Journeying into the Mystic
The first Tuesday evening of every month, I’m in the Green Room. That’s where you’ll find me because my spirit is hungry, and that’s where the nourishment is. As humans, we are smart enough to eat when we are famished—in both body and spirit.
I’m joined by maybe 200 others. We call this monthly gathering The Mystic, which meets in the Green Room at Crosstown Concourse, a multipurpose complex in Memphis. The gathering is deliberately simple. There is no sermon. No collection. No altar call. No attempt to resolve belief or persuade doubt.
We are shaped not only by what we think but by what we love, fear, grieve, and hope. The Mystic is a small attempt to tend that interior life.
The stated purpose of The Mystic is “to not feel better, but to get better at feeling.” The difference matters. Feeling better suggests relief, consolation, perhaps even escape. Getting better at feeling is more demanding. It asks us to stay present to complexity, our own and other people’s. To resist the urge to tidy up experiences too quickly. To notice what stirs beneath belief—fear, grief, joy, longing, anger, hope. Modern life offers endless distractions from feeling. Religion too can become a way of bypassing emotion rather than engaging it. The Mystic moves in the opposite direction. It assumes that faith formation involves the heart as much as the mind, affect as much as intellect.
Music, Conversation, Attention
So we begin not with words, but with music—Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” The song isn’t overtly religious, but it carries a sense of longing, surrender, and threshold that sets the tone. It invites us to cross from the utilitarian into the contemplative.
In that way, music plays a central role in this work. Renown saxophonist and Memphian Kirk Whalum is a regular presence. His horn isn’t background; it’s a participant. He is joined by a remarkable keyboardist in Dr. Ashley Davis and a singer with the voice of an angel, Keia Johnson.
Music interrupts our tendency to explain. It bypasses defenses. It invites the body into conversation. Sometimes it says what no one in the room yet has words for.
Silence matters too. At The Mystic, we don’t rush to fill it.
After the music fades, a conversation begins—centered on a small group of regular panelists or speakers. Five of us sit on a small stage. Over the months, we take turns serving as host and lifting up a theme for the night. The host isn’t expected to be an expert but a fellow traveler asking sincere questions. With me is a Jewish rabbi, Micah Greenstein, a local leader in the Reform Judaism movement. There is a thoughtful young UCC pastor, Lillian Lammers, trained as a chaplain at Vanderbilt Divinity School and currently pastor of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Memphis. She embraces conversations that can be challenging. Dorcas Young Griffin is a Shelby County government leader, the older sister of the City of Memphis mayor, and the daughter of two pastors. She brings a lived understanding of power, responsibility, and love for a city that resists easy answers. Our group includes Whalum as well, one of the world’s great musicians. (On Whitney Houston’s song, “I Will Always Love You,” he is the soloist.) He is also a graduate of Memphis Theological Seminary. His music doesn’t illustrate ideas so much as reveal them.
Our diversity isn’t symbolic. It is essential for exploring a wide range of themes, whether it is the nature of free will, a life of calling, or matters of recovery and gratitude. It as a prerequisite for all creativity. That’s The Mystic format: music, discussion, more music, more discussion, and finally more music. That’s all.
Preach, Teach, and Heal
I have lived my professional adult life at the intersection of faith and health, theology and practice, contemplation and logistics. These worlds often are seen as separate—even competing—but they have never felt that way to me. They are all concerned with the same question: What does it mean to care well for human beings as they actually are—fragile, hopeful, embodied, complex?
I’m a graduate of Yale Divinity School and an elder in the United Methodist Church. I’m also a family practice physician. For almost four decades, I have served as the founder and chief executive officer of Church Health in Memphis. We provide comprehensive health care to more than 80,000 working but uninsured people, without relying on federal funding.
Church Health began in 1987 in a small house that at one time was a brothel. We had a paucity of money and an abundance of conviction. We believed that health care isn’t merely a commodity but a moral good, and that people who work hard shouldn’t be denied care simply because they lack insurance. While a student at YDS, I explored the church’s historical response to the call to discipleship of Jesus, where to follow Jesus we are expected to “preach, teach, and heal.” It was clear to me that we don’t get to take a pass on being involved in a healing ministry. I don’t believe that anyone wants to look God in the face at the end of time and hear God say, “Did you think I was kidding about that?”
We saw 12 patients the first day we were open. Over time the work grew. More patients came. The scope of our practice expanded. More staff and volunteers joined. Eventually, we occupied 13 buildings around the neighborhood. We were caring for tens of thousands of patients. The scattered buildings became inefficient.
By 2011, we were looking for a way to be housed under one roof. That was when a young art historian, Todd Richardson, approached me with an audacious idea. He and his artist friends envisioned redeveloping a former Sears distribution center into a place for young artists to be nurtured and to thrive. All he wanted of Church Health was for us to be their doctors, and occupy a small space in the refurbished building.
The building had been standing since 1927, one of 10 distribution centers Sears built across the country in the 1920s. They all had the same architect, so they all pretty much look alike. If you think about it, Sears was Amazon before anyone thought of Amazon. You could order anything out of the Sears, Roebuck Catalog and it would show up on your porch. The building in Memphis serviced a 10-state area. From the third floor, you could order a complete kit for a house, and it would arrive by rail car.
