Ep. 71 Andrew Root - Waiting for the God who Acts

In this episode Andrew Root talks about waiting for God to act, sharing stories of community encounter, the importance of prayer, and reclaiming resonance in the accelerated age we live in.

Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is most recently the author of four volume Ministry in a Secular Age series (Churches and the Crisis of Decline, The Congregation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, and Faith Formation in a Secular Age), and The End of Youth Ministry?.  He has also authored Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross (Fortress, 2014) and Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker (Baker, 2014).  Root puts together theology and storytelling to explore how ministry leads us into encounter with divine action.  His book  The Relational Pastor (IVP, 2013) as well as a four book series with Zondervan called A Theological Journey Through Youth Ministry (titles include Taking Theology to Youth Ministry, Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry, Unpacking Scripture in Youth Ministry, and Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry) break new ground in this direction.  In 2012  his book The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry (with Kenda Creasy Dean, IVP, 2011) was Christianity Today Book of Merit.  He has written a number of other books on ministry and theology such as The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Baker Academic, 2010), The Promise of Despair (Abingdon, 2010), Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation (IVP, 2007) and Relationships Unfiltered (Zondervan/YS, 2009).  Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.

Andrew's Latest Book:
The Church After Innovation: Questioning our Obsession with Work, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship

Andrew's Recommendation:
For All Mankind

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.us

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

Follow on Facebook or Instagram at www.facebook.com/shiftingculturepodcast
https://www.instagram.com/shiftingculturepodcast/

Transcript

Joshua Johnson: 0:57

Hello, and welcome to the shifting culture podcasts in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson, go to shifting culture podcast.com To interact or donate. And don't forget to hit the Follow button on your favorite podcast app and leave a rating or review. Share your favorite episodes with your friends and network. That helps us out a lot. So thank you so much. Previous guests on the show have included Michael frost, Jr, Woodward, and Liam burns. But today's guest is Andrew root. Andrew is the professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary. And he is most recently the author of the ministry in the secular Age series, his fifth book in that series, church after innovation is out in September. Andy and I have a fascinating conversation about waiting for God to act, sharing stories of community encounter the importance of prayer, and reclaiming resonance in the accelerated age in which we live. It's really good conversation. I know you're going to enjoy it. I know you're gonna get a lot out of it, just like I did. So enjoy the conversation. Here's Andy. Andy, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming on.

Andrew Root: 2:09

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joshua Johnson: 2:12

Yeah. You know, as they're working through the ministry in the the secular age books, and you're walking through those things, what, what problem are you grappling with? What's the problem that you see? Yeah, I

Andrew Root: 2:24

think if I was to boil down the problem, I mean, it feels like the problem is pretty multifaceted. People out there on the ground in ministry right now are feeling kind of bombarded by problems. You know, of course, after the pandemic, here comes a bunch more problems. But the big problem that's pre pandemic that I want to deal with that I think maybe is even highlighted more, since the pandemic is just how do you how do you in your vocation, whether you're the pastor preaching every week, or you're the youth director in the basement or the children's minister, or the associate pastor, you know, doing a bunch of pastoral care? How do you talk to people about a living God in a kind of cultural milieu, that forms people just not diabolically or not like forcefully to not want to see God, there's not, there's almost not even a kind of direct atheistic response. It just happens. It's just kind of in the air they breathe, and even the most committed, most committed kind of people to our congregations can go weeks, and sometimes months without thinking about God or forgetting that they need to pray. And that's a very kind of different cultural reality where, and you know, that's probably been with us for quite a bit now. But it seems like it's, I don't know, like the chickens have come home to roost in some ways, or it's become more pronounced in certain ways. Maybe as institutions weaken, and pastoral vocational identity starts to feel like, okay, what am I doing here? What's the point of this, and probably coming on the backside of seeing a lot of, quote, unquote, successful churches lead to just huge amounts of burnout. And, you know, it's forms of spiritual abuse that have arisen from those. And so, you know, I think it's led people to think kind of, in the in the afterglows, of late capitalism and kind of Silicon Valley like, Okay, if the pastor isn't a great, you know, startup entrepreneur, what is the pastor? And can I go back to the past or someone who helps people pray and and think about a living God? Is that, is that even possible?

Joshua Johnson: 4:27

Yeah. I mean, that's a fantastic question. And it's also a question of, you know, how do we see the world? What's our worldview? If we have a view of the world in which, you know, say, I, the self, I am, you know, I am God, even though we don't, we may not overtly say that. We it just naturally is that it's all about us. It's all about the self, it's all about us trying to, to propagate something, and to try to use all of our, our muster to get something out of this world. If we're seeing the world in a view like that, what does it look like? What is the congregation? What does the church the community of God look like with one another, then?

