Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Andrew writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture and younger generations.
His most recent books are Churches and the Crisis of Decline and the book he joins me to discuss today, When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation beyond More Money, programs, and Innovation.
Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Andrew writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture and younger generations.
His most recent books are Churches and the Crisis of Decline and the book he joins me to discuss today, When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation beyond More Money, programs, and Innovation.
You're listening to episode 203 of the Pastor-Writer Podcast conversations on reading, writing and the Christian life. I'm your host, chase Replogel. If you're a pastor or someone who pays attention to things related to the church, you certainly understand that we're living in challenging times. Most pastors I talk to recognize their facing challenges they haven't faced before, and the many of the things they've long been doing don't seem to have the same impact, the same effect Whenever I'm thinking about cultural issues the church is facing. One of my favorite authors to turn to is Andrew Root. He wrote the series Ministry and a Secular Age, which has been really helpful for processing the times we do our work in, and he has a new book out. He joins me today to talk about, entitled when Church Stops Working. It was a really fascinating conversation about how the world is changing and how the church has struggled to respond to it. Andrew offers some really helpful advice, some wise advice and, I think, one that'll be an encouragement to you, as always. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm joined on the podcast today by Andrew Root. He's the Kerry Olson-Ballson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St Paul, minnesota. Andrew writes and researches in the areas of theology, ministry, culture and younger generations. It's been an honor to have him on the podcast before. We've talked about his ministry in a Secular Age series, which I highly recommend, and he's got a few new books out. His most recent books Churches and the Crisis of Decline, and the book he joins me today to talk about when Church Stops Working a future for your congregation beyond more money, programs and innovation. Well, andrew, it's an honor always to get to talk to you and a privilege to have you back on the Pastor Writer podcast.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's just great to be back. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe give us a catch us up a little bit on what you've been working on and are you still interested in the Secular Age and working out what ministry looks like? I know that series was so impactful to me and kind of where that's taken you and the work you're doing now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, thanks, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, in some ways the series was supposed to end and it hasn't ended. I guess I have a hard time ending things. So it was supposed to be three. In some sense it is three.
Speaker 2:It's the faith formation of Secular Age, the pastor in a Secular Age and the congregation of Secular Age, but then there's kind of three volumes that come out after that. So, as you were nice enough to reference the churches in the crisis that are client, and then there's a book called the Church After Innovation. And then this October there's a book that I can't remember the title of, but it's something like the church in secular mysticisms. That's kind of looking at the spirituality dynamic of our cultural reality.
Speaker 2:But one of the great benefits of those books has been that there's been a lot of pastors who have used them in their or they frame their thinking enough that they've tried to take those ideas to their councils and their sessions and their other leadership, lay leadership within their church. But then they would call me up and be like how do you talk about this with lay folks? Because those books are not easy. And so this book is kind of born out of that. When church stops working. It's supposed to kind of be a lay level, kind of on the ladder of reading, and then it's the ideas that you would read it with a group of folks. So the secular age stuff is really deep within it, but it's trying to maybe put it at a little lower level that can help pastors and congregation leaders and folks like that wrestle with some of these ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really helpful. I have a copy of the Church and Innovation on my shelf I haven't got to it yet, but I'm planning to and I noticed, though, having flipped through it, that it seemed like some of the themes were working themselves out in this book we're talking about today, when church stops working. How did it come about specifically this book? And I noticed also it's co-authored. Maybe a little bit about that, yeah well.
Speaker 2:I mean it really did come about because people would write me and say, can you come on Zoom? Or they'd be nice enough to fly me to their church and they would have some team within their congregation that was like the new vision team or it was just their kind of council and they would just kind of team me up and be like, hey, can you tell them all the things about the stuff? And so I found a way to kind of synthesize some of those bigger ideas into using video clips and things like that to kind of teach them. And yeah, we just really had the idea particularly Bob Hosak at Baker that it would be really helpful to have a kind of synthesis of particularly the first three volumes of the series for folks to read. And so that's where it came from.
Speaker 2:And then the co-author is my friend, blair Bertrand, who's a Canadian guy, which you shouldn't hold against him for being Canadian. He's a good Canadian guy and he's just a really good writer and he's been a good friend for years. We were at Princeton Seminary together and he knows these ideas really well and then he knows how to communicate them and I have the tendency to kind of follow rabbit trails and just start getting really into different philosophers and sociologists and things like that, and he's a little more disciplined. I can say let's just keep our feet on the ground here, so yeah. So having him kind of know the project inside and out and then having him hold me accountable to writing it in a way that would connect with councils and lay people was really the objective behind it.
