About the New Story Community
Why This Community Exists
Many people today sense that familiar ways of living and leading are no longer sufficient. Systems strain, trust erodes, and approaches that once offered clarity now feel misaligned with the realities we face.
The New Story Community exists to support people who are learning how to live and lead during this time of transition—not by fixing what is unraveling, but by attending to how they are being shaped within it. The work begins from the conviction that this moment calls for a deeper grounding than analysis, strategy, or effort alone can provide.
Rather than offering answers about what comes next, the community holds space for learning how to stand well in the midst of uncertainty, guided by practice, relationship, and attention to what is being asked of us now.
This work cannot be fully understood in advance. It reveals itself through practice, relationship, and time.
What “New Story” Means Here
Within this community, the phrase New Story names an orientation rather than a prediction. It acknowledges that an older story—one shaped by assumptions of control, extraction, and separation—is losing its coherence, while a new way of being has not yet fully taken form.
Between these movements lies a liminal space: a threshold marked by ambiguity, vulnerability, and the absence of clear signposts. In such a space, familiar frameworks often fail, and conventional measures of success offer little guidance.
The New Story Community does not claim to define what the New Story will be or how it will arrive. Instead, it attends to how people might live with integrity, care, and attentiveness in the meantime—rooted in trust that wisdom is available, even when the path ahead is not yet visible.
In this work, we hold three truths together: that an Old Story is ending and unraveling; that a New Story—life-giving and whole—is arriving in a time and manner known only to the Creator; and that the space between them is a liminal space, marked by uncertainty and few familiar signposts. This space is not meant to be navigated alone. It is best traveled in community.
How the Work Is Approached
This work is not centered on instruction or expertise. It is a process of formation.
Formation unfolds through sustained practice, presence, and relationship over time. Learning here is not primarily about acquiring ideas, but about noticing how one’s life is being shaped—through daily spiritual practice, regular reflection, and shared commitment within a community.
Gatherings emphasize simplicity and depth: silence, shared inquiry, teaching offered without urgency, and small-group practice. Understanding emerges gradually, through repetition and lived experience, rather than through explanation alone.
What matters most is not performance or mastery, but faithfulness to the practices and to one another.
This work is stewarded by Bill Grace and has emerged through decades of lived experience, listening, and practice in community.
The Role of Community
This work is not done alone.
Liminal spaces are disorienting. Without familiar landmarks, continuity becomes essential. The New Story Community offers a structure that supports sustained engagement over time—through regular gatherings, shared practices, and mutual accountability.
Community here is not primarily a source of comfort, but of steadiness. Trust grows through consistency, and learning is held collectively rather than privately. Wisdom moves not only from facilitator to participant, but among participants themselves, shaped by shared attention and care.
Boundaries
The New Story Community is not a strategic planning process, a movement, or an organization seeking to grow. It does not offer solutions to systemic problems or techniques for managing institutional decline.
It is not therapy, coaching, or self-improvement, and it does not promise transformation or personal outcomes.
The community does not claim to know when or how a New Story will arrive, nor does it speak with authority about what is to come. It simply offers a way of being present in the space between stories, grounded in practice, responsibility, and trust.
This work may resonate, or it may not. Discernment about participation unfolds over time and cannot be rushed or persuaded.