The Pastor as Gardener: Cultivating Ministry with Hope | Matt Erickson

In this episode of The UpWords Podcast, host John Terrill welcomes pastor and author Matt Erickson for a rich, thoughtful exploration of pastoral ministry through the lens of agrarian imagery. Drawing from his new book The Pastor as Gardener, Matt Erickson shares how the rhythms of soil, seasons, and cultivation offer a renewed vision for ministry in a time when many pastors feel depleted, disoriented, or discouraged.

Together, they discuss:

• Why gardening is such a powerful and biblical metaphor for ministry
• The pressures pastors face today — cultural polarization, unmet expectations, leadership models, and soul-level exhaustion
• The liberating shift from control to cultivation
• Scriptural roots of agrarian leadership (1 Cor. 3:6; Genesis 2; the resurrected Jesus as gardener)
• How place, soil, and local context shape faithful ministry
• Technology, AI, and the crisis of control — and how agrarian spirituality grounds us again
• Seasons of leadership, the “wall,” and finding hope in times of limitation
• A hopeful vision for the future church — diverse, listening, burden-bearing, and rooted in resurrection hope

This conversation offers encouragement for pastors, ministry leaders, and anyone longing for a more grounded, faithful, and hopeful way forward in Christian leadership.

📖 The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry (Eerdmans, 2026) = https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802884145/the-pastor-as-gardener/

CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and visit slbf.org/studio to learn more about our work at the intersection of faith, the academy, and the marketplace.

This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:08

There are things that happen in our life in the course of a year that I think also are like those seasons we experience in the natural world. Times of spring, abundance and things bursting forth, times of summer, things in the fullness of life, things in a season of a fall or autumn where things are contracting and maybe some things are dying. And even a season of winter where we may find ourselves in a time of it feels like nothing's happening, but again, there are things happening underground in the winter time.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the Academy, the Church, and the marketplace. Today, we are featuring a deeply insightful conversation between hosts John Terrell and Matt Erickson, senior pastor at Eastbrook Church and author of The Pastor as Gardener, a renewed vision for ministry. In this episode, Matt explores why so many pastors today feel stretched thin, disoriented, and discouraged, and how Scripture's agrarian imagery offers a pathway back to grounded, faithful ministry. Together, they reflect on gardening as a metaphor for cultivating souls, communities, and places, the pressures facing pastors in a polarized world, and how seasons of limitation can become doorways to hope. Whether you're in ministry, preparing for ministry, or simply seeking a richer imagination for Christian leadership, this conversation offers wisdom, honesty, and grace. Let's get into John's conversation with Matt Erickson.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Well, Matt, I am so excited to have you here. I have to tell you that your book, The Pastor is Gardener, A Renewed Vision for Ministry, is just fantastic. I enjoyed reading it immensely. And I think I think it's going to be a real gift to the pastors, but also a gift to the church as well. So thank you for writing this book.

SPEAKER_03 1:58

Thank you so much, John. It's a huge privilege to be with you today on the podcast, and I'm thankful for your encouragement with it as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

I'm eager to have this conversation. I'm grateful for the for your ministry at Eastbrook in Milwaukee. You feel like a neighbor just down the road from us. So it's it's fun to have this conversation. Let's just dive into this. Um, for whom did you write this book and and what do you hope for as a result of this book?

SPEAKER_03 2:24

Yeah, I wrote this book for pastors and anybody who's in ministry, whether that's inside the church or outside the church, um, as well as I think of those who are preparing for ministry, whether they're students or even professors who may be working alongside of undergrads or seminary students as they're preparing for ministry. So really aimed at that ministry audience, but I've already found in conversations that it's kind of reaching beyond that crowd into a broader audience, because I think there's resonance around the imagery of gardening at this time. My hope is really that it would reinvigorate imagination about what it means to be working with God in the world, specifically in pastoral or broader ministry, just to give people a renewed vision and imagination for what we're doing at a time where I think that's kind of being challenged. Yeah. And we're struggling with what it means to do ministry.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, that's so helpful. And um, again, just so glad you wrote the book. I think it is going to speak to a lot of people. This metaphor of gardening and agrarian life and farming, you know, it runs all the way through. And you quote lots of my uh heroes uh in the faith and others who have um been been wise counselors to me throughout this book. But I am curious, uh, when and how did you first uh begin to really love the land? When did this metaphor of farming and and gardening take root in your own life?

