The New Evangelism Message That's Changing Everything.

What if reframing evangelism isn't about getting more people in church, but about learning to meet Jesus in the midst of sorrow? In part two of our conversation with Luther Seminary professor Andy Root we explore a radically different approach to sharing faith that moves beyond happiness-hunting strategies to embrace God's presence in brokenness.

Andy Root, author of "Evangelism in an Age of Despair," challenges churches to stop chasing evangelism success like gamblers at a table and instead learn what it means to journey with people into their deepest sorrows.

Drawing insights from Blaise Pascal's spiritual journey, this conversation reveals how reframing evangelism around sorrow and loss can actually lead to more authentic faith sharing.

ABOUT ANDY ROOT:

Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is most recently the author of Evangelism in an Age of Despair and the six volume Ministry in a Secular Age series.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Book: Evangelism in an Age of Despair: Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness" by Andy Root
• Pivot Podcast episode: Reframing Evangelism: Following Jesus into Sorrow with Andy Root (Part 1)

Hello everyone, welcome to the Pivot Podcast. This is the podcast where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. This episode is part two of a conversation on evangelism with Andy Root, Terri Elton and myself, Dwight Zscheile If you wanna hear part one, go to your favorite platform and look for episode 131. Otherwise, enjoy.

When things look bankrupt, God renews. And that Christianity ⁓ is part of its mission is to help renew the world by loving the world and by bearing its own bankruptcy. And so I think that's a big point right now is that we have to learn what it means to actually be bankrupt. And that means being people who are anticipating ⁓ God moving. ⁓

And yet I think we're kind of thinking like, okay, we have very few pennies left. How do we get those in the right investment account? How do we get more out of less instead of saying, okay, we are at a painful but a ⁓ moment, a hinge moment in the church where ⁓ out of a lot of loss, something new is going to happen. And maybe our denominations will all go away. Dare I say, maybe our seminaries will, but the church will prevail because the church is the body of Jesus Christ.

So, Andy, from a leadership perspective, we want to hone in on something in your fictional narrative around, we follow Jesus into sorrow. Our friend from Fuller Seminary, ⁓ Scott Cormode says that one thing that key leaders do is to help, to make meaning, is to help plant language. So this seems like an example of planting language.

that congregational leaders, pastors, others could do. Say more about could this be part of what congregations do to plant those seeds to kind of lean into this idea.

Yeah, I think so. you we talked about in part one of this conversation we're having, this kind of sense of what it means to have a kind of watchword. And we also talked about kind of the franticness and that evangelism kind of tends to play in that. I mean, it does seem like if there is a reason to do evangelism, it's because we're falling behind and we need to kind of accelerate. We need to do more, ⁓ which again, like I said in the last episode, is kind of the

the under the breath thing, lot of mainline congregations say like, well, you know, maybe we need evangelism. But I do think what this kind of language does is it unhooks us from the need to accelerate. And what I mean by that is It's really an invitation into what it means to wait with God and to wait for God. But that kind of waiting can't be done in a kind of bored, waiting for a delayed flight kind of way. It has to be done

in anticipation, it has to be done with this kind of set of language that forms ⁓ narratives and stories that leads you to see the world in a certain way. So in the kind of narrative that I give, these lay people, the great gift their pastor has given them, which I think this pastor in the story would say is probably pretty average pastor. No one thinks like this is a world-class pastor, but he's actually quite a faithful pastor, but the thing that he's done that's really quite profound.

⁓ is, well, twofold, is he's really ministering out of his own brokenness in a kind of healthy way. And the other element is he's given his people language. He's given his people a watchword. So they simply go to work as in HR or as retired folks going through a grocery store, as people who go on walks, and they have a watchword that they meet Jesus Christ in sorrow, that Jesus Christ is found in sorrow. And so when sorrow is before them, ⁓

the first reflection, which often in our culture, the first reflex is, I need to get away from this because I need, this will corrupt my own happiness. They've been formed in a very different way to actually lean in to that sorrow. And so I think you absolutely need, and I think the leadership burden here, ⁓ and also the leadership joy is how do you give people a kind of language? ⁓ And how does that language not do something instrumental?

but actually create a space for being in the world in a certain way. ⁓ It almost becomes, in some sense, poetic. And what poetic language does is open up a reality. ⁓ And so I think a kind of watchword like this can give people not only direction, ⁓ but vision, and a way to interpret their lives and a way to mold their action.

