Matt Erickson — The Image of A Pastor

"We are not machines; we are living things. And the church is not a factory; it is a garden."

What are the images that shape your ministry? For many leaders, the dominant metaphors are often corporate or industrial—efficiency, scale, and production. But as the cultural landscape shifts, many pastors are finding these images are no longer sufficient for the soul-work of the local church.

In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Matt Erickson, Senior Pastor of Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Matt brings a unique blend of urban pastoral experience and a deep commitment to the Christian imagination. A graduate of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination, Matt has spent years thinking through how the metaphors we use dictate the health of our leadership.

We discuss his new book, The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry (releasing at the end of March). Matt shares why he believes the image of the gardener offers a more resilient, organic, and faithful way to lead in a complex world.

In this conversation, we explore:

• Why the "CEO" or "Manager" metaphors are failing the modern pastor.
• The patient, rhythmic work of "tending the soil" in an urban, multiracial context.
• How the Eugene Peterson Center influenced his vision for pastoral ministry.
• Practical ways to shift your leadership from a mindset of production to one of cultivation.

About Matt Erickson

Matt Erickson has served as the Senior Pastor at Eastbrook Church since 2011. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from Western Theological Seminary. Matt and his wife, Kelly, live in Milwaukee and are the parents of three adult children.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to episode 240 of the Pastor Rider Podcast, conversations on reading, writing, and the Christian life. I'm your host, Chase Replocal. It's great to be back with you on the podcast and a great conversation today with pastor and author Matt Erickson. He joins me to talk about the images that help us think about pastoral work. When we think of what a pastor is, what are the analogies, the images that we draw on? It's certainly an important conversation for pastors, but really for anyone in the church. And I think you'll get as much out of this conversation as I did. I hope it gives you a better image for what ministry can look like. As always, thanks for listening. Well, I'm joined on the podcast today by Matt Erickson. He's a pastor, a writer, a speaker. And since 2011, Matt has served as the senior pastor at Eastbrook Church, an urban multiracial church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Matt's married to Kelly, who has served in various ministry roles and operates her own spiritual direction practice. And together they have three children, all in college or beyond. Matt received a Bachelor's of Art in English and Christian Education from Wheaton College, a master's from Northern Uh Theological Seminary, and we we share a doctorate of ministry from the Eugene Peterson Center, which I'm excited to be able to talk a little bit about in his project, who is which has now uh come out this month uh in full publication. So he joins me to talk about a new book, The Pastor as Gardener, a renewed vision for ministry, a book I was really excited to pick up and was not disappointed by. I think a really needed book for pastors as well. So, Matt, uh what a privilege and honor. Thanks for all your hard work on the book and really excited to have you on the podcast to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

It's a joy to be with you, Chase. Thanks for all you do to help cultivate imagination and pastors.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Well, I'd love to hear maybe just as a starting point, a little bit about uh the church where you're serving, your current role there, uh kind of how you ended up there, just a little context for the work you're doing as a pastor today.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Absolutely. So I've been at Eastbrook since 2010, and I overlapped with a founding senior pastor who had been here for 30 years. So it was a big transition back in 2010. After a year of serving alongside of him, uh, I was called as the senior pastor of the church where I've been now in that role for the last, wow, almost 15 years, which is hard to believe. And our church is on the north edge of the city of Milwaukee, and uh the church is a multigenerational church or intergenerational church, multiracial church, uh, folks from a lot of different uh parts of the world. We have a significant ministry to international students. So we have grad students who are part of our congregation from all around the world, which is kind of a fun dynamic of our church. And um, yeah, and and across the age span, across socioeconomic status. Uh so it's a non-denominational church, um part of a family of churches in the greater Milwaukee area. Uh, but we kind of straddle this uniqueness of being an urban church and also having folks come from outlying areas. Um, yeah, it's a beautiful place, it's a quirky place, uh, but we kind of use the image of Revelation 7, 9, and 10 being a snapshot on earth of that multinational, multilinguistic community at the end of all time in the new heaven and the new earth. We want to be a little picture of that here on earth in Milwaukee right now.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Well, and Milwaukee, the brewers are looking like they're gonna be pretty good this year. So that seems like you got good things ahead. So I'm a Cardinals fan and may not prove to be the same kind of year.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

