It's time to Pivot! In episode eleven of season four, co-hosts Terri Elton and Dee Stokes welcome this weeks special guest, Calla Gilson.

Show Notes:

"On the Way" document: https://nwos-elca.church/on-the-way/

More on that can we found here: https://nwos-elca.church/on-the-way/

https://nwos-elca.church/2021/10/27/innovator-learning-academy/

Calla Gilson: Somehow the stuff of life resonates with people outside the church more than our bells and smells and shiny things. And that was a learning that I didn't expect to come by. But the incarnation and that the incarnation of the Jesus story as it's still being played out today, is a lot simpler than oftentimes we make it out to be.

Terri Elton: Welcome to Pivot. I'm Terri Elton from Luther Seminary.

Dee Stokes: And I am Dr. Dee Stokes joining tonight. Hello, everyone.

Terri Elton: And we have a great guest today coming to us from the Northwest Ohio Synod. Calla Gilson is on staff there and she has been doing fresh expressions type ministry from a synod level. And we're going to talk with her about how you get started in that work. So, Calla, welcome. And we're going to just let you introduce yourself.

Calla Gilson: Thanks for having me. My name is Calla Gilson. My pronouns are she, her and hers. And I am on staff with Bishop Daniel in the Northwestern Ohio Synod. I am like the original foodie. I love growing it. I love cooking it, I love eating it, and I love ever expanding that table to eat with more people. So Fresh Expressions is one of my favorite ways to talk about church because we can have dinner church.

Terri Elton: Nice. I love it. So let's just get started talking a little bit about how you got connected with fresh expressions and what particularly you've been doing in your synod.

Calla Gilson: Absolutely. You know, we at Northwestern Ohio Synod started out our journey with mixed ecology and fresh expressions in 2020. I happened to come on staff April 1st of 2020. So from the very beginning of my walk with the staff of the Northwestern Ohio Synod, we were trying to find a way when it seemed that there was no way, when everything as we had known it kind of was gone. And fresh expressions is a really intuitive way when you're trying to find your way because it really gets back to the beginning. What I always find when I'm talking to folks who are panicking about the church not being the way they have always known it, is to kind of follow with them back to Acts and find that what we're trying to do when we're doing some work with the emerging church is much, much closer to the community of the early Christians than some of the large institutional church we now celebrate together. So I came on in the pandemic. Everybody was panicking. We happened to take some classes by Dr. Michael Adam Beck, and that began our journey with fresh expressions.

Dee Stokes: You know, you mentioned Acts, and I'm so glad you did because I just believe that during the pandemic, the Lord was trying to move us back to Acts, you know, to first century. There's been more expressions of church that are maybe even a little bit smaller than mega churches, and there's been more house churches and all kinds of things. So talk a little bit more about that. I'm so glad that you mentioned Acts because it's very important. I think that I just believe we're in that movement right now. What do you think?

Calla Gilson: Absolutely. It's, a lot of times people see the work of emerging ministries outside the walls of the church, is very novel or something new, but really it's a return, especially for us. We are a synod of mostly rural populace. We're across 23 counties. And what you'll find when you look at our our folks is that about 1 in 8 people in our synod is directly connected to either feeding people here or around the US, that even if your family no longer is farming in the present generation, grandma and grandpa did farm. And so the schedules of planting and harvest have always shaped the cultural calendar and the order of our lives. And church kind of followed those patterns. And so COVID was kind of an in-between time when we were able to kind of parse through what in the patterns that we've created kind of still serve us and the church and what even in a rural environment, don't serve any longer. And so you'll see folks doing things like community gardening, for example. It was great. We started a community garden out at my parish and what was funny was, I said we should have a rogation service, we should bless the seed, we should bless the farmer. And in the process of writing up a liturgy for that, somebody came out of the church archive closet and said, Oh my gosh, we've done this before. And of course we've done this before because we come from farmers. And rogation was just always a way it had been done. But in my short lifetime that kind of been done away with. So it's interesting that COVID gave us the time to kind of pause and sort through all of these things that we thought were so important, were guilded, were liturg ized, if I could make up a word, right. And we came away just finding that, wow, maybe the Jesus story is the most important thing. And maybe if we lead with that, we'll discover some cool new territory.

