It's time to Pivot! In episode six of season four, our hosts Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile welcome this weeks special guest, author and pastor, Jorge Acevedo.

In todays episode, we explore a few questions around Jorge and his work.

How do inherited/traditional and Fresh Expressions work together?

Why do you care about Fresh Expressions and mixed ecology?

What are some things you want to share with pastors/judicatory executives and other leaders in inherited church about authorizing and supporting Fresh Expressions and cultivating a mixed ecology?

Jorge Acevedo is the Lead Pastor at Grace Church, a multi-site, United Methodist congregation in Southwest Florida with three campuses (Cape Coral, Fort Myers Shores, Fort Myers Central). Grace Church is recognized as having one of the largest and most effective recovery ministries in America.

Jorge co-authored Sent: Giving the Gift of Hope at Christmas. He also authored Vital: Churches Changing Communities and the World and co-authored The Heart of Youth Ministry. He has also written for the United Methodist Publishing House, Circuit Rider magazine, Good News magazine and Our Faith Today.

Mentioned in this episode:

Q4 Webinar: The Path from “I” to “We”: Extending Christian Community to the Neighborhood

Jorge Acevedo: There's no harm with taking your phone and filming a little video of, you know, 30 seconds of your dinner church and sending it to your bishop, which I've done hundreds of times saying, "Hey, thank you for letting me be at this assignment. Here's a little bit of the fruit of our ministry together." And now, is that kissing up? No, that's leading up.

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

Dwight Zscheile: And I'm Dwight Zscheile, also from Luther Seminary. And welcome to this episode where we are thrilled to have as our guest Jorge Acevedo, who is the lead pastor of Grace Church in Cape Coral, Florida. It's actually a multi-site church, so you can tell us a little bit about that. And George has been involved in cultivating innovative ministries of various sorts for for many years. And we invited him to share a bit about what does this work look like from the perspective of someone who is overseeing and leading a fast growing congregation? Jorge, welcome to the Pivot podcast. We're so excited to have you here.

Jorge Acevedo: It's really good to be with you.

Dwight Zscheile: Tell us a little bit about your story and tell us a bit about the story of Grace Church.

Jorge Acevedo: Sure. Well, I am a first generation follower of Jesus. I was not raised in a Christian home, actually came to Christ through a para-church ministry that was working in our high school. And in some ways from hour one, it was baked into kind of my spiritual history of these kind of non-traditional ways of reaching folk because I didn't go to summer camp or vacation Bible school or walk the aisle on a Sunday morning. I came to Christ through a ministry that held meetings in a apartment complex, community center, and actually gave my life to Christ using that little four spiritual laws book in my parents living room. A few days before my 18th birthday as a senior in high school, and to celebrate the fact that I had become a Christian, I went out with my best friend Greg and smoked a joint to celebrate the fact that I was a follower of Jesus. So as I and I tell my congregation and friends and pastors when I speak at conferences and things, you know, if you're going to reach pre-Christian folk, remember they don't come with the decoder ring. They don't understand all the rules and those kinds of things. And my life was a mess, but it was not the traditional what we call today, the inherited church, the church on the corner of Main and Maple with a beautiful sign and a wonderful kids ministry. It wasn't that kind of church that reached me. It was the body of Christ in this what we might call a fresh expression of church. We didn't call it that in the 70s, but that's what it was. It was a, it was a space, a place and a people that was created and cultivated to reach high school students who would probably not come to a traditional youth group. So it was baked into my spiritual history and DNA. Six months later, I landed in a United Methodist church in the late 70s going through charismatic renewal and was in that church where I was discipled and called and sent out into ministry and graduated from Asbury College and Asbury Seminary and met my wife, who we've been married now for 41 years in that youth group at that church. We married early and had kids early and then following seminary, served as an associate in youth pastor and then at for four years, four years as an executive pastor. And then I've been at Grace Church for 27 years. And this August I'll be stepping away. After 27 years, I'll be stepping away from my role as lead pastor. We've been in about of a four year succession plan. I'll be stepping into a ministry of coaching and writing and speaking. So for the whatever season God gives me. Grace Church is a United Methodist congregation that, like a lot of mainline churches, was struggling when I came 27 years ago, had peaked 5 or 6 years earlier in its worship attendance and was on this kind of steady decline, Ironically, in one of the fastest growing communities in America: Cape Coral, Florida. Percentage wise, per capita wise, a fast growing community. And so for the last 27 years, we've been seeking to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. I would say that Grace Church is passionately, outwardly focused, and that's been something that a kind of a culture that we've created over the years. You know, 15, ten, 15 years ago we were doing big outreach events out in our parking lot and having thousands of people coming to those kinds of events. And you could trace people's spiritual journey from a fall festival held in our parking lot to coming to our services, to giving their lives to Christ, to baptisms, to disciple experiences, to mission trips, to getting called into the ministry and serving as a staff person or even pastors in the life of our church. What we discovered about ten years ago is that our attractional style of ministry that had worked splendidly for us, we were doing better at it and seeing less results. Does that make sense? We were getting better at music, better at kids ministry, better at our preaching, even better at those kinds of things. But yet not seeing we just saw that the that our ROI, return on investment, wasn't as rabid as it had been in the early 10 to 15 years of our ministry here. And it began to leave us scratching our heads saying "what was going on?" And I think we now know that what was going on is kind of the last gasps of Christendom. I'm in the South and the kind of the last gasps of Christendom were happening. Our culture was shifting and we needed to find new strategies to reach new people. And that's when we bumped into the Fresh Expressions movement out of the UK. I actually did a a pilgrimage there and learned about fresh expressions and the mixed ecology experimentation that they were going through. They were ten, 15 years ahead of us. They were speaking to us from the future, if you will, about this movement. And so we've been experimenting, I guess, close to ten years now in the Fresh Expressions movement.