Sears quit publishing the catalogue in 1993, and all the distribution centers were soon abandoned. In Memphis, all 3,200 windows in the vacant building were broken. It was surrounded in barbed wire. Every developer in Memphis had tried to repurpose the building, but no one could figure a way to make it work financially. One prominent developer suggested, “Take a stick of dynamite to it,” but even that would cost too much. The structure languished, deep in the eyesore category.
Two Crazy Ideas Catch Fire
None of that deterred my young artist friends. The idea caught fire inside of me. So I married one crazy idea with another one: on July 8, 2011, I asked, “What if we move in there with you?” As a result, together, along with others, we spent three-and-a-half years renovating a building that in square footage is larger than the Empire State Building. It took over $200 million. It involved 30 financial institutions. It used New Market Tax Credits, historical preservation tax credits, philanthropy, and a large bank loan.
Rebranded as Crosstown Concourse, the building opened in 2017. Church Health is the anchor tenant. We occupy 150,000 square feet. In the building there is a high school, 254 apartments, five restaurants, three music venues, an array of art venues, a radio station, a recording studio, and a variety of retail. Plus much more. We refer to it as a vertical urban village built around health, education, and the arts. It has everything a small village would need and want. Kids attend school. Artists work in studios. Families receive health care. Musicians rehearse and perform. Neighbors eat together. The building hums with daily life. It is imperfect, contested, alive.
For me, Crosstown isn’t just an address. It’s a theological claim that human flourishing is integrated, not siloed; that health is connected to art, education, beauty, and belonging; that place itself can be an agent of healing.
Memphis Soul
When Crosstown opened, I was still serving locally as an associate pastor at St. John’s United Methodist Church, a role I had held for nearly 30 years. I loved that community. It had formed me, sustained me, and trusted me. But as Church Health and Crosstown grew together, the tension between parish ministry and a broader personal vocation became unavoidable.
John Wesley famously said, “The world is my parish.” I chose to try to live into the idea in my own life. Stepping away from formal parish ministry wasn’t a rejection of the church. It was an expansion of call. And yet, something became increasingly clear to me: though my work fed many, my own spirit was undernourished. I needed a place where I could listen more than lead. Where I could wonder instead of explain. Where faith could be explored without agenda.
That need gave birth to The Mystic.
Some people come to The Mystic wary of institutions. They’re not hostile to faith, but they are cautious. They have been burned by insistent expressions of certainty wielded without humility, by answers offered without listening. They come not to be convinced, but to be accompanied.
What is clear is that people are hungry for this kind of space. It’s not a worship service yet it is deeply spiritual. It’s not an education program yet it is formative. It isn’t activism yet it’s not disconnected from the world. Participants want permission to ask questions without receiving ready-made answers. To listen without being told what they should conclude. To sit across difference without defensiveness.
We hold The Mystic only once a month. That restraint is intentional. Scarcity gives it weight. It keeps us from becoming programmatic. It honors the fact that depth requires space.
The gathering is open to the public. Anyone may come. There is a podcast, and it is broadcast on the radio, extending the conversation beyond the room while preserving its tone.
In Memphis, a city marked by racial injustice, economic disparity, and deep beauty, Crosstown’s integration of commerce, health, art, and spirit matters. Crosstown isn’t a solution to the city’s problems. But it is a practice of hope. It suggests that proximity matters. That shared space can change how we see one another. The Mystic draws energy from that vision. It refuses the false divide between sacred and secular. It insists that spiritual reflection belongs in the middle of the city, not apart from it.
We don’t adjourn The Mystic each month with action steps. There is no call to respond. That can feel unsettling, even irresponsible, in a culture oriented toward outcomes. Rather, what we are practicing is attention. In theological education, we rightly focus on forming the mind with texts, doctrine, debates, histories. But formation that doesn’t attend to feelings remains incomplete. We are shaped not only by what we think but by what we love, fear, grieve, and hope. The Mystic is a small attempt to tend that interior life.
An Unfinished Experiment
There are moments, often when the music fills the room, when conversation falls away and something quieter takes its place. In those moments, I’m reminded that God is often encountered not in clarity, but in presence. Not in answers, but in shared attention.
The Mystic is an unfinished experiment, shaped by Memphis, by Crosstown, by the people who show up each month with open hearts and unsettled questions. It remains a way for me personally to feel my spirit getting fed, while I continue to go about my work as a physician caring for the uninsured of Memphis. Its animating conviction remains steady: that faith in our time must make space for feeling, not as sentimentality, but as discipline. That we become more faithful not by hardening ourselves against the world, but by learning to feel it more fully.
Sometimes, in a repurposed building that once shipped out everything from apparel to appliances and from toys to tools and now serves as a daily crossroads and a home for human lives, with a saxophone echoing through the place and Van Morrison’s lyrics lingering in memory, we catch a glimpse of what church might yet become.
Dr. G. Scott Morris ’79 M.Div. is the founder and former chief executive officer of Church Health in Memphis. Providing affordable health care to uninsured working people and their families, the organization has grown to become the largest faith-based, privately funded health center in the nation. With an undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and an M.D. from Emory University, he is also the recipient of a Yale-Jefferson Award for public service and a YDS Alumni Award for Distinction in Community Service.