Speaker 1:Well, the book definitely does that. I think it's really accessible. I think it's a great introduction. I hope if people read it it'll make you want to dig deeper into your other work, because I think you can go about as deep as you want. One of the great things about your work, too, is it'll inspire you to read other things as well, too, and really sort of begin this journey of trying to understand what the moment that we're in that's really where this book opens is trying to decide. Is the church currently facing a moment of decline or is this a moment of opportunity? So I'm interested. As you're talking, you've been getting a lot of interest from people wanting you to come in and help explain this moment to them, explain what you've been writing about this moment. How do you understand the moment that the church is in and what it is that we're looking at, we're facing right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it would be completely illogical to say that we're not in a moment of crisis. I think everyone feels that, that this is right, that we're at crisis point, that the kind of gauge on the dashboard of the church is in the red, that we feel that. So the last thing we want to say is like, oh, don't worry, there's no crisis here. We think there is a crisis here and that this cultural moment is one of crisis, but we think that inside of a crisis and the kind of fog of a crisis, it's very easy to misinterpret what the crisis is, and we tend to interpret the crisis as that there's fewer, fewer of everything, that there's mainly fewer people coming to church and therefore there are fewer dollars and therefore there are fewer resources overall and therefore there are ultimately fewer churches and fewer congregations in our denomination and maybe eventually here, fewer denominations there feels like that that's the crisis, that the crisis really is one of decline, and we think that there is a crisis but that the crisis isn't of decline. I mean, that's real.
Speaker 2:We're not saying that you're miscounting or something like that. What we are saying that the real crisis that we face is the crisis of how we all people imagine a living God in the world and that we do inherit a time where the idea that there's a living, speaking God who's moving in history, that there's a God who is God and not just some kind of idea or kind of ethical precept or something like that, that that becomes more and more unbelievable to people. So the real challenge of the congregation and the real necessity of the leaders within it is how do we help people again encounter a living, speaking God, as opposed to thinking just how can we get more kind of resources, more money, more people that we really think what will save the church as always, to save the church is not a new idea is that God will be responsible for the church and God's action within the world will save the church, because the church is to serve the world by proclaiming that God is living and active and moving within the world.
Speaker 1:This idea and the tagline of more money, programs and innovation. It sort of makes me chuckle when I say it, because it's so much of what I learned ministry to be coming through Bible College. Right, this was the era of entrepreneurialism and thinking about church growth and programs and everybody was creating mission statements and vision statements and core values and reading leadership, secular business books and trying to apply those to the church. As you look back over the last few decades, how is it that business and that emphasis on business practices has been impacting the church and where it sort of leaves us in this moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I think it's had huge impact and some of it's been good. I mean I don't think we should undersell or you know, I'm not trying to just put us in some kind of enclave that doesn't want to learn from those realities or anything like that, but it has been really true that we've had this certain perspective and maybe this is the best way to say that or, inside of that logic, we do think of the local congregation as a small business. And the first thing a small business has to figure out is what is its story Like? You know, why does it exist? What is its story? It's going to tell the world, which will frame its marketing, which will kind of frame it how it even, how it even views, like what the market is it's trying to reach. So you know, this is what we all were taught, like why we need a mission statement and things like that, because we need to figure out what our story is.
Speaker 2:And yet, theologically, that's a problem because the church, I think, theologically, doesn't have a story, doesn't have its own story. The only story the church has is the very story of God that's bound in the very person of Jesus Christ. So the real story that the church has to give itself over to is not its own, like what it does, what difference it makes, but it has to give itself over to the very story of God's movement in the world, of God's action within the community that it finds itself. So the church never can be the star of its own story and I think we often assume that we have to figure out how we can become the star of our own story. And the only way you win in this game is to find the kind of creative entrepreneurship that makes you a star. And I think this is one of the big challenges in a kind of broader cultural vein. Why kind of entrepreneurship and innovation is everywhere is because it does become a kind of style that a self can take on to win, if you will, to kind of win influence and win reach and win importance.
Speaker 2:And I think the church has felt like it's in deficit of all those things.