I don't want to cause any tension on the podcast. We'll get right back to talking pastoring. Absolutely. So funny.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

I am interested to know uh the book, uh The Pastor as Gardener. It's a part of some work that you've been doing through a doctoral program, obviously something you've been you've been thinking about for quite a while. Uh, what gets you interested in specifically thinking about the role of a pastor, writing about the way that we sort of understand or imagine what a pastor is?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Yeah, I mean, I've been in pastoral ministry since just the turn of into 2000. So been in ordained ministry for a long time in different types of roles. I served as a college pastor, university pastor in downtown Milwaukee for about five years, had been in a role like that in the suburbs of Chicago for a while, was a church planter before coming to the place where I am now. So I've been in a lot of different types of roles. Um, that church plant was actually more out where the suburbs meet the country. And now in an urban church, um, I had a lot of questions um before the pandemic. Um, I was walking alongside of a friend who went through a massive moral failure in ministry, kind of destabilized my understanding of what it meant to be a pastor, raised questions, started looking around and seeing some similar things happening around North America, and began to raise questions in my own mind about the way that we were forming pastors, what we were calling pastors to do, the sustaining nurture of pastors. And then the pandemic hit, which was obviously destabilizing for everybody in the world. But I think for pastors, at least raised some significant questions about what it means to be the church, what it means to be the pastor, how to be the community, and then all the divisions that spun out after that time. Uh, specifically for us as a multiracial church, we had a lot of questions around racial justice and what that meant. And all of that just led me into a deep reflective journey about what it means to be a pastor and um reassessing some of the images I had in my mind about what pastoral ministry was about sent me back into scripture, and I just locked in on some of these images that were more agricultural, agrarian. Uh, some of my own like backstory of growing up may relate to some of that. But anyway, that was kind of like the journey that led me into the reflection out of which this book came. And it just became very life-giving for me, very freeing in so many ways to enter into this image of the pastor as a gardener or the pastor as a farmer.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

One of the challenges I think of pastoring, probably just true of church participation as well, is you you do pick up these images or these ideas of what a pastor is, what a church is, often just sort of without really reflecting on them. You know, you sort of think about what a pastor is and just assume that's what a pastor is, and don't realize that previous generations, uh, previous times have drawn from different images or understandings than perhaps we have. And uh you used the word earlier that uh we need a sort of new imagination for what being a pastor is. And the book itself is kind of grounded on this idea of rethinking the images or the metaphors we have for pastoral work. Um, maybe you could talk a little bit about how metaphors or images shape the way we perceive what a pastor is and why being willing to reconsider those underlying images are so important.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

One of the things I think we need to pay attention to, Chase, and and you would get this, is that we live by stories and we live by metaphors. Uh metaphor is a compressed story. And so when we think about ministry, um, we are, as pastors or others who are um nonprofit leaders or folks that are in parachurch ministries, there are there are images in our mind that are firing and activating the story by which we do ministry. And I think a lot of pastors would, hey, just by nature of the word, talk about the pastor as a shepherd. That's a wonderful image in scripture. It's a wonderful image that's used through the history of pastoral theology and pastoral uh ministry. And I don't want to set it aside, but um, what I found for myself is I was talking about the pastor as a shepherd. But what was creeping in, even though I had worked against this so much of my ministry, was the pastor as the guy, the CEO, the one who is the leader, the one who is gonna be the person to lead the church, to direct things. And what I found unwittingly is that I had imbibed cultural stories, cultural metaphors about leadership that were then deforming the way I thought of the pastor, even as a shepherd. And so my journey into imagination, into metaphor that led me into these agrarian pictures or these gardening pictures really helped chasten my pride as a pastor, helped me realize I have control over some things or I have influence over some things. I can till the ground, I can prepare the soil, I can plant seeds, but but I cannot make things grow. I cannot be the person. And uh the doorway into all of this for me was 1 Corinthians chapter 3, where Paul talks about being the one who plants in Apollos Waters, but God is the one who gives the growth. That just became a doorway into a kind of a reimagining of the pastoral role role that just really um, again, I said life-giving before, it really breathed new life into me at a time when I was very destabilized as a pastor and confused. And also helped me find freedom again without having to be the one who was gonna make everything happen. I could trust God. I'd be faithful, but I could trust God to do things that I couldn't do.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