SPEAKER_03 3:56

I grew up in the Mississippi River Valley of Illinois, right on the border with Iowa. And the area where I grew up in was kind of a medium-sized city. And around that was farming fields. Actually, where I grew up is the headquarters of John Deere. So that area was just influenced by agricultural life. Uh, it was sort of all surrounding who we were and what we did. Um, my grandfather was a seed cord salesman. And so that was kind of part of the background of our family. And then gardening was also part of the rhythms of our family life. Uh, my dad picked that up from his parents, and then a lot of growing up, we would either in our own yard or even my dad sometimes had some garden plots at other places we would go to. And so I remember being part of those rhythms as a kid and growing up in that atmosphere. I think when I went to college close to Chicago area, and after that, really more connected to urban life. And so I had kind of distanced myself from my upbringing and some of that agricultural life of Midwestern U.S. But I found that as I was going through ministry and really getting deeper into the gospels, it was almost like that past agricultural background started coming to life again. And it was in a more recent time that that really became invigorated with how I started thinking about ministry. But it's it's definitely the environment in which I grew up. Uh I we were not a farming family. Uh we did garden a lot, but that was just the atmosphere all around where I was living.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

The Mississippi, I've never been to that part of Illinois. I'm I maybe I have. I don't remember a trip there, but the topography of the land is that um that would not be part of the driftless area, but I'm as but maybe it is. Um but I'm assuming nice rolling hills and undulating land. What's it what's it like?

SPEAKER_03 5:58

Uh it's beautiful, in my opinion. It's not, you know, the great Rocky Mountains or uh Appalachians or anything like that. I used to joke with my friends in college who were from other parts of the country, and they would say, Oh, Illinois is so flat. And I always wanted to take him home where I grew up because the river valley has just tons of hills along the river valley. In northern Illinois, a little further north from where I grew up, there's huge hills called the Palisades. But um, yeah, just lots of hills. And then once you get out of the river valley, it certainly does flatten out, which is great. Uh great soil because of the connectivity to the river basin. And uh, but beautiful places. Um, I love to go back there even still.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Yeah, yeah, it's it's beautiful. It'd be a nice place to be uh in warm weather right now. Um where for our listeners, you know, we're we're sub-zero or near zero temperatures right now. So thinking about Green River Valley is a nice thought. Matt, I want to explore your understanding of the overall health of the vocation of pastor in in society. You know, as you think about that role, how how are pastors doing? Um, we can talk about the church a little bit later, but how would you assess the health of the vocation of pastor in today's current climate?

SPEAKER_03 7:16

Aaron Powell It's certainly hard to make a general statement across everything, but I think it's pretty safe to say that pastors and those in ministry were struggling. Uh there's a number of reasons for that, I think. Um, in some ways, we look at the culture in the United States at least, and there's been just a series over the last 10 or 15 years of major fallouts, moral failures in ministry. And so I think we're in a crisis of integrity for the pastoral calling in life that a lot of pastors are struggling with, even if they've been faithful, are seeing that and saying, well, what about me? Or am I doing what I need to be doing right now? I think that's one of the places where there's a pressure. Another thing is the last 10 years, five years have proved to be very intense for navigating things. We have all felt that uh during the time of the pandemic, some of the social um aspects after the pandemic, racial justice questions. And pastors have found themselves in the tension of that space, trying to figure out how do I be a pastor now? And there is a series of uh pastors. This has been tracked by different organizations, uh, pastors resigning from ministry, just saying, I can't handle this anymore, and not able to persevere. And I have a lot of sympathy for pastors who have done that, because I think every pastor has probably sometime over the last five to 10 years said, maybe I should just quit. And so, around all that, then you've got these cultural dynamics like the pandemic that have created such polarization, the political polarization, pastors trying to bring people together to not be too political, and then other people saying, hey, you're not being political enough. That's all going on. And of course, we probably all heard the studies that say that the church in North America is in decline. And it's clear that that's not just the mainline churches anymore, uh, that there's a kind of a contraction of the church in North America. And whether we think that's good because it's bringing people back to the people who are really committed, a remnant or something like that, or not, it definitely creates a challenge for pastors to figure out how do I do what I do now, both my own struggles and then the broader societal struggles. In light of that, you know, your question about the health of pastors and pastoral ministry. I mean, I don't want to say pastors are on life support. I don't think it's that bad, but I just think there's a lot of struggle, confusion, questioning, lack of clarity about the way forward in this time that a lot of pastors are dealing with.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Yeah. And in in so many ways, we need a new model of leadership, which is why I think the book is so helpful. You gently critique some of the prevailing models of leadership that are out there. I wonder if you could speak to that.

SPEAKER_03 10:19

Yeah, I, you know, some of this comes out of my own story, but I have seen how as pastors, we are often searching for the latest model of doing ministry. And part of my book is even a little bit of a pushback against just a model, but really looking for a metaphor, uh, an image to guide us to live into. I've been in settings where we've seen ministry become pretty therapeutic, uh, whether it's in chaplaincy roles, or I've been in settings in churches where sometimes it becomes corporatized. Um, I've been in places where it's kind of a success-driven CEO model in different ways. And I just want to, in this book, try to bring us back to biblical metaphors and imagery for how we think about ministry so that we don't simply take what we see in the world around us, but we enter into the story of scripture and the imagery of scripture to really help us have, again, a renewed imagination. I just think the imagination is so powerful and metaphor is what feeds our imagination. And um I don't want us just to take on what we have been told this is what it means to be a successful pastor. I want us to get back deeper into the scripture and also some of the time-tested approaches and ways of thinking about being a pastor that we see in the history of the church, I think so important for us to get a hold of.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Matt, before I move into the next question, I want for our listeners, for you to, if you can't, articulate what it's like to lead a church and to experience some of these other models. And what does it do to your soul when you don't feel like you're measuring up or you're not quite living up to the expectation of whatever whatever this model would have you live up to? I wonder if you could just for a minute, take us into that as a leader of the church. How does that impact you personally, spiritually, trying to be faithful and yet finding yourself and in in many ways your church is very successful, but I imagine you find yourself against these impossible benchmarks, feeling like you're you're falling short.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