Andrew Root: 5:16

Yeah, I mean, I think that becomes the real challenge for us. Because, you know, I agree with you that the the self has been forced to carry more weight than probably I, you know, this is a big statement that I can't verify, like, you know, anthropologically, or something, but maybe more than any other time in human history, like the self has to bear a lot of weight. Now, part of that comes out of there, just the realities of, you know, Augustinian theology and the Reformation which put a lot of weight on myself to you know, your If you're the one who reads the Bible, you're the one who goes before a holy God, and praise the confession, you know, like you do this. So that puts a lot of weight on the self. But not this kind of way, like, for us, I think is late modern people, we start to feel like there really is no meaning out side of us, that any meaning we find in the world has to be constructed internally, we have to discover it in ourselves. And that's a very different reality to live in, where we don't necessarily assume there's a whole lot or maybe for some people, even any meaning outside of us, and that's just chaos or frustration or horizons to conquer something, but really any meaning will have will be discovered internally. That's tough. And it's tough to do ministry in that context, because, well, especially in any kind of Protestant kind of form, to where, you know, this, this Protestant form of putting weight on the self, like the self is the one who reads the scriptures itself can go before God, it doesn't need a priest to mediate this. It also had the assertion that balance this, that the self was sinful and broken, it needed something outside the self to save the cell. And now we kind of assumed that the Self does save its own self and particularly saves itself from meaninglessness and, and, and boredom. So, you know, the big question is, how do we free our people? How do we help people? I mean, the crazy thing about this, then in which is hard to talk about is that, that obsession with the self that that almost making the self its own god, like you're saying, and carrying the weight of all meaning and purpose, there's a certain way that it becomes so easy then to turn on the self and hate the self. So we have this really strange, strange culture, where people just, you know, you just go on to Instagram or Tiktok and people are just all about themselves. You know, there's nothing but Mee Mee Mee, mee, mee, Mee Mee or you watch reality TV, TV, and you hear these people just talking about me, me, me, me all the time. And yet the same people can be Amini me can just turn on themselves and hate themselves to, you know, like, utterly have let themselves down. You don't have to compete for anything else. It looks like everyone else has been able to find meaning within themselves, but I can't. So there's this kind of whiplash of like over glorifying yourself which well, it leads to a fetish you know, in fetishes are magical objects that never fulfill. So you end up hating your fetish as much as you want your fetish. And so the self becomes a kind of fetish that can't save in any way. And so we have to find a way I think in pastoral ministry particularly is it how do you free people from the adultery of the self without that leading in them, leading them to like hate themselves, or to become masochistic in some way? Like how do we, how does the Gospel itself which I think it really does, leads us to relativize the self under God's own act and being but it leads us back to, to love ourselves, but love ourselves not in the power of our own self, but in the very reality that Jesus Christ has come died rose again, and and called yourself into life? You know, that's a very different, that's a very different reality. So to me, that becomes the real challenge. I'm not sure I even got your question. But that was a rambling mess and answer.

Joshua Johnson: 9:03

It's got a big challenge. So what does it look like? Can we actually get to a place where we see something outside of ourselves, and I think even a lot of people within Christendom, which I don't know how much Christendom is left, but in the Christian world, they don't see it. They're blind to this, the self propagation. And they think that they're, they're talking God and God is outside of themselves. They're encountering him somehow. But it's really they're trying to create, or make God into their own image instead of us being made into the image of God. So what are some ways that we can start to help? Let's help people see what is going on and get them to back to a place where we can encounter God again.

Andrew Root: 9:56

Yeah, I mean, for really central for me. And to be completely honest, this comes completely out of my own theological commitments and my own kind of Lutheran early reformed kind of up commitments. But there is really something central to me about the theology of the cross, and the theology of the cross as as a way of really interpreting how it is that God acts and moves in the world, which I think is true for Luther. Like it isn't just purely a kind of doctrinal assertion, it is a practical assertion of this is how this God moves in the world. And that if you're going to find this God, you have to find this God in, in suffering and in loss, you know, there's this kind of echo of, of this kind of Pauline theology that it's kind of in a death experience in in, in the, you know, being being knocked to the ground on the road to Damascus, being In Judas, this house in the street called straight like an axe nine, that you when everything is wiped away when everything you thought you were supposed to do, and that all gets wiped away, you realize, or you find the God who takes what is dead and makes it alive in your life. So that becomes a very different dynamic, where instead of ministry being about kind of self help, how do we optimize your greatest self? Yeah, it really becomes about really practically, how do we form communities where people can confess a death experience, confess the places where they're lost, the places where they, you know, just just by circumstance are lost, like someone in their family is deeply sick, and they need God to act on that, or have have gotten themselves lost chasing after all sorts of other goods that have been nothing but bad and that and not good. But how do we invite people to kind of narrate those experiences. So to me, there's something about you, at least from one reading of kind of Paul and Luther and in even like someone like Bonhoeffer is that there's this there's this assertion that the first move of the self is to surrender, in confession, there's a kind of move towards confession. And again, that we have to be really careful doesn't turn into the kind of spiritual abuse to where we asked him to confess we can have power over them, you know what I mean, but it becomes a kind of form of confession, that is a certain vulnerability that is narrated to a community that allows us to share in each other's lives. So I think my my theological kind of novel idea, or what I've tried to push is to think about God, as always a minister, that God is primarily a minister. So the God we know is a God who acts in the world and how this got to x. And what this got X for the sake of is to minister to the world. And so to share on this God's being, we have to share this God's act. So when we do really ministered to our neighbor, out of their experiences of loss and death, and, and where the self finds itself at its limit, that there is a way that the divine breaks in to the human, there is a way that Jesus Christ is present acting, there's a way that we can testify to the God of Israel, taking what again, taking what is dead and making it alive. But that's, that's the way I tend to try to think about it.

