Special Guest: Jennie Wojciechowksi.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Any tradition that says we've never changed. It's not being truthful. You know, the church changes not just through time, but from place to place. You know, you always pick up culture. You always, you have to adapt. And so I don't know what the church is going to look like in 100 years. I don't think it's going to look like it will today.

Dwight Zscheile: Welcome to Pivot from Luther Seminary. I'm Dwight Zscheile.

Terri Elton: And I'm Terry Elton also from Luther Seminary. And today our guest is one of our church's story ins here from Luther, Jennie Wojciechowski. And she is going to share a little bit about historically about how this mixed ecology has worked with lay and clergy. So welcome, Jennie. And I would love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself and like, all right, I have to admit, how do you become our church historian and what makes you want to be a church historian?

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Very fair question. Hi, Terri. Hi, Dwight. Thanks so much for having me on. I was looking forward to this. All right. This is going to sound a little strange, but I was actually a historian before I was a Christian, so it might seem a little a little backwards. But, you know, I wanted to be a historian since like high school. I went to school for that, went to college for it. I... my original plan was to go right from my undergrad to doing a doctorate, preferably in like modern European history. I really liked social movements, really liked revolutions. That was kind of what I studied. And then God had other plans. I graduated. I ended up working in nonprofits. I became a Christian, and I went to seminary, which surprised everybody that I knew, including me. And I have a degree in like urban ministry. It's kind of what it shakes out to be. And through that process, I realized that the ministry probably wasn't for me. But, you know, I love the church. I love God, and I loved history. And I was, I became aware of the field of church history. So after I graduated from seminary, I ended up applying to a church history program. And I've been doing that ever since.

Terri Elton: That's awesome. I kind of was intrigued by social movements and some of the things that you were talking about as you look back in history and specifically as we think about the time when the church has been like needed to be awakened or stirred up a little bit. Right. How have you seen especially lay movements and times when that has been over history? Maybe you can tell us some stories about how that's happened in the past.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Yeah, absolutely. I guess I haven't really drifted that far from my roots, have I? I've just switched to the church. Social movements in the church, Yeah. So I would say lay movements have been really important part of Christianity since, I don't know, Mary Magdalene, like, ran away from the tomb. All right. From from day one, lay leaders were involved and Christianity couldn't have grown, couldn't have spread without them. In the early church, you have some really interesting situations where you have kind of like quasi clergy sort of situations, different lay people. You have prophets who don't really have like ecclesial authority, but they're gaining authority. You have things like the Office of the Widow, which are women who are consecrated and they have certain tasks, but they're not clergy. You have deaconesses that are kind of in this in-between space as well. So you have lots of positions right away and then, you know,pick a time period and you've got different...no, but seriously, there's all sorts of interesting things. You know, in the Middle Ages, let's say, when monasticism is big, one of the big sort of new, exciting developments is the development of like lay brothers, where you have more people coming into the monasteries in different roles. It's not quite what we would think of as lay leadership today, but it was pretty innovative for the time. Other times where you see a lot of lay leadership, a lot of kind of change, it would be when you have clergy shortages, that's a big, big driver. One of my favorite examples is Korea in the late 17, early 1800s, you have the start of Korean Catholicism. And what is interesting, it is one of the only countries that was never mission ized. You had Koreans who learned about Christianity on a diplomatic trip to China. They found like these documents, they brought them back and they're like, "Yeah, this seems right". But they didn't have any priests. They didn't have any clergy. So you have this form of completely lay lead Catholicism in the country and the government repressing them and persecuting them. So there is a situation where you have a very fruitful church, completely at odds with authority and completely lay lead.

Dwight Zscheile: So one of the things I hear in what you're sharing is that, you know, the Spirit really sort of stirs up these movements, their movements from below. They're not the hierarchy sitting in Rome or wherever saying, "Oh, we need to start these lay orders". It's. It's really the spirit empowering people. Reflect on on this moment. You know, if we think about the church, particularly in Western contexts and and even globally as well, how do you see the Spirit at work and in relation to that?