I think every pastor, ministry leader, probably any leader who's out there, any of us, you know, there's a an image that can be held in front of us. Success means blank, fill it in. Um, and so I've operated out of um, I've been a church planter. So success means if you're a church planter, in this timeline, you will achieve this size and this level of conversions or baptisms or impact in your community. I've been on staff at uh smaller churches. And so even in that, you can feel the inadequacy compared to those prevailing models that are placed out there. That real success means you've done this, that, or the other thing. Your church is of this size or you've crossed this threshold. And there's so many different things. I've been at really larger churches, and you're very specialized in your ministry and things like that. I just think what it can do to us is it can erode our sense of our confidence in God, in what He's called us to, um, to deal with that sense of inadequacy in our lives, to feel like in the middle of the night we wake up praying. I've had these times where you say, Lord, I just want to see this thing happen. And we realize we don't have a lot of control over some of those things. Um, I think it can lead us into some dark places of of either maybe cynicism about the church. I have some friends who have just become utterly cynical as pastors about what the church is about and it's just a business. I'm just supposed to do this. And then other times I could I think it can lead us into um deep trenches of depression as pastors. We don't feel good enough. And I think part of that is really kind of coming out of, you know, the models or the images that we're living into about what a pastor is supposed to be. I have found this one to be very freeing in this area. And I know we're gonna talk about some themes of the book related to that, but I think as pastors, we have to look in the face sometimes that the ways we're approaching what we're doing is feeding the kind of erosion of our own souls at the same time. And that's just it's a devastating place to be in. I've been there.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing. I want our listeners to hear that because it is, it is very real. And I think the struggles are real real. And sometimes we as parishioners or congregants put unreasonable expectations and standards on our on our pastors as well. So thank you for diving into that a little bit. This gardening agrarian life uh metaphor that you develop, which is so important. You know, one of the things I appreciated about the book is there are so many scriptural references to the agrarian life. And um, your book is just, you know, they're woven into your book beautifully. Scripture is and other external sources about spiritual leadership, uh Christian leadership, and the agrarian life. I wonder if you have a favorite passage or two that really has been a guide for you. I know that's a tough question to ask because it's like, you know, asking somebody to name their favorite child or something. But but I wonder if if there's one or two that that you'd like to reference as we dive into some of the content of your book that have just been for you a real um provided deep roots uh in this journey of thinking about leadership in a different way.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

Certainly. The one that became a doorway for me into this whole project is 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 6, where Paul is writing to the church in Corinth, and it's at a time where they're debating, you know, is Paul a good enough apostle and comparing him to other super apostles in that in that book, that letter. And Paul says, I planted, Apollos watered, but God is the one who gives the growth. That passage became a liberating passage for me. Um, it's often used in the context of church planting. That's really where I first gave attention to that many, many years ago as a church planter. But more recently, it became a doorway into a way of thinking about ministry that um helped me understand. I didn't have to do everything. I didn't have control over everything, and that ultimately the greatest gift is that God is the one who's at work in and through all of these things at the same time. So that passage is really key for me. Um, going all the way back to Genesis 2 is really important for me, thinking of the calling of humanity as having dominion. This is Genesis 1, but in Genesis 2 talks about man was placed in the garden and called by God to be a caretaker to cultivate on behalf of God. So that becomes a window or another doorway, I guess I should say, into how we think about ministry in light of that creation calling of cultivation of the earth. And then the other one is really significant for me is um at the end of uh the gospel of John, where Jesus is mistaken for a gardener by Mary after the resurrection. And what might that mean? I just have become intensely curious about parts of the Bible. What might it mean that Jesus was mistaken for a gardener? And believing that John as a writer, I mean, all scripture is like this. It's it's God breathed and the artistry that's there. John is so very intentional in the way that he writes. It's not, I don't think, a passing comment that he's saying Jesus is mistaken for a gardener. I think it's actually another doorway into the great redemptive gardening work that Jesus is doing in the world and inviting us as the church into both uh in the spiritual world and the and making disciples, but also in the creation around us. So there's a lot there, John, but those are some of the passages that have really been powerful for me in this journey.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Yeah, thank you. And and I hope that wets the appetite of of our listeners and viewers. Um, there's so much in scripture that um draws on these rich metaphors. Placemaking is also a theme that runs deeply through this book. Um so fans of Wendell Berry and others will will uh appreciate Wendell shows up a lot um in your book. He's a big conversation partner for me in this book. Yes, and rightfully so. Um but you also do one of the best jobs of deciphering Charles Taylor that I have ever experienced. And I actually did read A Secular Age. Everybody refers to it. And I was in a reading group that actually read this tome of a book. Uh I wouldn't have read it on my own. I needed the the support of a whole community to get through it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 19:21

It's a tough book to get through. Uh kudos to you for doing it.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

Well, it was it was fun. We did it here at at Upper House. But but I wonder if you could drawing on uh whoever you want to draw on, but also maybe you know deciphering Taylor for us. Why is placemaking or locating ourselves in a particular place? And soil and land is about a particular place. So there's the connection to your work. But why is locating ourselves in a particular place so important to ecclesial leadership?