Terri Elton: So I'd like to step into that moment. I was working in a large megachurch around some of these things and can kind of put myself there, right? The attractional model, we can do it better and it doesn't necessarily mean more people are coming, right? And yet I think often that's the mindset that that we have gone. How did you get started turning that? I mean, here's here's a church that is outward focused, right? But it was through a particular way, right? An attractional model of ministry. How did you, you came back from that training. You came back with that imagination for you. Tell me about what that first stage of work was like.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah. You know, when when you've been in a church a long time, there's hopefully what grows is, is a is amount a certain amount of trust in you gain some leadership capital. One of the things that I would say we cultivated from day one here is a is a culture of high experimentation. And so it really wasn't I mean, I like to tell folks our step into fresh expressions wasn't a big, big leap. It was a, it was a stretch, but it wasn't a leap because we had been doing stretches all along. We bought a $6 million grocery store, ran it for ten years as a community center. It just got to be too overhead, building heavy, sold it at a several million dollar loss and I still kept my job as the lead pastor. I led through all of that. And and so our church was willing to experiment even to the point where it where we didn't do well in terms of we fed 250,000 people in ten years. It's not like we didn't do well. We did good work, but we just couldn't make the business side of eight and a half acre, 57,000ft² piece of property work for us. And I would say that that, if you will that that failure, they say "fail forward," that failure made us question. The wisdom of building a ministry around a simply "come to" model. So out of that failure, we said, can we do all of these models in a "go to" model? What does it look like for us to have a go to model? So then when I went to the Fresh Expressions Pilgrimage with my bishop and some others and began to see that folks were doing things in community centers and parks, in bars and even on church campuses that were sitting empty six and a half days a week. And they were reinventing spaces to reach people who were not coming in the door on Sunday morning at 10 or 11 in the morning, but might come on Tuesday to a recovery meeting or to an art thing or to a music thing around hobbies and habits that people are engaged in. Again, it wasn't a stretch for us, I would say. I just simply began to to invite some of our leaders to read some of the literature. And in those days it was literature from the UK. There wasn't a lot being written here in the U.S. at that point. And to watch videos and to experiment with this, we hosted, I got invited to host a dinner church training and one of our staff, Heather Evans, attended that. And that was, that was for us, that God moment that you just can't create. She was, if you will, the person of favor in our church who has the apostolic gifts to lead it. And she was on our staff. Her own personal narrative is she had been a teacher in a very exclusive private school. She came to work on our staff, helped us launch some remarkable ministries, particularly in kids ministries, went back to a low income school, and there she began to build bridges between her experience as a children's director and her experience as a teacher in low income housing and saying, "Is there a way for our church to impact those children?" And she knew that fresh expressions would be that. So she then took it and she's run with it and taken it to great, great new levels of experimentation in the life of our church. So, you know, we have a culture of outreach that that made it a stretch, not a not a leap. And then and then we had the person of peace, if you will, the person of favor who felt the call to lead that. And those those were really the early days. And we've experimented. We've started more fresh expressions that have not made it than have. And that's just been a part of the culture of our church because they're very inexpensive and they often yield great fruit.

