"The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists." That's how Dr. Scott Cormode opens his book, and it's the starting point for this conversation about Christian leadership with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm. The Hugh De Pree Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of The Innovative Church, Scott argues that Christian leaders don't have followers — the people in their care belong first to Jesus — and that the real work of leadership is planting and watering while God gives the increase.

Scott shares five questions for discerning what keeps people awake at night, tells the story of a congregation transformed by teaching lament to middle schoolers, and offers a raw, personal account of reinventing prayer during his wife's cancer treatment. The conversation moves through reinventing ancient practices for a changing culture, the danger of an individualistic model of ministry, and how to build sustainable rhythms of labor and rest. Scott, one of Pivot's original co-hosts when it launched six years ago, brings both decades of scholarship and hard-won personal wisdom to this conversation about what it means to lead Christian communities faithfully today.

Oftentimes our goal wrongly is to listen long enough that I will know what to say. That's not really the goal of listening. The goal of listening is that I can listen to you enough that I understand how you experience what it means to be human. And I'm transformed by empathy, and that will change the way that I respond to you.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Pivot Podcast, where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Alicia Granholm.

And

I'm Dwight Zscheile Our guest today is Dr. Scott Cormode Hugh Depre Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the author of several books, including The Innovative Church. He has spent a long career thinking about what it means to lead Christian communities faithfully and to help ordinary people make Christian sense of their lives. Scott was one of the original co-hosts of this pivot podcast when it first launched.

during COVID six years ago, and we're excited to have him back with us as a guest to reflect on our s our theme for the season, which is making the ancient new. So welcome, Scott.

Thanks for having me.

We're so happy to have you, Scott. Scott, your work focuses on the need to remain committed to the unchanging gospel in an ever-changing world. And you've shared that the church as we know it today is calibrated for a different social and cultural situation than we currently find ourselves in. Could you share more about that?

Sure. The opening line of the book is the church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. Many of the assumptions that we made, any many of the ⁓ practices or not the practices, the ⁓ habits that we put in place ⁓ as a church were established a generation, two generations ago, and we can look at how the world has changed. And

The central question that I'm interested in is how do we embody a never-changing gospel in an ever-changing culture? We want to maintain a rock solid commitment to the never-changing gospel, but we can't simply assume that the form will stay the same. And the image that I have is that we need to develop a kind of agility.

That allows us to reinvent ourselves in front of whatever the new thing that is happening. I'll give you an example. I live in California and ⁓ I attend a church. I'm not the primary pastor, but I tend to preach regularly. And what I'll do is I'll take a month here or there. So ⁓ I'll take the month of January and the month of May typically.

And ⁓ in January twenty-sixth, just the one that just happened, ⁓ I was asked to preach. And in advance of my preparation, they told me back in November or so, ⁓ we would like you to preach on hospitality to immigrants as part of what you're going to do. And so I preached one sermon on hospitality to immigrants. Well, it just so happened.

That was during when the surge of ice was happening in South Minneapolis. And that was something that was deeply personal to us because my daughter happens to live exactly in the neighborhood where all of this was going on. She's about four miles from where you're sitting right now. So I wish I could be there with her. ⁓ But my congregation knew on the one hand that this was a national question.

But on the other hand, the fact that I could tell them stories about what was happening with her made it a very local kind of the thing because she grew up in that church. They all they all know her. they all have met her husband. They all know her husband's an African American. And so they know what it's that she's living in this community. And as we have these conversations, it feels fresh. Well, the church has been dealing with hospitality to strangers forever.

But the new question of how does that apply in this particular setting created a need for a kind of agility. And the question was how do we embody this never changing gospel in this new thing that has come along? And so we had to find a way to do that. That's what we mean when we talk about ⁓ embodying a never changing gospel in an ever-changing culture.

So you've written in your books quite a bit about how Christian leadership is not so much primarily about administration or even just kind of pastorally taking care of people, but but interpretation, theological interpretation, helping people kind of make sense of their experience, live their lives through the lens of the gospel. And so say more about what that looks like, particularly around this question of how do you make the never changing gospel

speak or be get enfleshed, if you will, in the life of a community in an ever changing world.

Sure, let me answer. There's a couple of pieces to that question. So let me answer in some parts. First, let me talk about what I mean when I say Christian leadership. I would argue that Christian leaders don't have followers. Jesus has followers, but they don't follow us. They follow Jesus. What we have is people entrusted to our care. They belong first and foremost to Jesus. So what exactly is the job of Christian leadership?

Well, I look to scripture for that. And the passage that means the most to me is when we think about Christian leadership, is ⁓ 1 Corinthians 3, 6. It says, Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. And of the three characters in this story, we can all agree that God is the most imp important one.