Terri Elton: That's awesome. Little Jesus. A little Acts. Not a bad place to start, right? Yeah. So one of the questions that we often ask here in Faith Lead and the work we do with churches and the work that we do, even with our students in that area, is what's what's the challenge that you're the problem you're trying to solve or the challenge you're trying to address? In the middle of the pandemic? There are a lot of challenges, right? Just closing down your doors and not being able to gather in person. But what I like what you're saying is you really we're getting to deeper challenges than just getting in the doorway or how to do a traditional service online kind of thing. So as you are working with the churches and the people in your synod, what was the challenge that was really in front of you that fresh expressions or this mixed ecology was helping you get at?

Calla Gilson: So what's really interesting is we found kind of like three basic challenges. The first is we asked all these pastors with so much theological training to jump in to a space, that being a secular space, where we assumed everyone had lots of connections, we assumed that we ran in circles both secular and sacred, when the reality of that division, right, is kind of questionable because it's all sacred space. And so what we found when we encourage folks to jump in and do a little bit of discovery about their neighborhood, do a little bit of work and practice around prayer walking, for example, beyond their church building, we found that a lot of our pastors said, "Well, where am I supposed to start?" Because I don't have any connections outside the church world. That was a really big learning for me as a young person who, yeah, faith is a big part of my identity, but it's not my whole identity. And I go to the gym and, you know, I run in the park and there's people I see when I do those things on a regular basis. And that's also part of who I am. I had a lot of pastors say, Nope, I just don't really have anywhere to plug in. And so we came up with some practices and we can talk a little bit about those in a minute to kind of push ourselves out of our comfort zone. It turns out "out of our comfort zone" is way bigger than out of our church. And so just kind of wrestling with trying to get people connected to their neighbors. The second challenge we found is that, man, we are a church where people think they can do it alone. We had a lot of people join in, enter into our Innovator Learning Academy and try to do it without a team. Try to start a church, an emerging ministry, a prayer group, a dinner church without a team. And that's actually kind of like the opposite of what we hear Jesus talk about again and again. You know, Jesus had the 72, the 12, and then when sending people out, sent people out two buy two, Right? And so we found a lot of people trying to just like be really strong and do it themselves. And that was a learning, that was a challenge. And then the last thing is something I like to talk about a lot. And a lot of my folks like "nones and dones," a lot of my friends who are finished with the church, this one really gets them and that we as the church have made everything so shiny and sterile. We have gilded things, we have scheduled things. We have made everything glisten and gleam when what Jesus worked with was the stuff of life. It was bread. It was wine, right? It was soil and seeds. And this one's big for me because I was a young adult in global ministry in Palestine. And so when living near Bethlehem, we would visit the Church of the Manger and we'd go down into the place, the cave, actually, where Jesus was believed to be born of all of Queen Helena's churches and things. This is the one that they're pretty sure is actually the birthplace. And there would be incense and there would be things hanging and digging and gleaming and gold encrusted. And then you just kind of pull back all those decorations and you just see stone wall because Jesus was born in a cave. He broke bread, he drank wine, he walked around and had dirty, stinky feet in his sandals. And that somehow the stuff of life resonates with people outside the church more than our bells and smells and shiny things. And that was a learning that I didn't expect to come by, that the incarnation and that the incarnation of the Jesus story as it's still being played out today, is a lot simpler than oftentimes we make it out to be.

Dee Stokes: I want to go back to your first challenge because I find that fascinating.

Calla Gilson: Yeah.

Dee Stokes: Of course, we all need an outlet and sometimes, honestly, people don't have outlets and I can see that from pastors. But how did you make the pastors recognized that, "Yes, you do go places other than the church, right?" You go to the grocery store, you go to the gas station, you go, and this is what Fresh expressions is all about, right? It's it's where I frequent. It's the places I like to go. And I see people like me at wherever the bowling alley or skate rink or whatever. Right. And you just see people who do things that you do. So how did you convince them? Yes, you do go places outside of the church?