Joshua Johnson: 13:02

Yeah, death and resurrection. And, and a daily death and resurrection. And it's, it's combined in both the death and resurrection are combined together. And it's beautiful things we're walking with others through that, and we're going through that, as well as figuring out how can we actually die to ourselves daily, and come back to life and, and see and have life in Christ. You know, in my circles, that I run in, there are a lot of people that really I run a lot of mission circles, church planting circles. So there's a lot of outward action and activity, there's a they're, they're being busy to justify their own existence. You know, and you're grappling with, you know, with, with Taylor, and Bonhoeffer, and Barton, all these theologians as you're walking through them. What are some implications for mission and church planting that you have gleaned from that?

Andrew Root: 14:05

Yeah, I mean, there's a really kind of counterintuitive thing that I'm more and more committed to, you know, as you set it up, but it is just kind of where I've been going is this, there is this real push to be busy and to kind of justify, justify ourselves through busyness. And I think there's a way of realizing that we individually need to kind of confess for that reality. But there's also just a way that the larger structures of our society just push that upon us and, and really, what it means to be modern people in many ways is to have this kind of conception, that things can be sped up, and things can go faster. And that the best way is the fast way, you know, so. But the problem with that is that we can start to go so fast, and we tend to go so fast, that we can really find ourselves alienated from the deeper things of life like this, to me that, you know, we talked about how outside of ourselves, there can be no meaning, like, that's only really possible, if we end up going at such a speed or the whole of society and the kind of structural realities, particularly of the Western world start to go so fast, that almost all the life gets sucked out of it for kind of instrumentalizing everything to go faster and into crew and to do more and to grow, to grow, to grow to grow. And, you know, no one should be no one should feel bad about growth or no one should be against growth, but we do also have to recognize that not all growth is good. You know, like cancer is a growth that isn't that good that that that kills? And so I think sometimes what's happened to us in the midst of our kind of feeling haunted by ghosts of decline or needing, therefore needing to kind of justify our positions is that we kind of run to these models that were been given through economic structures and just other institutional structures of modernity, which is to, to look at how we stabilize ourselves as a sociologist Herman Rosen says dynamically, so how growth becomes what stabilizes. So you have a mission startup, the only way to really justify the mission startup is that it should be growing, you know, someone would have the numbers like 15 20% annually in members in and giving dollars, and if it's not, if it's let's say it's growing at 6% or 7% clip, then really, you know, should the denomination or the network invest in that church plan? I don't know. Like, when it comes to a company, like flat growth is death, you know, it's, it's almost better, your your investors will be almost more okay with you to just go down in a blaze of fire and in you know, in crash than then to be growing at one or 2% No one, you know, no investor wants that, like, that's, that's nothing, they'd rather you swing for the fences and lose everything and just grow at one or 2%. But I think that gets transferred to how we think even about about ministry, and what that ends up doing is just burning us out. And it ultimately leads us unable to do the thing that I think God calls us to do, which is to wait on God. You know, the God of Israel is, is a very interesting, you know, interesting god, oh, God, this God says, but about God's self in the Scripture is really is this assertion that I'm an acting God, and you have to wait for me, and you have to wait for my my action? Well, in a late consumer society, my gosh, like Homer Simpson has taught us that waiting is the death of everything, you know, I mean, like, we're trying to get all the waiting out of life. And yet, I think at the deep core of ministry, and discipleship is learning to wait and wait on this God. And so, you know, are there other rubrics even think about a church plant or something like that, you know, like, what are the narratives of life coming out of death here? And is it possible you could be at flat growth, or even a little bit of a little bit declining growth, and yet you have these incredible narratives of the Spirit moving of Jesus Christ and moving in your community of life coming out of death, and too often, and I know it in the traditions I work in is that those narratives don't matter so much is the fact that you're making your budget, more people are coming in than last quarter, and on and on, it goes,

Joshua Johnson: 18:17

well, it's sad. And also, what it does right now is it's pushing all my buttons like I like I don't know, if I could just sit wait for God to act. Like I don't know if I could do that. I would like to do that. And I want to figure out how do I do that? Well, and how do I do that with purpose and meaning, and see in life, coming out of death? But how do I do that? How do we do that practically, in a way where I don't feel like I'm, I'm wasting my life. And I'm see I'm talking through this eminent frame, right, this world says it's about the self.

