Many church leaders feel caught between uncomfortable extremes when it comes to how to evangelize - either instrumental strategies that feel manipulative or avoiding evangelism altogether out of fear it will drive people away. In this episode, Luther Seminary professor Andy Root offers a third way through his new book "Evangelism in an Age of Despair." Andy shows how to evangelize through what he calls "a theology of consolation" - recognizing that the caring relationships churches naturally build actually constitute authentic evangelism when grounded in the conviction that Jesus Christ is present in our shared sorrows.

Rather than learning new programs or strategies, Andy helps church leaders recognize the evangelism they're already doing. When congregations sit with people going through cancer treatment, help neighbors clean out a deceased parent's home, or simply take walks with those who are grieving, they're practicing presence-based evangelism. This conversation will transform how you think about how to evangelize by moving from strategy-based approaches to authentic ministry that flows naturally from Christian care and consolation.

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 (Andy Root, 2025):
• Book: The Promise of Despair (Andy Root, 2010)
• Book: The Gospel of Wellness (Rina Raphael, 2022)
• Book: The Ethics of Authenticity (Charles Taylor, 2018)
• Book: Cosmopolis (Stephen Toulmin, 1992)

I grew up in the nineties and you know, even in my conservative Lutheran church, we were given all sorts of strategies, know, like bracelets to take people through the forest. Yeah, all sorts of different things. And it was all really evangelism equals a strategy as opposed to evangelism being in a kind of embodied way of participating with people and really importantly, where Jesus Christ is present. ⁓ And there is a subtext to this of trying to make

certain claim about how the theology of the cross even works and trying to say the theology of the cross is really not a doctrinal assertion about atonement. Maybe it is a bit, but really it's primarily about a way God moves concretely in our lives and that theology itself is supposed to be a companion on this pilgrimage of saying goodbye of

the joys and the sorrows of human life, and that we need a vision of how God moves in this way, how God is present in this perspective. So it's trying to hold all those things together.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Pivot Podcast where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile

And I'm Terri Elton. And today we're thrilled to have back with us to the show Dr. Andrew Root. And we're going to discuss his new book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, Hope Beyond the Failed Promise of Happiness. Andy Root teaches at Luther Seminary, where he's a professor and the Carrie Olson Balsam Chair of Children, Youth and Family Ministry. Many of you may know Andy from his writing, for he's a prolific writer. But today we're going to discuss his latest work,

where he invites us to reconsider evangelism, not as a strategy to boost church membership or a technique to fix declining attendance, but as an act of consolation in a world marked by despair and disconnection. So Andy, welcome to the Pick Fit Podcast.

So I want to begin with the subtitle of your book. ⁓ So what have you got against happiness? ⁓

Tell

us about any you met Andy Root I'm just kidding.

You did write a previous book called The Promise of Despair, I know. But so what do you mean by the failed promise of happiness? then what is this Renaissance thinker, Michel de Montaigne, who's lurking behind this whole concept of happiness in the West have to do with all this?

Yeah. Well, I'm for happiness. I'm not against happiness. I think happiness is like money. If it comes into your life, you should take it. Yeah, like no one should be against it. But it is a question similar maybe to money is should you live for it? Like should it shape the aims of your life, the larger purpose of your life? And I think we can make the kind of claim or I'm trying to in this book is that happiness is kind of been the major objective of most late modern people.

