In this compelling follow-up episode, the Pivot Podcast dives deeper into the heart of church leadership and innovation. Dr. Andy Root, Dr. Michael Binder, and Dr. Dwight Zscheile challenge prevailing notions about church growth and effectiveness, proposing a radical shift in approach. Could the key to revitalizing ministry be found in doing less, waiting on God, and embracing uncertainty?

Explore why slowing down might be the most innovative step a church can take, how to redefine growth beyond numbers, and what it means to cultivate the courage to ask difficult questions about God's activity. This conversation offers hope and practical wisdom for leaders feeling burnt out or discouraged, inviting them to rediscover the heart of authentic, Christ-centered ministry in a rapidly changing world.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• "The Congregation in a Secular Age," by Andrew Root | https://www.andrewroot.org/the-congregation-in-a-secular-age/
• Find more about Andrew Root's book, "The Church after Innovation" | https://www.andrewroot.org/the-church-after-innovation/
• "Leading Faithful Innovation" by Michael Binder, Dwight Zscheile, and Tessa Pinkstaff | https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506488769/Leading-Faithful-Innovation
• "Four Key Pivots the Church Must Make" | https://faithlead.org/about/framework/four-key-pivots/
• "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," by Robert J. Gordon | https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth
• Download: Free sample chapter of Leading Faithful Innovation | https://faithlead.org/topics/faithful-innovation/

Listen to the Podcast

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot/id1515600522
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0cDv3mtwlzTozjxcyYdFVj

Join us on social:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faithleadfromluther/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lutherfaithlead

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/4dzZyWXbVgs

Terri: 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 innovation with Doctor Andy Root, Doctor Michael Binder, and Doctor Dwight Zscheile. If you want to hit part one, go to your favorite platform and look for that episode. Otherwise, enjoy. So here's here's my question. I'm going to I'm going to throw something back at Andy. Do you imagine a different way of leading to make the turn that you're trying to do?

Andy: Yeah. Well, one of the ways that I want to push into leading is, first of all, to really hold up the language of what it means to minister and what it means to be a pastor, and what it means to think of a community as a community of ministers and pastors that everyone is participating in ministry because ministry is the form of God's action. So how do we form? How do we share in God's being is by taking the form of God's action and God is a minister. You know, this is to echo which maybe I said on the other podcast, Robert Jensen's point is, whoever God is, God is the one who frees Israel from Egypt and raises Jesus from the dead. In other words, the God we can know is the only God we can know is the God who acts. And this action to add to Jensen, my contribution to Jensen is simply to ask for it. He didn't ask.

Terri: Okay. Just checking.

Andy: He said, uh, he didn't. He didn't ask for it. But is that whatever that kind of action is? It's an action of ministry. It's bringing life out of death. It's it's it's bringing liberation. It's bringing wholeness. And so to participate in God's being is to participate in God's act. So having a community of ministers becomes really important. So I may need to use some kind of design theory to create an environment where we're ministering to one another. But I just wonder if the language of ministry doesn't become more robust. And so all of the actions that I think in my books that are the forms of leadership end up taking on this certain theological perspective, which they are embedded in a certain disposition of passivity to there in a sense of giving and receiving and even acting out of invitation toward something. So there's a deep sense of what it means to pray like my my biggest push is what if pastors just saw. The point is to echo Eugene Peterson as their job as the pastor is to teach people to pray, and that is, in a sense, an innovation to teach people who have never done direct address to God before. A way to do direct address to God is a huge, innovative process. But does it help them to say, now we're going to do an innovation, or does it help them to think of acts of formation within? I mean, you guys are trying to recover the traditional language too. I mean, that's my that's my question of when does it help? When does it?

Terri: There's Andy's response to leading. How what would you like to.