Andrew Root: 18:52

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can see how that plays in. Like, if you have to sit and wait and do nothing, and the self gets bored. It's even kind of more existential than, you know, just like, I don't like this movie, it's boring. But like boredom, feeling like, your own action is trapped or unable to go all of a sudden makes you feel like you have no purpose, you have no identity, and it becomes a kind of existential crisis. I do think you know, that we do have to be aware that there are different kinds of, of waiting, you know, you know what I mean? Like, it's really hard. I suppose there are people out there and God bless them. But it's really hard. Like when your flight is delayed, and you're sitting in an airport, and you have to, you have to sit there for an hour and a half waiting to board, it's pretty hard to find that as a spiritual space. You know what I mean? Like that kind of waiting? Just pretty much 99.9% of the time sucks. There's probably some real true mystics, spirituality, people out there who can, you know, start praying for people who are waiting, I tend to look at people and think you are annoying to get me on my plane, I want to I want to go. So there is a kind of waiting that just feels like being stuck. Yet there also is a kind of waiting where it feels like you're in time and it's full. It's it's full of something. But I think the difference in that kind of waiting is the kind of narrative that forms you in your waiting and what you're anticipating, you know, so when I'm waiting for a plane and it's delayed, I have no real story that's framing my waiting. My waiting just feels like the most inconvenient thing there is. And I feel really trapped and annoyed and therefore I hate all the people because they're keeping me from where my goal of moving on. But when we wait with a story, you can see there's a kind of theme of the story. It's a different kind of waiting, you know, so one of the things I say in the Book, churches in the crisis of decline is that we have to wait with a watchword. And you know, this is what's kind of interesting thinking about mission startups and congregations and things like that. We always say you better have a mission statement, like, what's going to make your church different? How are you going to? How are you going to compete for all those resources and all that relevance in your community? And I'm not against that. I think it probably at some level, any institutional structure needs that, you know, churches and mission startups or institutional structures and they need that. But what's crazy or what's wild is we've had a ton of mission statement work and Protestantism over the last 30 years and almost no watchword work by a watchword I mean, a kind of shorthand story that encompasses the life of the community of how God has shown up in this community. And a way that this God has, has moved. And so we actually call our people I think, to wait, not with empty hands, but wait with the story that's really based in scripture. But also based in the experience this community has had of God moving and God acting. So the kind of waiting really practically we have to do is with this kind of story with a watch where we're waiting attentive for God to act. When I'm at an airport, I'm not waiting for anything except that gate agent to say, We're boarding now and we're giving you 10,000 miles for for your inconvenience, like that's the only thing that could appease me, you know, what I mean? is given, given something for free, were the kind of waiting I think God calls us to is to wait, really wait for, wait with a story, wait with a lens, wait with a way of trying to interpret how this god wait, wait really on our toes waiting for this god to act and to move. But this is the imminent frame thing if we don't think God really acts and moves, if we think the Triune God is just an idea, and that one who acts in history and acts in the world, yeah, then you should just hurry up and try to build a really religiously successful, you know, church or initiative inside of shrinking religious marketplace. But if we really believe this, God acts and moves, and that the church is ultimately God's, and that God is ministering in the world, then we wait on our toes for this god to act and move. And sometimes we wait longer than others. But there's a certain kind of faithfulness, the waiting is trying to see, trying to hear,

Joshua Johnson: 23:05

wow, yeah, I love that and telling the story of God and moving and acting in our community. And what that has, has been and, you know, I just I remember when we were waiting to get pregnant and waiting for a son. And we were trying so hard we, we lost a baby, very early miscarriage, and then it took five years. But while we were waiting, there were there were stories of others, that God was faithful in the midst of things, there were stories that we were able to share, I was working on the border of Syria with Syrian refugees during that time. And so that was really the only time of connection and empathy that we could have is saying, Hey, we're waiting on a child, we have had this loss here. And we're waiting here. And we're waiting for God to act and move so that we could see new life. And they were in the same position and the same circumstances different one where they they lost their home, and a lot of people lost family members, and they're sitting, you know, as refugees, and they're waiting for new life to come. And those were some of the most powerful moments for us as we can actually relate one to another saying, Hey, we have this loss. But we know that God has been faithful in the past, we have heard the stories of God's faithfulness, and we want to see God work again. And we know that he's going to act at some time, and we're going to see some life. And so that was a really powerful moment of us waiting with one another. And so it's so helpful to us to have that. That thing to be able to do that with with other people and not just try to be these nice little Westerners coming in saying, I have all the answers, and I'm gonna make your life great again.

Andrew Root: 25:00

Yeah, well, that's beautiful story.

Joshua Johnson: 25:02

Thank you. Thank you, but and so I think that because of the self and propagating the self, you say, you know, we become masochist. But really, a lot of things that what's happening now, I think, in culture is we get into the place of depression and anxiety. Because we're trying to say, Alright, I'm going to take care of myself, and I really can't. And so I get depressed. I'm anxious. I'm not gonna be able to make it through the day. How can we deal with cultural anxiety and depression in this age?

