Welcome to the Pivot Podcast, brought to you by Luther Seminary's Faith+Lead!

Join Dr. Dee Stokes and Dr. Dwight Zscheile as they explore the ever-changing Church landscape. In this episode, they are joined by special guest Pastor Carl Johnson, a passionate church planter, innovative ministry entrepreneur, and seasoned trainer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Carl, the visionary founder of Storehouse Grocers, is on a mission to address both the spiritual and practical needs of his community.

Tune in as we dive into the dynamic world of church structures. Discover why the traditional one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective and explore the benefits of a mixed ecology model for your community.

Stay tuned for more episodes unraveling the complexities of this cultural shift.

You're in the right place if you're a pastor, lay leader, or simply curious about how faith communities adapt in changing times. Let's embark on this journey together!

Dee Stokes: As faith leaders, we often wonder how we can be most connected to our communities. Have you ever felt that way that you're actually disconnected from your neighbors? Or maybe you've tried a number of different things to connect with your neighbors, and maybe they failed? If this is you, then you are definitely in the right place today. By the end of this episode today, we'll share with you why the "one size fits all" approach to church is breaking down. We will discuss how to be missional right where you live, work, and play. God's church needs many different expressions to participate in God's mission today. Hello again everyone. I'm Dr. Dee Stokes.

Dwight Zscheile: And I'm Dr. Dwight Zscheile. Welcome to the Pivot podcast from Luther Seminary's Faith +Lead. If you're new here, this is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. In today's episode, we're excited to have with us Pastor Carl Johnson. Carl is a church planter, a ministry entrepreneur, and a trainer based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He's the founder of Storehouse Grocers. You know, many of us come out of denominational traditions that tend to have a very prescribed way of doing church or being church. Historically, over the past few centuries, a one size or one shape fits all approach was really appealing to many church leaders and attendees. But as our current culture shift has emerged, it's becoming more and more clear that this one size or one shape fits all approach no longer connects with the majority of people in our neighborhoods. We need a mixed ecology of inherited and innovative forms of church and ministry to connect with people in today's world. So if you're a pastor, a lay leader, a regional or denominational leader, and you're wondering why your church is disconnected from the local community and would love for this to change, then you're in the right place. So let's dive in.

Dee Stokes: So, Pastor Carl, welcome. Thank you for being with us today. I want to ask you a question. Um, tell us how you started your ministry. Just give us a little backdrop first.

Carl Johnson: Oh, yeah. So I started Faith city, started as a parachute plant. And so for some of you guys that don't know, parachute plant are people that go into a neighborhood, no denominational or, uh, help. Uh, no launch team help. No local church help. Just some crazy people who think they can go where God is already working and meet some people and open up this community of church. And so our community started in that, in that radical fashion of meeting people who live in Dayton's Bluff and wanted to really invest in not only in their community, their neighborhood, but see what God can do with them in the midst of that. And so our ministry started. With a meal, just having a series of meals with folks. Some would have called it dinner church, some would call them community meals. But we started just by eating with folks and getting to know them and just inviting them into multiple spaces at multiple times. And that's how our ministry started.

Dwight Zscheile: So tell us a little bit more about kind of your background, how you got to that point. And were you part of traditional churches before you did this, or tell us a little more your story?

Carl Johnson: Yeah. So I am an adult conversion, if anybody can understand what that means. I didn't come to know Christ until I was 29 years old, and I'm only 30 now, if you're looking at it.

Dee Stokes: Thou shalt not lie.

