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Hello and welcome to another edition of Mormon Transitions podcast. I'm your host John DeLin.

It's likely that I'll be posting this also as a Mormon Stories podcast episode.

But it's primarily a Mormon Transitions podcast episode because today we're going to be covering a topic that I think is super relevant and important for transitioning Mormons.

Many of you know and probably most of you won't.

Probably starting around 2011-2012, the idea of, let's just say, secular churches began to really emerge and penetrate global consciousness, especially amongst atheists, agnosticists, etc.

I would have first been, even though I thought about, I've been thinking about this idea for probably eight, nine, ten years, influenced by Kine Poetak and his books The Chosen, The Promise, etc. and Reform Judaism.

It wasn't until I heard about John Larson's living community, the former Mormon podcaster John Larson, and then Elaine DeBouton, who came out with a really good TED Talk called Atheism 2.0.

I know, and I think he followed that up with a book called Religion for Atheists, where people really started talking about the idea of having church-like entities that even meet regularly on Sunday, have congregations, have inspirational talks, youth groups, other sorts of things, just like a Sunday service in a church, but that they would not have the religious doctrine of theology.

And hopefully, they would include many sort of organizational best practices that maybe religions are slow to adopt, such as gender equality and racial equality and other types of things.

And so, since 2012, we've had a few of these sorts of organizations pop up.

The first one that I think I remember hearing about was Sunday Assembly, which is a group that I believe started in London around 2012-ish, with two comedians, I believe, who were named Sanderson and Pippa, and they started having these sort of Sunday meetings, where they would sing and dance and have sermons,

and eat cake and drink tea, and this idea spread pretty quickly, such that there are probably 40 or 50 or more Sunday Assembly congregations across the world.

Some good friends and I, Mike and Nicolayas and Chris and Steve Holbrook, some others.

We actually attended the Sunday Assembly group in Atlanta. They had sort of an international conference that we learned about them there.

We think they're doing great things that didn't feel like a good fit for post-mormons, which we can get into.

But during that time, we also learned about another organization here in the United States called Oasis.

And as I was reminded reading a little Time Magazine article, I believe it was Mike Ous, who's joining us today, who is the first sort of creator of an Oasis congregation.

Is that right, Mike?

Yes.

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