Dwight: Yeah. Well I'll just I'll give a more a little more context around, you know, I came to Luther Seminary to study the missional church and kind of really this out of this theological commitment that Michael referenced earlier and, and at the time here, a lot of that work was kind of very high level, pretty abstract. And, and so I kind of spent enough time trying to get congregations to become quote unquote, missional, like it's about joining God's, you know, activity and movement in the neighborhood and all this stuff. And I get these blank faces from people like, I don't want to become this. Like, what does that even mean? And it's it was so strange to them that that that the, the leadership practices that we've, you know, kind of worked on and, and curated and developed in this have been a way to try to help congregations take steps that are transformational in connecting with God, each other, and their neighbors in a very kind of simple, actionable, grassroots way. And so that often the presenting thing that congregations want is they will say, we know we need to innovate. That's the language that they'll use. And that can get channeled in really unhelpful directions around. We think of so much of the church growth movement was still essentially in the cultural framework of Christendom. We assume there's a kind of latent Christianity that people have that we can kind of reactivate and get people to come back into the church if we offer the right techniques. A lot of it was technical, but when you say no, we actually don't know how to take this journey like it is an open ended journey, as Michael was saying, like we. So really, what we need to learn how to do at the basic level is to obey and follow God and to discern spirit. So. So we talk a lot about a discernment based approach to leadership So I believe the Holy Spirit is the primary leader of the church. And. That the work of leadership is helping a community pay attention to and practice. Being led by the Holy Spirit, both personally and also communally, particularly with an eye toward the neighbor. And and that's where I think the conversation can default otherwise into how do we just fix this, this social club that we have or this organization that's, you know, we feel cared for in it because the pastor does it for us or whatever, and then you never get to Lydia. And so I'm always probably because I grew up outside the church, I'm always like, interested in Lydia insofar as Lydia is our spiritually curious but unaffiliated neighbor who's outside the gates of the structures by a place of prayer, whatever that is in today's world.

Michael: Fastest growing group of people in the religious landscape. Right? Exactly. The United States. Yeah. I guess I would just add, I think I think there's two different questions then. Right. There's this language question like how we talk about things that may make it easier or harder for people. And I agree with you that it might be that we need to drop the word innovation, but then we'd also have to keep paying attention to the to the epistemology of innovation to make sure it's not even sneakier, because we're just not saying it. Um, I would also say that in, in real world experiences that I've had people bring those assumptions with them, whether you say it that way or not. And even if you spend 20 minutes explaining, here's our way of thinking about innovation. They still think about it in the in the Apple way. Right? And the same thing with the word ministry, that 97% of people who hear you say you need to be a minister. They think you mean you should sign up to go to Luther Seminary, and then you spend a lot of time explaining, no, that's not what I mean by that. So I guess an open question is how do we not spend all our time redefining the words Um, or are there other words like to your question that we could use that wouldn't require so much redefining, but it feels like part of the issue of the moment, um, nationally, is that we are having a hard time defining words in general, and we do need to spend some time clarifying what we mean. But those presuppositions are coming into those conversations, kind of whether we like it or not. And I don't know that we can redefine them. I mean, practically, can we help people understand what we mean if we mean something different by innovation or minister? Sometimes not all the time.

Andy: Yeah. I mean, I guess that's that that is the the big wager here is actually the is the work to just I mean, this sounds a little a little stilted, but is it only to define the words. In other words, is it to take people deep inside of this kind of reality in our human beings, formed and changed inside of language? I mean, is that how you change imagination is that you have to give people different ways of of talking and, and you know, you guys are you guys have already had this kind of operative anthropology is that you actually are transformed by doing it. So, you know, you don't tell people this is how you pray, you start to pray. But there's, you know, there's a similar logic in there, which is you talk your way into believing like it's it's in the midst of, of talking like this and speaking like this, that you do that. So, you know, there is a lot at stake within our, our language games on on how those play out. And I think you're right, there's a kind of sneaky perspective that could arise even if we don't do the work. But I think one of the places we share and even Dwight, you mentioned when you came here, is there is an inherent hermeneutical nature to this. You know, that that the way leadership happens is a fundamentally interpretive process. I mean, that's what you're saying, interpreting what what God is doing and interpreting how the spirit is the primary leader that calls for visions of language, of how you're going to describe that, how you're going to articulate that, which is and I guess my question for us, and maybe mine's naive, but isn't could it be that certain poetic language say that's embedded more in the disposition of the psalmist is more helpful than this kind of pseudo creative business language? And I don't want to I don't want to bifurcate those so much, because I think when you live in an environment, there's going to be cross fertilization of that language. But do we need to put an emphasis more on one over the other? That's that's really my question. And what does that do to us?