Speaker 2:So it's been very tempted to turn to those kind of realities, to think about how it can renew itself.
Speaker 2:But any renewal movement throughout the history of the church has always been God's doing and it often has come from the confession of the church or of the Christian that we don't have the power to save ourselves, that we don't have the power to solve these problems, that there's no creativity in us that can get us to where we need to be, but that we can surrender and make confessions and live in communities that are trying to be faithful to what God is doing.
Speaker 2:And I know that sounds really pietistic maybe, but we think that it is the only way to kind of find renewal in this moment is to kind of double down on the faithfulness of God and God's responsibility for God's church and for how to have leaders really focus on the very practices of trying to discern how God is moving in the world and very simple but very profound things like what it means to pray together and what it means to have a kind of shared story about how God has moved within this community, how to keep track of those stories that those stories do.
Speaker 2:They really are present and it doesn't matter if your church has 10 people in it or 10,000 people. If you scratch the surface a little bit. People have all sorts of stories of moments of loss and brokenness where they felt the very ministering spirit of God come to them, and yet too often we don't have space or time or interest in those stories, because we're thinking like, how can we get more people to come? Or why does that church across town have so many more people than we have? And there's something tragic lost in that that is, I think, really at the heart of what it means to confess Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:It is interesting to think about. The kind of archetypal hero or leader of our day is probably one of innovation. It's like the Steve Jobs figure versus maybe an archetypal leader who would have been based on character or some sort of heroic sacrifice, or perhaps a philosopher of the past or order, maybe in time past that today's. It really is this idea of innovation and a kind of a pragmatism that's able to create new things. That seems to be what we're looking for, drawn to, aspire to be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And yet we're also at a moment where we're finding out, if we're willing to really look closely enough, we're finding out that that has really boomerang done us and has become incredibly toxic. Like you, just think of all the stories, of all these really winners that we can throw that in kind of scare quotes, the winners of the decline game, these churches and even movements of folks who found a way to build huge churches. I, just, my wife Karin, I just got done watching the Hillsong four-part documentary on Hulu and you do realize that a huge piece of this is that once you get on this growth engine and once you keep kind of accelerating towards that, once you kind of find the innovative secret sauce, you can never stop it. And this is the kind of diabolical we can even kind of say demonic part of this is, once you get on the accelerating growth engine, well, there's no getting off of it. I mean, if you grow at 20% this year, to be successful next year you need to grow at another 20%. I mean, if you just the kind of logic doesn't exist within us that says, oh well, we grew 15% last year, so this year we don't really need to grow at all, as a matter of fact, we could lose 5% of people and or 5% of our resources or 5% of our reach and we'd still be at 10% from two years ago. It's not how it works, you know. This is just not how it works inside of the kind of systems that we exist, in that if you grow 15% or 20%, that doesn't give you latitude to kind of take your foot off the accelerator and to relax and to live in the moment and to remember you're alive. No, you have to now grow more.
Speaker 2:So you can see that in some ways, like growth becomes a quite dangerous thing. It can become diabolically dangerous to your soul and we're kind of seeing a reckoning in that. And that's not to say that all big churches equal. You know this, this, these terrible, these terrible pastoral moments.
Speaker 2:But it is interesting that when we do audits on those, it had a lot to do with the fact that people felt utter anxiety and fright of not keeping the growing going and other folks who felt uneasy with it kind of justified it by saying well, you know, I don't know, I don't like Pastor So-and-So's behavior or they are intimidating people, but they did take this church from eight people in a living room to 8,000 people, you know. So, you know, I guess I guess you, you know you have to take a little bit. You have to take a little bit of the downside with the upside, and so, yeah, I mean, I just I think that is is a real concern we have to watch out for you know that once you, once you get on this rocket of acceleration, you can never stop it and that becomes a problem.
Speaker 1:One of the other patterns you unpack in the book is how this idea of more can lead churches, can lead pastors to begin to use people. I often think of it as sort of the volunteer mentality that as soon as you hear you get a T-shirt and now you become part of the fuel that keeps the machine running. And the number of people who can get really burnt out and hurt in a religious setting, a church setting, where really they've just become a volunteer or a tool within the church's tool belt to continue that growth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean absolutely. This is not a podcast about the Hillsong documentary, but you saw that the people who were volunteers and it needed volunteers to continue all of a sudden started to feel like that they were just objects. And this is the problem with the continued acceleration that has been part of my work for quite a while now. Is that the real temptations? It turns all the relationships we have into instruments. It instrumentalizes all relationships and so you just start to even see, like, okay, this person here that's before me. How do I parlay this relationship into more? You know whether that's more money, more giving, or whether it's more people coming because they influence others to come like.