Calla Gilson: Yeah, that's a great question. It was tough, but the first thing we needed to move past was that this isn't just another thing to add to your to do list, that a fresh expression isn't just something you get to check your box for, that it is the stuff of life. And so what we would do is we would do some community mapping where you just get a big old box of markers and a big old sheet of paper and you draw your community. And it's fascinating because we would go into a community and we would start to draw as people who don't spend much time there, right synod staff, we would start to draw out things and then the folks who live there would start to draw out things, and then we would add and they'd say, I've never thought about this grocery store or this bowling alley that way before because it was just, you become so used to what's around you that you miss the missional opportunity, right? Like you miss that, that too, is sacred ground. And that's why we love to use the language of parish. Actually, you'll hear Bishop Daniel say that all the time is it's not just your church building. It's everything around it that you serve. You serve all of that. And so some community mapping was really helpful, not just mapping your own community, but having somebody from the outside come in and do it with you. Very valuable. And we do a lot of prayer walking. So we would send people out in twos or threes, never alone again, and we would have have a good chunk of time to really walk the streets, see where people were spending time, pray over those spaces and bring those learnings back and kind of talk talk through them in a group.

Terri Elton: That's awesome. I have a question. You mentioned the Innovators Learning Academy. Did I get that right? Yeah. Tell me what that is. And for the people that were a part of it, what did it entail? Yeah.

Calla Gilson: So the first Innovator Learning Academy started in 2020 and we have since graduated I'll say, one class, the next class will be graduated here in a couple of weeks. They'll have their final session and then the final session for one group is the beginning of the journey for the next group. So actually the way we do this is you apply to the program. You do not apply a loan. We no longer let people apply a loan. They have to apply with a couple other people from their community. Doesn't even have to be their church. Then you begin a 16 month journey with five intentional retreats. And it used to be that folks would be pulled out of their context and brought somewhere new and learn together through a series of practices and learning, and then sent back to do that work. Actually, in this third iteration, what we're doing is we're going to actually send the teachers out to the context of the people. It'll be a little bit more of that opportunity for when you have a stranger come to your your own community and you're prayer walking with somebody with fresh eyes rather than practicing the skill of prayer, walking and then taking it back. Right. So we're going to be working with a couple different hubs around our synod where folks will gather regularly. And then in between those retreats where you do the learning, we had intentional coaching opportunities for folks to get on and kind of say, Hey, I'm really stuck on this, and we'd kind of talk them through that. You were always welcome to reach out to anybody, whether it be Michael having come and and been with us for some time or Synod staff or now, what's really cool is because we have people who have gone through it, they're teaching it. That's the model of discipleship that we love to celebrate that when folks are coming to the end of their time, that final retreat for them, they teach the first retreat for the next group. And so you do have this beautiful cycle of discipleship that kind of is never ending. Then it's also a free program, which is something that I think is really important to note. We started this is this is so wild. We did our very first year end ask in 2020. Bishop had asked that we raise $52,020. 52020. So that we could support this work that we felt we were being called to. And folks were amazingly generous and shared over $84,000 that propelled this work to begin. And then they've continued to give to it. So we've been able to maintain this academy pretty much for free for anybody who wants. They just have to get themselves to the retreats, which are within two hours drive usually for everybody.

Terri Elton: I love two things about what you just said about the model. I love the I would call it a theology of abundance, where we're feeling called to this. We put out an ask people give right, and then the people on the ground get to come and to share that piece. And then the sense of the building for scale or or shaping a ministry that pretty soon the synod doesn't have to, I mean, they need to maybe do some organizational stuff, Right. But but it's not an expert driven. Right. It's an equipping model. With regard to that. I'm an ELCA person, Dee's not. And I'm just going to say those are not two things that I hear everywhere in the ELCA. A Theology of abundance and an equipping model.

Calla Gilson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Terri Elton: What I want to ask is how the heck did you get there? Right? Was that already there? Did that happen in the time? Is there something you did?

Calla Gilson: It's not something you hear a lot about, but it is something that Jesus talks a lot about. And so I think that that kind of goes through the vision. So our mission statement is "making disciples, equipping leaders, strengthening parishes and nurturing new communities in northwestern Ohio and the world," right? So the focus being that discipleship is kind of baked in, like it's just it's how we operate or how we seek to operate, right? Because it's it's what we saw Jesus do. Part of this work started through what we call the Discipleship Initiative. And so we started out with that view of discipleship in mind. And then it kind of guided everything that we've we've sought to do. Yeah.