Michael: Yeah. And I like just testing that out. Like let's, you know, give it a try and see if this helps or that helps. My worry always is Christians talking like Christians in ways that people who aren't Christians can't really understand what we mean. And so but.

Andy: Here would be my pushback right now is in the midst of this, that the way we are talking right now, I feel like has been completely co-opted by two responses to the loss of capital, and one of them is that we have a bunch of people within our church and pastors that we're forming to be techno optimists, and this is a phrase I take from Robert Gordon in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, where he talks about there's part of our issue is there's just not growth out there. Like we haven't had really growth in GDP and standard of living since the 1970s in mainline Christianity just thrived when GDP was at 2 or 3%. And since it's been below 2%, evangelicalism was much more, much more shaped to be able to respond to the headwinds of low GDP, to kind of fight in a neoliberal capitalist time for for market share than mainline than the mainline was. But the mainline could live off of all of these excesses of its golden era. And we haven't had that, and we've been below 1%. And so Gordon will talk about this as a larger economic frame is what ends up happening is you have a group of people who are just optimistic that some new invention is right around the corner that will get us the GDP growth. So, you know, will it be robots? Will it be AI? What will it be that will bring this growth in all of the networked in innovations and network inventions have not brought GDP growth like it's been negative GDP growth. The smartphone and social media because GDP is linked to productivity of workers. And those don't seem to help those those inventions. Yeah. Believe it or not. Believe it or not they don't they don't seem to help it. So that's one is that I think it becomes very easy for our language then to become all about techno optimism. But the other side, that's just as connected to this kind of capitalist logic of, of acceleration, of, of escalation is a kind of identitarianism where inside the network, what you need to grow is recognition for your unique identity. And this is Emmanuel Castells has talked about this in the 1990s. He was saying, we're going to have these huge identity revolution because inside the network this will become a capitalist move. How do you build recognition and attention for your unique chosen identity realities? And across the mainline? Right now I mainly just see techno optimists or identitarians, and those two seem to be fighting with each other. But what's really fascinating is they're both capitalists. They both are really about the logic of escalation and in different ways. And I wonder if most of the time, the way we talk is not in this deep sense of what it means to obey, what it means to be forgiven, what we think about sin, what we think about the word. We either talk as techno optimists or we talk about identitarians and then create all our moral frameworks out of those two. And then we we obviously we can't talk of we can't really use some of this deeper language about how God acts because we've been framed by those two realities.

Dwight: Yeah. So and I think along those lines, I think that's really helpful. The underlying theological anthropology, that human nature is basically good, which under undergirds both of those ends up being this really pernicious force when you're trying to actually name God's action and think about God's, you know, coming to us in our suffering and loss, in our inability to act, particularly the inability to choose the good. Um, but but I think, I mean, so I think here's what I'm curious about. And you all jump in on this is, is I spend time with pastors and out kind of around the church. There is a sense of of a lot of that also being really exhausting and kind of just fatigue even from that too. Like people, there's a certain energy around doing the identitarian move that, um, people can find. And it's also really tiring to write and divisive ultimately, because it's about achievement, you still are having to perform and achieve yourself. Yeah. And competition. And so. So I wonder what the Holy Spirit is doing in this moment in our in our culture as so many structures do unravel and can't be fixed, you know, in their old way, like a lot of the mainline. The assumption is we can just somehow rescue or preserve these certain forms of whether it be congregation or denomination or judicatory or whatever. Um, that I don't think will actually work. And so I'm where I'm always telling people, we can't fix this. It's not fixable. And so what do we do? Instead, we listen to Scripture, to the word, to learn to listen to God. And we do that really concrete ways. And we have to do it in ways that bridge out to the neighbor and to the neighbor's stories. And insofar as the logic is, we are this voluntary association of people who are, you know, here to get our spiritual needs met or perpetuate a certain set of cultural traditions or whatever it might be music, liturgy, um, the neighbor and the neighbor's suffering. Just, just recedes in the background. And we've had Michael speak, but we spent a lot of time trying to get mainline churches to, um, care. Maybe. Maybe it's not too harsh of a word, honestly, about those neighbors who don't know the gospel. And, um, and so part of what we've tried to do in this is what are practices congregations can use to take them on that journey that bridges into both experiencing God's energy, the Holy Spirit's energy. It's very different. And drawing them into relationship with neighbors and even deeper relationships with each other in a more authentic way, like a more vulnerable way. Um, and because so much of how they've experienced church is not designed to do that. Um, I think a lot of evangelicals sometimes have a motivation around that where if you believe people are going to hell, like there's like, let's go, go out there. But, you know, very few mainline people believe that. And so what you end up with is, well, they're just all doing their own nice thing. They ubu out there. We have our thing here. We'd like people to come in on our terms, but that's less and less plausible now. So what do we do? Like, we're at a loss. And I think the loss is actually the moment of promise in a sense. But you wrote a book called Promise of Despair, right? So you know what I'm talking about.