I certainly, uh part of my own pastoral journey has been recognizing some of these images you just get handed, right? So for me, like you say, it's it's this shift to the pastor as leader, uh, I think it's been pretty substantial. I've watched in my own fellowship as a lot of our pastoral ministry programs at schools have become church leadership programs, or the number of pastoral books, you know, on the bookshelf, how many of them are now sort of leadership or vision-based books, or uh the pastor's podcast are, you know, increasingly interviewing entrepreneurs and business leaders to sort of learn lessons that can be applied. So it's really easy for the image you sort of carry of the church to be a brand, an organization. And then you're right, the pastor becomes the kind of visionary leader who's kind of you know putting putting all the volunteers and resources in place to achieve some task or goal uh to build something. And yeah, it can be really hard, I think, to even recognize that in some ways those images just become the default, you know. We don't even think about the fact that this is an image, rather, it's just the way we sort of think ministry is. And so books like yours, I think, you know, are at the very beginning are helpful just to step back and say, you know, there are other ways of thinking about what the pastoral work is. How has that evolved in your own uh in your own actual pastoring as well?

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Yeah, there's so much around that. I mean, I I still feel like there is a place for pastors to have vision. I just think we need to reactivate that in the biblical imagination. Um, all through scripture, we see people who are given vision, and we sort of demarcated, you know, visions like John on Patmos or Ezekiel as like one thing, and now the pastor, uh, what vision really means is yeah, you you organize things around uh a key goal, and then you get everybody mobilized toward that end. Um, and I think I'm reminded of how Dallas Willard once said, you know, the vision that we most need as Christians is uh not just like some sort of vision uh for direction or vision in sort of these like goal-oriented ways. The vision we need is kind of that Revelation one vision that John has, a vision of Jesus, and that that brings it back. So for the pastor, I think for me, the journey has been uh coming back to see Jesus in some fresh ways. Um, the vine and the branches in John 15, Jesus as the gardener at the end of the Gospel of John after the resurrection, and then through those things, my encounter with Jesus, then to be able to reimagine my role in a way that um I'm not becoming a workaholic for the kingdom of God, but I'm being faithful in the work over the long haul for the sake of what God wants to bring out of the uh sort of the fruitful harvest, and even letting go of what I think the harvest needs to be. As a church planter, so much of what I was a part of before coming here was okay, here's my goals. We need to get hit these benchmarks and all these different things. And it just ended up being me trying to control things, me trying to make things happen, and me also predetermining what the outcome of the harvest would be year by year. And I think um right now, the way that this uh metaphor of the pastor's gardener has helped me is to help me think in terms of generations in the future, that some of the work we're doing as pastors right now, even as the church is in decline, may just be for the future that we won't see, like planting a good tree. You know, you're not gonna see its full growth in your in your lifetime. Future generations will see that. If we want to have uh oaks of righteousness, we need to start the planting of the Lord now and even let the work go on after we're after we're no longer here.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

You alluded to this earlier, but the uh the garden theme for you, uh we'll get in a minute maybe to kind of how you see it across scripture, but that it also has some resonance just personally. Uh, how did you sort of uh come to recognize this theme, this image of gardening, and and how did you sort of begin to connect to who you were and maybe where you've come from as well?