Speaker 2:Everything becomes instrumentalized in that way and we lose something that's just utterly central about the gospel story and really the whole breath of the kind of Judeo-Christian reality which is this sense that this God is not a fertility God. You know, like we, one of the big moves in the Old Testament is that Israel comes to realize that this God, that Yahweh, is not a fertility God like the Canaanite God, so this God is not bound in growth, that this God is actually much more like a mother to a child, like a father to a child. And you know, you, just, it doesn't take much of walking around the symbolism and the icons of the Eastern and the Western church when you get back into the medieval period or whatever, and you visit Rome or you visit you know Istanbul today, old Constantinople to see how much imagery there is of the Madonna and the child, which is very much a contrasting narrative to the fertility God. And I am concerned that kind of American Protestantism really is looking for a fertility God and not the God who comes in Jesus Christ and sits in the lap of his mother, you know not the God who's made known in this deep Trinitarian language of father and son and what it means to share in each other's lives, not instrumentally, but to participate in each other's being so deeply. And I think that's something we do have to, we do have to reckon with and I think we hope that this book kind of frees us from from worshiping the bails.
Speaker 2:I know that sounds really dramatic in some ways, but that is. You know, that's what Israel is called from. It's an agricultural society and the bails are fertility gods and Israel always goes back to the fertility gods because they think what we think right now, which is, ah, you know, maybe it would be good to you know yeah, yeah, always good but maybe it would be also good to you know, like, hedge our bets and and, and you know, put a put a little, put a little money on the fertility God so that we can, so we can have a good harvest, so we can have more resources, so we don't feel the crunch of the climb. And I think, of course, israel's always called back to to stay inside this dynamic relationship of children to a parent, as opposed to those who are kind of instrumentally serving a fertility God.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really, really helpful image for framing it. When I first read when church stops working, I was tracking with you, as I've sort of alluded to so much of this as my own experience in ministry and how I was trained in ministry, and then when I got to what, what really is, I think you're kind of call of the book, which is the idea, the importance of waiting, it really kind of caught me a little bit off guard. I mean, you would imagine, you know, maybe you call the church to some sort of monastic way of living or some way of simplification or some intentional small group ministry, but you really don't propose a solution along those lines. Instead, the book tries to raise the level of importance of being and waiting within the life of the church, the life of an individual believer. Maybe you could talk a little bit about why waiting is important and how you can recognize that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, even talking about it with you, I feel deeply insecure about it because I think one of the things, especially as kind of middle class Americans we're taught, is that waiting is bad, you know, especially if you're. You know I don't know how old you are, but you know I'm in my, I'll just stick with my mid forties, even though that's not quite as true anymore. But you know, like the whole point is like waiting. Waiting is terrible. Like you know, all of our, all of our technological innovations was to kind of take, take the, the wanting out of waiting. And you know now you know, like I have my kids have no idea what it even really means to to like wait for a show to arrive. I guess some streaming services now like release them on the week. But you know, like the Netflix model where you get every episode the minute it drops, like there's just waiting, has been, has been kind of the enemy, I think, of of late modernity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's certainly more binging than waiting. I definitely think that's true.
Speaker 2:That is true that we've been more and more into binging, which you know, again, these are these are very interesting kind of using the kind of fertility images again, and and and and the kind of agricultural images of that that you know, binging, binging, a spirituality of binging versus spirituality of waiting. But I guess our big point here is that if, if, the, if, the crisis that we have to confront is not a crisis of decline but the crisis of how we imagine again that there's a living God speaking and moving in the world, then the first step to that will be to stop and to wait and to remember that God is God and we are not. And you know, this God of Israel is a God who moves, but this God moves on God's own timing. You know, this is a God who calls God's people into waiting all the time, and it isn't a kind of waiting. I don't think that is a waiting like waiting for your delayed flight in the airport, where you just feel absolutely stuck, you know, like you, just you feel caught. It's a kind of waiting that is waiting for something to occur, that's waiting for an advent, that's waiting for an event of arrival, but it's a waiting nevertheless, and I think, I think this is really important for us to. To take our first step into reimagining that this God acts and moves is to, instead of frantically thinking of what do we have to do to save ourselves.
