Special Episode with Ryan Burge: Part I | Episode 29

This week, Rodney interviewed Dr. Ryan Burge on the YTTB podcast.

Ryan Burge is a political scientist and former pastor who's become one of the country's leading data analysts on religion in America, with six books and writing in the New York Times, POLITICO, and the Wall Street Journal.

His research has helped us clarify and bring to life many of the presentations we've given in the church—genuinely fascinating and useful work. To learn more about Ryan, visit drburge.com.

Stay tuned next week for Part II.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Year Through the Bible Podcast. My name is Rodney Adams. I'm the executive pastor at Asbury Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the purpose of the Year Through the Bible podcast is exactly what it sounds like, is to help you read through the Bible. We've been doing that since um January of this year. However, we have a special two-part series that we're going to run for the next couple of weeks, and we are going to be joined by Ryan Burge, who is the author of the website Graphs About Religion. He is the professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Before that, he was a pastor of a church for a long time, and he's a social scientist. And we've used a lot of his data in some of the presentations and some of our thinking here at our church. And I thought it'd be awesome just to hear from him, get his perspective on the American church. We talk about a ton of things like demographics and uh church trends and what is Gen Z gonna be like and what's the American church gonna be like. So this is part one of our two-part series. Let's get started. Ryan, how are you? Good, man. How are you? I'm doing just fine. Good seeing you. Appreciate you being on with us. Of course. My pleasure to be here. So I kind of want to start a little bit with your story. I I started following you um online a handful of years ago. I looked through my texts earlier and and the last text I could find about you, about the work of yours that I had sent to somebody else, was in like 2023, but I think I was following you a little bit before that. But at some point around there, I caught a story that was written by you that was not related to your data work, just about your your church. And um you're a pastor. I hate saying were, um you are a pastor, you but you were uh a pastor of a church by title. Uh and you you wrote about that church closing its doors and and some of the just follow-on things that happened um and the ways that that made you feel and all that stuff. But that kind of informs how I think about your work. Um but can you just tell us a little bit about what what what's your story there?

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Yeah, so I uh I I I started as a pastor in the American Baptist Church when I was 20. It was a part-time youth ministry, sort of like summer intern. And then that was supposed to be three months, and it turned into three years as youth pastor of a little church in Centralia, Illinois. And then I went to a church in Marion, Illinois as the senior pastor when I was 23 and I was there for a year. And then I thought I was gonna leave ministry um and just kind of pursue my academic studies, kind of full-time. Uh, and a church in Mount Vernon, Illinois called me and asked if I would preach one Sunday, and I said, sure. And they asked me if I'd come back the next Sunday preached. I said sure. And then they called me a couple weeks later and said, Would you would you like to be our interim pastor? And I said, I mean, I guess. And I ended up being there for 17 and a half years. Um, I was the longest serving pastor in the history of the church. Church has been around since 1868. And the only reason I'm not the pastor there anymore is because uh my church closed down almost exactly two years ago to the day. It was July 21st, 2026, was our last service. Um, we we had been shrinking for at least 30 years when I got there. I mean, uh longer than that, actually. When the church was built, it was founded in 1868. The new building was built in the 1960s. When they opened the new building, there's 350 people on a Sunday. In the 1990s, it was down to 95 or 100. And when I took over in 2006, it was down to 50. Um, and so for my tenure, I went from 50 to 30 to we had Sundays near the end where we'd have five or six uh in worship on Sunday. So we made the decision to close down. And um, and that was probably uh I've I've lived a very charmed life. Haven't had a lot of people close to me die or get serious illnesses. I would I would rank that up there in one of the worst experiences of my life. Um and it's in many ways a funeral. Um, and I'm still dealing with sort of some of the grief and emotion that comes with all that was, you know, for 17 and a half years.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

I didn't realize that you were the longest serving pastor there. And it opened its doors in 1868.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, the average tenure is about three or four years, especially in the early years like the 1800s. There's actually a plaque I have somewhere in my office downstairs that has every pastor listed in their starting date, ending date. And um, I did some data analysis on that because what else do I do? Right. Um, and the longest serving pastor before me was about 10 years. Um, so it was a church that definitely didn't have sort of stable leadership for uh, you know, long periods of time. And the only reason I stuck around for 17 and a half is because what are they gonna do fire me? You know, they didn't they didn't have money else. Um, so I kind of just stuck with them and they stuck with me. Started there when I was 24 years old, and uh the last service was held when I was 42. So really saw me through. I mean, when I when I first started there, I was unmarried. Uh, didn't have a I only had a bachelor's degree when I left. I was married, had a PhD, written four books, had two kids, bought a house, had a dog. You know, my life had completely changed uh just in front of their eyes, the congregation there, and and their their lives changed too at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

I bet they just loved you too.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Um, yeah, I think they put up with me some Sundays. I think there's still there's just it's it moved beyond pastor and parishioner when you're that small. You know what I mean? It's almost like we were a community of faith as opposed to sort of like a pastor-led congregation. And the the sort of the interesting coda to that story is that last Sunday, we I started going to United Methodist Church in town. Um I know the pastor well, and I sort of I'm okay with where they are. They actually have enough people that I I don't, you know, I I can hide there a little bit, which is what I wanted. I didn't want to be, I didn't want to go back to a church of 20 people. I just couldn't do it. I'd done it for so long. And um, there were six members of First Baptist Church in the pews of that United Methodist Church. So I half our congregation is now worshiping in a different location with a different pastor, which has been really sort of affirming for me in a lot of ways that you know that that I that I managed to bridge that chasm. You know, those people aren't left without without a congregation to join, and that gives me a lot of solace and a lot of peace knowing that.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Oh man. So I'm not that familiar with the American Baptists, but is the reason for the short sort of tenure of the pastors going back that that long, was it by design? Is that an itinerate system, or is it or is it just demographics and changes in the community? What, what, what's that related to?

SPEAKER_01 6:26

It's definitely not um like structural, right? It's not an institutional thing. Baptists have never been very top-down, right? Very bottom-up. You know, your local church calls a pastor, the denomination really can't say anything about who they call or when they call or how they call. But, you know, if you think about it, there are some churches that just for whatever reason, like have a lot of turnover. You know, this is something I want to study more and more as I go forward, is like looking at some churches, like the church I grew up in, first church in Southern Illinois, in my entire life has basically had two pastors, and I'm 44. So, you know, like it's just interesting how like every church, you could have 10 Southern Baptist churches, you know, in 10 towns they're all lined up against each other, and five of them might have had three pastors in a hundred years, and the other five might have had 30 pastors in a hundred years. So I just think it's an interesting sort of like organism thing. Sure. So in our case, it certainly wasn't structural, it was just how the church was. And so I guess in some ways I provided that stability that they needed. Um, and then actually part of the reason, and this is something I don't talk about too much, but part of the reason that they didn't close was because I stuck around for a while. You know, if I would have like uh I I interviewed for jobs all over America, you know, for to uh academic jobs, you know, like from Spokane, Washington to Charlotte, uh Charleston, South Carolina to everywhere in between. And if I would have taken one of those jobs, there's a good chance that church would have not made it to 2024 because they would have not been able to find a pastor who can work part-time, who can, you know, can can uh associate with that congregation the way that I did. So in many ways I felt like a burden and a blessing to be their pastor because I knew if I pulled the ripcord that that church would also close down as well. Yeah. So, you know, that that in the last couple of years especially weighed on my conscience very heavily about decisions I needed to make in my life. And I think, you know, everything ends up where it's supposed to be, but there were times I really struggled with that. You know, the burden that God had put on my heart to shepherd those people as long as I was able to is a burden. And even now I'm still their pastor in many ways. Like I've already done two funerals since my church closed. So, you know, I'll be doing funerals for probably the next 20 years, just burying people who are members of my congregation. And that's my uh that's my sacred obligation to them, you know. When I signed up to be their pastor, you know, when I was 24 years old, and I take that very, very seriously. So yeah, I mean, people ask me, are you a former pastor or current pastor? I say both and, you know, like I'll always be there. As long as one of those members is still breathing, I'll still be a pastor to those people.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Yeah, amen. So um I'm gonna say something that I've that I feel like is true, but I don't have it in my little lived experience set. So I realize that it can be um hard to hear for some church folks. But I feel like um death and rebirth is it's just a part of the organic nature of of how God created the world. So um in biology, and you know, you look at cell biology, you look just basically anywhere, death, even though it is the end of something and is tragic, often precedes something else, a new life or whatever. And I don't mean maybe acutely in one particular body or anything like that. But my point is like in the organic process, um death, death is kind of the way of life. Like it's kind of it's the thing that comes. I'm curious if you feel that way about churches and the institutional church, if you feel like um as new seasons come about in Christ church, particularly in America, if you feel like um the closing of smaller churches um is probably normal, although unfortunate, or if you th or do you think that there's something um inherently wrong in the United States or in our faith that is allowing for these churches to close their doors where we could actually repent and do something different? I don't mean to equate closing with faithfulness, but you know what I mean. Like it's yeah, like is this is ultimately though disappointing, is this will the will the demographers of 500 years from now look back and see this as normal or or and healthy eventually, or what what are we to make of all this? And I want to talk about some of the data too.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Yeah. Uh I think that man, it's easy to want to hold on to what you know. Um the un the unknown is incredibly scary. And you know, the the there's the old phrase, you know, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And I think, you know, obviously it doesn't work in this situation as well, but it's the idea of like, I know what this church is, I know what it can do, I know what it can't do, I know what it has and what it doesn't have. Some yeah, what I've realized is like when church going from 100 to 50 feels like wow, we're gonna close quickly, but man, churches can hang on from 50 to 10 a long time. Like it's scratching and clawing and doing all those things. And I think a lot of churches were in the same or are in the same position that my church was. You know, they're doing everything they can to scratch and claw and just keep the doors open however they can. I'll say this here's a weird anecdote. I I've known a lot of people who've gotten like hip replacements and knee replacement surgeries because I my congregation was all older folks. I think every one of them had a replacement at some point. And I like to talk to them about that. And I'll tell you the one thing I heard over and over again. Everyone told me that they were, they, they struggled to get it done. They pushed it off, they pushed it off. But when they had it done, and then like three months later, they're like, I'm so glad I did that because now I can walk better and I feel better and I'm in less pain. I think there's something to be said for like churches closing and that same idea. It's you know, like, oh, well, well, what we can make another year, we can make another six months, we can make another Sunday. It's like, but if you would just do the hard thing and then get to the other side of it, you would realize that probably what's on the other side of it is not as bad as what you had it. It's just you didn't know that. And the uncertainty is what kills you. So I think a lot, you know, a lot of that's taught me, even in my own life. This is a weird example too. Uh, I was I was thinking about getting LASIK surgery for a very long time and I was very terrified of getting it for all the kind of weird reasons. Oh, you're gonna go blind and da-da-da-da. I had it done in January. And I I about once every three days now I go, I'm not wearing glasses, and I don't even know that. You know, it's like this is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, but I was afraid to get it done. So I think a lot of us, we don't, we are un the uncertainty is what holds us back from doing what we know is the right thing to do. And I think a lot of churches are living with that weight of history.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

You know, that they can't close the doors down. So I my my thing would be if you're a smaller church and you've been declining for a very long time, do the hard thing. You know, don't be, don't be a coward. You know, Christ calls us to be courageous, right? And to do the thing that we don't want to do. And I think for a lot of churches, that means having a very real conversation about how you close, why you close, when you close, what it means to close. Because I think there's nothing, there might be actually some some much better days ahead if you choose to do that. At least that's been my situation, you know, the last couple of years. I don't, I, I, I don't regret um, you regret always when something fails, but I I think it was the right thing to do. You know, I've never questioned that looking back on it now. I mean, we're in a lot better spot. Me personally, those congregants, everyone else. It's just it's such a better place for all of us to be.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah. Did you um did you have your own building at the end? Did you sell that property, or how did that work?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, so that's an interesting story. Um, as our church was declining, we had a 14,000 square foot building on almost eight acres of ground. So very large, you know, physical space for 20 people. Um, our power bills were were being, you know, $12,000 a year. That was probably a quarter of our budget was utilities. We had a boiler that if it went out, it would sink us. Our roof repair was $70,000. You know, like all these things started adding up. And so what we did was we put the church on the market. And let me tell you, friends, anyone listening to this, if you ever try to sell a church, good luck. Because it is not a building that's easy to sell like a home or a commercial business. It lives in this different third space where no one wants to buy it. And if someone wants to buy it, they want to tear it down and you don't want them to tear it down. So there's all that weight of it too. So, you know, we showed it to a bunch of places. We had offers, you know, the one we had one offer that was $150,000 cash for a building of 14,000 square feet. So I'm like, um, that's probably not gonna a dollar a foot. You know, just think about what that is, a dollar a foot. Yeah. Um, and what eventually happened was there was a private Christian school in town that was in a different Baptist church and they'd outgrown their facility and wanted their own facility. So we essentially gave them the building for one dollar, and they allowed us to worship in uh the sanctuary or wherever we wanted on the weekends because they were only there Monday through Thursday. That was their school week is Monday through Thursday. And then we could head out of the building on Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Or I'm sorry, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah. And so we would be, you know, we were sort of two ships passing in the night and we paid them a hundred bucks a month in rent, um, utilities, things like that, and that was it. And we went like that for about five years at the end. So when we closed down, we owned very little, you know, of physical things. We just had some money in accounts, and it was actually really easy. That to me might be the biggest impediment for a lot of congregations, is the is the building problem. And by the way, you being the first church to close down is actually easy because a lot of people will want to buy a church building, the first one that goes on the market. But imagine you the sixth of the eighth or the tenth, you know, that's gonna be much, much harder if you decide to close then. So um, we were lucky in that regard, and what we did could not be replicated by pretty much anybody else because of the circumstances that we had around us. It's every closure is its own little thing. That's what I've realized. And ours followed a weird path, but it got us to where we needed to go.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

Yeah. Oh, and and and by the way, like the longer you prolong, the longer you prolong the process, the more deferred maintenance there is, the the less the less attractive the property becomes just by its own merits of being a commercial property.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

That's exactly and then there's things like ADA accessibility, you know, sprinkler systems, like all the grandfathering that happens with a church building, because most governments don't want to mess with churches. They kind of let you do whatever you want. But if it becomes like a private business or a condominium, you know, like anything residential, the rules change completely. So, like one guy wanted to buy our building and basically tear it down and put, you know, housing development in it. And I told him, I go, I don't want to have uh any more of this conversation with you. If we get desperate, I'll call you back. But that's not what we want this to do. This is not how we want this to end up. So I worry that more and more church buildings are going to have to be torn down because the problem with church buildings, by the way, is they're not good for much of anything except being a church or a school. Like that's really the only two purposes they serve without a lot of retrofitting. So, you know, it's it's a real I worry about that to me, and it almost comes like a municipal problem, too, because you're talking about a local city government, all of a sudden you have 10 churches closed, and now they're that those are derelict buildings that are going to bring vagrancy and crime and everything else. I mean, it's gonna be a real logistical problem from like a policy perspective going forward. And I think a lot of pastors are are hoping that that they can hand the hot potato off to someone else, right? You know, that that that they're not the ones dealing with these problems because let me tell you, it is it's no fun. You didn't get you didn't sign up to be a pastor to deal to deal with problems like real estate and insurance, but that's what I had to deal with a lot of is maintenance and upkeep and budgets and things I I didn't really want to do, but I had no choice.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah. And there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of of of churches that have been in this position and are are in it now. You wrote some articles about denominational decline, and you know, we we're we are a um former United Methodist church, now um have begun a new ecclesial connection called the Asbury Connection, sort of named after the missionary Francis Asbury. Um and I'd like to talk to you about where you think ecclesial connection in America is kind of headed. I have some opinions myself, but just at face value you have um the United Methodist Church, uh, to use our own example, started or it was constituted as it kind of has been for the last several decades in 1968. It never had a growth year. Not one from 1968. I think the PC USA might be the same way. I'm not I don't remember I don't know their exact date of when they started, but I I feel like that that was a similar trend. PC USA didn't have a growth year. I'm curious if there's other ones like that. I mean that that alone, like we've we've seen we've seen these trends coming for 40, 50 years. We just don't totally didn't totally know how they would manifest, or maybe we did. I wasn't thinking about it then. Um and a lot of those mainline uh groups um sort of used to be built on the backs of their small county seat churches. Um, you know, there's a UMC in every town if you drive across Texas or Oklahoma or whatever. Um and now we can't produce enough pastors to fill them. I mean, there's just so much there. I'd love to just talk about that a little bit. I mean that um ultimately this this was kind of always heading in this direction. Uh I don't know that we could have seen this 40 years ago. What do you agree with that? Do you feel like this we are only now beginning to deal with this, I th I feel like at closings and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

You don't have to deal with it until you do. Yeah. You know what I mean? And that's where we are right now is the you know, the United Methodists and Presbyterian Church USA, the ELCA, the Episcopalians, like go down the list, right? Like they all um were sort of these mighty organizations rolling through America, you know, in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even. They have all this money and all these resources and all these seminaries and all these people. I mean, fun fact, in 1968, the United Methodist Church was the same size as the Southern Baptist Convention, 11 million, right about 11 million people. And today the SBC is 12.3, and the United Methodists are about four. You know, I mean, like it's it's hard. The it's actually true that at one point almost every county in the United States had a United Methodist Church. I mean, it was the most geographically dispersed denomination we've ever had, and it probably ever will have, actually, not probably, certainly will ever have in American history. And now we're moving toward. So the movement's definitely away from institutions, right? Definitely away from denominations, the way we understood them, are not nearly as uh attractive as they used to be. So Methodist, Baptists, I mean, you know, the Southern Baptists are even declining, right? The only thing that's really growing in the Protestant world are non-denominational Christians. Um, they've gone from, you know, a rounding error to 35 to 40 million of them in America. Um, and they sort of live in this, you know, what we were talking about earlier, like this this association, right? Like I think there's everyone's trying to like keep all the things that you need from a denomination, but not be a denomination, if that makes any sense. Sort of live in this sort of tension of like, no, we're all really independent, but we also have these logistical networks that help us with conferences and finding new pastors and and these kind of things. Because listen, there's some huge advantages to being non-denominational because you have no denominational overhead. Obviously, you don't have to send money up the chain, you know, apportionments in the United Methodist Church are 10, 12%. I mean, that's a lot of money to go up. Um, but the downside is you don't get any of that structure, any of that logistical support. You know, you don't have all that denominational stuff on top. So, like the question I always ask is if you're non-denominational, where do you go to church camp? You know, like who sets those up? Do you rely on parachurch ministries to do that? Who does missions work? You know, a lot of non-denombs don't have any real mission work, especially internationally, because the Methodists and the Baptists have spent tens of millions of dollars building these missionary networks all over the world. So, you know, there's there's advantages and disadvantages to both, but definitely the zeitgeist, the spirit of the time right now is definitely in the direction of non-denominationalism. And deinstitutionalization. And I worry that people don't see what they're missing. And they're missing a lot, by the way, by not being part of a denomination, because there are some real advantages to denominational life. It's just those are not being uh seen, understood, realized at the local congregational level.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Yeah, one of the um I think one of the parts of denominational life that that I don't hear a lot um talked about is when you have a um when you have shared theological convictions and accountability and sort of structure around that, the the boost that that is to the small church pastor who doesn't have a leadership team around him to sort of stand in the surf and let the waves break on them when you know someone in the congregation wants you to do a thing that that that you don't believe you should do, a third baptism, a second baptism, uh, you know, um, even just matters over infant baptism, whether you do them or do or or don't, whichever side of the divide you fall on, not everybody in your congregation is going to understand that until they're standing in front of the baptistry waiting for you to to baptize their baby. Um if you're that one pastor in that one small town that you've had dinner with these folks for for 10 years and you're in a relationship with them and now um theological conviction bumps up against real life, like I think it is actually helpful for these pastors to to be able to sit on a foundation of codified, you know, statement of beliefs and and doctrinal convictions. Not that they would pass the buck and say, hey, I'd love to help you, but my hands are tied, but just to say, like, this is what we believe. And they know that even though we're not standing there, there's an entire body of other pastors and other elders and other church leaders that are also standing there saying, Yeah, we're we're okay with believing this. Um I I just I feel like that's an area that doesn't get talked about too much, which is just the the um being able to link arms with with um folks who are standing in the surf with you and letting the letting the the the waves break on you when when theological conviction kind of meets you know real life. That's kind of what I think would be a huge benefit.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Oh, I think you've the accountability question is I've never heard anyone answer that question well for me. You know, if you have, if you're let's say a Southern Baptist, United Methodist, and you have a scandal, you know, uh God forbid a sexual abuse allegation comes up, there's someone to call. You know, there's a there's a body of people whose job it is just to investigate and they don't know you or they don't know that person. Their job is just to get to the truth. They don't belong to anybody or have any affiliation with anybody. If you're non-denominational, who do you call? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you are the leadership, you are the adults in the room. You are who investigates the investigators? You know what I mean? Like that's the problem that I worry about. And I'm telling you right now, that I think a lot of people leave major denominations like the Catholic Church, Southern Baptist Convention, over sexual abuse scandals, potential cover-ups, et cetera, thinking if they go to a non-Denon, they won't have those problems. Yeah, you will. It's just they won't be investigated very well and they won't make the national news. Because, you know, one church allegation is certainly bad, but that's not national news. If an entire denomination like SBC or Catholics are covering something up, that becomes a national story. So what I worry about is this is sort of like papered over, you know, these problems that we face in churches. And I mean, you know, we can use examples like Mars Hill in Seattle with Mark Driscoll and that whole situation fell apart largely because Mark Driscoll ran that church like a tyrant and there was no adult in the room to come in and say, hey, dude, you don't run the, you know, we we can tell you who runs this church and it's not you and all those things. So there is a huge downside to non-denominationalism. And I wish that people who chose those churches understood that better. You know, that there's this is not, wow, like there's nothing bad about this arrangement. Yeah, there is. There's no, there's no church ecclesiology or polity that's without error. All right. That's got doesn't have huge drawbacks to it. You just have to pick the one. To me, I'd rather you go in with the two with eyes wide open, right? Knowing what your weaknesses are and then thinking about ways to sort of steer against those weaknesses as opposed to going, oh, it's just all great here. Because I'm telling you, it's not going to be all great all the time.