Carl Johnson: At 29 I came through a ministry called Teen Challenge. And Teen Challenge was doing something very unique in the region that I was doing. They were starting a lot of teen challenges, uh, overseas, locally. And then they said we want to start a Bible college. And so I was like, oh, I want to go to Bible college. And they were like, hey, there's one caveat. You got to raise money in order to come to Bible college. We want you to graduate with no debt. And so I've never raised money before. I had just came through Teen Challenge. I was somebody off the street. I was addicted to drugs, alcohol. I was a hustler. I didn't know what raising money meant. I didn't know what, like the support group, what that meant. And I only knew I had one uncle that was a pastor. So I just wrote him a letter. That's all I knew to do. And then the next thing I know, uh, I'm on this fundraising journey in my life, uh, getting supporters and understanding like what a newsletter is and and taking pictures out in the middle of the country so people could see me as this, as this missionary going to college and sharing that sharing that dream. And I went to it was called Emerging Leaders College. And during that time I just got a vision for the city. I was out in the middle of nowhere in the country, of course. And so the biggest thing that we went to was Walmart during the week. And, uh, and there was two things that we love going to Zaxby's and Walmart. And so those are the two biggest things. But we did mission trips every semester. We spend two weeks out on the road going to different teen challenges and visiting different cities. So we went all the way up the east. Uh, so like from New Jersey, Connecticut, all the way down to Florida. And then we would go all the way west to Oklahoma. And I just remember, I remember there was one semester I got chosen to be the preacher at all of those, those centers. So we visited 22 centers within that semester. And I just remember, like, just the call. Of just like preaching in my life and just seeing that happen. And so Teen Challenge has some Pentecostal roots. And so we did a lot of like we had a lot of services where the pinpoint of ministry for us. And so we went into women's centers, men's centers, youth centers. So we were hitting the whole gambit and I just remember they asked us to write a paper on on large, on ministry in large cities. And this is like where I got the initial call and that's where I heard about church planting. And that's where I heard C. Peter Wagner's quote, "the greatest evangelistic tool under heaven to reach the lost is to plant churches." And that bug bit me, and I think it turned into a virus. And it has not quit since 2013. And so I left Bible college and I went to Saint Louis, Missouri for the longest six months of my life and joined the church plant and worked for Joyce Meyer's ministry and in the midst of that was helping her and her organization start a men's home called the Genesis Men's Program. I was part of a commercial back then, so a lot of people knew me in the Midwest from that commercial. Then I went to an established. Then after that, I was like, I don't want to do church planting ever again. I'm done. Carl's done with church planting after Saint Louis. I mean Saint Louis was the hardest urban center that I've been in in my life. It was probably the most difficult , like homelessness and and like the barriers and the social traps that we all face in that and that kind of ecological footprint. Like you couldn't feed people openly every time we did a public feed, sorry to use that, but when we would feed the homeless, the police would come and shut us down. It was just like an adverse situation of being to try to minister to folks, I mean, and also love the the opportunity to work in coffee shops in Central West End in Saint Louis and ride my bike around and have a messenger bag and do all those kind of young church planting things. And then back then church planting was sexy and cool and everybody wanted to do it. And I just remember. I just remember, like knowing the ins and outs of, like, waking up at 6:00 in the morning and unloading a trailer and setting up a whole church every single Sunday. And then I remember it took me it was like four months in and and I finally was like, I finally was in the church service. And it was like this lady, uh, she had been accosted, she had been raped, she had been trapped. And she was in her apartment, and she was in church praying loud and singing. And she said, this is the first place she came out of her apartment to be in public in like, a year and a half. And I was like, well, what's wrong with me? Why don't I just worship God? If this person next to me is worshiping loud? And that was like a clicked in me with all the hard work and all the burden. And I was like, this is why I worship God. For someone that's sitting next to me who's been trapped in their fears and their doubt and their pain, and they found thi place to release all that to God. And so that like, really like shifted my whole heart and like what church planting was going to be like and I and so I left that church in Saint Louis and moved to the most diverse small town. It's called Lima, Ohio, if anybody's heard of it out there. And so Lima is a is rural, city, suburban and metropolitan. So it's like really interesting to be there. And so I was out there serving the church and we did food pantries, soup kitchen, doing a lot of inner city stuff in a very small town of 40,000 people. And I just remember, like, I could not get rid of this, like, bug that I wanted to plant a church and I wanted to plan it differently. I didn't want it to be the same. I wanted to offer services to people. I wanted to overcome those hindrances, social gaps. I wanted to make the gospel practical, like if somebody came and they were like, hey, I need some toilet paper. I wanted the church to be like, yeah, here, take a roll of toilet paper. Hey, if women need a feminine needs, we wanted to be able to supply that. If people wanted food, we wanted to be able to supply that. We wanted to be able to show people that Jesus just wasn't this far away God. And he just wasn't this person that the pastor was asking you to give your money to. But he was this practical supplier of needs that could bring you closer to him, and you could have a relationship not because you needed it, but because you had to have it. And most of the time I kept hearing people saying, Jesus, Jesus ain't taking care of these bills. Jesus ain't doing this. Jesus ain't doing that. And I was like, well, God, I know you can. I know you can solve those issues. I know you're bigger than our circumstances. So what would church look like if we believed that you're bigger than our circumstances that we go through? And so what if people are poor? So what if people would need to come to that, but they need to come to a place where they could be discipled and that they could be helped and that they could be concerned for. And so that's where Faith City kind of opened up. And that's the thought that me and my wife had. We wanted to end the social trap. Uh, which was food insecurity, something very practical, something very real. We knew that God could overcome that. And then we wanted people to be discipled out of poverty. We didn't want people to be like, hey, I'm coming to this church and I want to still be the same. We want them to be discipled out of that. We wanted them to see Jesus as the center point of delivering them from their circumstances and their situations that they were in on a daily basis. And that is where Faith City became the purpose of Faith City moving into a neighborhood focus was like, if this is going to work, we have to be a church that is totally missional and totally neighborhood.