And you can hear this in how we talk about our children, know, like almost as a concession, we're just like, I just want them to be happy. ⁓ Or we even say at the front end, like my whole goal with parenting is I just want to have happy kids. Like that's all that really matters to me. And yet this is a very strange kind of thing, you know, especially if you get outside the modern period, like no ancient Greek would ever think the point of life is to be happy. Again, like an ancient Greek philosopher would have been like, yeah, if you get it, great.

but you probably only discover your happiness right before you're gonna die, then you really should not chase happiness. Like chasing happiness, hunting for happiness, will probably not form you in the best of ways. And yet I think what's occurred of course is that we have become happiness hunters. That's the larger objective, especially for middle-class people. But I really think this filters across classes and that happiness seems to be the end. And it really does go back to this late Renaissance thinker, ⁓

Michel de Montaigne, who I think really is the kind of inventor. mean, no one invents happiness, but I think Montaigne has this vision that the good life would be a happy life and it's no longer duty for Montaigne. leaves the court. ⁓ He is kind of sick of all the French inner politics and he just returns to his chateau and he just wants to live a life of reflection. He wants to live a life of contentment.

And when he sleeps, he wants to sleep. When he gardens, he wants to garden. When he pets his cat, he wants to pet his cat. So this kind of sense of, of contentment is, is core to Montaigne. And Montaigne does lurk in the background of a lot of our thinkers who have framed our lives and maybe most directly for us Americans. One of the great readers and admirers of Montaigne was Thomas Jefferson. So life, liberating the pursuit of happiness.

that what Jefferson is thinking of is a country made for people to live on their chateaus and their little agrarian communities and read their books and pet their cats and be free from all kind of tyranny to live happy lives.

But the flip side of that is a lot of sadness as you talk about in your book. so talk a little bit about the whole concept of wellness, how that's associated with happiness and kind of happiness health as a kind of cluster of ideas there. But then the flip side of sadness underneath that.

Yeah, well, I I try to sketch a story here, and this may be just my age, but it's fairly captivated with the 1990s. Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, when music was at its best, which just has made some people turn off the podcast right now, because they are like, doctrine of the Trinity, we can wrestle with that, but do not say that my era of music is not the best era.

Taylor even thinks the worries of individualism may be overcome if we can focus on authenticity. If we can see authenticity as a moral category that can frame our lives, we may be even to escape instrumentalism and individualism ⁓ and lack of freedom. There may be a way forward to build even a stronger liberal democracy ⁓ and ways of life. And Tuleman just absolutely thinks that

the sixties ideals, which are really this kind of refusal of this kind of rationalistic ⁓ kind of techno. You can hear it in the cosmopolitan, this kind of technical functioning that was kind of leading America into the Vietnam War. And then the counterculture kind of pushed back and wants to return to art. And we get Woodstock is this utopian sense of, of, you know, beyond the tech, the technopolis.

⁓ And he thinks that the 90s will be that, that something got corrupted in Reagan's 80s, but that will get back there in the 90s. And yet when you look at the trajectory of this, that the 90s didn't end so well and the second woodstock was anything but idealistic as it was rage and fires and mayhem. But the first three decades of the 21st century, think unequivocally have been

quite sad decades. ⁓ And that something has turned across the West, but maybe across the whole of our global culture, that people feel, well, mental health crisis on the rise, economic inequality there, liberal democracy is threatened in many places. And these have been really quite sad times that people feel a lot of anxiety and things like that.

So one of the things that I was thinking about as you were addressing these is happiness is not really the trajectory of the good life of Christian faith. And I've heard from other theologians that are theologians of the cross, right? That God has something to do with despair or these sad times. So how do you think through or help Christians think through that have kind of drank the Kool-Aid of happiness?

and what we got was despair. And now what does that mean for us that are Christian public leaders to speak in? Because first of all, we have the big momentum of happiness around us, but also that doesn't actually resonate with the Christ maybe that we know or at least read about in scripture.