Andrew Root: 25:42

Yeah, I mean, it is really A huge question in there, one of the theorists that I deal with, and I think it's a congregation book is a guy. It's a Parisian thinker named Alan Erbert, which does not sound very like Parisian like that you run into him on the streets of Paris or something. But you know, I guess that's what his bio says. But he's written this really great book called The, the weariness of the self. And it's, it's better and it's French translation, I'm not going to actually say it in French and humiliate myself. But the direct French translation is, the fatigue of being yourself is the title of this book, the direct translation, the fatigue of being yourself. And his point is that there is something about kind of late 20th century, late modern world, that depression has become the real ailment that we deal with. And it just becomes endemic and is everywhere across particularly upwardly mobile societies, that depression is just is there. And he thinks what depression is, which I find really fascinating is he does not think it's a pathology of happiness, which is sometimes how we think about it, like when you're depressed, you can't be happy, and isn't that terrible, isn't that he doesn't think that he thinks it's actually a ailment of change. And what what he thinks occurs is that there becomes this demand in the self to continue to perform, to continue to curate the self to continue to kind of assess the cells value next to all these other cells that are doing their own project that you're yourself becomes its own project that you're tending to all the time. And when you run out of energy for that, when you take too many ELLs, as opposed to Wus on that, when you just don't have the energy to change and change again, and keep up with all this, that you find yourself in a kind of state of despondency, and in the state of, of depression. So there is this, there's this deep sense. I mean, I wish I had like practical things that we can do, but from a larger kind of congregational perspective is we just have to recognize and we have to think beyond the performative self, like how do we think about the self in relation, this is, again, why I think the cross is so important that the self really matters. But the self finds itself by losing itself. And the self, you know, Paul says, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me that the self that Paul knows is now the self that is dead and made alive in Christ very different than I have to form, optimize myself, see how many likes I can get, right? You know, like, continue to work on my resume, so I can get another job and, and keep advancing and going and going. And then I feel all this regret and guilt because I, you know, I should have finished that degree, or I should have, you know, I should have done this with my life. Or if I was just more interesting and could start, you know, start a podcast that everyone listened to, you know, this podcast, then then, you know, then then I would be doing well, or, you know, you go to a dinner party, and everyone's talking about New York Times articles, and you're like, why can't I be the kind of self who reads the New York Times, you're like, I don't have time for that. And you just keep up, you know, everyone's talking about how they ride their peloton bikes, and you're like, Man, I can't take a walk around the block. And so you can start to feel really guilty that your performance is bad. So there is this way, we have to kind of think about how the self really knows itself in these kind of vulnerable moments of confession and surrender. But I also really worry that that fatigue, that to fatigue, to be yourself and get imposed on the church itself. Yeah. And I think we have a lot of churches. So I've talked to pastors around the country, who they would say that their church is depressed, like not the people in the church. I mean, there are people in their church that feel that but maybe not everybody, maybe not, maybe not even, you know, 50%, or 30%. But the church as an entity as a kind of collective reality just feels depressed, like people just don't have the energy to How about and I think a lot of pastors after the pandemic, my wife is actually a pastor of a small church. And she feels that like, the whole system of people kind of pulling on the rope together, that all got interrupted. And now since coming back from the pandemic, she's had to do way more work than she did before. Because people just are out of practice people, people are exhausted. And people people kind of feel like, yeah, they feel there's a kind of depression that hovers over them. So that's one of the things I really worry about as we kind of think about how the church needs to change to keep up. So we have to be very careful. And if we can't learn to wait and wait on God and have a kind of horizon that we're seeking for God's own act and being that it will lead us to just try to do more with less, and try to do more with less will turn us into performative congregations that will eventually burn us out and depress us and we'll be too fatigued to be church which seems to be to me at deeply theological problem.

Joshua Johnson: 30:48

That's a big problem. It's a really big problem to have. And, you know, it's not the problem of trying to keep up in our accelerated age, like we're accelerating, we're getting faster and faster, and there's more change. So that means that we're more fatigued, right? That means that we're trying to perform more that we're changing more quickly. We're changing every, you know, six months now, you know, that we have people that I'm saying, hey, you know, I was at a friend's house last week in Denver, and she's been asking all of our friends, can you? Do you have the energy? Can you plan for this fall? Are you able to actually have plans this fall? And she said, almost everybody, they're all ministry, pastors, some sort of ministry people. And almost entirely every single one of them said, I can't plan I have to go week by week. As because we don't, we know that things are going to change so fast, that we're already fatigued. And I don't know if something is going to change this fall, like people just have a sense, like, oh, the world is gonna be different than it is right now. Or that? I'm done. Like, I have too much fatigue.

Andrew Root: 32:05

Yeah, yeah. It's really hard. It's really hard to know. You know, it feels really hard to know, maybe we all do sense that. Or maybe we're kind of traumatized by it all that we think, gonna change next week, you know, like, yeah, I don't know, how you felt around just even like planning, vacations and getaways, it's like, you know, you used to be able to really depend on that weren't going unless someone tests positive. You know, and so we all kind of feel that, but I just think people are just really deeply tired and fatigued. And I think, you know, most congregations in ministry life, the paid ministry person has had to carry that way. And they're already exhausted, and they're fatigued to come into this, but they're there lay leadership is just also exhausted, and also fatigued. And yeah, it becomes a, it becomes a big problem.