Dee Stokes: I'm glad you said that, because I know you love that word missional, and I want you to define that for our listeners and viewers and tell us how to be missional.

Carl Johnson: Yeah. So I define missional. It is not mission. And why I'll say that is there's two ways for you to think about missional. And this is the clearest way, instead of giving you like a theological definition or what that means. So missional is, so missional means that I, it means there's two things that happen, missional doesn't mean that you move into a neighborhood, get a job and become a school teacher in an impoverished community and say, me going to work every day, getting paid is missional. That is not missional at all. That may be mission, because mission means that you go in and serve the indigenous community. You have no indigeneity to it, but you are taking care of financially. You are taking care of your needs, and you just serve the people that are around. That's that's a mission. Missional means that you gather a group of people who have a very specific need, or specific circumstances that they may be overcoming. You build a team, and that team goes in and says, hey, we want to start an after school program in our community. And that team takes that call and starts after school program for the kids in their community. That's missional. Missional is not some place that you go alone. It's not someplace that you go privately. It's not someplace that you go without a community of believers. It is a place that you go together, and it's a place that you that you would call that you would be a community of mission missional practitioners. And so, like we always say, there's a difference. And I'm going to talk about this a little bit. There's a difference between a mission, a missionary and a mercenary. And these are the two things that we have to watch out for, because a mercenary is someone that says, I don't need team, I don't need community. I can do this all by myself. All you have to do is help me. Give me your finances. Give me your resources, and I'll do, I'll do whatever I need to do. And the person is like, no, I need other families, other community. I need my neighbors to come be discipled with me. And we need to solve this together. That would be my definition.

Dee Stokes: So how can we get the church to be more missional? Let's say I'm at an inherited church.

Carl Johnson: Yeah.

Dee Stokes: And I really want to be more missional. I mean, I really want to touch my neighbors. I really, um, you know, my neighborhood doesn't look like my church, perhaps.

Carl Johnson: So the first thing I always tell people. What would be the first expression of what your neighborhood would look like that's working in your community? And that first expression that we all could see is an elementary school. If we go to our local elementary school, we can see in our neighborhood, in our community, we'll see every expression of culture, of people, of kids. They're going to be the future of that neighborhood. And so these are your first people that you would see. So if you're going to invest anything, invest in the lowest common denominator that can't give you nothing back. And so if that's people, invest food, invest reading, whatever the school needs, say, hey, I want to come in and adopt you, do that, or I want to come in and serve you, do that, or I want to come in and volunteer whatever that looks like. And as you're volunteering the first expression of this church, you'll see. You'll see a need. You'll see a need arise. They may be there may be parenting classes that may come up. There may be food that the kids need. I mean, we got every meal in the Twin Cities and beyond, and they're always talking about how they need people to pack, in schools right now. And so, like churches, churches are the best place to partner with folks who need who need to supply those needs. And so that first thing about being missional is seeing the indigenous culture that's already living there. And so how do you do that? Go to your local elementary school.