Dwight Zscheile: So tell us a little bit more about some of those stories and maybe even beginning with what Heather did in experimenting with that ministry and that dinner church in the trailer park, if I understand correctly. Tell us about that. Yeah.

Jorge Acevedo: Well, our first entree was not the trailer park. Our first entree was into a similar it's a hunger drought community about four miles from us. It's called Suncoast. And Suncoast has the second largest trailer park in the southeast of America. It's it's generations of working poor, particularly Anglo folk that are stuck in cycles of poverty and addiction. They were their children were in the elementary school that we had been providing reading mentors for, our church had a reading mentors ministry there. And so we already had relationship with some parents and some kids through that. And we found that there was a community center there that set empty most days. And so we said, we're going to experiment with a dinner church in this empty community center. And I think we paid $100 a week to use the community center, and we cook the food at our church kitchen here. We had some volunteers come and do that, and then we would serve the food and sit with our neighbors and share together what we call pause and wows. How is life powed them and how is life wild them? We eventually started introducing a Jesus story and and dinner church and church broke out in that dinner church space and we began to see people coming to faith. We began to have baptisms. We did funerals and weddings in this community center and ran that for many, many, many years until some change happened at the county with the community center. And they kind of basically kicked us out. And so we've been we've moved that to a new space not far from there. And that continues until today, where every Monday we do a dinner church in a new space, a similar space in that community. When COVID hit in this early spring of 2020, we had just begun sensing a call to another trailer park. And I believe that's the one, Dwight, that you're talking about. Another trailer park just 3 or 4 miles from us as well. That's primarily filled with undocumented folk from South and Central America. They had a church next door, and that church graciously allowed us to use their social hall that opens out to the trailer park. We were able to reach through that launch of that dinner church, a fair number of folk who were English speaking, but we could never had a breakthrough with our Spanish speaking neighbors. They would show up, but we just never had a breakthrough. And then on September 28th of 2022, a Cat four hurricane, Hurricane Ian, came through, filled that church with water and destroyed that trailer park. Just devastated the trailer park. And it was interesting that that tragedy opened the door for us to engage with our Spanish speaking neighbors. We met the the grandma of the trailer park, Maria, and she opened the door for us to begin ministering in the trailer park, helping them with rebuilding. We're in the process now. We have mission teams coming from all over the country and helping us rebuild those trailers. And we've since then bought a food truck that we take into the trailer park and we set up tables and we do dinner church. And now it's primarily with our Spanish speaking friends. We have some interpreters that we've raised up that help us from the trailer park. And church is breaking out around tables there as we are rebuilding that community one trailer at a time. It's remarkable. It's a beautiful thing.

Terri Elton: One of the things that occurred to me as you were telling that story is you have to have a vision of a long game, not a short game. And and what I'm wondering is twofold. One, what's your hoped for end when you try these experiments, whether it's dinner church in a trailer park or some other thing, what's your hoped for? Kind of what are the signs that you keep going if that happens? And then how do you raise up leaders to kind of do this work?