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Yeah, I grew up in the Mississippi River Valley of Illinois, um, in an area called the Quad Cities. It's two cities in Illinois, two cities in Iowa. I was on the Illinois side of the river, and my parents were from central Illinois, my dad, especially more from farming country. And so farming and uh agriculture is all around the atmosphere I grew up in. We were a city family, so it's not like we were farmers. John Deere's headquarters was in the area that I grew up in. It was just all around us. But my my great-grandparents had been um Scandinavian immigrants to Illinois, um, tenant farmers, and and they grew a lot of their own food in gardens that kind of carried on generation by generation. So I just had this rich imagination of uh being a little kid and my my dad's parents, my grandparents' uh garden, of being out in in uh square foot gardens uh in our own yard as a kid, and then also garden plots my dad and mom would cultivate. So there was just a lot of this in there. And so I think when I started reading the Bible during this time of crisis for me and finding these images, it was like it was connecting with some long shadows of imagination in my life. And we'd always been gardeners ourselves, my wife Kelly and I with our kids. In fact, just this past uh weekend, we were getting our own square foot raised bed gardens ready and putting things in place. And I just realized there's something powerful in the connection with the earth uh that connects through the whole history of scripture from Genesis to Revelation and these ideas of gardens and fruitfulness. And uh, yeah, so it was just in my imagination. When I when I read the Bible, I realized I was imagining Jesus sometimes as being uh a Midwestern American farmer. And I was like, okay, I have to re-acclimate that, but it did open some things up for me in a really fresh way.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Biblically, I think people obviously they they think of the first garden in Genesis, they think of the sort of new garden in Revelation. But one of the passages you write about really well in the book that uh well, again, was not sort of front of mind when I think about gardens was the fact that Jesus himself in his resurrection is mistaken for being a gardener. And you actually find uh some significant meaning to that image.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

Yeah, I I think in John's gospel, um, you know, every gospel is inspired by God, and every gospel writer is putting things in on purpose. But there's something about the way that John writes his gospel. I think that everybody recognizes, whether you're a young kid reading the Bible or whether you're an academic scholar, you realize that John is just so intentional. From the very beginning in John chapter one, he is echoing the book of Genesis. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And those echoes of Scripture, and even specifically in Genesis, I think resurfaced several times. And one of those places where I see that really strongly is in um Jesus' post-resurrection appearance to Mary, where it says in John chapter 20 that Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener. And when I read that in the past, I just always took that as kind of a quirky little moment. Oh, that's cool, you know. But as I spent uh more time with it, uh I began to realize, in in my opinion, that uh because John is so intentional, Mary's mistake is actually a message to us about who Jesus is. He is, yes, the vine in John 15, but here he is in John 20 after the resurrection, he is the gardener. This is a connection with divine identity, and I think it's also a cue as to the restorative work that Jesus is doing and wants his disciples to be a part of afterwards, this new gardening work of God in the midst of the world. And it just became so evocative to me in my imagination, just conjured up so much to begin to think about the freshness, the newness of planting and cultivating with Christ in this world until the full arrival of the new heaven and the new earth at the end of human history. That's just a beautiful passage. I could go on and on for a long time, Chase, about it.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah, well, I love it. I the gospel writers, they each find unique ways to handle the resurrection. I've always loved in Luke's gospel that one of the first things Jesus does is he's says he's hungry and they pass him. Luke specifically says broiled fish to eat. It's like stressing the physicality of Jesus' sort of resurrected body that he's eating fish. But I had not made the same connection, but I I'm convinced uh by your writing that there's something really interesting going on there that John is. It even makes you wonder, you know, maybe not to stretch it too far, but if Jesus wasn't doing some gardening work, I mean, what is she seeing in Jesus that allows her to mistake him for gardening? That there is something about his physicality, his resurrection, this, you know, coming new creation that has Jesus, you know, now at work in this garden is, I think, a more important image than perhaps I've recognized before.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Yeah, I I love that the way you're just talking about that. What was Jesus doing that made her think that was he uh kneeling down and putting his hands in the soil, like in that uh extra part in the Gospel of John with the woman caught in adultery? Was there something there? I hadn't even thought of that in that way, but I do believe that John is saying something to us. And I love even just the irony of the fact that Mary mistaking him for the gardener or thinking he was the gardener is actually telling us something that otherwise we might not grasp about Jesus. And it just opens up so much into themes that you do see from Genesis all the way into the book of Revelation, which ends with a city in the garden. And um, there's again, I think there's echoes there. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 3. There's just so much inside of our New Testament and the whole Bible around these images. Um, Israel is often referred to as a planting of the Lord, that God is clearing a space to plant Israel even after the return from exile. And so I do think there's some resonance with the biblical imagination for the covenant community people and who they are going to be in the world.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

