Faith Over Fear · The Through Line
I didn't know I was building Hollow Bone.
Craig Rose talks through the trail that led from wanting to build a ministry without a church, to decades inside nonprofits and cultural movements, to meeting Stephen Sedmak, gathering Camp Mary and asking a new question about fear, generosity and exchange.
FAITH OVER FEAR · Introducing HollowBoneInitiative.com
Part I
The Question
At sixteen, Craig's grandmother Ellie told him to go into business and make money. Craig told her he wanted to become a pastor — but even then he knew he did not mean the conventional version.
He did not want a church building. He did not want members. He was not sure he even wanted followers. He wanted to understand how a ministry or nonprofit could move through the world without being tied to one building, one city or one denomination.
How do you build a movement without building another system people have to join?
Part II
Thirty Years of Clues
Over the next decades, that question kept showing up in different forms: youth outreach, XXXchurch, Launch 501(c)(3), artists, books, technology, retreats and people whose ideas did not fit neatly inside a church or a conventional business.
Craig watched movements travel through stories, shirts, films, musicians, college campuses and people willing to carry an idea to someone else. He spent more than twenty-five years around nonprofits while also learning the language of business, media, software, publishing, representation and culture.
Then he met Stephen Sedmak. Stephen had already moved through business, sound technology, land, writing and decades of questions about consciousness. Craig helped publish Stephen's books. Stephen invited Craig to Shope Creek. Together they began asking two questions: can we move the collective beyond fear, and can we shift the nature of exchange?
Camp Mary brought the questions into a room. Artists, musicians, doctors, healers, founders, fathers, sons and seekers gathered on the land. The experience did not arrive as a finished institution. It arrived as evidence that the conditions mattered.
What if people could participate in an experience — and some could give pieces of what they are building back into the initiative instead of only dollars?
That question became part of the emerging Hollow Bone model: a vessel that can receive money, expertise, time, creative work, ownership and other forms of participation, then keep moving value toward the next person, project or place.
Part III
The Invitation
By the time Craig arrived in Asheville, he was not sure whether he was retiring, beginning again, or simply bringing together everything he had already done.
What felt clear was the through line: faith over fear, changing the nature of exchange, and helping people believe enough in what they carry to bring their offering into the world.
The Deer Trail becomes one living example. Kenny McCormick IV followed an unconventional path into the music, relationships and experiences that eventually led him to Asheville. Hollow Bone supported the conditions around the work before anyone could know exactly what would come next.
The next chapter is participation: screenings, gatherings, artists, businesses, technology, healing work and a Well that can be filled and replenished.
Beyond fear and shifting the nature of exchange — I think that's my passion.
Craig describes the larger journey as a scavenger hunt for the soul: not a new religion, but an invitation into play, agency, spirit, mystery and aliveness.
The Through Line
Maybe the work was never to build followers. Maybe it was to build a Well deep enough that the next person could bring their offering into the world.