Joshua Johnson: 33:01

So is there anything that you have? You've seen as people are wrestling with this, that we could cut through that the fatigue and get to the root problem?

Andrew Root: 33:11

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, there's no easy answer. But the big thing we have to guard from, I think, is not allowing all our relationships. And this, this even comes when you feel like oh, my gosh, no one's helping out and we have Sunday school to do or we said, we're going to do this thing. And now no one's signing up, is we just have to really guard against instrumentalizing every relationship, you know, so in other words, like, I'm gonna call these people, and I'm gonna see how they're doing and I'm gonna take him to coffee, because I really, really, really need them to teach fifth grade Sunday school, you know what I mean? Like we're every relationship we have is to kind of when, when something falls down the road, and I think we have to be really careful of that because I think that it's what burns people out and burns us out. And so you know, like, again, that quote, heart my Rosa, one of the things that I've tried to dialogue with his roses point is in this accelerated age, it really does lead us to alienation and alienates us from one another. it alienates us from God it alienates us from, from things that speak to us like art and beauty and you know, things like that, we just miss it all because we're just going too fast and, and everything feels kind of lifeless. And this is that depression thing again, he says, like, you know, it's, it can feel like, especially when you're depressed, you feel like this. But even when you're just know you're being burned out, you feel like the Livewire between you and the world has been cut off. Like, there's, there's nothing there that you just everything feels dull. And so he thinks that though, he thinks we do have these other kinds of relationships in the world that aren't just instrumental, and he calls them resonance, these kinds of experiences we have where we, where we feel time becomes full, and we feel connected to something bigger than us, we feel actually taken out of ourselves, where our self doesn't really matter. But our self is also deeply included, you know, like it's, it's this kind of sense that there's something more than the self but the self also is, is treasured the self is relativized and yet honored in some way, like we have these experiences when we see something beautiful or, or when someone really cares for us. And, and so I guess, I don't know exactly how to do this. But there's got to be a way that what the kind of action we think about kind of forming our people into and that we take on as leaders in ministry is more resonance action than acceleration action. And the props. The pastors that have gotten the most props, the ministry leaders that have gotten the most Pat's on the back tend to be those who have written the wave of acceleration, not that unnecessary. Verily, in small ways, in subtle ways, created the this environment of resonance in their in their community. But if we can we become so busy that we can even hear a poem speak to us, or the beauty of a five year old who asks a question, then there inside the imminent frame, there is no way we'll be able to hear the living God speak, you know, so, part of being formed to hear the living God speak to us, again, is to have a different kind of relationship to the world. If God is speaking within the world, then, you know, like I said, watch where it makes us attentive to how God might be acting and moving in the world, then we need to engage the world not as a kind of innate object we're trying to extract resources out of, but as a as a place to connect and connect deeply with one another, and with deeper stories and with beauty and with truth. And I think we need to point our people to that. And that will mean some slowing down, it will mean some slowing down. But slowing down without resonance won't be enough, either. We've all had that experience where we got on vacation and slow down. And then it just feels worse, because that inbox is just following emails. And you now have to work three times harder than next week after your vacation to make up for the vacation you took you know, why really rich people who can go really fast, just bring their, their administrator along with him on every get behind those emails, but most of us can't afford That's right. Ministry, let alone taking them on our vacation.

Joshua Johnson: 37:20

Exactly, exactly. And so you know, as they're walking, have you found a posture that we could take to be able to go slow in this fast world where we actually can engage with others engage the culture, but not get burnt out? By trying to perform enough to keep up?

Andrew Root: 37:41

Yeah, you had a posture, I think that we need to take in this series is going to seem very positivistic. And some people will probably roll their eyes. But we do really have to learn again to pray, and what it means to be people who pray, and again, and not allowing our prayers to become instrumentalized. Like, let's pray this way. So God does this for us. Let's get a leverage our prayer prayers and make God do this. But what does it mean to actually pray, to commune with God to wait in B? And I just think that leadership right now what it really needs to be in the context of our moment, is it really needs to be at the center? How do you teach your people to pray? Yeah, what does it mean to teach your people to pray? How does how does your community and even as it gathers become a place of prayer, where we tell our stories as prayers, and we pray our stories, and it really is about kind of gathering in telling stories of how God has acted moved in our lives or, or how we need to act to move and we feel like God has abandoned us that we're lost. I mean, there's places for lament in these in this too. But again, that's a that's a kind of disposition of prayer to have what it means to, to narrate our experiences. And, yeah, I know, it seems really kind of simplistic, but I think it's really important, if anything, what I do as a leader in ministry, what I do as a pastor is I teach people to pray, and invite people to pray. I don't know, I know, it probably is not the sexiest thing ever. But I do think it's a way to move inside the imminent frame to kind of escaped from that acceleration and to seek residence and to see and hear the living God move again.