I want to talk a little bit about how this image then impacts the actual work of ministry of the pastor. One of the things you write about in the book is that picking up this image as a gardener, the work of pastoring is gardening, that it helps decenter the pastor and it helps make the pastoral work less individualistic.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Yeah, the the gardening work or farming work, when we think about it today, it can be actually individualistic. But in the best sense, um, if you enter into the imagination of someone like Wendell Berry, whose um work in in Kentucky in kind of a renewal of agricultural work, or James Rebanks and the UK, uh they will help you see how uh farming work, agricultural work, gardening work is really it's community-oriented. And so we need each other. We need each other to help each other out at harvest time. And so when we default in North America, especially in the Western world, especially, to the individualism, the individuality of the pastor, um, we sometimes miss the fact that we need community. And so um, some of the work of recovering communities of pastors, both for formation and for nurture. I know that you and I were uh both through the Peterson Center at Western Seminary and the cohort model of walking through learning. Uh, for me, that was the just the relationships was almost as valuable as the learning experience and just how vital it is to be in a community, even if we're a solo pastor, to have a community of ministry around us, other pastors we can spend time with where we can learn together, but not just develop best practices or something like that. Actually share life together and be there for each other. I just think that's so, so important for us and easy to miss if we default into the a solo individual, you know, shepherd who's got to get it all done.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

One of the other sections I found really helpful was uh your writings on seasons, that obviously for a garden seasons are. Are are uh are central. You know, they control what's happening and the work you're doing. And how you relate that to growth within the church, thinking about growth within the church, how have thinking in seasons impacted the way you're pastoring and leading a church as well?

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Yeah, there's one part of that, Chase, that's for us in our own lives as pastors to think through the season where we might be in. Um there was a season of time um after all that destabilizing of of my friend and then COVID and the racial justice challenges uh in our church where I was just utterly burned out. And uh my wife and I met with a spiritual director for kind of an intensive kind of five-day week-long type of thing. And I was I was just done. Um, I didn't have any energy, I didn't have any passion, I was just trying to survive. And he said to me, Matt, maybe you need to think of yourself as in a winter right now, and it feels like everything is dead, uh, but there's still things that God is doing underground. And he was just encouraging me that it's okay to embrace the winter season of my life. So I think we can think about our own lives in terms of spring, summer, fall, winter. But then also in the life of our churches, um there are seasons where we enter into a spring where it feels like there's just a vibrancy of new growth. Uh, there are seasons where there's a summer, it just feels like everything's alive, you're just enjoying uh all the beauty of ministry, the fruitfulness of it, the warmth of it. There are other seasons where there are things that we're doing in ministry that have to begin to die. This is something we often resist in ministry. We're just trying to keep things on life support. It there are seasons for ministries to die, for things that we've been doing to go into the ground and become not meaningless, but sometimes to die and become the compost that fuels the next thing, the next um season of growth. And then there are winters where we enter into, you know, some quiet, some stillness where it may not feel like there's a light of vitality, but as we are we as we are waiting, as we're watching, God is doing something that may be hard for us to perceive. And sometimes in those winters, it's just accepting it and watching and praying. Um, so so there's been things uh, you know, in our own church where I've I've realized, hey, I've tried to keep things going long past what God is actually doing. And it's okay to let this come to a close, a specific ministry or some small groups or a way of doing what we're doing uh at our at our church. Um and then we're also experience, we've experienced after that hard time um during COVID and and the tensions of racial justice, uh, we've actually experienced some real vitality after that, but it took a long time to get there.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