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah, that's a great question. Our hope is the same for our fresh expressions of church that it is for our inherited church here on the corner of Hancock Ridge Parkway and Southeast 21st place, we we don't think that there's two missions. There's only one mission. And that mission is to make disciples, apprentices of Jesus, followers of Jesus. And I think Jesus in the great Commission tells us how to do that. He says, "Go," you have to take the initiative. He doesn't say, "Come to me." He says, "Go." He says, "teach." That's disciple making or baptize. I'm sorry. That's initiating, teach. That's that the formation part of of the discipleship process and "obey," that's the sending part, the more missional part of what it means to follow Christ. It's the what Jim Collins calls the flywheel, you know, it's the flywheel of disciple making where you go, you baptize, you initiate, you teach, you form people. And then you, you, you teach them to obey, to send them out into the community so that we can reach more people. We have four words we use reach, connect, form, send. It's kind of our disciples path. And so there's not two disciples paths, one for the inherited church and then one for these fresh expressions of church. There's just one and that's to make disciples. And so, you know, our highest aspiration is to help people take their next step with God. And so that has meant, for example, in some of these trailer parks, what we've done is we've started Bible studies. We do a women's gathering once a month, a women's breakfast that's turned into a time where we do birthing parties, you know, for moms, for new moms, or we do, and and yes, they come and they share their lives together, but they grow in God and that that's become a disciple making space that was birthed out of the fresh expression space, ironically held back at the inherited church because we have the space for it there. So our aspirations are to to grow folks in their in their disciple making. So there's a symbiotic relationship between the inherited church and the fresh expressions of church. And we believe that when it's done well, it's tethered, it really is tethered. They are tethered together. So the majority of our startup leadership comes from the inherited church. So part of what our our responsibility is as shepherds and teachers is to discover who are the apostles, prophets, evangelists, evangelists. So the Ephesians 4 A.P.E.S.T.: apostle, prophet, evangelists, shepherds, teachers. The shepherd teachers tend to be the inherited church folk. They're the folks that care for those who grow up disciples in the life of what we call the church, the apostles, prophets and evangelists, we typically kick them out or we try to domesticate them. Shepherd Teachers tend to. And so what we've discovered is, Oh, no fresh expressions is a place to release your apostles, prophets and evangelists instead of running them off. Then they get mad at the church and, you know, all those kinds of things because we're not we're not prophetic enough. We're not making a difference in the community. We don't care about the poor. We don't care about those on the margins. No, no. Release them. Give them a space to live in their full entrepreneurial beauty because apostles, prophets and evangelists are messy, you know, they're the ones that will take on hell with a squirt gun, you know. And so we what we've tried to do is create a safe space, if you will, for them to do the dangerous ministry of Jesus. What we try to do is regularly in our worship experiences and in our, you know, our media spaces is have little short videos, "come join us in dinner church" or "come join us as a part of this rebuilding team." Or we have another one of my I would call it my favorite fresh expression is called exceptional entrepreneurs. It's a space and a place that we've created for aged out special needs young adults. One of the things we discovered in our community is that the poverty rate, divorce rate for families with adult special needs when they age out of the system, in most states, it's 21 or 22. They sit at home. There's typically a single mom who's living under the poverty line. Because dad left a long time ago because it was too hard. And she's raising this 32 year old intellectually challenged person or even physically challenged person. So we created a respite space that is a church. It meets Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. And we've created a little cottage industry around that where they create products. But what we're really doing is creating disciples. And I've done baptism services there. They do prayer, they have worship there and their families, which are typically completely disconnected from any local church, find that that becomes their church. Parents begin to support one another. So we have staff that kind of oversees that and we're taking folks from the inherited church. It's typically a one on one ratio, so we have about 20 special needs adults, young adults and older adults even now in that ministry. And we typically have one adult that it takes to be with them because there's a woodshop and other kinds of things. And where are those volunteers coming? They're coming from the chairs and the pews of our campuses as we send them out to do that kind of work. The beautiful thing, though, is to watch folks from the fresh expression then become a part of the leadership as well. So whenever we launch these things, we always try to have a handful of folks that are from the community. They don't even have to be followers of Jesus yet because sometimes doing the work of Jesus, they become followers of Jesus. So they do the things that Jesus did and all of a sudden they're they're crazy Christ followers. But that's their church. They seldom show up in the big sanctuary 100ft from me down down the hallway.