Well, I think one of the things that I want to highlight is I think one of the ways that we look at leadership here at Luther Seminary is the role of interpretation, right? Spiritual meaning making, helping people interpret. And you can't do that for someone, but you can give the practice, you can open spaces, you can give them language. Because I think that's often what people are missing because culturally the language is really different.

Yeah, well, and so you use the word action and I want to just draw you out a little bit on that because I think one of the, I think the opportunities in this approach to evangelism is a certain dependence upon God to act in places that seem God forsaken. And so again, for churches that are exhausted by trying to just sort of generate energy through activity and

you know, whatever programming will get more people to come. And if they're thinking of evangelism sort of along those lines, what are some practices for congregations to learn how to release some of that, if you will, or to ⁓ be able to sort of tolerate and sink into almost, rest into perhaps a kind of ⁓ presence and participation, use that word, rather than simply.

more of their own activity that would, you know, kind of feel like again, in the wellness mode, it's up to us to save ourselves.

Yeah, well, this is, ⁓ we talked in the first, in part one about Michel de Montaigne and this is, I mean, this is also a pretentious thing of probably the book, but I think of it as my French book, you know, cause I tell a kind of French story because I think the French are the ones who give us happiness as a kind of central dynamic of our own action and that we should be, we should be chasers of happiness. ⁓ And yeah, the French also give us the,

antidote to this, the kind of counter response to this. And Maybe one of the most famous converts, people evangelized in all of at least Western Christian history is the polymath Blaise Pascal. ⁓ And so Pascal has this experience of, know, having the fire of God come to him and, you know, it is changed. If you don't know Blaise Pascal, he's basically the guy who invents the calculator and that, ⁓ and he invents probability theory that

insurance companies and Las Vegas still use today. without, without a all there's no Geico and there's no Las Vegas. So yeah, thank you. can thank him, but he had an experience where he was really living a party life basically. And as you were just saying Dwight, he was gambling a lot at salons and there was a whole renaissance is about probably 200 years after Montaigne.

150 years after Montaigne. And Montaigne was kind of back in fashion and people were trying to be Montaigne and they're trying to be these honest, was like the honest man, I say in the book, the honest dude. So it's basically kind of what they were trying to be. And that's what was all around salon life. And Pascal tried it and he realized it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because of, he realized it doesn't work because he was a gambler. And he's like, you know, the way

this chase for happiness functions is much like gambling because when you're at a table gambling, you say to yourself, okay, if I just win this hand, then I'll be happy. I'll be happy if I win this. And then you say, think, oh, I'll pay the house off. We'll go on vacation. I'll be able to take my foot off the accelerator and I'll be able to calm down. And I think this is what churches say too. Like if we could just, if we could just use evangelism, get another 50 people here, get the endowment up, then it would be okay.

Pascal tries it and he realizes like when you win a big hand gambling, you go away and you do feel an incredible amount of happiness. You do feel incredible relief. He says, but it doesn't take very long. It doesn't take very long, and all of a sudden you feel this nagging to get back to the table because this discontent comes over you. And what you realize is you need to distract yourself that you need to get back. And he thinks that what this happiness hunting actually does is distract us from a deeper reality.

And so then Probably the most famous thing of Pascal is his wager, Pascal's wager. And we've completely corrupted it because we tend to think that Pascal means, you know, like it's a 50-50 game here. There either is a God or there isn't a God. And if you bet there isn't a God and find out there is a God, you're in big trouble. But hey, if you bet there ⁓ is a God and find out there isn't a God,

You know, you haven't lost very much. So if you're gonna push your chips in, bet on that. But that's really not what Pascal means. What Pascal means, what his wager actually is, is you can't be happy. The gambler's issue. You cannot solidify yourself in happiness because it will burn you out. You're gonna have to keep racing to distract yourself. Even in a religious form.