Dee Stokes: Yeah. I appreciate that that answer, that response. Tell us how, when you moved into your community, how you assess the needs and the assets here. Here's why I add assets. Because I think so many times we enter communities, we have this grandiose idea that we're actually going to change the whole city or the whole community, and we're not, okay. We're going to we're we're going to hopefully focus on a smaller area and actually make significant change there. But there are assets in that community, not going in like we're the savior trying to save the community and only focusing on the needs of the community because the community itself has assets, good, positive things that we can partner with. So how did you, when you went to your community, address the needs and the assets of your community?

Carl Johnson: Yeah. So first, uh, Dr. Dee, you're talking about like, so this is science that a lot of people would like to forget that when we talk about race, gender, class, community, they're actually sciences that, that research this. And one of the sciences that you're talking about is called asset based community development, which is used, which is used a lot in in CCDA. But there's a missing portion of asset based community development. And that's ethnography. That's the science where you understand the, the people the ethnos of your community, where things can be, where Christ can be incarnational. So there's also like the assets could be like, oh, we got we got one asset would be, we got a college, we got a hospital, we got restaurants. Those are assets in the community because they keep the community going. And how do you partner with those assets to fulfill those needs? But then ethnography would say: Who are the people? And Jesus would say this in Matthew 8:1 he says this, and I love it. And he's talking to Peter. And he says, some of you will taste the kingdom of God when death comes. And there will be others of you that will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come. That rocked me when I moved into the neighborhood, like I cannot, I will not see like the end of my life until the kingdom of God is being seen in my community. Like that's where a church needs to shift a mindset. So ethnography helps us shift a mindset because we can't be incarnational and thinking we are the only incarnation because they're already, there're already people. God's already moving in your community. Like, if you're so so churched to think that God only moves in the four walls of your building that your whole mindset needs a confusing pivot to see the Kingdom of God moving in beauty and triumph, already in your neighborhood, in your city, there is something that's already winning. There's somebody that's already doing something like I remember like there was a, there was like people wanted to start a Young Life in Saint Paul. While they were trying to start a Young Life, a middle school teacher already gathered students and took them to Young Life camp, and they were like, oh, she's already doing it. Like we, she just did it. And there's people that are already doing something in your community. They may not even be part of your church, but your church needs to shift the mindset that says everything has to happen here, to say everything has to happen out there. Your church may not grow. You may not make new disciples. You may just deepen the roots in which your church stands by just pivoting your mindset in this moment and the mindset that you need to pivot is that God is already at work in my community. Where can I go to work with God? That is the pivot that we had to make, that we had to share. And if you want to be part of this community, you have to know where God's already working. And so that's the big point. Like, we always think that people are so lost without Jesus, but we don't often think about how they need us to disciple them from one point to the next. Like, I'll share a quick story. I saw this guy walking when I was in Lima, Ohio across our church parking lot. And I was working in the four walls of the church. The church had became my mission field and so I could never go out. And I'll go back to that after this, not going to. So the church that became my mission field. And so I remember seeing a guy. He was African American guy wearing loud colors. And I went out to him and I was like, hey, I don't know what's going on, but the Lord wants me to pray for you. Can I pray for you? He's like, yeah, I actually have been reading the Bible. And I was with my girlfriend, and I told her the Bible had made it clear that we couldn't live together no more. And what we were doing was wrong. And I made her move out and and I said, if you still want to be with me, we're going to live like the Bible says. Like, he had no pastor. He didn't have no church. This guy just picked up a Bible, and the Holy Spirit convicted him right in there on his life. And he got to encounter me. God was already at work. Yeah. I didn't introduce him to the Bible. I didn't have to give him a Bible. He was already reading. He was already praying, he was already seeking. And I started to pray. And he didn't know what that meant. He didn't have no direction. He didn't have nobody discipling him to the next point. And when I came in encounter with him, it was the encounter. Like, oh snap, like I am doing the right thing. Yeah. And I pray for him. He began to cry and weep and was like, what do I do next? And I said, well, sometimes people repent for the things that they've done. Is this something that you want to do? He says, yeah, and he did it right then and there. No. No coercion, no nothing. He was already ripe for what God wanted him to do. And so that is like what I believe in certain circles we call those persons of peace. People who have been harassed, people have been burdened. People who have been messed up. Those are the persons of peace, not your perfect Christian that's been coming to church for 20, 30 years. Those aren't persons of peace. They may be great disciple makers, but they aren't the people that are going to open up doors to the gospel for those people in your community. And so I think when we change our mindsets, we start to see that there's there's a kingdom operating around us. And the church needs to switch from being the mission that your church needs to stop being a mission field and become the missionary force.