Dee Stokes: Well, I'm not a part of the ELCA like Terri has said, but hey, I might want to get involved with that. Is that just for ELCA people or. Or what?

Calla Gilson: No, Right now, I mean, we really welcome anybody with an interest and a passion, so please, Dr. Dee, come on. Come on over.

Terri Elton: Okay. That's really crazy. That is maybe the craziest thing. Anybody's welcome, right? No, I love that. Right? Yeah. So who tell me three stories or, like, who are some examples of who might be a part of this? And what did they come in thinking they were going to do and then what happened?

Calla Gilson: Yes, absolutely. So when we look at kind of we've come away with three learnings that I think our, what we would call innovators, because that's how we refer to these folks. And, you know, Dr. Dee, I'm sure with both of your work with Michael, you've seen this curve, right? And you have the innovative group is very, very small. It's just a couple people who are curious and it takes a really long time to hit that point in the curve where you get to gain a critical mass. So our early people, they did some really remarkable things pretty early on. The first is Heather Smith. She is a deacon and she and her husband, who's also a deacon, during the pandemic, you know, they they really tried to stay safe. They homeschool their kids. And were looking for a way to engage their spirituality, not within a church building, just out of sheer need to stay safe. And so one of the values of the Smith family is the intergenerational element that church provides, right? One of the greatest gifts of mainline Protestantism is that like and many Christian communities is that intergenerational thing that happens, whether it's on Sunday morning or at the church potluck or Sunday school, right? And so Heather began a project called Hike and Seek, where she invited other families with littles and grandparents to all come along and do a visio divina of sight. So essentially what that looked like was everybody would join together at a park and then Heather would read a piece of scripture and everybody would be asked to pick a word. And throughout their hike together as an intergenerational group, they would each look for that word in nature and talk to one another about where they saw love or faith or steadfastness in the trees and in the plants and in the babbling brook. And then they would come back together at the end of the hike. And I'll discuss this together. Say a prayer and head off to their own homes. It was a great opportunity to be outside, socially distanced and have grandma and grandpa there next to little brother and mom and dad. It was beautiful, intergenerational built in. And so Heather came into the Innovator Academy with a love of nature. She came into the Innovator Academy with a with a spirituality that turned towards nature. And when she began experimenting, this is what it looked like. It's uniquely her. And it's the stuff of her life basically used to glorify God, which is pretty cool.

Dee Stokes: I love it. I love it. Thank you for that example. I just I just love the fact, if I may for a moment, how God, whether he sent the pandemic or allowed it, I'm not going to get into theology with you. But but how He's used it for his glory and I love these stories. And a lot of you're speaking our language. You speak in incubator and accelerator and you know that that's sow Seeds ish, you know, And so I'm over here grinning because a lot of this is what we do with the Seeds Project. And I love the piece where your folks give back to the next generation that is so Jesus and so biblical. And I'm just excited about what you guys are doing in your synod. And if I say something wrong, correct me because I don't speak the ELCA language, but I just believe it's God. And and I'm just happy to hear you talk about it and to see what God has done through a time where we thought we were in despair and distraught. Some people, God really has done a work with his church and I'm excited about what I see. Thank you for what you do and we bless what you do and want you to continue to do what you do.