Dwight Zscheile: So one of the things I love about the stories you're sharing is how holistic your approach is. You're super clear on "We're about making disciples of Jesus," and yet you are meeting people where they're at in their experiences of suffering, loss, vulnerability, struggle and loving them. I'm curious, just if you would speak a little bit about that holistic approach and what you've learned about the importance of it. Yeah.

Jorge Acevedo: So part of my personal narrative, I don't think any of us can ever get away from the fact that our personal narrative often defines our theology and our practice of ministry. So I came out of an adult, I'm an adult child of an alcoholic. I'm an alcoholic. A drug addict. By the grace of God, clean and sober for over 40 years. And so when I became a lead pastor and had had at least a modicum of of authority, we launched a recovery ministry 23 years ago. What I didn't know then, which I know now, is it really our recovery ministry was really our first entree into fresh expressions of church. It was a fresh expression at the inherited church, but it was bringing a whole different population into our church as we became a Christ centered 12 step recovery program, where we name Jesus as our higher power. And so over the 23 years, we've helped hundreds and thousands of people come to faith in Christ and grow in their discipleship, using the 12 steps as a model for discipleship. And I personally just it's a personal this is you don't have to agree with me on this one. I personally believe the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is the single best disciple making process on the planet today. And we shouldn't be surprised. Bill W and that team got it out of the Scriptures. Emmett Fox's Sermon on the Mount was very profoundly influenced the early movement of Alcoholics Anonymous. And so in the in the culture of our church was already embedded this idea that we could help people in some non-traditional ways, meaning Sunday morning, 8:30 service Sunday school or Sunday school in the 11:00 service, we could create a space, a people, a place, and a process for people with addictions, afflictions and compulsive behaviors, hurts habits and hangups to grow in their discipleship. But that was happening inside of the church and that that did spread into the life of our congregation. We have a prayer that we pray, Dwight, for the 27 years I've been here and that's Lord, send us to people nobody else wants or sees. We've added to that prayer and Lord, now send us to the people that nobody else wants or sees. I believe leaders, spiritual leaders have three main responsibilities. They build healthy holy teams. And those teams cultivate transformational environments. And that's art more than science. And that has to do with your theology and your practices. And then thirdly, they they develop fruitful disciple making processes and recognize that that is unique and has to be contextualized and all of those kinds of things. So we build teams, create cultures and fruitful processes for disciple making. And I think those things taken together are what have allowed us to expand our vision beyond what we would call the spiritual things of life. I am out of the Wesleyan tradition and we kind of hold together the temporal and eternal realities of life, and it is a kind of messy place that we live in. I call it rubbing dirt on it. We got to rub some dirt on it, and so we try to rub dirt on it. So we feed lots of people, we clothe lots of people, we help house lots of people, but we also anoint people with oil and pray for healing, you know? And I don't think it's an either or thing. It's a both and.

Terri Elton: So you talked about being part of the United Methodist Church. How is it like to be a do this really innovative, non-traditional ministry connected to a mainline denomination and in years a global denomination that's can be messy in its own institutional church right. Sure. Right? In that way.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah. My tribe is you know, it's like a lot of the mainline tribes has struggled. And, you know, it's interesting. I never questioned why God had me in, and , I think I think more entrepreneurial and kind of what you might call a more independently minded kind of congregations. But I've always wanted to be a part of a tribe of folks that we could do better together than we could apart. Community matters. And so I would say that for the most part, our ministry has been welcomed and embraced. I've spent recently, I'm moving towards retirement, so we're counting a lot of things. Like I've spoken at over 150 conferences in my tribe for the most part. I mean, there's a handful that were outside of the, U.M., circles. And so I would say that's been a good thing. And I would say until recently, as you know, things are really bubbling up in our tribe right now. Until recently, till the, till the last several years, very much welcomed with open arms. It's been a little bit different here as of late, but I don't want to speak ill of my of my beloved tribe, you know. So I would say for the most part, it's been a welcoming thing. It's not been, yeah, surely there's going to be folks that hold you at suspect because you're doing things outside of the norm. I'm not sure that Martin Luther won the most Valuable Player award during his day as he tried some new innovative kinds of things, new ways of thinking and doing. Neither did Mr. Wesley. Most of the time he got hit in the head with rocks and all kinds of stuff. So I've not been, you know, I've not been voted out of the, off the island. I've not been hit with rocks. So I would say for the most part, I'd say it's been okay. I don't know if I answered your question.