Dwight Zscheile: Amen. I want to ask, draw you out a little bit on one dimension of that, which is the practices of discerning, right? Because in all the stories you've been sharing, there's a real commitment to following God's leadership, right? And tell us a little more about what that looks like, because I think that's something that a lot of congregations struggle with.

Carl Johnson: Yeah. So when we think about, I think I talked to Michael Chan about this. It's a, there's two specific things that we talk about in the beginning of somebody's discipleship journey, and that's calling in purpose. Oftentimes discipleship journeys. When you're talking in church, it's about training you up to do the thing that you're already doing. And people are like, where do I do it? Like, how do I do it? Like, where's the calling at? First call is the Great Commission. We would hope everybody understands. That's a communal call. That's not like this private call. And when I say community, that means the whole church. Anyone that joins the church is part of a church. Man, woman and child. You're called to be a disciple maker among the nations. Like, that's the first call, the Great Commission, like you're commissioned to do that. And then the second call is like your vocational call, like that's where you work, where you play, where you eat. That's those two things. There's two calls that you have the vocational calls, like, where am I going to make disciples? And then the, the primary calling is, which I call it, the primary calling is that you are a disciple maker, every believer, disciple maker, and every disciple maker a leader that's how we call it at our church. Like, you can make change. Dr. Miles Monroe says that we're all change makers. Like there's nothing, there's nothing. And the leadership came is when we said we want to be missional instead of instead of hierarchical. And the leadership change was we're all missional.

Dee Stokes: Yes.

Carl Johnson: Even my son's missional. We walk our dog down the street, that's a missional practice because our neighbors are seeing us and we're seeing our neighbors and we're getting stopped like that missional activity of moving about is what makes neighborhood and community like vibrant. And the leadership of God is saying, he's telling us to go. And make disciples. That's his leadership. Like. Uh, in in e Bible, there's this there's this phrase, Dwight, is talking about. I always think this is the best mantra. You're going to find a way when you go. Go the way. You can't find the way, the truth and the light if you just stand in the same place. If you're staying in darkness, of course you're not going to find it. But as you go, that's the leadership. As we enact people to go into the elementary school, go to the tutoring, go walk the neighborhood, they find a way. They find a call. They find a tension. They find a purpose. They're like, oh, this is. Pastor Carl, this is what I'm passionate about. This is what I want to do. Go to the community garden and start digging dirt with somebody. As you go, that's where the leadership of God finds you. Now, I happen to be very nomadic in my going and my wife reminds me of that all the time. And so there's also that when you bloom where you're planted. But it doesn't mean that there's not a season of nurturing, and it's a season of pollinating. Plants pollinate in other places. So plants got to go too. They don't just stay planted and nothing goes. A part of them has to move. And so I would say the leadership of God always is on a move like the book of Mark shows us that Jesus is is an itinerant preacher. He is this preacher on the go. And I believe that's what we have to look at, is that Jesus wasn't someone that stayed in the synagogue. He was someone that went to the people and where they went. And that going is where the leadership starts to develop. When people start to see you, interact with you, communicate with you. And now people affectionately in my community called me the Rev. I don't have to say, "hey, my name is Reverend Carl Johnson. This is what I do" Like, "Hey Rev, there he goes." And so I think that is the leadership of God. Like God says go. He doesn't say, stay right here. Jeremiah 29:11. He says, while you've been exiled. He, what does he say? He says: Build houses. Intermarry. Go. Don't stay doing the same thing you've been doing. He tells them. He says you, I have a plan to prosper you. I have a plan for you. And those things are so powerful to me that God has this movement, this movement in our hearts. And my I think my calling has been to see the movement of God. That's the first purpose. Like, where's God already moving? Where's the movement of God in our community?