Yeah, and I think this links into the other part of your question, Dwight, that I didn't get to, which is kind of about the wellness ⁓ kind of perspective. Because I do think a danger is to presume that our religion ⁓ adds to our wellness and that there's a certain kind of category in our lives amongst other categories of our lives that if we can kind of get a hold of our religion in the right way, that that will add to our banked happiness in some ways, or that religion should make us happy.

which I think anyone outside the modern period would look at sideways. know, like religion's supposed to make you happy. No, it's supposed to ask you to renounce some things, to hold to some creeds that maybe you find disturbing in some ways, to have to give your life to something. But there is a kind of deep sense, I think, where ⁓ wellness is kind of hooked to happiness in some sense, or it readies us to be able to be chasers of happiness. So we do have this, I think, perspective that

you do have to procure your own happiness. So there is a sense that it's a battle, it's a competition, and it would really help to be able to meditate well, would be helped to be in shape that will make you happy. know, like all these forms of wellness, both bodily and kind of mentally, are to prepare you for that. But I think the interesting dynamic that makes us so darn sad is that these elements, even around like wellness, is that when you find yourself in the

kind of broken realities of life, ⁓ they don't help very much or they don't give you a kind of participation or a kind of way into those experiences. So one of the inspirations of the book was reading this kind of popular text that someone recommended to me that I found really fascinating called the Gospel of Wellness by this New York Times writer. And she really was a full-fledged believer in wellness, writing about wellness.

And she writes this book because she becomes distraught because what occurs is her father dies. And she realizes there's no yoga instructor who will walk her through this. And so the most kind of ⁓ deeply broken experiences she has, even just kind of the base finitudes of life, she's utterly alone in those. And no one on Facebook really is with her in there. There's a lot of sad emojis that come up.

And I think people are so sad because they're so alone. And yet in that hall of mirrors, they can see all sorts of other people that look really happy, but they have no access to those people, no kind of shared discourse with those people. And it just kind of reverberates back that they are alone and failing at life. And particularly when these events, these occurrences that will inevitably happen, where you have to say goodbye to someone or some reality in your life.

People are having to do that for the most part completely alone.

Hmm. Well, so I'm thinking about kind of how the church is related to this. Yeah. On the one hand, you know, you'll see often, ⁓ a legitimization of religion, like if you meditate, it makes you feel better. It makes you happier. Right. So, so churches can get caught into kind of justifying themselves on the, within the kind of intellectual grammar, if you will, of this whole framework. ⁓ but then say more about some of the church temptations. Cause you're talking in your book a bit about.

how it's easy to get it caught in a loop of basically the church needs to save itself and then put energy into that. And thus then you get this sort of deepening malaise as I think what's often described shortly for mainline churches that's playing out in many ways and leads lots of exhaustion. And some of our listeners may be experiencing that.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. it's an, well, I mean, I feel a little bit like anxious about the book only in the sense that like evangelism is the big word. And I try even, you know, I have this little piece like, I think it's titled something like read before, read before using, know, kind of a, kind of a sense of like, what's this book really about? Because it is a book about evangelism, but.

⁓ It's more a book about a theology of consolation. And so Usually when we read evangelism books, we're kind of getting models of evangelism. kind of maybe getting biblical justifications for evangelism. And maybe there's a bit of that in there, but I'm trying more to show you a picture of what evangelism might look like through a theology of consolation. But I really did want to pick up evangelism as a practice because I go to mainline churches and it's amazing how many people will say, and even thinking mainly lay people,

who will say kind of under their breath or kind of as a whisper, it will be like, I don't know, like maybe we need to try evangelism. Like they're uncomfortable with it. Desperation. Yes, but they're so desperate. Like they've tried everything and they think, well, maybe the only way we won't close or maybe the way we'll find our way back to some kind of semblance of the golden era is if we just do evangelism. So there's a certain sense like evangelism is this,

Right.

this embarrassing tool the church used to use that people would like to lock away in a back shed and never really use. But now they look around and think, maybe we should do that. And it's just an interesting dynamic because the kind of conservative Protestantism that some of us have experiences in, that there was a major instrumentalizing of evangelism. Evangelism is taking people through the four spiritual laws. It is a altar call, and we can count how many people come forward. And we know the retreat or

or the youth camp was a good one because we had X amount of people make statements of faith and we prayed with this many people. And that always felt very bizarre and very instrumental. But then this kind of flips all the way around to mainliners who, because they're so worried about the future of their church, they're like, well, I mean, I've never felt comfortable. I feel like it violates my kind of sense of pluralism and politeness and a kind of...