Jennie Wojciechowksi: It always seems like these innovative movements kind of bubble up organically. You know, you you see people who are moved by the Spirit, who are propelled into the world. They're not necessarily seminary educated, but there's there's a there's a passion, you know, early Pentecostal movement or something is a great example where you have a moment that completely transforms the religious landscape and people are just inspired and they feel God calling them to go and they go. They don't wait. They don't wait to get there. You know, five years and I work at a seminary. I'm not bashing it. I'm pro seminary. But, you know, they go and like, all right, I live in California now, but I'm going to literally travel the entire world and tell anybody who's going to listen. And usually there's some real conflict with hierarchies when people do this. But it's it's happened again and again. And often these revivals come from places you would not expect.

Terri Elton: So I'm a missiologist by training. And one of the people that has really fascinated me as as he as a missiologist has looked across history is there's always been two kind of movements, kind of the people that are staying where they are, kind of the establishment, if you will, doing church formation that way, doing faith formation that way. And then the the missionaries, the apostles, the the people that are moving around. Right. And somehow together we're better, right? Without one, you know, without if we don't have a local community we're not as robust. But if we don't have these missionaries traveling around or or different forms over the years, we also can get really stuck and really closed in. I hear you talking about that historically from some different places. And this kind of the sense of there's a built in corrective, almost like the spirit kind of fans the flame where if women are said you can't be in leadership, they pop up and they become leading lay movements or or Korea or whatever. Right. Are there some examples of things that you've had where, like one part has been kind of shut down and the other part kind of opens up?

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Oh, definitely. When you're talking, the first thing that popped into my mind was the second great awakening in the United States, because you have these established kind of East Coast churches and, you know, they're they're doing good work, right? They're doing everything you'd expect a church to do. And then you get somebody like Charles Finney all right. Who has this moment in the woods and all of a sudden he wants to go preach to everybody he can find. Right. He's he's propelled by God, as he puts it, and he comes up with all these tactics. And they were really, really controversial. He had a whole system. He had something called the anxious bench where if you were feeling the stirrings in your heart to convert to Christianity right then and right there, you know, he'd bring you down. He was he was a very large man. He was, you know, oh, well over six feet in the 1800s. And he would loom over you and preach at you until you accepted Jesus Christ. And a lot of established churches were against this or like this is kind of manipulative. This you shouldn't have like a whole system for conversion. It should be God's action, not your action. And Finney would be like, "Well, it works." Simple as that. And and so you get this. You're right, this corrective where you have the established churches who are probably staying in their buildings a little bit too much, but then sometimes those established churches tend to pull people back a little bit too, you know, maybe what maybe everything you're doing isn't great. Maybe we should think about some of these things. So it's a good balance to have to have both.

Terri Elton: Yeah. I think about in in the church, I'm a Lutheran, I'm an ELCA Lutheran, and I think of all the forms of candidacy and the vetting of leaders and that kind of stuff, and that would not go well, right? Somebody just having a vision and going off and having a system of conversion. And yet like you said, there's this sense of and why are you so stuck in your building and why are you so stuck in these ways? And why does it have to be with all this weird language and why do you have to have a color book that everybody you know, there's all of these internal kind of "closed system" things. And I wonder if there's a sense of the spirit breaks open some of our boxes and it pushes us to trust less in ourselves and the systems and more in God is God. And God can work through even Pharaoh, I've heard right and plagues and things like that. Right. So I think it's an interesting thing for us today, especially in places where we see church decline or at least active participation in faith communities decline and yet not a decline in spirituality or curiosity about God or even willing to to lean in to spiritual questions and curiosity in really unorthodox ways. And I think we as church leaders that are internal, the box need to pay more attention and be less critical maybe and be more in a dialogue. Dwight, what are you thinking?