Dee Stokes: You know, sometimes we don't talk about our failures enough so that other people can avoid the pitfalls in ministry. Tell me a story in your current context of actually when you failed, and so that we can avoid that so that our viewers and listeners can actually avoid that. Would you do that?

Carl Johnson: Yeah. So first I want to caveat how I define failure. And so, first of all, we live in a world where success is the king, right? Not progression. Uh, I've heard a motivational speaker says practice makes perfect, right? No it doesn't. Practice makes progress, right? So if you've never planted a church and you're going to plant a church and you think you're going to, we build them, they come. Practice makes progress. You'll make progress, but you're not going to make perfection. Failure, designed by one of my mentors from afar, I don't know him in person. I just love him. His name is Dr. Sam. Chant makes everything simple. He says failure is your first attempt in learning. And if you never fail, you never learn. Right. That's that's my mantra. Like you have to fail at something. I think the one thing that we if we're parents and we have kids, we fail all the time. When our kids start school, they show us. When you get that first call from whatever the dean or the principal, they were like, hey, I caught you a kid doing something real interesting, and you're like, oh my God, I failed as parents. No first attempt in learning. We all have that. And in church planting the first attempt to learn is that not everybody is going to come. When you say come. Not all the money's going to come in when you wanted to come in. Not every Sunday is going to be packed to the gills. You know that takes time. And oftentimes when we, see part of church planning was was the launch large mentality was like, we're going to launch so large that for the next 100 years, we'll never have to worry about finances ever again. And I think failure in my, in my context has been that I failed to completely understand what it really meant to plant a church, what it meant to have resiliency, what it meant to see these pitfalls of exhaustion, frustration, failed expectations is the number one failure of church planting. People are going to fail you, oh Lord, are people going to fail you. Jesus won't fail you because he says that in the great commission I'll never forsake you. I'll be with you till the end of the age. But people say, I don't know about you, pastor. You got to prove yourself, for trust and certainty before I'll be loyal. Right. And so those things fail all the time. And I think the first thing I learned was that my expectations will consistently fail me. And that is something, and that will frustrate you right to no end, is that you may have an expectation for something to be done correctly, done right. But when you have people involved, it never looks the way that you want it to look, and you may call it a failure. It actually is a failure if you get frustrated because that's, if you get angry, if you get mad, if you get depressed, if you get discouraged. You can say your expectations have been failed every single time. And that was the first failure that I would, that I would admit to on a consistent basis, where those expectations of how things would go. And we often have those and then the expectations of others, like we live in a world where if we're going to plant a church, we need others to support us, to uplift us, to bring us into complete satisfaction of what we're doing, right, in affirmation. And they're going to fail you. And oftentimes if they fail us, we attribute that to our church failing, our church planting failing. And sometimes we don't live through those processes long enough to see that it's a learning moment. It's not just a teaching moment. And so we see a lot of churches close. Because of the failed expectations, failed promises. We see a lot of pastors leave the fold because of failed expectations, failed promises, and so and so. I will plead Dr. Dee , for those who are listening to us to pivot. To say, What would make us? What would what new expectations do we need to have of not only ourselves, but of God and what we're doing with church?

Dwight Zscheile: Thank you so much, Carl. So one last question for you. And I just want to lift up a couple of things I've heard from you in this conversation. One is don't go alone. Start small, so even something as simple as walking your dog can be a missional practice. But tell us, you know, for those listeners who want to maybe take some next steps in, you know, shifting from this one size fits all form of church to a mixed ecology, what are some simple next steps you would encourage people to take?