SPEAKER_03 19:56

We can make a lot of assumptions in pastoral leadership that everything is the same everywhere. And I don't think that's true. Context is extraordinarily important. We understand that usually when we think about historical context, how ministry may look different in different seasons of the history of the world. But I think we have, in the American post-industrial approach to thinking about life, we have forgotten the uniqueness of place many times. And so part of what I'm doing in the book is exploring the environment, how the environment of the North American world around, and that's where I do a lot with Taylor and the secular age, and then also the soil of the particular places, the geography of where we are, and also the unique, um, in terms of a pastor's role, the unique context of a congregation or denominational tradition. All of those things I think we really have to give time and attention to. I'm a pastor in urban Milwaukee. Uh, I'm in a church that has been here for more than 40 years. It's part of a specific family of churches. It's the only one of those that's in the city of Milwaukee. Um, we're at a part of the city that's a junction of the city meeting first ring suburbs. All of those things are extraordinarily important. Milwaukee's one of the most segregated cities in the United States. That's important for how I think about doing ministry. And what's helpful for Taylor when we think about the environment, and I think Taylor, there's things that are amazing about him, and there are limitations of what he does, but he helps us understand that sort of broader environmental, um, ideological, philosophical framework in which we exist without even thinking about it. His work on the secular age is tremendous in helping us understand those tensions that we live in this disenchanted age. And so even talking about God will often make us feel out of sorts or not connected. How do we touch upon that haunting? Reality that there's this sense of longing for the divine, and yet we've written that off in the age in which we live. So Taylor's helpful for that. Andrew Root, who is a pastoral theologian who's written a lot about these things, has a great series about ministry in the secular age, a series of books that kind of grapple with what Taylor might mean for the way that we do ministry. So he's a great conversation partner around this. But I do think we have to be aware of that kind of water in which we swim. I think that's where Taylor is helpful for us. Jamie Smith's accessible summary of what Taylor's getting at in his book is really helpful in this work as well. But I think if we don't pay attention to that, we just make assumptions and sometimes try to make simplistic connections that don't really delve deep into the context in which we find ourselves. Taylor's one way to get at that. And I think there's probably other philosophers and thinkers who help us become aware of the philosophical and social dynamics that are just taken for granted in our day and age. And I do think it's important for pastors to be thoughtful, for those in ministry to be thoughtful, to be exegeting our culture in our day as much as we're exegeting scripture.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Do you think agrarian the agrarian metaphor, uh land, soil, gardening, in some ways is that metaphor powerful? Not because not only because it's it's a model of a different kind of leadership, but because it it offers the capacity to re-enchant our society. I mean, people still are drawn to nature. They find the transcendent in nature. Um I'm interested in your thoughts on on the metaphor for re-enchanting the larger community or society that has lost, as a natural instinct, an understanding of the divine or transcendent present in everyday life.

SPEAKER_03 23:54

So many people, like you said, are drawn to nature. And I think it is because of that longing for transcendence. And gardening is a very accessible form of that. Whether you have succulents in your apartment, or whether you have a square foot garden in an urban setting, or whether you have a larger plot of land where you're doing a little bit larger scale gardening or micro farming, all of that connects us into the beauty of nature and the mystery of what we cannot control. And even if we can scientifically understand everything that's going on, there's still something just profoundly wonderful, transcendent, mysterious about putting a seed or a seedling into the ground and watching it over the course of several months suddenly creates tomatoes or a tree that grows from a very small size to something that can be much bigger. How is it that all that can be packed into a seed? It's just an astounding thing. So I think it does connect us with the fact that we're part of something bigger. And even people who are drawn to nature in a totally non-religious sense also, you'll hear them talking today almost in religious language about these things. And so I do think gardening is a place where that's almost more accessible to us in a very uh day-to-day way, and to recognize that as disenchanted as we may feel, there's still enchantment all around us.

SPEAKER_00 25:25

Yeah. We'll be back to our conversation with Matt Erickson in just a moment. If this imagery of pastoring is gardening, of working the soil of a particular place with patience, humility, and hope is resonating with you, I want to invite you to go deeper. Matt's new book, The Pastor is Gardener, a renewed vision for ministry, is filled with biblical reflection, theological insight, and very honest engagement with the pressures pastors face today. Now, let's return to our conversation and pick up where Matt shares about his own season of hitting the wall and how this gardening metaphor became a pathway into renewed hope.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

I wonder, Matt, if you could speak to the practices and disciplines of a pastor gardener, a pastor or church leader who views their model or their framework of leadership through the lens of gardening. What does it look like? What are some of the practices and disciplines you've cultivated in your own life?