Calla Gilson: Oh, thank you so much. Absolutely big Amen to all of that. Another kind of learning we came away from those that first two cohorts, a lot of our folks thought you had to create something that you had really to work really, really hard to make something happen. And just like Dr. Dee said, you know, it is more about recognizing what God is already doing in your community and joining in on that beautiful dance of the Holy Spirit and what she's up to. So we have an innovator who she wasn't quite sure exactly where God might be calling her, but she kept thinking about the recovery community, given her experience with the recovery community. And so every time she was really wrestling with this and she would come to a retreat and say, ahhh, it's still on my heart. It's still in my heart. But the pandemic is still causing all of these troubles of how do I get into the halfway house to help? How do I get to these young women in the halfway house to help them in their recovery? Well, pretty soon she got a phone call. She got a phone call from the halfway house and it asked if would she please come. Regardless of the COVID, this is way later pandemic, the COVID restrictions, would she please come and spend time with the women and would she please help them connect to a church? It was it was the exact thing she had been praying about and hemming and hawing and trying to get into for the last year. And so now she goes in to the halfway house and spends time with the ladies doing art projects because one of the asks that they had was how could we decorate our space for Christmas? We don't have any money. And Vicky, with her amazing, amazing skills in craft and in art, she helped them decorate their space for Christmas. And so she's been able to kind of start to care for these women in a spiritual way. She introduced them to her church, which has an amazing online presence where the pastor is very intentional at interacting with the online participants. And so in addition to her arts and crafts that she does together with those women walking alongside them in recovery, she also goes and helps connect them with church, where they have now connected with the pastor in that community. Really, really remarkable. And then the third, just because you asked about practices, right? Not everybody comes in and in 16 months, it's a magical process of being done. And I think that that's a beautiful part of the process as well. We have a pastor who was really excited about combining his love of improv and ministry and so was going to work very hard to create a ministry using improv with college students now. He tried and he tried. And he tried. And he tried. And then at the end of his time, we ask that the outgoing innovators present gifts for the incoming innovators, whatever they wish they had going through the cohort. And he handed each person a small Lego man and he said, "This is your Lego person, so that all those times you try something and no one shows up, at least you have a Lego friend with you." So, you know, not every person, it's not a science. It's not something that you come in and you do X, Y and Z and you have a fresh expression. There's a reason that we use the word "nurture" new communities instead of launch new communities. Launch is very scientific. You write the equation, you get the rocket in place and you launch it. And you know what? Sometimes it never comes back. And there are whole stories of rockets going up and never returning. Right? But when you nurture something, you walk alongside it and you feed it and you encourage it and you watch it grow and you learn from it, who has ever nurtured something that they didn't also themselves, you know, be changed by. o those are just three little stories, and I could tell more, but we did plenty of failure toasts. I will say that that's part of our practice.

Terri Elton: All right. I want one failure toast. I want to hear a story about that. And I'm going to give you another thing. And maybe these connect or maybe they don't. I imagine that some people think, oh, this is going to be awesome. Let's do fresh expressions so we can grow our church, right? Or so people start coming to worship or something. Tell me how the established church or the current church members, the people maybe that weren't in these incubator groups working on these, how they saw this and what to do with that, and then a failure toast.

Calla Gilson: Absolutely. So I will say, we gathered at a brewery actually in one of our retreats. And everybody was sipping on their beverage of choice. And Michael called us all to attention and said it is time for the failure toasts. And so we did take turns and one person would stand up and they would say, this was my failing. It ranged from everything from I didn't realize that I had scheduled the activity that I had planned for after all of the daycare children had already been picked up for the day and everybody would toast them and say, "here. here!" and encourage them in their failure because at least they tried. And isn't this valuable? Even if each of us tried something and failed and realized that maybe it wasn't as scary as we thought and then went back, thought through what happened and then tried again. And maybe, maybe, maybe something else. God works through that. So the failure toasts are kind of all over and it depends on your crowd, but they're litte learnings and they're big learnings. Right? But I really think that your, your question here about fresh expressions being a strategy to fix and or save the church is spot on. Because somehow somehow that is very easy to believe. We use the word inherited church, and I love the word inherited church because personally, growing up as a fifth generation member of this little rural church I'm a part of it is the church that I inherited in all ways. Their songs I knew because they were sung to me, the Lord's Prayer was, you know, it's at every meal in my family. But we try to see this mixed ecology as a thing of both and which is really good for us Lutherans to remember that. It isn't good for us to cling so tightly to what is and not be able to even have hope for what could be. There's an example of one church, and it was thrilling to watch the way that after one thing happened, the rate and fervor and excitement with which they were ready to try something else just kind of increased. Now, neither of those projects changed everything. Neither of those projects put more butts in the pews, but they did encourage and help that church understand more about who their neighbor was. Because going from not being able to tell anybody, I can actually remember the outreach ommittee and the evangelism committee, The goal that they had made in 2022 was to contact other people who were members of the church who hadn't come back to ask them why. And I remember saying I thought you guys were the evangelism committee. Why are we talking to our own people? Why aren't we going out and knocking on the doors of our neighbors and asking what they need in this time? Right. And you go from that to a church that now really is looking at a couple different fresh expressions. These things are it's progress, but neither pulls energy away from the other. That's why that that term of mixed ecology, I think works really well.