religious peacemaking, a kind of- kinds of rules. It breaks all kinds of rules and yet we're afraid we're gonna disappear. so, I don't know, I so like maybe we should do evangelism, you know? And so I think like obviously those, I just don't think that's the way to think about the practice itself. And so this is a way of trying to think of evangelism more sacramentally.

kinds of

more through the theology of the cross to your question, like, could you even think of evangelism through the theology of the cross? ⁓ And so this kind of theology of consolation is a way of trying to do that. ⁓ But then I also, you know, kind of have to show you what it looks like. And so there's this weird kind of combination of history and fictional story with these kind of contemporary kind of crises of like,

what's the future of the church here. ⁓ So I am trying to kind of imagine a congregation that might just end up doing evangelism in their being by really being for the world and being out in the world and just being attentive of what it means to share in people's lives in a deep way and in a confessional way. But what it means to actually be very, I think this would be a very countercultural reality for the church to actually

be willing to enter people's sadness. Again, not in a kind of instrumental way, but in a way of the call of Christ is to enter people's sadness in a culture that really so built on wellness doesn't wanna do that. So we turn religion into a form of wellness instead of into a form of participation and union and shared suffering and proclamation that a very impossible thing nevertheless is made possible in our very lives, which is

that this God comes known in these moments and turns all brokenness ⁓ into new life and heals in that way.

So a lot of what you said lit up ideas that I just wanna try and connect together. If despair is connected or is associated with being lonely or disconnected, right? And if evangelism has become instrumental, I hear you inviting in this consolation and in this piece to a

think about connection more than instrumental, right? And I think as I listen to our students at Luther that we kind of have this bizarre continuum of some of our international students that evangelism is just the heart of gospel. Like they cannot imagine being Christian without it. And others that are on the opposite other end don't ever make me evangelize because it's been this instrumental, sometimes weapon actually.

But I hear you inviting us to say, lean into connection and tell stories, right? And I think of in my own life where the gospel has entered in, has been in deep times of rokenness. And it's in telling the stories, for example, when our daughter was diagnosed with cancer a month into the pandemic, there was two kinds of things. There were people that couldn't lean in.

and be well, could, that was one big difference. But there was also this sense of all kinds of people that had been on a journey that sat with us. And as we were ready to look for helpers, ⁓ thank you, Mr. Rogers kind of thing, ⁓ then they would be willing to say, here's a website, here's a contact. It wasn't to get over the pain, right?

but it was in those moments of ⁓ needing resources or needing next steps. And I think what I hear you inviting us into is that kind of thing that we do in other parts of our lives. Right? What would that mean? And I would maybe use some of the story with Mary Ann and her church to say like, what could those pictures be like for a congregation? Cause I think,

People are longing for that in those congregations, but have no clue how to do it or where to start.

Yeah.

Yeah, so there is ⁓ this fictional story. I mean, I always do this in Fear and Trembling too, because this has been a ⁓ kind of, I don't know, trope, maybe it's too strong, but this has been a pattern that I've done is try to write these fictional stories. And I do that mainly because I'm a practical theologian and I don't think that necessarily means, I guess this is contested, but I don't necessarily think that means that I have to do like,

interviews and research, but I do think it does mean I have to get concrete and I cannot just stay in some kind of historical doctrinal thing. So I have to try to show you what this looks like, but I also want to access a depth that means I can't tell it to you, but I have to show it to you. So there's problems with making these fictional narratives, but the way I try to imagine this or say that this looks, and of course this is inspired from so many conversations with people across the church.

is to really try to embed this in lay people, not really pastor directed. mean, in some sense, this pastor shows up. But the pastor really is a secondary agent in sending a congregation in to do evangelism. That it really is about this woman, Mary Ann, who's just working HR, but has had an experience where she went through loss and came into the church just because someone else cared for her in the midst of that moment.

and was really framed to think about the attentiveness to people who were in sorrow because Jesus Christ is found in sorrow. So there's a certain kind of proclamation normative assertion that Jesus Christ is in sorrow and then sending people into the world therefore to be attentive to sorrow, not in a kind of instrumental way, but in a way of trying to participate in where Jesus Christ is present.