Joshua Johnson: 39:28

Yeah. And, you know, we can't just teach people to pray, we have to be people of prayer ourselves. And if we just go out and say, I want to get my congregation, my people to pray more, I'm gonna teach them how to pray and you're not living at yourself, and you're not a person of prayer. That's not going to work. And you know, people will feel that as well. And that's also that's also a performative type of thing. When you're, we're saying, Hey, I'm gonna teach you, I'm gonna do this, you're gonna get it. I'm gonna outsource prayer. And we can't outsource prayer.

Andrew Root: 40:03

Right? Yeah. And I mean, I don't think, I don't know who would admit this, but probably so many pastors have felt in the last few decades, like, I don't have any time for prayer. Like, there's no time to pray. And I always try to tell my own students, which you know, I don't know they probably feel under the burden of this but Gregory the Great that the bishop in the early in the early Christian tradition, used to say to his, as his priest as he was as he was ordaining them, he said, You better not, whatever you do, now that I'm ordaining you, you're going into the ministry, you better not become too busy. Because your job a big part of your job is to contemplate the Trinity. So don't get too busy so you can constantly Like the Trinity, and I always say to my students, like, try that with your next Personnel Committee, you know, I need to, I need about 1520 hours a week. So I can just contemplate the Trinity. And, you know, you'd get some very strange looks, you know, from your denominational officials and from your own congregational Personnel Committee, but maybe it's not that far away from what we actually need to be in this place to contemplate and pray. I don't know, I think I think there's, I think there's a time back to a more mystical experience here of, of, of seeking for God and in prayer, and in some ways in silence. Yeah.

Joshua Johnson: 41:21

You know, I think that's, that's pretty huge, and key centering prayer of, you know, just sitting in silence with God, and just being there with him, is, we often think that, hey, I'm gonna have to find the words to say, and I'm gonna say, I gotta say, this thing, this thing, this thing, and I need to get God to act, or instead of saying, Okay, I just need to shut up and be in his presence, and let him ministered to me, in the midst of whatever I'm going through, and I don't need to say the words, there's no words that I need to say, I just need to be with God, in the midst of this.

Andrew Root: 41:58

Yeah. And that's exactly where you're kind of getting with your point that it's how we form ourselves to, if prayer is instrumental, then you can just go to a bookshelf and give people a curriculum to pray. But if prayer is kind of silence before the God who is God, you can't teach people how to sit in silence If you don't do it, and you know, it is practicing with people. And you know, how do we practice that with people? And so, but again, I understand why everyone feels like I How would I have time to even sit in? And, you know, listen for God and, and sit in God's presence, but I think it's really necessary now more than ever. Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 42:39

that's huge. It's huge. You have you have a new book coming out soon. All right. Tell me anything. What are you you're working on? Now? You have a new book every every couple of months, right?

Andrew Root: 42:53

Well, let me be quick. But in sickness, I will admit that I tell my wife, I'm, I'm a good existentialist in certain ways, like I'm miserable when I'm writing, but I'm more miserable when I'm not. So it's really more for me than anyone else. I'm just very thankful that anyone has read them at all. But yeah, there's a book coming out at the end of September, I think, early October, called the church after innovation, which is really kind of, well, it is continuing this ministry in the secular Age series. It's looking at kind of work, and how, what it means to work inside of secular age, and how work has been kind of transformed in late modernity, and particularly looking at the Protestant obsession with kind of innovation and in particularly kind of Silicon Valley innovation, which I touched on in the congregation and secular age, but kind of dig deeper here. And every every, well, I shouldn't say every but a lot of kind of Protestant institutions, I know are pretty obsessed with trying to become innovative places. Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 43:52

under 100%.

Andrew Root: 43:54

And, you know, there's some good reasons for that. And then there's also some things we should be aware of, and some ways that, you know, it's just very, it's a very odd reality that, especially again, and to not keep saying the Protestant, you know, blowing on the Protestant horn here, but there is a way that Protestantism really thought your Christian life, especially reformed Protestantism, your Christian life was lived out in the way he worked, you know, so if if Max Weber's correct, there's a way that belief, the kind of belief in a God creates capitalism, not you know, not just economic realities, it's that you want it to live faithfully before God and the way you showed you with faithfully for God was to work hard and to reinvest money and kind of to work for a little extra money, but then reinvest that in the system. But we're in a really weird time where it used to be that the way we thought about our faith, kind of filtered in it spilled into how we thought about what it meant to work. And now there's a weird way that the way we think about work, particularly kind of permanent innovation of, of Silicon Valley, has washed back into the church. And now we're thinking that the best forms of ministry that the best congregations look like Silicon Valley startups, and I'm just trying to say, well, let's, let's think about that. Let's think about where this all comes from. And I do think maybe we should really hold on to some innovation practices that we've been given. But let's, let's be really clear where they come from, and and you know, where they rest before we jump in and fully. So that's, that's kind of the book.

Joshua Johnson: 45:30

Great. Do you talk a little bit think about the theology of work work is worship and that that realm, and what are your quick thoughts on on that?