Terri Elton: No, that's great. I think there's a generosity in what you've said, but there's also, I think, an expectation. Let me just see if I'm hearing you right, that you're not asking them to be what you are. Right. Or to see everything your way.

Jorge Acevedo: Nope.

Terri Elton: But to have a relationship and to say, can we be church together?

Jorge Acevedo: That would be. You said it's so much better than, I wish I had said that.

Terri Elton: Yeah, but I think I hear as I listen to especially our graduates that have that do have a missional imagination about the kind of church you're talking about, expect the church body, the institutional church to get them to and support it and do all that. And it's not always going to be that way. In fact, it's rarely that way.

Jorge Acevedo: Yeah.

Terri Elton: But also you don't have to walk away and ignore them. Right. What would you say to some new pastors going in that we're going to do this combination of inherited church and fresh expressions?

Jorge Acevedo: So I would say, I would give to you the mantra out of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is growth by attraction, not by promotion. Bishop Peter Storey, Methodist bishop who was serving in Johannesburg during apartheid in South Africa, spoke at a pastor's conference. When I was a wee young, wet behind the ear, fresh out of seminary pastor. And he told the story of of them gathering together white Christians and black Christians, which was against the law, against the apartheid laws. And during the Q&A, somebody asked him, why aren't you worried about getting in trouble with the authorities? So, again, you have to translate this into church life. And because I've had those moments. If we stretch then, am I going to get the call from headquarters to say, you know, "stop, don't do that"? Whatever he said this line he said, "I had to determine, we had to determine, whether we were going to shout at the darkness or light candles." And that struck me as a young pastor said, you know, I'm just going to light candles. I'm not going to, I'm not going to fight headquarters. I'm just going to light candles. Yeah, there have been a few that have tried to blow it out, but for the most part, I have to say that the institution has kind of taken notice and said, oh, you know, because I've always tried to root it not only in Scripture, but also in our Wesleyan tradition, our kind of unique Wesleyan tradition. And it's hard to argue, I say it's hard to argue with Jesus and John Wesley in my tribe, you know, and it's kind of hard to argue if you can, if you can find a text in Wesley and a text in Jesus, you typically can win the day regardless of, you know, where you are on the theological prism or practice of ministry, you know, in terms of being institutional or entrepreneurial. The other thing that I would say to a young pastor is you do yourself a favor by learning to lead up well, because I know that as a local church pastor, you know, we now have a staff of 80, 90 people, three campuses and, you know, 501C3's and all kinds of stuff. And I always tell our folks, surprises are bad. They just always are. So whenever we've tried to do some of these innovative things, I've always let my up lines know because surprises are bad. And that's leading up well. And the other piece that I would say is - this one's for free- the other thing I would say is, you know, there's nothing, there's no harm with taking your phone and filming a little video of, you know, 30 seconds of your dinner church and sending it to your bishop, which I've done hundreds of times saying, "hey, thank you for letting me be at this assignment. Here's a little bit of the fruit of our ministry together." And now that is that kissing up? No, that's leading up. That's leading up. And so I think sometimes younger leaders and I put in the category younger can be not younger in age, but it's also can be younger in experience. So you can be 45, graduated from Luther Seminary and in your first assignment. That's what I mean by younger that younger leaders need to learn to lead up well, leading up well is no surprises, leading up Well, is is keeping folks informed of what you're doing, Because I would say that if you lined up my judicatories over the 27 years that I've been here, they would tell you to a person that they were never surprised. They always knew, "Hey, we're thinking about buying a grocery store. What do you, you know, what do you think?" You know, those kinds of things.

Dwight Zscheile: So one of the things I hear you doing is particularly in your stories about Jesus and Wesley, John Wesley is really rooting this work in the tradition. So, of course, Wesley is perhaps one of the greatest examples of someone who was, you know, went outside the structures of the parish church and preached in the fields and did small groups and all of these things that were incredibly innovative in his own day. So in many ways, for for Wesleyans and Methodists to do fresh expressions is the most traditional thing. And if you go back to Wesley, but can you speak a bit about how that anchoring into the tradition, finding that usable past in our own traditions even, it may be centuries later in a very different context, how that can free up imagination and permission?