And so it's really kind of her story of what it means for her to care for this woman named Renata, who is not, I mean, this is where it's inspired from the gospel wellness book. Like Renata becomes in many ways framed off this woman who wrote this book, who loses her father, has no one, the kind of wellness culture fails her, but through a bunch of twists and turns, Marianna's there and is simply willing to participate in her life.

And that opens up to other experiences. then there's pastoral responsibilities in the midst of that of how do you form a congregation that can simply go out into the world and in many ways embody evangelism more than go out with a strategy. And I guess that's been my concern. I grew up in the 90s and even in my conservative Lutheran church, we were given all sorts of strategies.

bracelets to take people through the forest. Yeah, all sorts of different things. And it was all really evangelism equals a strategy as opposed to evangelism being in a kind of embodied way of participating with people and really importantly, where Jesus Christ is present. And There is a subtext to this of trying to make a certain claim about how the theology of the cross even works and trying to say that theology of the cross is really not a doctrinal

assertion about atonement. Maybe it is a bit, but really it's primarily about a way God moves concretely in our lives and that theology itself is supposed to be a companion on this pilgrimage of saying goodbye ⁓ of the joys and the sorrows of human life.

and that we need a vision of how God moves in this way, how God is present in this perspective. So it's trying to hold all those things together.

Well, and I even imagine storytelling is something congregations can do. That's not instrumental. To be a community of storytelling where in a moment where I thought God was not there, God showed up or was revealed in a particular way. I think mainline Protestants kind of shy away from that too.

Like ⁓ testimony in some form, right, would be maybe what other church values would call. But in a moment of what I like what you're saying is in consolation, right? Like that is a different way of coming at it.

Well, I love the stories in the book. think they're really poignant and beautiful and maybe you should write a novel sometime. think it could be a way to kind of fill. No, no, no, it's actually, no, no, no, no, no, it's really hopeful. I mean, it's sad, but it's, no, there's, there's promise and it's the despair.

It'd really depressing.

The end of this is.

I know what TV shows he watches. They're kind of dark.

But so a couple of things I wanna explore with you around that. First is that, I think if you ask a lot of congregations, particularly mainline congregations, of where do they experience God or what do they do well? They would probably say, we're a caring community that loves each other. But you make a move in this that's outward focused. So it's not just when we gather, we love each other, we care for each other, but the members of the congregation are kind of ambassadors of that ministry to people in daily life.

Um, and, so I'm curious about that. And in other words, if, if, if there's a leader, a listener, uh, who's wondering, well, how do I, how do I help people make that movie? Um, but then also the challenge that, um, they might raise reading your story, which is, Hey, these people in this church, they seem to be able to just pick up and like, go, you know, help out these people. I mean, it's noticed cause they have all this free time and are they all retired or, know, like, cause it's all the pressures you describe in the book.

that are also the hustle of, you know, the treadmill people are on also conspire to make it really hard for church to do this.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. mean, like picking up the second one first, like I get that. I, yeah, I can feel that tension in my own life. And I, yeah, I think in the, the narrative, like I just think of Mary Ann, like what it starts with as she reaches out to Renata. And first of all, just says,

I can see what's happening here. But she can only do that kind of name her suffering, ala kala thing, what it is, because someone else has done that for her before. ⁓ you know, like there's this kind of sense of, I mean, this is to me, like a kind of Protestant sense of what the saints do for us, like where we could still hold on to saints, that we do follow the footsteps of others before us. And this is just another lay person who was there for her. And so she's simply just trying to

practice the faith in the same mode. But there needed to be a pastoral leader. mean, leadership is really important here. And the leadership element that happens in this story is the pastor just simply continues to give them a watchword that says, we find Jesus in sorrow, that Jesus Christ is found in sorrow. And so they're just aware of that reality. But like with Marianne around the kind of time perspective, is she, the invitation to Renata is come and go on a walk with me.