Speaker 2:I think the first move of the old Christian tradition is to stop and wait for God's gift. That comes in anticipation. You know like we get a deep sense of of waiting in Luke's narrative of Jesus' birth. You know that that John the Baptist comes after years of waiting, that, of course, abraham and Sarah, it is waiting and waiting, and waiting and waiting, until things seem utterly impossible. That God moves, that it doesn't take much to see how much waiting is, is an essential piece of of the biblical text. And we do think I mean we, we often, you know, we're often told that the church has its birth in Acts two, where Pentecost happens, which of course, is true in many ways.
Speaker 2:But the first command that the church gets, that we try to raise, is not in Acts two, but in Acts one, where, after the experience, the epiphany of of the resurrected Christ and the road to mass, jesus calls the disciples to go to Jerusalem and to wait. That the church really starts in waiting and being in a stance of of waiting to receive the very gift of God, the very presence of God. And yet, even saying that, as a kind of middle class, middle-aged American, you just feel like no, no, no, no, no, no. If things aren't good, you just do more. You know like, if you don't, if you don't feel good, figure something out, do more, do more, do more, do more. And the only way we're gonna be okay is finding a way to do more.
Speaker 2:And yet I just don't think that that's the spirituality that promises yeah, I mean, in some ways that promises a little bit of this monastic encounter with the living God. I think in many ways the monastic life is a life of waiting, a waiting and prayer, of waiting with a story that you hold. So it feels very counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of us, but it is definitely not counter to the kind of unfoldings of the Christian tradition and the biblical text itself.
Speaker 1:I grew up in a charismatic Pentecostal tradition where the idea of tearing, which was the idea of waiting, was really a part of the way you practice prayer, you practice faith. And as I was reading, I kept thinking, boy, you just, even in my own tradition, you hear about that word or that language less where it used to be so central. Certainly, something about our world today has just sped up. I mean, technology has certainly done that, but is there something more in the secular mindset, the secular framework that it's making it so difficult to wait?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I do think that this is really true and you know one of the thinkers that's under under the surface of this book, which you know. You kindly said that you know in the other books there's a lot of footnotes of other things to read and other dialogues happening. I was told in this book there could be no footnotes.
Speaker 1:So you know those less Charles Taylor mentioned, right Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so those readers who I am, I have been known to be a footnote, a holic, so this was my, like you know, jump off the wagon or on the wagon or whatever the analogy is.
Speaker 2:So there is no footnotes here, but you know, in the, in the subtext here, or one of the thinkers that you can find, a lot of footnotes in and the other books is is Hartmont Rosa, the German social theorist, who really thinks what it means to be a modern person is to find every part of our lives always speeding up our experience of technology, like you referenced, but also just social change, you know, like you just have to watch a few episodes from the office in season three or four, even, you know, let alone even the last season you start to realize that the jokes they said then you can't say now, like just the change socially has been incredibly fast, and then just the pace of our lives.
Speaker 2:It just feels like things continue to speed up. But underneath all that, what Rosa thinks has occurred, which which we're really playing with in this book, is that the way you stabilize any institution and in many ways the way you stabilize your own life, is what he calls dynamic stabilization, and what he means is growth. Like the way a company stabilizes itself and will be around is it just has to continue to grow and once it doesn't grow, it no longer has value. And this becomes a crazy thing. You know so if you're. If your company grows by by 15%, the next year you need to grow more than another 15%, but if your growth falls below 5%, then, well, it's not investable anymore and you should just, you know, sell it for parts. And so this is, this is the kind of the reality that just continues to speed up our lives is that we just feel like personally, and even subjectively, let alone institutionally, that things just need to continue to grow and we need to continue to push for growth.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the diabolical elements of this that becomes a real spiritual crisis is it's not even a sense of growing to have more, it's growing just to not be left behind.
Speaker 2:You know, like if we feel that with our own children, like if we don't get them involved in all these things, it's not even delusions of them being first round draft picks, it's just the fact that they're not going to be able to play on the 11, the U 11 team, because they didn't go to eight camps and be involved in all this stuff, you know.