Jorge Acevedo: Absolutely. Yeah. I sometimes and I stole this from Len Sweet. I heard him use that phrase years ago, the whole idea of turbocharging the tradition, you know, what does that look like? And so the idea is not necessarily the forms, but but the principles are there. And I think for all of us, whether it's in a more reformed tradition or a more Catholic tradition or, you know, my my Wesleyan Armenian tradition, there are these rich tap roots that spring forward. They're almost begging for contemporary expressions of them. You know, what is that? What does that look like and what does that mean? Mr. Wesley used to do these things called love feasts, where they were testimony times, and it wasn't communion, but it was close, you know, and it, you know. So what does that look like? What is a 21st century expression of that look like? He has these statements throughout his journals where he says, after witnessing George Whitfield preach, he said, I determined to become more vile for the gospel. But then later he would write of field preaching. I love the commodious room and the handsome pulpit and the leathered seat. And then he goes on eloquently talking about the chapel. But he says, but I should be cursed if I do not embrace field preaching. He recognized that there was a vileness about pub theology, you know, which is some of my friends. I don't do it because I'm an alcoholic. But you know, nothing wrong with having a pint and the Bible and having conversations. My buddy does a tattoo parlor, church church. Michael Beck does a lot around VR, virtual reality church. And and I think for my tribe, those are the tap roots of field preaching and preaching houses and the foundry, which was a kind of this all purpose facility in London where they would teach children to read but also do medical clinics, but also do evangelism and disciple making and small groups out of the foundry. So I think we sterilize our ministry. When we don't reach back as we reach forward. We sterilize it because there's there's nothing of substance there. Of the 2000 year rich tradition of the church, I do a lot of reading and research and agonizing about the state of disciple making in North America , in America. That in our post COVID, in our political divisions and our racial divisions, the quality and the character of a lot of disciples are coming into question, at least for folks like me, as I see folks embrace racist things or Christian nationalism, those kinds of things. And so it's interesting what's happening in in a lot of pockets in the life of the church around making disciples. And it speaks to your, what you just said. Dwight It's interesting that there are these voices, these kind of prophetic voices out there that are calling us back to the ancient practices. In a very contemporary way. So you have people like John Mark Comer, Tyler Staton over in the Seattle Portland area. You have folks that are taking the work of Dallas, Willard and Robert Mulholland and and and Ruth Haley Barton and and people like Rich Villodas down in Brooklyn. And they're calling us to this to a life of Sabbath and solitude and stillness and silence. We didn't invent that stuff. That's a part of that rich taproot. And I'm finding that pre-Christian people in post Christendom America are attracted to that kind of stuff. Because they've they've tried a consumer approach to life. They've tried a hedonistic approach to life. And they're going, "there's, it tastes like sawdust." It doesn't last. It's not compelling. And so you you tell them to practice lectio and they they their head spins round on their axis in delight as they're connecting to God in rich, transcendent ways. So I think, yeah, we can't lose that. Do we have to somehow turbocharge that and pull it into the 21st century and allow it to inform and sometimes even direct our ministries?

Terri Elton: Jorge that's awesome. I love it. Thanks for sharing your stories with us, your journey. And we're going to put a link to your website so if people want to follow their or look at some of the pictures or imagine what the stories kind of look like on the ground. Please know, we were talking before we started, your communities and we're in prayer for you as you continue to pick up after the hurricanes, that there's there's a lot of hard work there and people's lives that are that you're right in the midst of with that. So we thank you for that.

Jorge Acevedo: Thank you.

Terri Elton: And next week we are going to go to some pioneer stories of people that are doing the real entrepreneurial stuff here in the US, and we encourage you to join us again next week.

Faith+Lead: This episode of the Pivot podcast was brought to you by Faith Lead. If you enjoy today's show, head over to Faith. Org to gain access to a free resources. See you next time.