Terri Elton: It's interesting. We too often use inherited church and when you were talking, my family that I married into the Elton family has an inherited farm. So guess who's inheriting a farm? This city girl that actually grew up in Southern California. My dad grew up on a farm. He knows stuff about a farm. My father in law grew up on a farm, but I did not. And what's interesting to me, so my husband and I have been spending a lot of time talking about this because both generations that that are are going to move off. And now we have this 100 year farm that family has been tending. And we have to do it differently because we are never going to be the farmers of that land. And what does it mean to steward a community, to steward a time? And it's what what occurred to me as you were talking is I think we can do that stewarding kind of conversation in other areas of our life. But somehow when it comes to church at least there can be people that grow up in the church this more stagnant kind of "We have to do it this way."

Calla Gilson: Yeah.

Terri Elton: And that's not even how farmers do it. I was talking to my my college friend who actually runs a farm. He has his family farm and he's handing it down to the next generation and wondering. They've continue to change. Right. And wondering what it means at this time. So we have examples of this that I think we could learn from. Dee, what do you got as we wrap up here?

Calla Gilson: Well. I don't have much to say other than I'm so excited about what you guys are doing in Ohio and just keep doing it, you know, and keep teaching people. You know, Terri, you're talking about change. It is the fresh expressions kind of motto that, you know, we love music, but we didn't complain when we had to go from eight tracks to cassettes to MP3's and showing my age. We just bought the new thing and we kept listening to music because we love music. So the gospel is the same. And but the way we present the gospel has to change and has changed. And so we love the gospel. We just have to do it on Facebook sometimes instead of always doing it in the church, right? Or do it at Dog Park Church. Right. Or Tattoo Parlor Church. If I ever meet you, I'm going to show you my tattoo that I got down at tattoo parlor church at Michael Beck's church one year. So thank you.

Calla Gilson: That's really awesome. That's really awesome. The only other thing I'd say about failure, because you talked about innovation of all of this technology, right? And I mean, we know how many different iterations folks, scientists, tech developers have to go through to get the one thing that we then get into our hands, right. And how long they've been working at doing that, we found that the more someone could get comfortable, failing and laugh at it and do a toast, the more likely they were to then actually nurture something in a space where they knew God was already at work. We do something called micro grants that also started in 2020, and what that is, is it's up to $2,000 to try something new and you have to start it within a month of receiving the money and you need to finish it by the end of the year, which is like a six month period. We usually do them around Pentecost and these have been so valuable, if not just for folks to try something, just try something different, try something new. It's going to feel off. It's going to feel different. But boy, what could God do with it? You know, we I just was looking at the statistics of this program that we've done the other day, and we have, let's see. We've given away over $184,000 of these tiny little grants to anyone who would like to try something new. So there's both a hunger and a curiosity to discover what God is up to in this current way of calling out to expanding the church. And there's a desire to do the work. And that is, that is like so encouraging.

Terri Elton: That's so fun. What I'm encouraged by is I think sometimes when you're just one local congregation, this problems, these problems can feel so big. But you have used the platform of the Synod and Parish. Right? Rethinking. We're called to place we're called to be a witness in this part of Ohio. And we're all assets. We're all witnesses to this gospel. So I'm leaving today, I think your three challenges are challenges we all can face. What does it mean to connect with neighbors in really authentic ways and even little ways? What does it mean to do it with the team, to partner, to collaborate, and maybe with crazy people that you hadn't thought about before? And what does it mean to put the gospel in incarnation in the messiness of everyday life? And that sounds like a church movement I want to be a part of. And then to do it with support and coaching and toasting failure. Not all bad. Right. And trusting in in the Church of Acts and the witness of Jesus Christ. That's awesome. You have brought joy to my day in this, in this conversation. Today is the last interview we have for this this season four of Pivot podcast. Next week in our interview, we are just going to get back with Dee and Dwight and I and say, "What have we learned?" So we wrap up, Pivot next week, so come back and join us.

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