One of the things I always worry about in conversations like this one, which I think you're navigating it well, is it it is easy for it to sound like we're just sort of uh correcting pastors, you know? Ah, these pastors with their problems, these pastors with their wrong images, these pastors obsessed with growth. And uh I actually think one of the challenges is, you know, the congregation itself, the people in the pews have certain expectations. And it's very easy to sort of pick those up and run with those. And so a lot of what you're describing, I mean, part of the challenge for a pastor is even if you're wanting seasons, even if you're trying to embrace the sort of model of pastoring as a gardener, uh, you know, if if a congregation doesn't understand or if a congregation has different expectations, it can create a real tension for a pastor. How has this work? Uh, obviously it's shaped how you think about your role as a pastor, but how has it shaped your congregation? How have you how have you gone about sort of uh uh helping to create this same image in the minds of your parishioners? Uh, what does that interaction look like for the pastor to get the image, but then to be able to create the kind of community, the kind of congregation that also understands the image?

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah, I I want to be absolutely honest with anybody who's listening to this. Uh, I am not a perfect pastor. Our church is not a perfect church. I don't think that we've arrived. We're very much on the way. I'm very much in development. But I think even that that idea, we're in development, is just a breath of fresh air for most of us as pastors. And so part of what I've tried to cultivate within our church is just that idea that we're we're on the way. We are not completed. Uh, it's okay to admit our weaknesses. It's okay to say, hey, we're we're doing great in this area, but this other domain of ministry or this part of our lives, wow, it needs to be, it needs to be broken up. You know, there's that old statement in one of the prophets that says, break up the fallow ground, the hard ground. Uh, it's time for like something new to happen. And that's uh an image of repentance. You know, there is things within all of us that are just very much on the journey. Part of how I've cultivated at Eastbrook is just continuing to hold up this idea of developmental approach to spirituality, a developmental growth approach to our life as a church that we've not arrived and we never will. Um, tried to cultivate a long-term perspective on what we're doing so that we're not just interested in short-term gains. Yes, we're going to celebrate when someone comes to know Christ. Yes, we're going to celebrate um milestones in people's lives or breakthroughs of healing uh in relationships or other things like that. But we're also really looking for that long-term growth that happens over seasons of time. And then to be honest, I've just woven in a lot of uh agrarian imagery into um how I'm preaching and things like that, so that I think it gives people this sort of, again, trying to cast pictures into people's imagination that help us in a time in North America where the church is really under pressure. I don't mean in terms of persecution, uh, but under pressure to give in to other cultural narratives. At times when the church is under pressure to believe it's all over, we're in decline, it's just gonna all fall apart. Um, I just believe there's just a tremendous amount of hope for the church, but we do have to have the the right, I don't want to say the right. That's that's not what I mean. We just have to have lively pictures in our imagination and uh letting the Holy Spirit uh do a baptizing work, like C. S. Lewis said, my my imagination was baptized. Uh, we need that, I think, in the church, both pastors and uh the people in in our congregations.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