SPEAKER_03 26:26

Yeah. One of the pictures that's helpful for me, John, when I think about all this is just the image of a plant, what's above the ground and what's below the ground. When we think about ministry, and I'll talk maybe a little bit more specifically about pastoral ministry, although I think it can apply to other uh roles of ministry and even leadership, there's the there's the aspects of what we do that are visible. That's like the plant above the ground, the stem and the shoots and the leaves and the fruits that are there. Um, so for a pastor or somebody in ministry, we do a lot of work in three areas that I at least identify in the book, related to the word of God, scripture related to prayer and related to worship, or even with the sacraments in that space. So when we're working with the word in that visible aspect of what we do, you know, we're preaching. This is super important. We want to be good handlers of the word, or even if it's leading a Bible study or using scripture to provide counsel to someone one-to-one, we need to do those things well. That's an important aspect of our practice, the life of prayer. We pray in public gatherings, we pray with people one-to-one. Some settings, people pray after services with folks. That's an aspect of the ministry that we do. And then the life of worship, you know, we're leading in worship or we're leading people into an encounter with God in some way, even if it's a worship night uh like hosted at Upper House or something that you have with some of the student organizations. Those are the visible things that are there. And we do want to do those things fruitfully. But sometimes the discussion ends there. And where I want to put the attention on in the conversation about those visible acts, the above-ground work of ministry, is that there's also the invisible, below ground aspects of what we're doing. And so along those three areas, as pastors or people in ministry, we also need to receive the word ourselves. And so I think a vital practice is our own taking in of scripture, reading it on a regular basis, meditating on it, um, taking Lexio Divina to let it sink into our lives, not just being proclaimers, but being receivers and hearers of the word ourselves. Uh, that life of prayer, that we also cultivate our own life of prayer, it should be probably hidden. We're not just here to do sort of uh spiritual acrobatics in prayer in front of people. We want to draw near to God ourselves, to be still and to know that He's God, to read the Psalms regularly is the prayer book of the Bible. And then also our own life of worship and partaking of the sacraments, that we are people who are shaped on the inside by these realities of the word, prayer, and worship. And so I think those practices under the ground, the hidden aspect, some of the integrity crisis that's happening in ministry right now is I think because so much attention is on what's above ground to the detriment of what's hidden below the ground. And we need to understand those things fit together and have to flow together. That's where I spend a lot of time in certain parts of the book. Um, there's other aspects of theological formation and aspects that I think are important. But if I had to boil it down to the practices of ministry, it'd be that visible, invisible, above ground, below ground handling of word, prayer, and worship.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

That's so helpful. You know, a lot of us, not just in pastoral ministry, but in serving in lots of different disciplines and vocational paths, I think feel the deleterious, the sinister effects of social media and AI and the way that that kind of eats away at our soul as well. I know through a common friend, Jim Kirk, uh, who I read the book with, I was in a book discussion of Paul Kingsnorth's book, Against the Machine, which is pretty chilling in its diagnosis of um the technological world and where it's especially generative AI is going. You know, the your book, your project, in some ways uh pushes back against some of those forces, not in a way that that uh declares they're wrong, but puts roots down in a different kind of way that I think gives us resilience against some of these forces. I wonder if you could speak to the challenges that you face as a pastor up against uh technology, efficiency, corporatism, AI, all of these things that are coming at us at light speed. How did this work? Thinking about pastor as gardener, how does this work help you to thrive even amidst those countervailing forces?

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Yeah, one thing I'm I'm not trying to do is not face into those things. Um Kings North's work is incredibly helpful and a little scary. Um, if we look at it, he's a great voice to listen to. Um, what I think is helpful about the agrarian imagery in this time is that so much of our culture is predicated on a need for control. And we want to control how things are done. We want to control outcomes. And that is a myth. We will never be in control. And obviously, I think one of the ethical debates about AI is how much are we in control versus how much is it beginning to control us and some of what that may mean. But the agrarian imagery puts us into that firm reality that there are certain things we have influence over, and there are other things that are just entirely outside of our control. This is part of what became liberating to me. I said this before: the idea that, yeah, there are things I can do in the context, like a good gardener working with soil, uh, remediating soil, or being aware of is there enough water that I can bring to these plants or things like that. I want to do what I do well, but there are other aspects that I just have absolutely no control over. I can't control how much sunlight's gonna come. I can't control how much rain is gonna come. I can't control exactly when the fruit is gonna emerge from um from that tomato plant or from the beets being fully formed under the ground. I have to wait with patience. I have to have an appropriate humility. And I do think um Hartmut Rosa talks about the uncontrollability of the world, right? So there's this feeling that we want to control, but the reality is uh that's that's not true. And so we have to accept our limitations. And I think that's one of the places where we're struggling today. And even social media can sometimes make us feel like we should be capable to be omniscient and have unlimited influence. And that's just not a reality. And uh the gardening imagery, again, I think kind of helps us come to terms with our limitations, our humanity, to live as human beings, incarnate in a world that is organic. So many of Jesus' images uh and metaphors that he tells stories about in the parables are so organic. Yes, he he didn't comment of post-industrial time. That also may be a divine gift to us to bring us back into connectivity with the world. It helps with the enchantment side. And I also think it chastens us in an appropriate way as human beings, and in ministry and in leadership wherever we find ourselves. Uh, we need to engage with the real world in which we live, but we can do it out of a posture of humility as we do those things.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