Andy: Well, I do think it's a huge question about how we define what growth is. And I guess that's my that's my biggest concern is that we always see growth in this, in this logic of escalation. And I do think, you know, so this is the project I'm working on now is like thinking of Michael's point is, well, can we can we does language help us or do we end up finding ourselves caught in a kind of language cul de sacs too? So maybe, you know, to put the Protestant tradition with the Orthodox one, that the icon also is a word event, you know, but it doesn't come in in words. It comes in an image. And I think there are two interesting images. If we were then going to, you know accommodate to the cultural reality and make memes of this. You know, there is a sense where we think what will save us is accommodation or translation. Maybe it's translation, maybe it's accommodation. I just, you know, this is where I get old man, get off my lawn. Like, why does everything have to be a meme now? Um, you can make this a meme right now, but, you know, we could meme this in the sense of like, look at Artemis of Ephesus. You know, like, here's Artemis of Ephesus. And if you if you've seen that, you can you can stumble onto a statue in the in the Vatican Museum. And it's this god, this fertility god with all these breasts everywhere. And there is a kind of sense of, we think this is what will save us. If we could just create churches that have all these resources. And yet Artemis of Ephesus, like, I don't want to get in to the mythology around her because I don't know enough, but there isn't a lot of grace in the midst of it. It's like she is a God who punishes, and she's a God who gives and takes away. And you know, and you think the same of Baal here, like Baal in the cycle of death to come back. And, you know, you have to you have to serve this. But then if you're walking around the Vatican Museum, you'll also stumble on all these Renaissance pictures of the Madonna and the child. And that's a very different picture of the Madonna in the child and the fertility god. The fertility god is growth of more more of the cults, more of capital in our time, where the Madonna and the child is a growth into something. So Christianity has a fundamental commitment to growth, but it isn't growth into more and more. It's growth into into Jesus Christ, into the spirit. So what I want us to do with innovation, however we use it, we use it where we don't is make it about the growth into this union of the spirit, this union of one another, the growth into commitment, responsibility, advocacy for your neighbor into personhood as opposed to more relevance, more resources. And the problem is, in this capitalist age if we don't redefine that in some way, or give people narratives or images to see that, they will always think it means okay, if we do this, we can get we can get 12% growth, or we can, you know, we can we can feel. And I actually want us to honor those people who think that because what they are thinking is, I would like this church to be there, to bury me. I would like this church to be there for my grandkids. My father gave money for this pulpit and I would like this to continue. That's all a good and we should honor that. But it does get sucked into this logic that we got to grow. We have to grow the capital. And I do think Christianity we shouldn't shy away from. We're about growth, but it's really growth into as opposed of something.

Terri: So I'm curious, I think there's a similarity, even though you both talk about it or the two books talk about it very differently and you're thinking about it. There's a being and doing element here, right? There's there's a relational God, you are God's beloved. Um. You cannot save yourself. That is recognized here. And what we do comes out of that encounter, that awakening, that moment. It is not the point. And it's got to drive us back to the being, the relational, the the ministry in and for the neighbor and the the good in the world. Right. I mean, I mean, there's there's a lot of themes through here. One of the things that I, I just want to just drop into within that is, I think, a myth that exists in the church. And you both, you all agree on this, I think, like, leaders can't just work harder. And the burnout and the and the all the things that have come with that we we're were seeing it in spades. How would you speak to that leader today? Because the bottom line is it's going to take a long time to change the church, right? This. But there's a moment that that leaders are just drowning and they need a they need I want to go into this hopeful future. Give me something in this moment that is an anchor or a lifeline for me to stay in the midst as this paradigm is shifting.