Yeah, it just feels like these images can be so difficult to hold on to in our culture. Uh, you know, you you get it one day, the congregation gets it one day, and then a few months go by, and you know, our church, we've tried we've tried so hard to stay simple and sort of focused on the right things. And then as the church grows a little bit, people will say, Oh, now we can become a church-like, or now we can do this thing that uh, you know, we sort of just carry these other images in our brains that sort of default or trip us into those kind of expectations. But the challenge of sort of holding on to these images, uh, particularly one of the things you get into in the book that's also helpful is um uh the voice of the philosopher uh Charles Taylor plays a big role in sort of describing the culture around us, the secular age that we live in, and and how it creates some of these pressures for holding on to the images you're describing.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Taylor is uh a helpful voice. Um, I think we have to understand the environment in which we're doing ministry. Um, and by that I mean sort of the atmosphere in which we live that we just take for granted. Uh, Taylor does amazing work on the idea of living in a secular age of the disenchantment of the world around us, and that even for Christians, um, the way that we think of the world, our social imaginary, the way we interact with the world is just by default actually secular and disenchanted. And so uh what I'm trying to do with with the work with Taylor is is uh help us understand how to assess what's happening in the in the cultural environment, the the water in which we swim that we don't even uh know about. And and whether we agree with Taylor's assessment or not, uh what I'm really trying to get at is pastors, and even this goes for everybody, just really digging into and being aware of and having kind of the temperature of the world in which we live. I mean, one of the things that you're talking about with with your church, and I think all of us as pastors feel it is um, you know, we're having a few hours a week to help um disciple people, preach scripture, uh invigorate people's imagination with the biblical imagination. But all the rest of the week, there is so much content coming into people's lives through um what they're reading online, through the things that are being put their way through billboards, through uh news that's coming, through social media, through podcasts. You know, it goes endlessly. And so it sometimes can feel like an uphill battle. Just even being aware of what's happening and what's that doing to our attention is part of just being aware of the of the cultural environment. And as pastors, we can't wish that away. We have to like step into that space and be able to then speak into that. Andrew Root is another great uh pastoral theologian who does some wonderful work on this, kind of taking Taylor's work on a secular age and then connecting it into our own time. Um, his pastor in a secular age is a great book, and and he has a whole series of books around these themes. Again, just to be aware, to diagnose accurately what's happening.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

If a pastor is listening to our conversation and saying, okay, there's something in this image of a gardener that I need to recover, something that feels, you know, life-giving or refreshing in this image, uh, how do you go about that in a world that, you know, like you're describing, most of the pressures on a pastor may not be pushing them this way. Uh, what are some of the ways that we can begin to implement this image or or sort of uh ground ourselves in this image for somebody who may be just thinking about it for the first time?

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Yeah, I think um there's so much, so many different ways I could I could answer that, Chase for sure. I'd say, hey, take a look at the book, because I I think it digs into that, you know, the environment, which is part of what we're talking about with Charles Taylor, um, is a big piece of that. How do we understand what's happening in our world today and how is that then beginning to shape our ministry? Paying attention to the soil in which we do our ministry work, our particular church, um, uh, to not just try to uh take some mass-marketed model of ministry and apply it to our church, but to say, okay, I can learn from that, from somebody else's work, but how do I uh now in this place pay particular attention to my congregation? What is its geography? What is its space? What is its history? And then if you're part of a denomination or a family of churches, uh, what is kind of the ethos of that so that we know how to best work in that particular soil? Um, and I just think that's incredibly important. Um, paying attention to the story of our space. I mean, Milwaukee, where I live, it's a unique city. It's not, it's not Denver, it's not Portland, it's not Austin, it's not uh Boston. It's a unique place. It's one of the most segregated cities in the United States. So that's something about the soil that I have to pay attention to. My church is non-denominational. There's upsides and downsides of that. How do I pay attention to those things? You know, getting a community around you that helps you do ministry over the long haul and sustain this kind of imagination is a vital place to start. And then, and then I think having some practices that are historically tried, the importance of things that we never outgrow, the life of prayer, the life with scripture, our own um uh discipline or discipleship with Christ, all those become roots under the surface that then fuel the visible aspects of our ministry with the word, like preaching or our ministry of prayer, or our own discipleship for others. We have to have roots in our own life for that. And and one of those I mentioned already that I think can be really important to pastors is the idea of spiritual direction, having someone who walks alongside of you who can speak into and uh help you get a hold of what's going on in your own life that may be impacting your ministry both positively and sometimes negatively.