Yeah. And you speak pretty openly in the book about your own crisis of limitation, hitting, hitting a wall or kind of a bleak winner. I I don't know what exact language you use. I can't remember, but it's and it was not too long ago. I wonder if you could speak to that a little bit. You know, what was that like? And and I imagine in some ways this you wrote this book for yourself, as we often do when we work on these kinds of things, because you're finding your yourself in a in a tough spot and you needed a different framework for thinking about leadership. And this gardening framework was one that helped. But I wonder if you could just speak to the own your own crisis of limitation.

SPEAKER_03 34:57

Absolutely. I'm happy to do that. This book was a book that I wrote to myself originally. It was coming out of my own grappling with a way forward. I had walked along a dear friend who went through a major ministry collapse through some very bad decisions that he made. And it really brought into question for me some of the way that I was approaching ministry at that time. And then a little bit after that, we went into the pandemic. And I'm sure most pastors can relate to me saying I felt like I was in a no-win situation. You know, everybody says, come on. Stephen Covey says, get a win-win. And I was like, I feel like I'm in a no-win. No matter what you do about public gathering or masks, it's just not going to make everybody happy. And that was way sharper than it ever had been. And then as a church that is multi-ethnic, multiracial, immediately plunged into the challenges of racial justice that are always there, but were brought to a fever pitch around that season of time, George Floyd, and so many other things. And I just felt like I was going into a free fall. Um, and I couldn't get a handhold. I was like falling down a chasm without knowing how to, you know, get a hold of something. And it was in that time that I just kind of went into a journey of reapproaching scripture, trying to figure out what it meant to be in ministry. I started reading different books, started returning to books that I had read before, but I felt like I needed to hear what they had to say again, um, and recovered my footing around these images of agrarian imagery in Scripture. Again, it helped me realize I was doing something that I didn't have control over, but I could plant and minister faithfully and I could entrust the results to God. I knew there were aspects of that that related to who I was that I needed to pay attention to. And I also realized there was kind of a long-term perspective that gardening and and farming helped me come to terms with. I didn't have to solve it next week. I didn't have to get everything figured out by next year. I could actually be planting and cultivating for the next generation that I would never see. And that became freeing for me as well. Um, I could be faithful, I could do hard work, I could try to be fruitful and effective, uh, but I knew some of this I had to let go of the way I was thinking about ministry at that time.

SPEAKER_01 37:33

Yeah. Thank you, Matt. Thanks for sharing that. You know, a lot of us think about our lives in the context of seasons. I think that can be helpful no matter where we work and where we serve, whether it's family or the trades or university life or medicine. You know, there are seasons and cycles of life. And sometimes those happen over a lifetime, those cycles are seasons, and sometimes they happen within a chronological year. And you do a lot of work around uh thinking about life in seasons and uh vocation in seasons, and you draw on lots of really great work, lots of leaders who have thought hard about this from many disciplines. I wonder if you could speak about the seasons of life and how we might encounter them and move through them, make peace with them and even flourish in those seasons, even the seasons that are harder.

