Jeff Russell

Sorry for not responding to this for a bit, things came up, as they do.

Thanks for this link, I'll have to check it out - I'm always keen to learn about religious organizational structures, especially those with any track record of success at all. I've been especially interested in those that don't explicitly mimic American protestant churches, but now that you mention it, maybe that's a mistake - as you say, that may just be baked into our religious culture by now.

As for the limited appeal of Germanic polytheist reconstruction, yeah, that's a thing I've been thinking about for a while now, but it's had to languish on the back-burner while I pursue other projects: what might a fringe religious movement that starts with heathenry look like that is flexible and robust enough to last through the current cultural pendulum swing to politics (rather than spirituality), and hopefully beyond. Druidry is my explicit model here of what good looks like, but it has a few features that would be hard to emulate (focus on nature, which allows for a lot of religious agnosticism while still having a shared spiritual focus, a great name with lots of historical oomph, and so forth). I plan on developing more of this, but it's very much on the slow roll right now.