unknown 34:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Well, your book, uh, I would definitely recommend it as a place to start for listeners. It's uh I remember when I was reading Peterson for the first time, kind of in my own vocational crisis. And uh the the way I always describe it is it was like somebody opened a window. You know, it's like not only did you feel the air, but you realize there was a whole world that you had just sort of not been in. And uh, I think your book sets in that line. We need more books like this one that just kind of open a window, open a door for pastors to realize, you know, perhaps there's more, more ways of thinking about the work they're doing, more ways of sort of uh going about that work, and that, you know, perhaps the models we've been handed, as limited as they can feel, are not the only way to do ministry. And so I do think for anybody who's beginning that process of thinking about what ministry could look like, perhaps beyond what they've experienced at the pastor as a gardener is a great place to start. Thank you. Uh uh curious if the book has uh, as you've been sort of sharing, I know you've been doing some other podcasts. Uh, you've been uh obviously uh uh the book's been out now for a few weeks. Uh, how are you getting responses from pastors? How's it being received? And uh what are people taking away from it?

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Yeah, I've had some really fun conversations. Uh some of that has come, like you said, through uh some of the podcast conversations and then follow-ups. I've had some pastors reaching out to me directly, have had some wonderful um phone and zoom and email conversations with pastors. So it seems like it's resonating. Um, it feels like um this idea of the pastor as a gardener is something that is speaking into people's imagination at this time. Uh, especially I've seen, you know, you mentioned the seasons, uh, some of the work of awareness of our culture and setting. And then, and then also uh I talk a lot about hope at the end of the book as sort of the chief virtue of the pastor gardener. And I think that's also deeply resonated because it's feels like a time in our culture where there's a lot of despair, a lot of confusion, and a crisis of hope. And so it feels like that's that's uh taking some root and and you know, I'm looking forward to future conversations and opportunities to talk with people about it. So yeah, I feel free, anybody who's listening to reach out to me and love to have conversations and and learn with everybody else as we explore this image.

SPEAKER_01 36:42

Yeah, I hope that happens. It's uh it's a perfect time to pick up the book. It's spring, as you were describing your family. My wife's got uh got plants in the greenhouse already that she's open and waiting and maybe in a few more weeks to put in the ground, and so certainly a part of our lives as well, too. What a great time to pick up the book and read it. And I hope uh, you know, I do hope it becomes more than a book, too. I hope it it sparks a lot of great conversations. I think the best books give us language for having conversations. We we didn't have the language to have, and I think this book can do that, help us just talk more about what a pastor can be. And so I hope the book uh I hope it turns into a little movement amongst pastors and really begins to spread. Uh, if people want to follow the work you're doing, uh anything else you're working on, anything ahead, or the best place for them to be able to maybe learn more about the book or things in the future? Sure.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Uh folks can find me on my website, it's just mwerickson.com. And then uh I write on Substack, mwerickson.substack.com. So you can follow some of the things there. Um I'm not on Facebook and Instagram. Um, so you wouldn't, these are those would be the best places. And of course, you can you can go to um, you know, all the places that you normally pick up books and and pastors gardener should be there. And I have a few other things I'm working on in the future. I'll be at a couple conferences doing uh breakout sessions on this, so I'm looking forward to that over the next year as well.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

Yeah. Well, again, the book we've been discussing, The Pastor as Gardener, a renewed vision for ministry by Matt Erickson, uh, just out in March. And so perfect time to pick it up and read it. Matt, thanks for what I know has been years of hard work on this topic, and I'm believing just the beginning of some great conversations that are come around it. Thank you so much, Chase.

SPEAKER_00 38:18

And again, thank you for being a good voice for pastors to encourage us to do meaningful and fruitful work in ministry. I'm grateful for you.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

As always, you can find information about today's episode, including a link to Matt's site, as well as information about his book by going to pastorwriter.com. Also, I'd appreciate it if you had subscribed to the podcast, leave a review. And if you haven't checked out the work I'm doing on YouTube, I've been doing some teaching over there. Uh, feel free just to search my name, Chase RepLogal, and you'll be able to find those videos. Hopefully, enjoy them as well. As always, thanks for listening. Until next time, you can see that the event is a good thing.