Dwight Zscheile: So what I'm hearing you say, Jennie, is that the mixed ecology is nothing new. It's what the church has always done in some ways. I want to unpack that a little bit more for you with you. And I'm thinking about your own Roman Catholic tradition, which has historically made space organizationally for multiple impulses. So we have the kind of parish system, but then there are various types of orders, whether it be lay orders or monastic orders, movements, missionary orders and all of that. In Protestantism, sometimes, you know, people feel like if I'm going to start and have a new impulse, I need to start a new denomination and break away. Or there have also been movements within denominational families and things like that. But say a little bit more about the role of structure in both supporting these kinds of movements that are reaching people in different ways. And also the maybe the downside of that where structure can also interfere.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Yeah, that's a great question. Yes. As as a Catholic, obviously in the Catholic Church, I mean, the Catholic Church currently has about a billion people. All right. And so often people look at the Catholic Church and they see the papacy and the hierarchy and they're like, "that's the church". And I'm always like, that's part of the church. There's a billion people. It's not just the Curia, right? You're right. We have all these different orders and different expressions and lay movements and quasi lay movements, and not everyone even gets along that well. But we kind of have this commitment to still being Catholic, even if we're going to argue about different things, you know, Jesuits are going to be different than Dominicans, different than Franciscans. And you know, what I keep kind of keeps popping into my head is like the the Daughters of Charity, founded by Saint Vincent de Paul, because they, this was really innovative at the time, because you have a group of of women and because women were generally cloistered during this time. But they saw a need out and they started in Paris actually. And at this time, you have a lot of wealthy women providing services kind of just in their free time. And it didn't go super well to have like the aristocracy providing like orphans and widows with help kind of on the streets of Paris. And so they decided to have these Catholic women go out and they made annual vows instead of perpetual vows so they could go and actually serve the people. And it was incredibly transformative. It actually changed women's monastic habits from that point forward. So I think that's a really good example of being creative within the structure. But then of course, you have plenty of creativity outside of the structure of the Catholic Church too, which sometimes goes better than others. Sometimes you have popular lay movements like charismatic forms of Catholicism are growing today, which has been pretty successful. But then you have groups like the "beguines" in the Middle Ages that started off being okay. They were, you know, a lay group of women who came together to live together, but they weren't nuns and they didn't have vows. They just kind of made simple vows and, you know, to live together and serve the poor and things. And suddenly they became pretty repressed. So you see different ways it plays out in Catholic history.

Terri Elton: So one of the interesting things to me that I'm kind of picking up is that there may be concerns like clergy shortage or there's an issue of the poor, you know, a need in the world, right? There's a need to stir up faith, right? A charismatic kind of movement around faith. Or there's maybe like, we need to reorganize how we do church that the reasons behind some of these movements have really varied. With with three in that. When you think of today, what are some lessons that we could bring from things when it went well not when it blew up but like here's an example of like they're like, hey, we figured out how to partner or this was a constructive thing that came out of. A late movement or a different kind of way of of things happening. What are some lessons we can learn?

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Well, I think whenever you can get the established church and these lay movements to actually work together, you get the the best case scenario, you know, whether that be, you know, the Methodists and their lay preaching to reach the unchurched, which was incredibly successful whether it is you know this tent revivals. This is another incredibly successful thing that actually had the backing of a lot of churches when you have just, you know, creativity around, you know, colonial America. Right. They couldn't get pastors here. No one wanted to come here. They had nice state, you know, state sponsored pastor ships back home. And so what do you do with that? Well, you know, you got to think creatively, and maybe that means you have a pastor serve eight congregations. But but they can't actually serve 8 congregations. Right. You need to have lay leaders step in and actually provide ministry there. Yeah, I think cooperation is really, really key.

Terri Elton: I like that. And part of what I'm thinking about is maybe to go into my own church history of my denomination and see where are places we've done this before and can we revive in 21st century. So I think of the prairies of the Lutheran Church and they couldn't get Norwegian, German, Swedish, who pick your, you know, kind of pastor that they were trying to get and the ways the lay people just thrived. Right. And that was so significant to their own faith and to the well being of the community and to growing and evangelizing right. The church. And it was a holistic faith. It wasn't set on a doctrinal like orthodox. Are we doing, are we in or out? It was really every day and ordinary and I wonder if other histories might also have things within their own history that they could reimagine for this time and this place.