Speaker 2:So we feel like we have to do more and more just to stay in the same place, and I think we feel that ecclesially too. I think we feel that, as the church, like we, we just have to keep doing more and more and more to stay in place, or or the church, the church will, will die, and I think that does distract us from the deeper realities, which is what does it mean, what does it mean Pastorally, what does it mean as lay people and leadership, to just walk with people in life and death? Well, that becomes, that becomes far less important than just trying to keep ourselves stabilized by growing more and more and more, and so there's a lot going on there and that ultimately leads to huge levels of burnout and just the level of stress we have to bear because we just continue to have to put more energy into more actions. You know that that just becomes a huge burden we bear.
Speaker 1:I was thinking, as you were talking, about a scene from Eugene Peterson's memoir where he talks about their church getting started and gathering people and building a church and designing it and the construction process. The church was growing and he said, you know, for the first two or three weeks after they were in the new building it was their biggest attendance, and then slowly attendance started to decline and people were sort of drifting. He felt the community sort of falling apart and he went to his overseer's nomination Lee, and the advice he was given was you need to start a new building program. And he said well, we've got plenty of room, we just finished. And his overseer said all people understand is the next projects you've got to give them the next project. I think that's exactly what you're describing right, People. People only belong if there's something new coming, the sort of FOMO driving us always bigger, always better. That really that's how so many of us have learned to belong or engage in Christian community.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the only thing that stabilizes you. You know, like it, it just there's. There's no stabilization, there's no investment without it. But yeah, I mean, I think in many ways, what we're trying to do here, and a lot of the project that this all builds on, is really trying to raise and put in deeper conversation A lot of the points that Peterson made years ago. You know about what it really means to think, about being a pastor and being a church and the faithfulness to the living God in the midst of it.
Speaker 1:You write in the book that churches should seek to have a watchword, not just a mission statement. There's lots and lots of advice and lots and lots of definitions and tools and books for pastors wanting to develop a mission statement. What does it mean for a church, a pastor, to develop a watchword?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think a watchword is something that it makes more sense. I just got back from Europe and you'll sometimes hear this like pop up even in in stories on the continent or in the UK or whatever, where people just know the kind of concept of a watchword more than Americans. We just it's really not in our imagination, but the idea of it simply is is like what is the, what is the shorthand of a larger story that's framing your imagination. And you know like we try to contrast the mission statement with a watchword, because we think a mission statement really is about the church being the star of its own story. What's, what's the church's story? But a watchword is really the, a shorthand story of how God has moved in this community and it's it's really a lens, if you will, to to hold before the congregation, of how God has moved within the midst of this. So God is how God has acted for us. And we do think the kind of waiting we're calling for is not again the kind of waiting at the doctor's office or a waiting at the airport with a delayed flight, where you're just kind of like, just feel stuck. It's a kind of waiting with the story. It's waiting on watch, watching for looking at the world through, if you will, this shorthand of the story. So we end the book by by giving some examples of that, of these of these watchwords of of congregations that maybe weren't even a call to the watchword but essentially had a shorthand of a story, that that framed them.
Speaker 2:And you know, the one that that comes to mind from from the end of the story is this couple who were Sunday School teachers said they were teaching a seventh grade Sunday School class, and the pastor I references is an incredible pastor, has just retired, named Mike Wood, and and Mike is just an incredibly talented pastor and he started at this church this is, you know, now 30 years ago or something like that, 30, 40 years ago and he noticed that these the seventh grade Sunday School teachers were doing very weird things and not following any of his lesson plans, and he find that he'd find the class in the weird places, like the boiler room of the church, and always they were under the table and he felt a little annoyed that they just weren't following his expertise on how to do this. And yet he started to discover that the seventh graders were incredibly moved by the class and then people started telling him stories about how they'd been out of. You know, they'd been out of seventh grade for seven, eight years and they were still getting phone calls on their birthday and the Juergensons these Sunday School teachers were singing. They would sing to these kids their happy birthday on the phone every year. And Mike started to realize there was something going on here. So he went to them curiously and was like what are, what are, what are you doing? And you know, and and you know it seems like you're great Sunday School teachers, but tell me what you know, what are why, how is this happening? And they actually were very deferential and like, oh, we're so sorry and we're actually terrible Sunday School teachers because we really only have one lesson and the one lesson we teach kids is that nothing can separate them from God. Then nothing can separate them. That's all we ever teach them is that nothing can separate them.