And what it does is it shows that God is the one doing the primary work that we call Christian leadership, but that we still have a task. This task is planting and watering. And when I think about planting and watering, I think about my grandfather. My grandfather was what the Bible would call a steward. He was the ⁓ he ran a 140-acre citrus ranch here in California that was owned by an absentee landlord.

And his job was to make his trees grow in exactly the same way that his pastor's job is to make their congregation grow. But could my grandfather really produce fruit? No, he could not, in the same way that a pastor can't really produce fruit. But what could my grandfather do? He spent his days planting and watering, he spent his days creating environment.

Conducive to growth, and then he handed his trees over to God. In the same way, we as pastors, we as people who are leading in Jesus' name, we plant and water, we create an environment conducive to growth, and then we hand our people over to God. And so everything that I'll say here about Christian leadership is very much in the context of what does it look like to create an environment conducive to growth?

So that we can then hand over our people to God. And you talked about the Christian idea of calling. That's a Christian practice. We call it vocation. I would argue that Christian vocation is defined by the people entrusted to our care. Oftentimes people want to define vocation as where my gifts meet the world's needs, or it's about my passions or my gifts, or my it's not about me.

It is about the people entrusted to my care. I'll give you an analogy. ⁓ God gave me daughters. I I live in a family of girls. I have two daughters and a wife. And I happen to have a passion for basketball. I play basketball still to this day as an old man. and I happened to marry a woman who was five foot ten and the shortest person in her family. And this was gonna be great for me when my daughters came along.

I was going to teach them basketball. But then something happened. When they were about three years old, they looked at mommy and they looked at daddy and they said, Mommy's way more interesting. We're going to be like her. Now, if my boys or my daughters had chosen my route, my wife would have had looked to learn about basketball. But instead, I have had to learn about the things that interest them.

So I can tell you about knitting and I can tell you about cooking and I can tell you now about bird watching in Minnesota because my daughter when she moved to Minneapolis joined some group called the Kestrels and they go bird watching.

When my daughter, my daughter's a physicist, she works for 3M. When she went off to do her PhD in physics, I would spend Tuesday nights watching YouTube videos on physics so that I could have conversations with her. I didn't do that because I have a passion for physics. I did that because I have a passion for the person entrusted to my care, for my daughter. So you asked, what is vocation? Vocation is to have a people entrusted to your care.

And to become who those people need you to be, even and especially if it's not exactly who you thought you signed up to be, in the same exact way that because God gave me daughters who happen to be interested in things like cooking and knitting and bird watching and physics, that's what I have become. So that's my answer, the people entrusted to your care.

In a similar way, I am learning a lot these days about Transformers and Pokemon. Because I have two boys and one of whom is obsessed with Transformers. So last night the latest model arrived and we were there reading the manual of how to transform it in my mind without breaking it. That's always my fears. I don't want to break this.

Scott, we've seen a number of indications that there is a real hunger, perhaps growing, some might argue, for spiritual depth right now, even among people ⁓ who've kept their distance from the church. What are you making of that? And what does it ask of a pastor or a church leader who's trying to meet them where they're at?

So, my take on this is that everyone has a longing for some way to make spiritual sense of their lives. And I use this phrase a lot: making spiritual sense. I think that is what the calling of a Christian leader is. That much of the New Testament, for example, is simply letters back and forth between a leader and a people where they have questions.

And the leader is making spiritual sense of things like, what do we do about meat sacrifice to idols? Or what do we do about the fact that we have ⁓ some widows are receiving food and some widows are not? How do we fix that prop? Yeah, over and over again, it requires making spiritual sense.

And so I think that is the primary responsibility and the hunger that people have. But the obvious question then becomes: how do we go about that? And

When I was in seminary, one of the things that they would regularly do whenever we had a a ⁓ question is they would say, Here are three easy steps to solving whatever problem. And it was very reassuring, but it was very static. And the first question you asked about was ⁓ one of the answers we talked about was how we need agility for problems we can't see coming. I mean, at no point did I ever prepare any of my seminary students.

For this coming pandemic that we all knew was happening. It came as a surprise to me and it came as a surprise to them. But I had to prepare them for something they didn't see coming. And the way that you can prepare people for what we don't see coming is instead of giving leaders answers, we give leaders questions. So I'm I've produced five questions that I think that every leader can ask in any kind of a setting.

And that will help them figure out how to respond to that spiritual hunger that you're talking about. The first question is: who are the people entrusted to your care? Again, we don't have followers, we have people entrusted to your care. You're not responsible for everything. My grandfather wasn't responsible for everybody's farm, but he had his trees. So who are the people entrusted to your care? And the second question is: what are their longings and losses?

What is how do they experience what it means to be human? There are times that it is glorious to be human, that falling in love is a glorious thing. And you could pick any culture in any time, and that human experience of falling in love is a glorious thing. That's something about what it means to be human. But there are also losses. ⁓ losing a loved one, for example, is a loss, whether it's in my time and place or in somebody else's time and place.