SPEAKER_03 38:31

Yeah, I came to spend a lot of time around this because of my own journey. So thinking over the course of our lives in a linear way, Fowler talks about stages of faith. Bobby Clinton and The Making of a Leader talks about different seasons and um the critical journey by Janet Hagberg and Robert Gullick. Like that book was very formative for me at a time when I was going through my own crisis. If people are familiar with that book, I felt like I was stuck at the wall for about three years. And I was trying to figure out what was happening in my journey. And I think especially just having some language to talk about the stages over the course of our life can help us, like you said, John, I mean, to come to terms and to make peace with those things. I had a spiritual director in that time of crisis say to me, you cannot get yourself through the wall. This wall period in the critical journey is this season where you're kind of stuck. You feel like things you believed don't make sense in the same way that they used to. You don't know how to get to the other side into a season of fruitfulness. You feel like everything's like coming apart. And this person just said, you can't, you can't get yourself through that. God has to bring you through that. And I'm a person who has a tendency to work harder and harder and harder to make something happen sometimes. And that was incredibly humbling for me to just let that go. So thinking of letting God carry me into that next season and then coming to a place of, I don't know if I would say contentment, but I would definitely say coming to a place of acceptance that I was in this one season and God was going to bring me into the next one. And instead of trying to control that to make it happen, to let God be the one leading me on that journey was incredibly helpful. So that kind of linear view was extraordinarily helpful. But then also thinking through the year by year, the way we experience seasons. You already mentioned you're in Madison, I'm in Milwaukee, it's been sub-zero when we're recording this. We cannot wait here for spring to come, but we're we're in the winter. So you got to kind of relax into the winter in some way. There are things that happen in our life in the course of a year that I think also are like those seasons we experience in the natural world, times of spring, abundance and things bursting forth, times of summer, things in the fullness of life, things in a season of a fall or autumn where things are contracting and maybe some things are dying. And even a season of winter where we may find ourselves in a time of it feels like nothing's happening. But again, there are things happening underground in the in the winter time. And being able to come to terms with that, the church or liturgical calendar has become very helpful for me to walk through the life of Christ and the life of the church. And then I think also recognizing that in our spiritual life as well as in our ministry life, those seasons that can happen even in a year are worth paying attention to. Again, not to ignore it, not to push it aside and just plow through things, which was sometimes my tendency, instead to come to a place of peace and acceptance about where we find ourselves. There's a few frameworks that I try to work with in the book that explore that. And I hope I have more time to even dig into that because I think I've found for myself and for others a lot of meaning and fruit there in the way we think about ministry.

SPEAKER_01 42:11

Yeah. And also organizations. I think there's a way that season thinking about seasons and cycles can help you locate your organization or your church in a particular time or cycle of life. What have you learned about organizational life and seasonal life?

SPEAKER_03 42:29

Yeah, the questions that can rise up around those seasons and to think through our organizations in that way. Is there something like spring that's thawing or greening? Are we seeing growth start to happen in a specific way? How do we give attention to that? Are we finding ourselves in a summer of this, the season of abundance to enjoy that, but also know that it won't go on forever? Uh, the fall where there might be contracting of some things, are there sometimes things in our organizations, our churches, our ministries that need to die? It's okay to pay attention to those things. And even do we find ourselves in a winter organizationally where it seems like nothing is happening? There may be environmental factors for that around us. Um, are there things where, in terms of our staffing, we may find it just feels like things have plateaued or something? I think being able to ask those kind of questions are helpful. For me, that came in in my current setting. I followed a founding pastor who'd been here for 30 years. So it's very clearly a change happening in the church's life. And initially, it felt that although the transition actually went really, really well between us, it still felt like there was a season where just so much adjustment happening, and there ended up having to be some things that that died off and almost like an S curve kind of movement, where then there was some new momentum, a spring started to come. And even now I've been here uh at Eastbrook for coming up on 16 years. I'm asking those same questions. What do I need to pay attention to in sort of the life of our church? And I think that's applicable to those who are leading organizations even outside of religious settings. It's it's very relevant. There's so much to explore there that uh we could probably spend the a whole podcast just on that.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Yeah, I really appreciated that part of the book where you you help the reader locate himself, herself, but also organizationally to think about the particular seasons that organizations go through and churches go through. That was very, very helpful. You you end your book with a chapter on hope, and you call hope the defining virtue of the it's the defining virtue of the pastor gardener. I wonder if you could expound on why hope is so important. Why do you see it as the defining virtue?

SPEAKER_03 44:52

Well, I think the very nature of agrarian imagery is very much hope-related. When you plant, you are hoping something's gonna grow. And so the very imagery itself is laden with hope. You would not plant if you didn't think something was going to come, even though you may not see any activity happening for a season of time. I think for us as Christians, hope is an extraordinarily important virtue. We talk about faith, hope, and love. And I think a lot of attention is sometimes given either to faith, you know, what's the role of faith in our lives, and also the high priority of love of love. The greatest of these is love, Paul says. But hope right now, I think we're in a crisis of hope. We're in a crisis of hope in our national conversation. We're in a crisis of hope about the state of the church in North America. And um, several times throughout the book, I returned to a little book called The Man Who Planted Trees. It's a bit of a parable of hope in my mind, related to the fact uh this man who plants trees over the course of decades of his life, he's an unknown figure, unknown figure, and eventually changes the geography and the terrain of the place where he lives in France in this little book, creating a huge forest, creating a lush and lavish, well-watered land that draws people to it. And they never know his name, but it's because he's planted for the future and for generations to come. And I really think in this season, in our national conversation, in this season in the church conversation, and even some of the crises that are there for pastors and for ministry leaders, we have to be a people of hope. We're resurrection people. And because Jesus died, we look at the truth of things that are not the way they should be. We look at the truth of the death that can be around us and sometimes touching us and in us. And yet we also cling to the hope. Uh, Jurgen Moltman, who's one of those great theologians of hope, says that we we have our vision on the future, the eschaton that's coming, and then we live into the present. We bring that future into the present. And I think Jesus, as the gardener, calls us as his people to live with that kind of gardening vision, which is ultimately a vision of hope. Even though we may not move forward by sight, we're going to move forward with hope, trusting that God is going to do something as we do these things. So for me, this book has ended up becoming really a journey of hope at a time that I started in crisis. And uh it's it's what I hold on to in the midst of everything that's going on in my own setting, in my own life and in the world around us.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

That's beautiful. I wonder if you could continue that and give us an image uh through hope of what the church can be, what you long for it to be in this challenging season that we find ourselves in. Just cast a vision for the church in uh let's just say North America. Uh, what can the church be for the world in these times?