Speaker 2:And then they ended up telling this incredible story about their own son who was hearing impaired, who they loved and felt a lot of kind of in the 70s, felt a lot of kind of cultural estrangement and things like that. And they used to keep telling their son over and over again nothing can separate you from the love of God. And then their son came of age and was married and ended up dying of a disease. And then the Juergensons themselves only got through this deep suffering because they remembered that nothing, even this incredible loss, could not separate them from the love of God. So now all they did with every Sunday School class was teach them that nothing could separate you from the love of God. And Mike heard that and is like that's amazing. And they started preaching sermons on it and they started referencing it in the congregation that nothing can separate you from the love of God and that became their watchword. They went out into the world, they looked at each other's stories of their lives and always remembered that there's nothing that could separate you from the love of God. And Mike says you'll find a watchword.
Speaker 2:When people start talking in your church, it starts sounding like scripture Pay attention, because that may be your watchword. Well, it became so important that a few years into them kind of having this as their watchword and continuing to talk about it they had a mother in their congregation who got. They don't know what was wrong. She was going through a crisis and they think maybe she had Lyme disease. She's just. Something wasn't right and in the midst of that she ended up committing suicide.
Speaker 2:And this watchword nothing can separate you from the love of God became so profound to the church and it shaped them for a decade. And then Mike's point is you have to renew your watchword. Once in a while New stories start to form, but it's the idea that God is moving within the congregation and that people will just come to describe it, and the leader's job is to raise these little stories and call the whole congregation to see their lives and to see the congregation itself through this watchword. So we think a mission statement is important, why the church itself exists, but not more important than a watchword. A watchword is the kind of testifying to what God is doing. It's the taking people into having a shared story of the way God acts and moves within the midst of their community.
Speaker 1:I do want to ask a couple of questions as a way of wrapping up. I want to get to specifically what pastors can do with this, but maybe before then, for the average believer Christian who finds themselves burnt out, tired, feeling their world constantly speeding up and seeing the ways that that's impacting the way that they participate in worship and faith, I think most of us as pastors are seeing people's attendance habits change. People are the way I joke about it is used to. People would say, hey, sorry, I missed Sunday, we were at the lake. And now it's hey, sorry, I missed, we were at the lake Saturday. And if I have anything else going on around Sunday. Believers are feeling that. They are feeling the kind of tired anxiety that you're describing. What is the way to begin doing this? What is your weight into this kind of weighting when it feels so counterintuitive, when it actually feels in a way risky in the world that we live in right now for an average believer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean part of the whole challenge of this and I think some people who read our stuff will have a kind of visceral reaction against it is because a huge piece of it is that it's uncontrollable, that there's a certain level of uncontrollability, and this is what we want you to wait for. I mean, it has to be waiting because God is God and you can't control God. If we could tell you you say these words and then God shows up, or you stand on your right leg and put your left hand on your nose and then God will do stuff, then we wouldn't be talking about God. We'd be talking about some magical incantations, some spirit we control or some technology that we can operate or something like that. But we're talking about the very God, who is God, and this God will move how God wants to move and this God will be present as God wants to be present. And we have to be reminded that God is God and we are not and all we can do is continue to wait for this God. And so there is a sense where we have to learn and this is a huge task of leadership to embrace the uncontrollability and that actually, the most profound realities in our lives are always uncontrollable.
Speaker 2:I mean the love we have with our spouse or even our children. A huge piece of that is uncontrollable. You know the ones you try to control it. This is back to the kind of instrumentalization. Once you try to control every relationship you have, you have to turn it into an instrument, you have to turn it into an object. It no longer becomes a deep event of encounter. So I think the first thing we can do is stop and to wait and to trust that God is faithful in the uncontrollability. But I think that is about reminding people that the greatest gift the church can give you especially kind of worship on Sundays is just to be these people in this place. And that really is a rip off from Aziz Ansari's comedy show, which we reference in the book, where he has this moment of taking the group into just being these people in this moment. And there's something profound about it.
Speaker 2:We also try to remind people and I guess these are the other practicalities is that that starts by making a confession and living in gratitude. You know that he starts by saying you know, I used to say thank you very much when I ended the show, but I didn't mean it. I never really meant it, I was just on to the next thing. But now, because of the suffering he's gone through, because of a loss that he's experienced, he's much more cognizant of being in this moment, of not moving on to the next thing, but being present here, and that causes him to have to see the humanity of others and to be actually very grateful that they're there.