Carl Johnson: First off, I don't think you can do what everyone else can do. If you see somebody doing a dinner church, don't think dinner church is going to be the answer. There's something that the Lord like prompted me to remember. He says, I called you to run your race, right? Your community race. Like what happens in my community doesn't happen to anybody else's community. What I preach on Sunday, nobody else can preach on that Sunday. When I talk about dreams and visions and what that happens like that works really well in my missional practice. And get a coach. Don't just get any coach. Get a missional coach. If you need a missional coach, call me. My information will be in there. I'll get you a missional coach or like I'll be your missional coach. Don't think you can do this by just reading a couple of books, because you can't do anything without community. So you need a community of mentors and coaches who are missional, who can help you make this shift because it's a mindset shift. It's not just like, oh, I'm taking this Holy Spirit shift. It's a mindset shift. The shift in the way you think about your finances, shift the way you think about your leadership, shift in the way you think about your family, shift the way you think about your community. Those are shifts. And taking these shifts for some people can be huge transitions, and a shift and a transition aren't the same thing. Like, I could shift in my neighborhood to say that we're going to open up a cultural center only because we already have many cultures in our church. That's a shift. That's not a transition. If my church was all white and I'm like, oh, we're going to open up a cultural center, invite black and brown and indigenous people, be like, oh, that's a transition. Like, we've never even had conversations with these people. We don't even know who they are. We don't even know how they'll use our space. That's not a shift for you. That's a transition. And making a missional transition is hard. It's like turning a boat. Like you can shift the sail to catch the wind, but you can't turn the boat all the way around and go down a different current. That's a lot. That's a strong, that's a strong turn. And so I would say to people like, if you're going to make some shifts, make shifts, but if you're going to make transitions, get help because these transitions aren't easy to make, right. Like if you're a family that doesn't have kids, and then all of a sudden you want to adopt five kids, come on, people, that's a shift.

Dee Stokes: That's a nightmare!

Carl Johnson: Right. These are things that obviously you're going to change your life. And if you're a person that doesn't have the family support to take care of five kids, then you know you need more help. You know, you you d encouragement. You know, you need all type of things. And so I would think if you were doing a shift, if you're going to shift and transition, you're going to need some people around you that can help you rethink those models, rethink those paradigms. And that is not something that's easy and timing is, doesn't belong to you. So time is another construct that we have created to live in. So your 24 hour day does not matter to God. What matters to God is your obedience in your shifting, your obedience in your mindset. And he tells you to seek the welfare of the city and you'd be like, well, I like my Toyota Sequoia over my Honda, then there's a shift you need to make in your mind around whose welfare you are seeking. And so that's the other thing about passion and missional mindset. You don't think about yourself. You think about others and that other, that others thinking, there's actually verses in the Bible that tell you there's 120 verses about taking care of one another and not taking care of yourself. And I think these are shifts that we all need to make, Dwight, in our lives towards Christ, is really looking at how our leadership needs to shift in every season. If it stays the same and we do the same thing for hundreds and hundreds of years, we are bound to have a revolution. Good or bad.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Carl, et's end on that note. Thank you so much for joining us today. So tell us, where can our audience find you online.

Carl Johnson: Yeah, so you can find me on Facebook Instagram. So if you really want to find us we have a new website that'll be coming up soon called Decapolis City Cooperative. And that is going to be helping churches become missional and scale businesses at the same time. And so we're really excited about that using cooperative models, which the church is a cooperative model for you guys that don't know that yet. And so we are doing a lot of training and teaching in this next season. And so we can't wait to see the missional impulse that comes out of cooperative spaces and cooperative economics in the next season. So it is Decapolis like the ten cities in the Bible, City Cooperative, and that's where people can find me.

Dwight Zscheile: Great. Thank you so much, Carl. So in our next episode, we're going to be digging deeper into how the church can navigate a changing world. So if you, like us, love thinking and talking about theology and ways to help people discover and rediscover God's activity in their lives and neighborhoods, you won't want to miss this episode. Thanks for tuning in today. We'll see you next week.

Faith+Lead: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith lead. Faith lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at FaithLead. Org.