It's universal to being human. And so the way that I talk about it is I ask people, how do you pay attention to what it means for what your people, what keeps your people awake at night? And if you could know what keeps your people awake at night, that's your preaching and teaching agenda. You need to respond to that. The third question is: what are the big lies they believe about God? Over and over again, our people believe big lies.

I have a list of, I don't know, I think it's 23 of them that I've that I've built up just from listening to congregations. ⁓ one of them, for example, is the idea that believing the right things makes up for not doing the right things. These are, or one of the ones that's very common in youth ministry is, well, if you really knew me, you wouldn't love me.

We have to pay attention to the big lies. And then our job is number four is how do you make spiritual sense of that? And then the fifth one is how do you present that as a shared story of future hope? A shared story of future hope. So all of that adds up together to where you can create a shared story of future hope that makes spiritual sense of the longings and losses of the people entrusted to your care. And if you do that.

If you really listen well, you will then be able to satisfy that deep spiritual hunger that people often aren't able to articulate, but are grabbing for.

So I love that framework and I love that phrase that you have in your book repeatedly, which is leadership begins with listening. And I shamelessly use that to my with my students as well as I teach ⁓ leadership here at Luther Seminary. ⁓ but I want to just dig in a little bit more to how do we think about stewarding ancient traditions, practices, wisdom in that process you just described and and to help those.

practices, those stories, those those the ancient wisdom connect with the longings and losses that people have.

So let me answer you. I think you've answered asked two questions. One is about listening, and one is about ancient practices. I will give a brief answer to the listening question because ⁓ left to my own devices, I will talk about that for hours on end. ⁓ I think that part of the question is who do we listen to? The people entrusted to our care. What do we listen for? Their longings and losses. How do we listen well? We listen with compassion. And

The key idea is we listen in order to be transformed. Oftentimes, our goal wrongly is to listen long enough that I will know what to say. That's not really the goal of listening. The goal of listening is that I can listen to you enough that I understand how you experience what it means to be human. And I'm transformed by empathy, and that will change the way that I respond to you.

The other thing that ⁓ I w y you asked is how do we take ancient practices?

⁓ I've got a couple of chapters in my book where we have nine Christian practices that we talk about reinventing. And what I mean by reinventing practices is the idea that there are certain practices that are what are called constitutive practices. They constitute the faith. There is no time or place where Christians have met that they didn't practice this particular. So for example, worship. We can't say that, yes.

My church is one of those churches that we we believe in Jesus, but we don't worship. That doesn't make any sense. We've got nine of these different practices that we work through. And we recognize that the structure of the practice can change over time. None of us think that we should worship the way we did a thousand years ago, and that and that simply whatever worship looked like a thousand years ago is what it should look like today. There was a time and a place where

Introducing this new innovation of organ music into the church was deeply controversial. And then there was a time when introducing guitars was in deeply controversial. The structure can change, but the goal is still to praise and glorify God. So I think what we need to do is reinvent Christian practices. And let me give you an example of a reinvented practice.

My wife was diagnosed about 18 years ago with very serious cancer. And it changed the way that I pray. I had to reinvent my understanding of prayer. Because if I was really being honest, sometimes I had a big lie that I believed that, well, if I could pray just the right way, I could obligate God to do what whatever I wanted God to do. That's not a good understanding of prayer.

And sometimes I had a big lie in my head that was, well, prayer is just self-talk. And it's just about me, God's gonna do whatever God's gonna do. That's not an adequate understanding of prayer either. Well, what is? What I came to realize is that for me, prayer is offering up with fear and trembling the thing that matters most to us and handing it to God. And what I came to do when my wife was going through her chemo.

was ⁓ every day when I would get to the point where I was finally alone, which was usually in my car on the way to work. So my my prayer was while commuting. And what I would do is I would say, God, I don't want to have to trust you. If I could, if there was a way that I could guarantee that Jeannie would be well, I would take this away from you and I would do it myself.

But there is no way that I can guarantee that. And so because I have no choice but to trust you, then I choose to trust you. And I understand the irony of saying, because I have no choice, I choose to trust you. But I would say, because I have no choice, I choose to trust you. And with fear and trembling, I hand you over to God. And literally hand you, Jeannie, over to you. And as I was driving, I would literally take my hands.

and lift them up like I'm handing my wife over to him. That is how I came to understand prayer because of the demands of the life in which we lead. So I've got nine of these different practices that we could talk together about. ⁓ Maybe we can give it some example another example later on.

Thanks for sharing that, Scott. Scott, can you share a story about innovation and Christian innovation as it plays out in local ministry contexts that you've seen?