Andrew Root: 45:40

Yeah, I do. But you know, where I ultimately go theologically and this is a They're kind of good full circle for us as to the self. Because I do I think that the way work is structured. Now one of the ways that it is evolved is it's glorified creativity. Like if you if you worked in a corporation in the 1960s, no one thought you were doing anything creative. I mean, you know, like, you think those episodes of Mad Men at the first season of Mad Men were the creative wing, the art, the art, the art department, like they were completely ostracized, and they no one cared about them. But now this weird things happen, where we really do glorify creativity, and we kind of think design, creativity will solve everything. And people have a lot less protections at their jobs, you know, their jobs are talked about the fluidity of everything, like people's jobs are really fluid and, and that accelerates their lives. But what people tend to get is a way to kind of work on yourself and work because of the way creativity functions. So the advantage of getting all this flexibility which corporations need to have permanent innovation, is you also get this sense of personal development you get to work on. So the manager is no longer a manager managing a complicated system, the managers, your coach, as you and a small team work on some kind of project, you know, and so it really does the advantage you get for less kind of protections when it comes to insurance and job security and things like that, as you get to creatively work on yourself, well, that's all good, but it also creates this obsessive self culture we have. So what I tried to do theologically is is returned to the kind of the German Rhineland mystics who impacted Luther who think very differently about the self and to think the self must lose, you kind of have to lose yourself to find yourself and try to return to that and, and kind of think about work, not as this creating the self, but this way of, of, of honoring God, and like you said, worship and things like that. So yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 47:47

great, beautiful. It a couple of questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Andrew Root: 47:55

What I give to my 21 year old self? This is going to be completely inconsistent with everything I've said, but I would say invest in Google. That would be good. No, I What would I say to my 21 year old self? I think? I don't know. I would, I would? I think I would say, um, yeah, just just hang in there. Just keep reading keep. Yeah, and, and really, that it's always important to continue to seek for the living God in the world, and that the church is more important than you. I think I'd want to tell my 21 year old self that because it's, it's taken years to, to learn that many ways. You know that the think that you know what, what I'm trying to do is just serve God and give to God, what I think that the church might need, and it might need it, it might not need it. But this is it might not need it. Now. Maybe it needs it in two decades. You know what I mean? But this is, this is the calling I've been given. And that's enough, I guess until my 21 year old self like, it's enough to really hear your calling and follow that. Oh, it's becoming therapy.

Joshua Johnson: 49:18

That's good. We could have we could have a therapy session. We can just go on to the next hour, we'll get to therapy session, then. Yeah, speaking of like, just keep reading anything you've read lately, or watched lately that you could recommend?

Andrew Root: 49:33

Yeah, well, what I've Yeah. What have I been watching? I'm super, super intrigued. And almost, well, I'm almost caught up with, for all mankind on an Apple Apple plus, I just find it's fascinating. Yeah, so people haven't watched it. It's like a thought experiment in alternate history, if you will, if the space space race would have continued. So there's three seasons, and the first one is like, you know, right around the Apollo missions. And what happens is Russia wins wins the race to the moon. And of course, this compels the United States to stay more deeply invested in and they jump forward, I think, what are they going forward, like the 80s and then they jump forward to the 90s. And it's really fascinating to think about what what would happen so I mean, the episodes now or it's 94, and like, everything's kind of the same but different to they do in a really interesting way. And they're 1994 and they're making it to Mars, you know, so it's the idea of what would have happened in the 70s. And particularly after a after, after the explosion of the of the space shuttle, if things would have continued well, Okay, I'm finding that really interesting kind of thinking about alternate history.

Joshua Johnson: 50:48

Yeah, having started on on season two, and season one season one was really rough patch. And like the few episodes there, I mean, it was just some horrific loss and grief that was hard for me to deal with. And then I got there, like the end of season one is spectacular. The way that they finish seasons is pretty amazing. It is amazing. And I've, I've heard that the rest of it as as, as it wasn't, season one is probably a slow go and season two for a while, build it up. But season two ends spectacularly as well. And so I should probably catch back up

Andrew Root: 51:27

there. So you know, talking about acceleration, there's so much to watch. Yeah.

Joshua Johnson: 51:32

You can't keep up. You just can't keep up conversations. Sad.

Andrew Root: 51:39

But it's, you know, we are living in the golden era TV. So we also that's true shift for that. Yeah,

Joshua Johnson: 51:44

it's true. It's true. Great. Where can people find, find your work? Anything that you want to say? Look out for?

Andrew Root: 51:53

Yeah, I mean, it was kind of you to ask about the book coming out in at the end of September. So churches, the church after innovation, and then people I mean, I have a website, just android.org that is getting revamped as we speak, which is kind of cool. And you can find me there. And, you know, you can also find me on that. That terrible dumpster fire called Twitter too. But I I'm rarely on that, but I shouldn't say I'm really I'm looking at like sports tweets all the time. But you know, try to not read much else.

Joshua Johnson: 52:23

There you go. There you go. Andy, it was such a pleasure to have you on and to have this conversation. Really enjoyed it. So thank you so much for being here.

Andrew Root: 52:35

Yeah, it was great. Thanks.