Like this is- Pretty simple stuff. I'm already, I mean, this, I already walk. Right. But I also found a kind of holy moment when I've walked with Valentina and we talked through this stuff and I was there. So I walk at 6 PM, meet me there. And of course, yeah, it's not so straightforward on the nose in the story. Like she's not there at first, but eventually she comes and there's this certain kind of sense of what it just means to be there. The other part of this then that has real practice and this really comes from-

from my wife, Kara's congregation in some ways. Like they do do some stuff that is costly in time. there's a kind of, ⁓ our church has done this, the kind of Swedish death cleaning team. What is that? Yeah, so I mean, I think there was a show, like a reality show on Swedish death cleaning, which is.

Is

dark side of a Marie Kondo or something like it?

Basically, it's, ⁓ you know, only the Scandinavians can do this so well, but it's, mean, essentially like a purging and just kind of holding on to what you want to die with, I guess, but in the ways that we've like Swedish death cleaned our church, like, you know, get rid of all the stuff, but there's also been a kind of ministry of how do you help people who all of sudden, you know, their father dies and they're just overwhelmed with stuff and they, yeah. And what does it mean to kind of

walk with them through that. And of course that usually in our churches are kind of retired people with more time that end up doing that. It's not everyone who does that. So there are certain practices, ⁓ but there is an ecclesiology here that says this is the whole church doing this in some ways. And it may be these four retired people who can get up and go to Phoenix and do this, ⁓ but communities respond in that way.

⁓ And then there's also, know, like another story is just a woman who leaves a voicemail at their church because she's, she happened to be at a funeral, which is another kind of, you know, can see a mainline element here. It's one of the things that they, this is community challenges to Renata after her father dies is that he needs to be, there needs to be a funeral. That it isn't enough just to be done with this. you, know, you, he, actually gets kind of prophetically challenged. Like,

it's really important, know, funerals, first church service she's ever really been to. And it's a very confusing reality. And in some ways it leads her away from the church. Like after that experience, she kind of disappears from the story. Because I also didn't want to be like, this is an easy A, B, C, move. Right, exactly. And then I could kind of perform a contradiction here. But it does mean that a friend that she's been disconnected with goes to this funeral and then has a miscarriage.

can recruit new church members.

and doesn't know what to do and is utterly alone. It's, know, third, fourth miscarriage, utter despair, and leaves a message on the church. She has this sense, she's watched these people console this other acquaintance and she needs that. And the church just has to respond. Like the church has to respond to someone crying out within the world that needs accompaniment, that needs consolation. And that's enough. That's what it means to kind of be.

but you need that proclamation as well that Jesus Christ is found there. And so then, you they have, you can see there's even kind of structured programs for them. I mean, they don't think about it this way, but they do things like Swedish death cleaning and they have a sitters and they sit with people who are in suffering. And this all goes back to a woman we don't even know in the story named Valentina who after her son was arrested and then was...

convicted of a crime and was in utter grief, people just came and sat with her. And because Jesus is found in sorrow, so the Christian simply puts themselves in sorrow, not in a masochistic way, not in an instrumental way, but in a sense of a revelatory way, because this is where Jesus Christ is found.

Well, Andy, thank you for this rich conversation around evangelism and really helping us reimagine it in a different kind of way.

And to our audience, as always, thanks for joining us on this episode of Pivot. To help spread the word about Pivot, please like and subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube or leave a review. And ⁓ we will be continuing our conversation with Andy in part two of this episode.

And of course, the best compliment you can give us is to share this episode of Pivot with a Friend. So until next time, this is Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile.