accepted isn't really you.
Belonging is different. Belonging is when you show up as you ACTUALLY ARE — complicated, unfinished, uncertain — and find that there's a place for that person anyway. That you don't have to earn your way in or maintain a performance to stay.
Loneliness isn't just about being alone. It's about being unseen. Unwoven. You can be lonely in a crowd, in a marriage, even in a congregation— if the version of you that's present isn't the real one.
The ache for belonging is the ache to stop PERFORMING and start BEING YOURSELF. Bring your weird into the room. Let that freak flag fly, baby.
What the early community attempted
There's a description in the book of Acts of the earliest Jesus community that has always struck me as both beautiful and worth taking seriously:
'All those who trusted in Jesus were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.'
Now, I'm not going to tell you to sell everything and move into a commune (this isn’t actually a cult!). But I want to linger here for a moment.
In the ancient Greco-Roman world, your identity was determined by your bloodline, your ethnicity, your class, your gender. In Greco-Roman culture, people claimed ethnic identity from ancestors— you were literally born into your customs and beliefs. Religion was in the blood. The idea that people from different ethnic backgrounds, different economic classes, enslaved people alongside free people, women alongside men, could gather at the same table as equals— that was radical. Historically disruptive.
The earliest Jesus communities articulated a vision— particularly in Paul's letter to the Galatians: 'neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female'— that cut directly against the social order of their world.
Now— did they always live up to it? No. The historical record is honest about that. The vision outran the practice, as it usually does. Early Christianity quickly developed its own in-group dynamics, its own hierarchies, its own failures. This is not a fairy tale.
But here's what matters: they attempted something the world around them said was impossible. They tried to build a community where the usual sorting mechanisms— wealth, status, ethnicity, gender— didn't get to have the final word. Where the table was wider than the culture thought was reasonable.
That attempt— that stubborn, imperfect attempt— became one of the most transformative ongoing social experiments in human history. Not because they got it perfectly right. But because they kept reaching toward a vision that the world kept calling naive. 
Sound familiar? We get to be a part of that legacy. I want that for us.
What we're up against
Cynicism, though, is alive and well.
When someone talks about building systems that actually take care of people — a real safety net, genuine healthcare, communities where everyone has enough — they hear: too expensive. naive. Unrealistic.
Even the christian-adjacent politicized wing of the American Church has mostly taken that vision and turned it into an afterlife destination called “Heaven” that has little to do with the here and now, and is only attained through perfect behavior and putting up with unjust systems without reacting to it.
When someone talks about the kind of belonging where you don't have to earn your place, where you're welcomed as you are regardless of what you produce or contribute— they hear: that's not how the world works. grow up.
When someone talks about the vision Jesus articulated… a world where the hungry are fed, the lonely are placed, the marginalized are centered… they hear: nice idea. impractical.
The cynics have always tried to be louder than the dreamers. And the dreamers have always been the ones who got anything done.
Here's what I've been thinking about all summer, across these six weeks: the barriers to our yearning are real. The barriers to belonging are real. Some of them are structural; the way adult life is organized makes deep community hard to build. The built-in consistent access we had in school doesn't recreate itself automatically. The institutions that used to create connection have weakened. Many only experience anything resembling that kind of connection as a “perk” of staying employed in the same job long enough.
But some of the barriers are internal. I think we can say that, without shame. 
We wait. We wait for someone else to organize it. We wait for the perfect moment, the house clean enough to host in, the enough energy, the right invitation. We treat belonging as something that should come find us rather than something we actively, courageously seek out...
Priya Parker, who has spent her career studying how and why humans gather (The Art of Gathering), makes this point: when the focus of a gathering is on the 'stuff' of the event, we shrink a human challenge down to a logistical one. The mess isn't what keeps people away. The story we tell ourselves about why now isn't the right time— that's what keeps people away.
VIDEO: Priya Parker x Ezra Klein on The Art of Gathering
Connection takes courage. Belonging takes risk. Showing up and saying I want to be part of something, and I want you to be part of it with me— that's vulnerable in ways our culture doesn't reward.
But it is, I believe, exactly what we were made for. 
The barrier practice and the vision
As I wrap up here— one question.
What gets in the way of your own belonging? What keeps you from reaching toward the connection you actually ache for?
Maybe it's a wound— a time you tried and got hurt. Maybe it's the pace of your life. Maybe it's the belief that you're too much, or not enough, or that it's too late to start. Maybe it's the persistent, inculturated voice that says: just be content with what you have. stop wanting more.
Whatever it is — write it down. Or draw it. Don't overthink it. Just name it.
<<time>>
In a few minutes we're going to take those outside to the fire. And we're going to offer them to it as a symbolic act of saying: I don't want this to have as much power over me as it has. I want to keep reaching.
Because here's the vision I want to leave you with— the one that has anchored this whole series for me.
Ever heard of the book of Revelation? It’s at the tail-end of the Bible, and when read literally, it admittedly sounds insane. But it’s not a history book, it’s a vision, a poem, a love-letter to a Church positioned against empire dominance— and at the end of it, there's an image of the world finally, fully healed. And here's how it's described: 'God's dwelling place is now among the people.'
Among the people. The ache for belonging, finally answered— not by escape from community, but by the deepest possible immersion in it.
That's the direction the whole story has been pointing. A world where the hungry are fed and the lonely are placed and the fearful are made safe and the weary finally rest and everyone gets to play and purpose gets to flourish— not someday in a far-off future, but here, practiced imperfectly, begun now, by us.
The cynics will always call it naive. You know by now I think that's a compliment.
The fire in your belly— The Ache— is not a problem. It's a compass. And the world needs more people willing to follow it together, rather than carrying it alone.
Tend the fire. For yourself. For each other. For the world that could be. May it be so.

The longing for stillness is its own kind of fire… quiet, insistent, easy to dismiss until you can't anymore. This week we practice the art of the honest pause, and ask what yearning reveals when we finally get still enough to hear it.
 
LINKS:
Keepers of the Fire |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up

Underneath every longing– for love, for purpose, for belonging, for rest– there's often a simpler, older ache: to exist without fear. This week we hold that tenderly, name how far the world still is from that vision, and commission each other as keepers of the fire for ourselves, for one another, and for that big, divine vision of love that could be.