Lara: Are you a pastor feeling overwhelmed by the demands of ministry? But what if doing less could actually help you achieve more? Join Faith+Lead's free webinar, The Ministry of Less is More: five Practices to Cultivate a Flourishing Church by scaling back in this interactive session led by Doctor Alicia Granholm. You'll learn how to identify truly high impact activities strategies for scaling back without compromising your calling, and ways to create space for the Holy Spirit to work more powerfully through your ministry by doing less. This isn't about adding to your plate. It's about finding a way to focus on what's essential and let go of the rest. The webinar is completely free and available at three different times to fit your schedule. Don't miss this opportunity to transform your approach to ministry. Register now at FaithLead. org slash webinars. That's faithlead. Org slash webinars.

Michael: One way to come after that would be when you're pastoring, or if you're a lay leader in your church. You've been working really hard, and maybe you're not seeing the things that you hoped for. The reminder that I hope you hear from all of us today on this podcast is that it really isn't up to us. We can't make it grow anyway. We can't fix it. We can't design the right app to get the people the things we're dependent on God. And God isn't always that predictable. God is loving. God is kind. God is merciful. God is also holy and completely other than us. And so if we think we're going to control God, we're from the Christian perspective. We're we're wrong. And I can confess from my own leadership experience as a sort of high achieving, high driven personality type, it's so much easier for me when I feel stuck or I'm imagining the people that Andy mentioned who are coming to conferences trying to find the right solution to the things, and you feel stuck and you feel like you've tried things and it hasn't worked. You don't know what to do. Maybe it's even your job. I'd much rather work harder than wait for whatever it is God's going to bring up. Because what if God brings nothing up? How do I explain that to my supervisor? What if I have to wait a really long time? What if the thing God creates doesn't actually address the problem that I thought we had in the first place? I can't control God. I can control my own effort. So I think the hope is to give up on being the solution. Just help yourself. Give yourself the grace that God gives you and give up on being the answer person, the person who has to solve everything and reframe your own understanding of your role as someone who's there to participate in whatever it is that God is doing, and you have certain gifts. That's the reason God's called you there. You can use those gifts, but the results are not up to you. The results are up to God. And if there aren't other people who are going to journey with you, then there isn't a way to do it. And in fact, if you work really hard to try to do it for them, you're not succeeding. You're doing them a disservice. They are not going to grow in their own relationship with God. If you try to do things that they are unwilling or unable to do, so give up on that. And I found a lot of freedom as a pastor to just say, that's just not my job. And and people are plenty confused by that because they think it is your job. And it's helpful to say out loud, like, I, I can't fix that. I can try to point myself and you to the grace of God and to a willingness to genuinely listen and try something, knowing it might not solve our problem. And at least for me, that was hopeful, because this burden I felt on my shoulders got lifted. I can't fix this anyway, but I can play the role that God has called me to play and then see what happens. And it might be great and it might be hard, I don't know. But that's the journey. Mhm.

Terri: Can we also note that took you back into heating and cooling and out of a church.

Michael: I mean, business leadership. If anyone's listening who leads a business or is helpful in doing that, it isn't any different. There's a million business books that try to tell you the same thing. The core lie of the age is if you do it smart enough and work hard enough, you can do anything. And that's just not true. You can't. So as a business Christian trying to be a Christian business leader, you say, God, I don't know. I can't fix this either. But these are my gifts, this is my calling. And I'm going to try to step into it today.

Terri: And part of why I bring that up is I think some of the freedom is going to come in by vocational ministry leadership. Yeah. Where where churches can afford. And that's a gift. Yeah. A full time person. And they're having to rethink the whole thing and share it like it leans into something different.

Michael: This is probably a different podcast, but my 30s on that is if we can change the expectations of paid staff people by either making them bi vocational or redefining their job descriptions in ways that everybody understands, we can empower them to do some ministry work that currently they don't have the time or energy to do because they're too busy opening the doors, closing the doors, making sure the place functions. And that's not the work we need them to do and actually to help us move forward as a community.

S6: Mhm.