It cannot occur. And this, can hear a certain echo here that Kierkegaard picks up and really puts within the Lutheran tradition and thinks about justification because it's the same kind of thing. You keep either at a practical level or at a doctrinal level or at a pietistic level, you keep having to do more to really distract yourself from a deeper reality. And Pascal's wager is, if you will actually stop, make a confession that you're unhappy or that there's sorrow within you. And if you will fall into the sorrow,

If you will actually interrogate the sorrow, you will let, if you'll make the confession that you are sorrowful, his wager is you will meet a great presence there. And that presence will be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and it will be pure fire. It will liberate. But that's the wager, is that there's something that will meet you in the sorrow. And I think this is the kind of message of evangelism in our time.

And maybe it's not for every time, but for our time particularly, I think it is to say to the world, what if you fell into your sorrow? We think that you'll be met there because we've been met in that experience. And then I think we'd have to do something that Pascal didn't do, which Pascal's perspective is too individualistic. And I think we can say, man, if you try to fall into your sorrow by yourself, it could become demonic, but we will, and that's what I try to show in this story, we will.

We will journey with you into the sorrow. We will search with you. We've been there, we'll do this with you. But our great bet, our great wager, is that you're gonna find a great presence there. And the only proof we have of it is that we have. And that we think that this will transform your life. I think that's the message, the evangelistic message for this time, as opposed to saying like, this will make, I mean, there's a certain hidden.

Yeah.

prosperity gospel in all of our views of evangelism, even in the main line. It's essentially a prosperity gospel, even though we wouldn't say it's a prosperity gospel, but we think maybe we should do evangelism because then we'll get some more capital out of this. And I think we need to really interrogate that because I think it does end up just being a gambler's gambit of keeping ourselves distracted, even at a religious level.

So, you know, lot of your books, especially the most recent ones, have been, I think, inviting the church to wrestle with this core dilemma of late modernity around how deeply we're formed in this culture to justify ourselves and save ourselves. And you draw on a writer ⁓ in Germany right after World War II, ⁓ Eugene Rosenstock, who's talking about

kind of what does it mean for the church to die? know, is it up to us to save the church? And I'm just curious on that because it seems to me that there's still a lot of time and energy and kind of focus around this fundamental question of, we talk about it here on Pivot is fixing the church. It's just all this energy around that. And that's becoming less and less plausible. What will it take for our ⁓ mentality to shift in the American church

to get, I think, to the kind of humility that would help us discern what to let go of in that and then what to step into. Like these practices, you're just.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I do think that there has to be a way ⁓ to free ourselves from a bit of the idolatry of the church itself. And I guess what I mean by that is that I hear a lot of people talking and mainline people, intellectuals, ⁓ pastors, where the church is always the main subject of the conversation. And...

You know, like to say that we have to get away from the idolatry of the church is not to say that the church doesn't matter. ⁓ But there is a kind of sense where the way we think of the church right now is the kind of elderly grandparent that we need to take the keys to the car away from, you know? And it's dangerous that it hurts people, that even maybe when it doesn't want to hurt people, sometimes it's grumpy and it's mean and it hurts people. So, you know, watch out with your children and how talks about this. ⁓ Sometimes it's just, you know,

a loving ⁓ old grandparent, but doesn't know that it's gonna turn the wrong way down a one way and potentially kill ⁓ you. We feel that way, but it's so utterly ⁓ patronizing. The church is still the body of Christ and it still parents us in some ways. But really there is an intention here, and I think this is thrown from the theology of the cross, and what

You know, I end the book with Luther and really try to put Luther in conversation or remember the historical context of how important Staupitz was to Luther and that Staupitz really was Luther's pastor and consoled him in a sense of great sorrow. And Staupitz' word to Luther was just never take your eyes off the face of Jesus Christ, really around his own sorrow, around his own anxiety.

around his own sense of the failures of the church ⁓ was to just keep your eyes on Jesus Christ. ⁓ So, I mean, again, this seems potentially pietistic, but it really is what does it mean to look on the face of Jesus Christ, to give our attention to Jesus Christ? And I wanna concretely say that the way we do that is not really primarily through doctrinal means, but it is really through a ministry of shared suffering.