Speaker 2:In the Christian life, especially in its Protestant form, the real call of human action is to live in gratitude, gratitude to God, gratitude to one another, that we've had a God who's acted for us and saved us in the working of the cross and the resurrection.
Speaker 2:And so I think that there does start with this ability to kind of make confessions of these places in our lives that do feel overwhelmed and where we do feel lost, and then to say thank you for those who hear these stories.
Speaker 2:And I know that still has a huge challenge which you raise, you know, really quite profoundly, which is that we still have to gather people, and that becomes harder and harder in this moment. How do we gather people? But my sense is that gathering people and the necessity of gathering bodies together, we're not going to solve that problem by just saying that we're going to become these great entrepreneurs. That feels exciting at the front end, but it ends up ultimately meaning that people have to do more and more with less, and I think one of our first steps is to stop again, to teach people to pray, to teach people to tell their stories to one another and then to have a whole spirit within the congregation that can say thank you to each other. I think that becomes a huge piece. It still feels quite nebulous in some ways because it is uncontrollable, but it really ultimately becomes about how do we have these experiences of each other's humanity as we yearn for the presence of God.
Speaker 1:I often will say to my congregation that one of the most important spiritual disciplines I know is just showing up. And I don't mean it as be good about attendance. I mean it is more than that of just being present, of waiting, of not coming with an agenda, but just being amongst God's people and seeing what God is doing. Your advice for pastors, again I mean pick up a copy of when church stops working. I think this conversation is reflective of the kinds of conversations we as pastors certainly need right now to help our imagination be able to perceive another way. But for a pastor who is feeling sort of overwhelmed and anxious and that constant pressure for more and bigger, how do you go about beginning to untangle that, to practice a kind of waiting and even larger for a pastor to lead a congregation into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think the first step is for us to realize and not kind of be prisoners of the moment, and to realize that these are not great times for the church. No one will look back on the first three decades of the 21st century and say, well, this was the golden age of Protestantism or this was a real important time of institutional growth and things like that. We are in a rough spot and we can feel really guilty about that. I mean, I think that this is the kind of diabolical piece of the kind of innovative acceleration narrative of decline is that you can do more and you can stop this. And if it does go bad and if your church has to close or you just never see more than four or five percent growth, well it's your fault. You weren't creative enough, you didn't have enough energy, you lost. You were a loser and I think we have to release ourselves from that. These are not the golden era. But we also have to remind ourselves that there have been worse times, that the churches experience far worse times, that if you were part of the church in the 10th, 11th century in England or Scotland, you had Viking raiders coming to your shores like stealing your chalice to the Eucharist and sticking a sword in a Sunday school teacher. Those were pretty tough times, and so the church has had more difficult periods than this and God has seen it through. And God will see it through again.
Speaker 2:And what you're called to is not to save the church All the saving is God's work.
Speaker 2:You're called just faithfully oh, it's a kind of quote, peterson again walk the long, slow walk in the same direction with these people, and what that really means is the joy and the burden of living with these people, of helping them live and die, helping them find meaning in the midst of their living and dying. That it is an incredible privilege. There's nothing else like it in our cultural reality, where there's a community of people, where there is a person called a pastor who leads that community of people into life and death and into making meaning in the midst of it. I think that's quite a beautiful thing. And we can lose all of that because we think, oh my gosh, I'll feel incredibly guilty if we lose our church or if how can I look myself in the mirror if I am not the star in my denomination? And that will end up making something other than the faithfulness of living with these people, being with these people in this moment, it'll make something else more important than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a great word, a great final image, and one of hope, one of gratitude. I believe in being a pastor. I know you believe in the calling as well too, and I hope those listening find themselves encouraged by it as well too. Difficult times, but I think, as you put it so well too, god walks with us at these times and there's good work ahead for all of us. The book when Church Stops Working A Future for your Congregation Beyond More Money, programs and Innovation, andy, it's just a great book. I highly highly recommend it, and your work has always been meaningful and helpful to me. So I've got it all, and I'll be by the next one when it comes out as well too, and so I just want to say thanks for the work you've been putting in over these years, helping guide us and excited for more things to come for you as well.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm honored, and thanks for another great conversation. Bye.