Dwight: So I'll just add a couple of things. Um, and this is give yourself as a leader and give your community permission to streamline and prune and stop doing things because the temptation is to get busier to add more. And that is the least helpful thing right now if you are trying to help your community learn how to follow God. And so, um, so even post-pandemic Now, a lot of churches had the temptation, let's just like get all that stuff going again, really do discernment around. What can we stop doing to create the space spiritually and emotionally and otherwise, in the life of and temporarily in the life of the community to do a different set of practices? Because a lot of the practices that we've inherited that we have been busy about in church aren't actually helping people learn how to obey and follow God in daily life or live into the story of Scripture. They're doing other things that might be good, but, um, but not actually helping us move forward. So so we we often say, I think we say in the book that most churches we know are doing too many things. So I find, you know, John 15, the vine and branches and rerouting and abiding in the vine and the true vine and the pruning. Every branch that bears fruit. Jesus. God prunes. To bear more fruit. And if we think of that, not in a capitalist growth sense, but in a but in a spiritual sense, um, I think that's really important. And, and I think just having clarity around, well, following Jesus. Like, what is the Jesus shaped life like actually look like? What are some contours of that, some dimensions of that. Can we be explicit about that helps people at least have a sense of what does that journey look like? And then what are the really simple practices that we orient the community's life around, helping people do to live into that which may not be a rummage sale or the altar guild? And like all the committees and things that we've inherited.

Andy: Yeah, I think this is where we, the three of us, really agree. I mean, I think to build on that, there's a there's a phrase that I've been told it's come through like oral history from this place, a Luther seminary, a pedagogical phrase that the great Don Juel used to say in his classrooms. Here is a great New Testament professor when he would say, if it's not going well and he's talking about in the classroom, if it's not going well, I'm working too hard. That was his kind of phrase. And what that meant for him is that he had to kind of not drown people with more information and more processes, but to listen, to hear from his students, to create more of a communio in the in the classroom. And I do think that's part of we could learn that right now. Like, if it's not going well in pastoral ministry, you're working too hard. You know, like stop, open your hands or, you know, put down your hands and and wait, wait on God and attend to the people around you. I mean, I think that is the most core innovative process. And I see what you guys are getting at is just attend to the relationships around you, those in in the neighborhood. And there is a certain anthropology at play in that too, which is there's no such thing as people who are not connected to other people in the world through your congregation. I mean, there's people all over the place. It's like when when congregations tell me we have no children in our church. Like that's utter BS. I mean, you have neighbors who they don't come to this church. They're not members. So, you know, that's why you think you have no children, but you all have grandchildren that that need to be prayed for and held and and so what does it mean to really attend to those kind of relationships? And I think sometimes we want to do so much that we are doing too much. It's not going well because we're because you're working too hard. And to actually turn into attend to the relationships around you.

Michael: I'll just add one last thing to say. You know, Jesus is not worried. I mean that did.

Terri: You get an email on that? No.

Michael: Just biblically, literally. Jesus is telling us, don't worry and I will be.

Terri: With you to the end of the age. I hear him say.

Michael: You know, hey, yeah I've been here before. I understand all of the forces that are impacting you on a daily basis, even if you can't parse them as well as Andy can. I understand them, and if the only thing you can do today is trust me or renew your trust in me, I know the way out. And you know, the best thing about being a Christian is that we're not actually leading this thing. We're followers of Jesus, and Jesus has been here before, so I think there is a lot of hope in were not the answer. And it doesn't take understanding everything at the deepest level in order to be able to love your neighbor, love God, and invest in people around you.

Terri: So here's we're talking about this pivot from fixing to listening and discerning a theme that you, both or all of us agree on here is that if the leader's work is this interpretive space, making holding an environment where we can be listening and wondering what God, what might be God inviting us into. Um, that's the worthy thing. That's the center of. Of what this this work is. And there's a lot of ways that we can get there. Um, there's some new questions to ask, some new practices. There's some questioning of, like what is going on around us. And is that really helpful? Right. I think there's critique that is worthy of just, you know, adding another thing. Um, I'm going to give each of you one last opportunity to say something to our listeners. What's one thing you'd like that hasn't been said yet, or you want to reiterate from what we talked about today as we think about this pivot in the church today.