Dwight Zscheile: If we think about Jaroslav Pelican's wonderful phrase about, you know, tradition being the "living faith of the dead,and traditionalism, the dead faith of the living" that, you know, you're inviting us into really retrieving out of the history resources for this moment treasures, stories of inspiration and all of that. I'm curious, you've recently published a book on women in Christian Christian Movement, and I'm curious about the role of women in particular in some of these mixed ecology histories.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Yes, absolutely. I have I've thought a lot about this. Well, there are a few exceptions, but generally speaking, women were not part of hierarchies. They were not ordained until about 1500 years ago. And even today, most people go to churches that do not ordain women, globally. Okay. So women have always found really creative ways to lead, though, right? Obviously, there are some structural leadership, you know, nuns, abbesses and stuff. But a lot of times you have women finding alternative ways to lead, to influence their communities, to meet the needs of the people. Something that I have found incredibly interesting in US history is women, like their ladies aid organizations. And it's funny now for people because they think, oh, like the church lady groups, this isn't progressive. It was so progressive. The fact that women would come together, maybe even at night. All right. To work for a common cause, women would lead themselves. This is one of the first opportunities where women actually got to lead. Right. And so it could have been, say, a sewing circle. It could have been putting on a strawberry festival, these little things. But women of a congregation would come together and they would figure out, what are we going to do? Sometimes it could just be, you know, sewing vestments or coming up with like, you know, altar decorations or things like that. But then as they got more comfortable leading within these these small organizations, their sights got bigger, their fundraising got a whole lot more effective. You have plenty of examples where suddenly women are, say, paying the pastor's salary. They are purchasing things for the church that they think the church should have, but the board of elders doesn't think they should have. They are seeing needs in the community. There's a few different things that a lot of these women's groups got involved with. Number one, care for children. There was often, you know, a lot of emphasis on that, but also like boarding houses for women, because women, a lot of women did work in the 19th, early 20th century, but they were paid really poorly and so they could not afford housing. And so you would have these kind of church women building dormitories for working women so they had a place to live. You had these church women creating settlement houses, you know, maternity hospitals, just all sorts of different kind of reform efforts that they felt they needed to provide because of their Christian calling and they did not see their churches doing it. Missions is another great example where a lot of these church women would see the denominationally run mission boards and say they're not paying enough attention to women overseas. We need to do something. And they would start fundraising. And the Augustana Synod was determined to get a woman doctor in India, and that was one of their big pushes because they felt that was a need and that the denomination was not doing. So, again and again, you see women kind of stepping up and working around those structures to get what needs to be done.

Terri Elton: What I'm curious about in those examples was the way they were listening and watching the context. And I think, boy, that's something we have to do today. And sometimes we just get mad because the institutional church isn't doing it. And what I hear in this is that, okay, so now what? How might you be a part of a constructive back to what our possibilities be a way of coming along that? And at some point, yeah, maybe it needs to get into the institutional or inherited structures of the church, but maybe there's other ways that this need can be met. And maybe as the people of God were called to all those ways of meeting the needs of the world, and maybe there's something specific around those women seeing that need for a doctor that they were rightly situated to raise up the attention and to call our attention to. Because I think so often we just want to bash what's not happening rather than see the opportunity to lean in and to take our passions and to find other people with those passions and to see the needs in our area and and be a person of faith engaged in it.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Right. So often it's so easy to be like, oh, the church isn't doing that. Like, but we're all the church, you know? I mean, it depends how you define church, but a church isn't just like an institution. It's not just a building, like it is the people of God, like we are of the church. So.

Terri Elton: Amen. Yes.

Dwight Zscheile: Jennie, I'd love to reflect together with you about a shift that seems to be taking place for in the primary way that American Christianity has been organized in the last 200 years. Ted Smith calls this the "age of association," the voluntary association being the primary way that people, both organized congregations, denominations are a product of this period. But even a lot of those women's movements took the form of then women's voluntary associations. And, you know, most of those in today's world have a hard time finding younger women or younger people. And this is the same with congregations to actually join because we're now living more and more in what Charles Taylor calls the "age of authenticity" since the late 1960s, where it's not so much about finding belonging and meaning through joining and affiliating with and serving these voluntary associations. It's really more about sort of discovering, expressing your true self, often apart from institutions. So how do you see that shift playing out and what might some implications be for the church?

