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Sanderson Jones
Sanderson Jones (born 1981) is a British comedian, filmmaker and social entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Sunday Assembly.

Comedy Career

Sanderson Jones began to perform stand up in 2008 and is known for his innovative conceptual performances with the Skinny saying ‘Sanderson creates genres at the same rate other comedians write shows.

His 2010 Edinburgh Fringe show ‘Taking Liberties’ challenged the legal definition of art.

In 2011 he took his show to the Melbourne Comedy Festival where it received favourable reviews from The Age and The Herald.

In August that of 2011 he created his show Comedy Sale where every single ticket was sold in person. The show had a sold out run and was one of the best-reviewed shows of the Fringe.

In every show of Comedy Sale Sanderson Jones would research the audience and include their social media into the performance. In October 2011 the show went to the Union Chapel where it played to 700 people, who he had all met previously. The show was nominated for a Malcolm Hardee Award in 2011, and for a Chortle Award for Innovation in Comedy in 2012.

In 2012 Sanderson Jones took Comedy Sale to Australia where he played shows at the Adelaide Town Hall, the National Theatre and the Sydney Opera House.

In 2013 he was part of Mark Watson’s 24 Hour Comedy Show for Comic Relief and broke the world record for the world’s longest hug.

Sunday Assembly

In 2013 he co-founded Sunday Assembly with Pippa Evans - a worldwide movement of non-religious congregations. Sunday Assembly spread rapidly with the Daily Beast calling it ‘the world’s fastest growing church’. .

Sunday Assembly has been widely studied. In 2015 researchers from Oxford University and Brunel University completed a 6 month longitudinal survey of Sunday Assembly participants, and found that attending was correlated to improved wellbeing in a significant way. The impact of Sunday Assembly has been discussed in books such as The “Emerging Church, Millennials, and Religion: Volume 1: Prospects and Problems”, “Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular”, “Organized Secularism in the United States: New Directions in Research” and Oxford Dictionary of Atheism (2016).

For his work on Sunday Assembly Sanderson Jones was elected to the prestigious Ashoka Fellowship which ‘recognises leading social entrepreneurs with solutions to social problems who seek to make large-scale changes to society’.

He has also received awards and recognition from Nesta and UnLtd.

Lifefulness

In 2018 he left Sunday Assembly to develop the practice of Lifefulness - an approach that adapts the techniques of the spiritual community in a way that everyone can take part. Lifefulness secularises the religious congregation, in the same way mindfulness adapted vipassana meditation and modern yoga adapted Hindhu hatha yoga.

In 2020 the Lifefulness Project was selected onto the Facebook Community Accelerator as one of the world’s 100 leading social impact communities.

Lifefulness builds on the studies into Sunday Assembly and the research into Religion and Health that shows how congregations improve people’s lives.

Sanderson Jones and James Croft, the minister of the St. Louis Ethical Society, are writing a book about Lifefulness, and are chronicling that journey in the Lifefulness Podcast.

Broadcasting

Sanderson Jones wrote and presented Meet The Unbelievers a three-part series which investigated how unbelievers create meaning and belonging. The show was produced by History Hit (Dan Snow’s history channel) and funded by Understanding Unbelief - the world’s largest study of atheists and agnostics.

He is regularly invited onto news programmes to discuss issues of faith, community and belief.

In May 2020 he contributed to two BBC world service programmes on community and prayer.