Dwight: So I'll just begin with a story that we include in the book, which is a meeting that I was in with some denominational like judicatory level leaders some years ago, where we had asked them all to come with a like a just two pager of like, what's the reality of the congregation at the grassroots level of the congregations in your systems? And they would say, you know, x number of growing, declining and all this stuff. And this one group came and said bravely, most of our congregations can't identify their source of hope. And so if that applies, if you're honest with yourself to your congregation and even to you as a leader, as these cultural narratives that Andy's so well described shape us to, to have to be the, the ones who save and and fix and all of that, then, um, our hope is in God, precisely in our worst. That's our story. And so, um, so I think the hope word is really important to claim, but to be very careful about how we define.

Michael: I just want to say thank you. Thank you for listening to this. Listening to this means you're investing in your own leadership and trying to figure out the best way forward for yourself and other people. I know that there's been a lot of conversation about folks wanting to not do this anymore. I had a pastor who trained me who said, you should always have a job in mind that you would do if you weren't doing this anymore. As someone who has done a lot of jobs and a lot of different sectors of society, it is so essential to have great leadership in congregations, so essential and in having been in hundreds, if not thousands of churches in my life. When you see healthy leaders who are serving faithfully and pointing people to God, it's amazing. There is no other organization like the church when it's at its best, representing God in the world, bringing about health and wholeness in the lives of the people around them. It's the best. So we're so thankful for all that you do. And we recognize the many long hours and the many efforts that nobody else sees. We see them, we know about them, and we're thankful for them.

Andy: Well, my word will not be as positive.

S7: As you should have gone before me. You should know that was.

Andy: Really a beautifully wrapped up. So maybe as they edit this, they can just splice ours in or maybe not. But I think what's been really nice for me about this conversation, I do think we've come to a place of, of um, and I think we knew this was going to happen, but of agreeing on a lot. And there is a kind of position of receiving that that we want to be at and and, you know, asking people to wait and to trust. Um, but I guess what I want to want to leave people with is there is that disposition of do less of, you know, that you can't save this institution. But to ask the question, What is God up to? What is God's God doing? And that's why to do less so that you can you can hear that. But that is a fundamentally courageous question. And there's a reason that a lot of pastors don't want to ask it, or a lot of theologians don't want to teach you to ask. It is because to ask that question, um, is very dangerous to ask, what is God doing? Because what God is doing is taking what's dead and making it alive. And so to try to find where God is at work is going to lead you into having to walk into death for the sake of proclaiming the hope that Dwight's talking about. So this should be, I think, where we all agree is on this interpretive reality that at the core of your leadership is about asking, What is God doing? But I want to remind us as we leave that that is a there's freedom in that that doesn't ask you to do more, but it does ask you to have to see differently. And it does ask you to have to bear something, and it does ask you to follow to the cross. And that that is that is a big burden. And you can't do that alone. So you're going to need colleagues, you're going to need conversations, you're going to need to be pastored yourself. Um, but it's not about optimizing and winning W's. It's about bearing death for the sake of life. It's about walking, um, with that mother who just got word that her that her that her child's got cancer. Um, it's about standing with that spouse who's about to bury, um, someone they've lived with for 40 years. It's about helping people to live well and and to die in the embrace of of Jesus Christ.

Terri: Well, I get to work with these Gentlemen, and we get to have these kind of conversations in places here. What I'm grateful for, for this podcast in general, but for today specifically, we are called to steward the future witness of this amazing gospel. And I think this is a hard time to lead. And it's a really exciting time, because when you lay it down and you sit with that family, there's nothing more powerful, right? And that's how this momentum, this is how the turn happens. So I thank you for engaging with one another. And to our listeners, we have a gift for you. In addition to this podcast, is that we have one free chapter out of the book that we talked about, leading faithful innovation that you can find by looking at the show notes and how to download that. And for those of you listening here, you can help us spread the word. If you're watching us on YouTube, please subscribe and make sure you can get future episodes. If you're listening on any of our podcast platforms, please leave us a review that really helps us in our work here. And finally, you've heard this before. If you've listened, the best compliment you can give us is to share this this episode with someone that it might really be powerful for. So please do that. Get the word out. So till our next episode, this is Terri Elton signing out for another pivot podcast.

Faith+Lead voiceover: 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.