which of course has a lot of creedal doctrinal elements under it. But those are all there to help make sense of what happens here, of Pascal's perspective. What do I meet here? What has just happened? How do I now talk about this fire that's met me here? ⁓ So yeah, ⁓ the Rosenstock-Huessy piece is that his whole point is that when the church is at its most bankrupt, God renews it. ⁓

There is, you can disconnect the kind of logic that bankruptcy means, potential disaster ending, ⁓ that the church is always renewed out of that. And his whole point is that, you know, I make this claim, which you two maybe would contest, but I think ⁓ Rosenstock really is the original missional theologian because he really sees Christianity as fundamentally missional in so much so that it...

it then makes, he thinks that Judaism and Christianity have to be held together. And that Judaism reminds Christianity, well, first of all, Christianity is the missional impulse of Judaism, but Judaism has to remind Christianity to love the world, because Christianity can get so obsessed with its mission that it actually becomes more Roman than Christian. You know, it conquers and overcomes. So Judaism reminds Christianity to always love the world, but Christianity is a missional impulse that

in his point that Judaism did have and is to bring this sense of Yahweh's mercy and ministerial desire to free us from death and impingement that this is really what Christianity is to bring this message. And Rosenstock is so significant ⁓ in his message, is so significant that he has an argument with his younger cousin over a long night of debate.

and his younger cousins got to convert like Rosenstock grew up Jewish, was a kind of assimilated German Jew and was planning like his cousin because he admired him so much to become ⁓ a Christian as well. And after this long conversation with his cousin, with Rosenstock, his cousin decided that he would remain a Jew and became the most important 20th century Jewish theologian, ⁓ Rosenvig.

And he remains Jewish because he so believes ⁓ Rosenstock's perspective that he realizes he doesn't have to convert. ⁓ And there's an interesting way to think about this is that Rosenvig becomes one of the great converts of the 20th century and it's a return to his Judaism because it is a return to the sense that God is in control and that when things look bankrupt, God renews and that Christianity ⁓

is part of its mission is to help renew the world by loving the world and by bearing its own bankruptcy. And so I think that's a big point right now is that we have to learn what it means to actually be bankrupt. And that means being people who are anticipating ⁓ God move, God moving. ⁓ And yet I think we're kind of thinking like, okay, we have very few pennies left. How do we get those in the right investment account?

How do we get more out of less instead of saying, we are at a painful, but a moment, a hinge moment in the church where out of a lot of loss, something new is gonna happen. And maybe our denominations will all go away. Dare I say, maybe our seminaries will, but the church will prevail because the church is the body of Jesus Christ. So as long as we can hold onto that, I think we can participate in whatever new comes.

But a theology of Jesus meeting us in sorrow has to be there too, because saying goodbye to denominational structures, saying goodbye to seminary, saying goodbye to our modern ways of organizing ourselves may have to happen. ⁓ But we can never do that in a kind of way that says to others like, better get your, we better get our bleepity bleep together, or it's all gonna go away and there'll be no Christianity, there'll be no church in America. That's simply fatalistic.

The church will prevail because Jesus Christ is risen and it is the body of Jesus Christ. ⁓ But at the same time, we have no promises that our structures will prevail. And we should grieve that. I mean, when those come and go, ⁓ we also shouldn't be, know, stoics in a way to just not grieve those realities going. And we should fight for some, but some we'll to say goodbye to. But we have to hold faith that God will

Meet us in the midst of that.

I feel like we're gonna end with hope and that's the hope, right? And I think, but it also says evangelism in despair ⁓ doesn't look the same, right? So ⁓ our hope comes from God and God's action. So thanks Andy for bringing us a little bit deeper into this work. And we look forward to sharing this with our readers and for our listeners and for you to read Andy's book.

And to our audience, as always, thanks for joining us on this episode of Pivot. To help spread the word, please like and subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube, or if you're listening, leave a review, it really helps.

And finally, the best compliment you can give us is to share Pivot with a friend. So we encourage you to pass this on to people that might enjoy it. So until next time, this is Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile signing off.