Jennie Wojciechowksi: That's a good question. I have lots of feelings about this, this this "age of authenticity". I mean, I think a lot of our problems come from the fact that voluntary associations have fallen apart, that we do not, as a society, think about the collective well-being as much as we used to. And so you're right. It's not just declining church membership. It's voluntary organizations. You're right. Most of these women's groups have disappeared by now. You know, there's no Lions or Knights of Columbus or, you know, there's a few left, right. So you don't have people involved in these groups looking out for the better. And so this idea of the "age of authenticity," I really question that term. You know, is, is your Instagram post really authentic? You know, things like that. But I understand where Charles Hill is coming from on this. I do get that. But we have moved to this hyper individualistic society, I think. I mean, we've always been individualistic, right? We're as Americans, but we've moved so beyond it that it's just sort of now like, what can I do for me and my immediate surroundings? I think one of the big challenges of our society, not just the church, of society, is how do we get people to be more engaged with kind of our collective well-being. And so I would like, I hope, the church can sort of step into this. And I'm not arguing that we need to go back to like a 1950s parish model. That's not happening. But people are lonely. People are, you know, depressed, anxious, like they've haven't been. And you know, it all, there's there's all these problems. And it is because of this lack of connection, I think a lack of kind of thinking outside yourself in a sense. And that sounds perhaps a little harsh, but part of religion and why, you know, I'm part of religion is that it is joining something bigger than yourself. It's not just thinking about my spirituality, how this can help me. There's more to it.

Dwight Zscheile: So the "age of association" model for organizing religion is still relatively new. It's only 200 years out of 2000 years of church history. So as that collapses and we know of a lot of pastors and bishops and denominational leaders who are trying to rescue it, trying to make it work again, And that's a really hard thing to do right now, especially after the pandemic. And yet the impulse to love the neighbor, to share the gospel, to join with people where they are, the Spirit is still stirring that actively. But the organizational expression of that seems to be shifting right now. And that's where I wonder. Can church history free us from having maybe too narrow of a view of what church or even movement should look like in order to imagine other possibilities where, for instance, in fresh expressions, the assumption isn't that people are going to become formal members, you know, and pledge and, you know, have a 501c3 way of organizing a particular, you know, fresh expression in the neighborhood. Some might do that, but many are much more organic and and looser in that sense. And yet they're they're still vehicles for the Spirit led impulse to play out. That is, again, as you've been describing all throughout human history, has flourished.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Yeah. And I think the one thing that church history can really, really teach us is that the church is always changing. There is no "this is the Christian model". You're right. This voluntary organization model worked really well for a while in the United States, especially before that. The the state church worked for a while. You know, there's been many different expressions, but it's not static. Any tradition that says "we've never changed," it's not being truthful. You know, the church changes not just through time, but from place to place. You know, you always pick up culture, you always you have to adapt or you're going to die. And so I don't know what the church is going to look like in 100 years. I don't think it's going to look like it will today. And, you know, part of part of it's hard for us if like, we really love the church and we love our traditions. And, you know, I'm Catholic. I love my church buildings and these beautiful things. But I do know that that's not really what the church is. The church is the people of God. And we do need to adapt and we will adapt

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Well, and I was thinking, as you were talking, that left to ourselves, we get to an end. And then at some point we say, all right, is this it? Or might there be something else? And that kind of leaning back into what is a different way of being community. And it begins again, the organic finding each other. Who are who are people that I can show up and be in conversation about these big questions of God and pain in the world and all of those kinds of things. And for me, I will just say that one of the things that has been really fun about the fresh expressions both in the UK and in the US, has been just a network of people telling stories and empowering people, not controlling, not dictating, but trying to iterate around what might we learn and how might we pay attention to the Spirit's movement among us for the sake of God's witness in the world? Not membership, not the inherited church. And I think that's one way of stewarding the moment. And in the upcoming episodes, we're going to talk about some of those stories and some of those movements and what they look like. But I really appreciate, Jennie, you reminding us that as much as we want to believe there's one ideal form of church or the one perfect time in history there hasn't been and that there are, this is God's presence among us doing this and stirring up within us. And we're all called to be part of whatever this thing is, this time that we're at to be a witness. Before we end, I want to know the title of your book, and then we'll put a link in our show notes so people can find it if they want.

Jennie Wojciechowksi: Absolutely. Thank you. It is Women in the Christian Story, A Global history.

Terri Elton: Nice. Well, Jennie, thanks for being with us today. And thanks to all of our listeners for going back in history. And maybe some of this history was new and some of it maybe is a refresher for you. Next week, we're going to hear from one of the UK pioneers about what's a framework for thinking about the mixed ecology from his experience in the UK.

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