SPEAKER_00 26:20

Yeah, and especially when you have, um, and I don't mean to be critical of these these churches, but when you have these non-denominational churches that are on their either their first pastor, so the founding pastor or the founding pastor's son or something like that, where there's it's just there hasn't been there. They may have been there for a couple of decades, but there hasn't been the longevity of like of leadership change and and uh different types of governance structures and just different things that have been molded over and and and sharpened over a long period of time. The church that I'm in now, um I was telling you earlier to it's a larger church. Um we'll have 2,800 on the weekends, um, but um in worship with us, but not certainly not as large as it could be. There are much larger churches out there, there are much larger churches even in our town here in Tulsa. Um what's interesting is it's a it's a former United Methodist church, but there's been uh really um three pastors. So the current senior pastor was here, has been here since 2022, and then the pastor before him was here for 29 years, the pastor before him was here for 29 years. And so um as we're sort of carving out our our denominational future, and we very much want to be um connected to um the tribe, so to speak. Like we very much want want to be connected to the the the broader body of our um of churches that we've been connected to historically, um there is almost this sorting going on with well um who are we connected with and what what types of connections make sense and where are where is connection good and where is connection a drag on ministry? And I know that that can be of a a little bit of a third rail to say it like that, but um I think the I think the the denominational landscape in America is asking that question broadly. Like what what is right connection when the older institutions that we've sort of been resting on for the last hundred years are starting to break apart? What does right connection look like if you don't desire autonomy? Like you don't desire just complete independence, leave us alone, we want to do whatever we want. We actually want to be in connection.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

That's to m so my wife's Catholic. So I go to mass with my wife and kids sometimes. And I I we can have theological discussions about you know who's right and who's wrong. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in like organizational discussions and sort of sociological discussions. The one thing I appreciate the Catholic Church about anything else is it doesn't matter who the priest is. It really doesn't. Because guess what? The homily is five minutes of a 60-minute worship service where the job of the priest is really to serve the elements. You know, like you can plug and play a different priest in every week and it would change almost nothing about what the what the mass is on a Sunday morning. If you are in a non-denominational church, there's a good chance that the pastor is preaching that Sunday was the pastor who preached the very first Sunday of that church ever. You know, they have one pastor. So if that pastor retires or dies, or God forbid, gets engaged in a scandal, which has happened before, what happens to that congregation? Are you following that person? Are you following Christ? You know, and I think this is the fatal flaw of Protestantism, as far as I can tell, is it's very much personality driven. You know, for to its great benefit and its great detriment, it's personality driven. Now, saying the Catholic Church doesn't have problems because boy, it does have lots of problems. But again, there is no perfect form of worship here. You know what I mean? Like there's trade-offs in everything. And this is what I worry about with these non-denoms. I mean, I can give you 10 stories at the top of my head of a non-denom pastor getting in trouble or retiring or dying. And that congregation now is a half the size it was or a third the size it was, or it doesn't even exist anymore because really it was about the pastor, not the community of faith. And what I would say to pastors who are leading churches like that, find ways to get out of your own way. You know what I mean? Find ways to minimize your role in that congregation as much as you can. Only preach 25 Sundays a year. Let other people be, you know, preach, do anything you can to be more relational to the congregation, right? Get find ways to be more structural and less personality driven, because that to me is that's a, and by the way, from the pastor's perspective, that's such a burden on their shoulders too, right? Because now they're the ones carrying this congregation forward, as opposed to us carrying each other forward. And I just think that that's something that Protestants, especially evangelical Protestants, need to think about a whole lot more going forward, is how you balance those ideas together.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of glad you said that because um I don't personally think a whole lot about the the personality-driven churches, although they're out there, but I think more of like um, I guess we'll call it low church evangelicalism, where it is driven by the personality. Um, you know, the the worship bands are typically um, you know, following just the latest trends in worship music, things like that. And it's it can be very emotive. Um, where um the an alternate expression of that of worship would be a more liturgical form of worship, a more high church form of worship, even on the Protestant side, where um, you know, the the prayers of the saints and the liturgies of the church that have been have been prayed over, thought over, and said for centuries upon centuries sort of um make up a a a large portion of your worship service, um, connecting you to the to the communion of saints, to the body that's been there long before you, even if um maybe your affiliations look you know different than they did several years ago. I wonder I think a lot about churches that have staying power. So what so the churches that have staying power for the next hundred years, next hundred and fifty years, there's the the the single personality, we'll just call them low tur low church, non-denominational, sort of low evangelical churches. I just don't think they'll be here in 150 years. And I think Christ is at work, and I think the Holy Spirit is at work in these places. I'm not negating their faithfulness. Um I am I do question their staying power, going back to our conversation earlier about death and rebirth and just kind of how how things cycle. Um, I don't necessarily think it's inherently bad, but um, I think what will have staying power are the churches that are at at least trying to remain connected to um the particularly the worship traditions and the and the the the the spiritual discipline traditions that have been handed to us rather than making our own sort of you know the the next best way to follow Christ, so to speak.

SPEAKER_01 32:53

In my own church, we started very low church Baptist when I got there. And by the time we were done, we were saying the creed every Sunday, uh said the Lord's Prayer every Sunday, saying the Glory of Patriot every Sunday, saying the doxology every Sunday, read three of the four readings every Sunday, I followed the lectionary. Yeah, you know, and so there's ways to like hybridize, you get what I mean? Like you don't have to take all of it, but create some structure, right? Create some liturgy. Don't just be all low church where it's like, I mean, literally, if you go to somebody's churches, it's two things. It's 30 minutes of music, 30 minutes of preaching. That's it. Like, you can add, you can cut those things down, do 10 minutes of uh responsive reading, do, you know, read the Old Testament and the New Testament. Like, do the creed, do something that causes the congregation to have a. And I'll say this, when I don't know what to say, I have this little book called the Book of Common Prayer. It's a little black book, it's got a cross on the front. When I go walk into a hospital room and someone's struggling, you know what I do? I open that book up and start praying the book, the prayers over people who are sick. Yeah. You know, when I go to a graveside, I open that book up and it says, you know, you know, it it quotes the scriptures and it says what to say, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You raise your hand, you do these things. And when you don't know what to do, it tells you what to do. It gives you the structure. When I'm laying in bed at night, don't know, you know, my mind is racing and I'm I'm struggling, I say the general thanksgiving to myself over and over again. I say the Jesus prayer to myself over and over again. I say the Lord's prayer to myself over and over again. I say the general confession to myself over and over again, right? Because that gives me comfort. That's the sort of like solid pieces in my mind. And I hope, and I actually know this to be true because I've gone to people who have been in their very last days and had, you know, terrible Alzheimer's. If I start saying, I believe in God the Father Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, they will finish the rest of it for me perfectly. It somehow rests deeply in our psyche. You know, these words, these chants, these incantations, these creeds, these things that they go beyond knowledge. You know, they sort of like get in your brainstem somehow. And that's the thing I wish that low church Protestants would be a little more sensitive to is there's a reason this stuff works. You know, like it's it works because it's worked for thousands of years. And for us to say, no, no, no, we're gonna get rid of all that, I'm not opposed to innovation. Don't get me wrong. But I think just to throw everything out and do a hard reboot is not what the church needs. It needs the old and the new, right? The ancient and the contemporary. That's what's gonna give the church staying power over a long period of time. Because by the way, those creeds and those chants and those um calls and responses have sustained people for hundreds of years. And you're no different than your grandparents, okay? The thing that kept them going is what can keep you going too. And I really wish people would lean more into that.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the the saints that have come before us knew how formation worked. And and um I'm this is this is partially what makes me a small c conservative, um, not in the political sense, but just um taking a high view of what has already been prayed over and proven for centuries and then handed to you like Chesterton's fence. Like, who am I to tear it down until I fully understand it? Um so that's a that's a big that's a big deal for me. All right, that is gonna do it for today. This has been part one of our two part series with Ryan Birge. We hope you'll join us next week for part two.