SPEAKER_03 48:02

The church of the future, the church of the future living in the now in North America is a community that I believe lives into the Revelation 7 picture of the church where every tribe, every language, every people are gathered together around the throne of God and before the Lamb, saying together, salvation belongs to our God. It's a community of difference that creates space for each other with their eyes on the Savior, and then live into the present moment in a way that is mystifying and attractive at the same time to the world around us. At a time when we are so polarized, I believe the church of the future lived now, is a community that knows how to have conversations in a world that doesn't know how to talk. It's a community that listens, in a world that is ready to say all sorts of things, but sometimes struggles to listen. It's a community that, as Paul says in Galatians 6, bears one another's burdens, enters into each other's journey, and thereby fulfills the law of Christ. It's a church that is broken and shattered because we follow a broken and shattered Messiah. But it's a church that is filled with resurrection power and bears witness to that in a world that is marked by so much death and so much confusion. It's a it's a church that's a beautiful and broken community longing for the future, but living as witnesses now in the present and infiltrating every aspect of the society and the world for the glory of God. I'm starting to preach, probably, John.

SPEAKER_01 49:46

Yeah, no, oh no. I I love it. And I know a lot of us are, you know, there are people listening that are skeptical, cynical, and um, but we need the church to be strong and and it can be. And I am so grateful for the vision you bring uh to the church and to pastoral leadership, pastors around the world to lead in a way that is sustaining and is faithful. And um so I'm just grateful and I love that vision. Um, it gets me excited, it it gets my heart pumping. And so I I am really grateful. I and I'm glad you're gonna be here in a number of weeks. Um can't wait. We'll put details in the show notes. This is a little bit of a teaser to to come and experience uh and meet Matt firsthand. We're gonna do a book launch uh for Matt. I think it's a noon event. Um we'll have all that information out. Uh I can't remember the date. Do you remember the date, Matt? I think it's March 25th, if I remember correctly. March 25th. Okay. So two months. Uh so, anyways, Matt, I'm so excited for how God's going to use this book in the world. Thank you for your leadership at Eastbrook. Thank you for being a leader in the national conversation about the health of the church. And I'm glad you're you're just down the road and we get to see one another from time to time. And I'm grateful for your time today. Before I let you go, though, I want to ask you one last question. What's coming next in your pastoral leadership? Do you have another book you're working on? Just love to hear. I know you got lots of exciting challenges there in Milwaukee. What has you busy these days in your leadership at Eastbrook or beyond?

SPEAKER_03 51:22

Well, first before I say that, thanks for your kind words and also thank you for you and all that's happening with the Brown Foundation and Upper House and the way that you and so many who you're connected to there are doing wonderful work for the kingdom. I'm just really grateful for you all and have benefited from your, from your efforts. So thank you for that. And I'm looking forward to being with you soon.

SPEAKER_01 51:45

Good.

SPEAKER_03 51:46

Um, you know, things that are next for me, you know, in our local church, we have things we're trying to think through uh based on, you know, the age of our church. I don't mean in terms of the attendees, but really a church that's almost coming on 50 years of existing. So we're trying to ask questions about those stages of life and thinking through all the way down to the practicalities of our space and the campus that we are on here in Milwaukee. That's one thing that's that's ahead for us, just asking deep questions about how to be part of God's mission in the world here in the city and around the world. I have a couple books that I'm working on. We'll see if they ever see the light of day. One is to take some of the work in the pastor as gardener and hopefully turn it into a shorter book that's more broad in its focus, more around spirituality, uh, Christian spirituality connected to some of the agricultural and agrarian imagery. I'm hoping we'll see what that comes out with. And another book that I'm I'm working on, a shorter project uh that I don't have contracts for any of these things, but related to to despair and how do we be hopeful in the midst of an age of despair. We'll see what comes with all that. We'll see.

SPEAKER_01 52:55

Yeah. Great. Matt, thank you so much for spending time with us. We look forward to seeing you here in a few months and just grateful for the time and for your work and for your ministry. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 53:06

Thank you so much, John. Great to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 53:12

Well, that's our conversation with Matt Erickson. We hope it gave you a model of leadership rooted in hope in today's complicated church culture, and a different imagination for ministry, one that looks more like a gardener tending the soil than a leader trying to control every outcome. We talked about the crisis of pastoral health, the importance of place and context, the quiet underground work of word, prayer, and worship, and the way seasons, including seasons of limitation and hitting the wall, are not signs of failure but invitations to deeper dependence on God. We also heard Matt's hopeful vision of the church as a beautiful broken resurrection people, bearing one another's burdens and bearing witness to Christ in a polarized world. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.