So, this is a perfect example of how to talk about one of those practices. One of those practices that ⁓ is embedded in Scripture is the practice of lament. ⁓ 50% of the psalms are psalms of praise, 40% of the psalms are psalms of lament. And part of what we teach is that I want to be able to talk to God the way the Psalms talk to God. And if I were

in charge of all Christian worship. And it's clear to me I'm not. But if I were in charge of all Christian worship, I would say that every worship service should have a time of praise because we should rejoice with those who rejoice. And every time of worship should have a time of lament because should we should lament with those who lament or weep with those who weep. And so you want an example. ⁓ There was a pastor who came to the Fuller Youth Institute who we were teaching about lament.

And she ministered mostly to middle schoolers. And she recognized that they were anxious, busy, and stressed. And that the message of one of the things that we teach is the message of the Psalms of Lament is that God can handle your honesty, even and especially if you are angry at God. Over and over, the Psalms of Lament give us language to say the kinds of things that when we read the you can't say that to God. Well, except it's in scripture. So I guess you can.

And if anybody feels the angst of anger, it's middle schoolers, especially middle school boys who in this youth group happen to have a lot of middle school boys. And so she wanted to find a way to teach lament to middle schoolers. But that's that's a pretty sophisticated thing. So here's what what what we did together. She put together ⁓

Almost like mad libs. I don't know if you know mad libs are in elementary school, but you fill in the blank. And so each time they got together, what they would do as a community is she would give them a little sheet and it would say, ⁓ number one, the first sentence would say, God, I don't understand blank, and let them fill in whatever they wanted. Number two, God, please fix blank. Number three,

God, I will trust you with my future even if blank. And then number four, God, I will praise you even when blank. And they would write these out. And they did that week after week. Well, at one point, the parents noted a diff noticed a difference. And they came and said, What's going on? My kids at a different place in their relationship with God. And so they taught them a little about this and they

And the parents said, we want a piece of this. And so they had a training that ⁓ evening where the middle schoolers trained their parents in how to lament. Well, the word got out and the congregation said, We want a piece. And they ended up doing that kind of training for the entire congregation led by the middle school boys. That's an example of what it means to take a practice like lament and to reinvent it.

And to shape a whole congregation.

So I love that story. And ⁓ you know, I I just want to step back with you and think about kind of just the last several generations of American church history. And, you know, we had a lot of congregations leading up into the seventies and eighties that were very traditional in terms of their liturgy and their style of worship and all of that. And then we had the secret sensitive movement in the in the eighties and nineties and a lot of

contemporary worship and a stripping out of a lot of elements of liturgy and kind of more traditional, you know, practice kinds of things in order to respond to particularly baby boomers who maybe grew up in a kind of, you know, traditional form of church that just didn't speak to them. It wasn't speaking contemporary language. Now we seem to be seeing a little bit more of a turn of interest in

Classical spiritual practices, liturgy in some places, you know, ⁓ Gen Z folks wanting kind of very traditional forms of church sometimes. What do you make of all of that? And how do you think about kind of that opportunity to take these to steward these ancient things, but also to make them accessible to people in a contemporary space?

There is something I love about the movement, and there's something that worries me about the movement. What I love about the movement is that it brings, well, I think the gospel is God's response to the human condition. And we have generations of wisdom that are loaded up in those practices and those prayers. And bringing in those generations of wisdom about the human condition is wonderful.

The thing that worries me is sometimes the ancient language becomes precious and we want to use the ancient language. I actually think the most important part of it is not the language itself, but the

Longing, the loss, the hunger that it responds to. Part of the reason that those prayers, part of the reason those practices are so important, is because they respond to something that is deep in the human condition. And so I've seen churches that feel like they are debating, should we use contemporary language or should we use ancient practices? Well, why can't we just use the ancient practices in very contemporary language?

There is a moment that a church gains credibility. And when it is, it's when the pastor can speak something that resonates in the heart of people that describes the dilemma, not the answer. We think, we think that having the answer is the thing. ⁓ I remember when I was in seminary and I there was a pastor who

I regularly heard preached and she would start every sermon with, Do you know what it's like when? And then she would describe in maybe a sentence or two something about why it was hard to be human. Do you know what it's like when you're had a really hard day and you get home and you discover that and something and and er the moment everybody goes, ⁓ yes, that's the moment of credibility. Not necessarily having

all of the answers, but feeling heard. And so if we can find ways, whether it is ancient language or contemporary language, to respond to the things that keep people awake at night, that's what's going to change them.

When a pastor is trying to do introduce ancient practices into a congregation that did not grow up with them, what can tend to go wrong and what does it look like when things go well?

I want to offer an analogy of how we typically do new programs to explain why we need a different method. When my daughter was learning to drive, I took her to the church parking lot like on a Sunday afternoon when there was nobody there, and we set up some dirt clods in there, and I just had her weave in and out, just practicing where you know she couldn't make a I mean, she couldn't get far enough that she was gonna hurt anything.

We made jokes about it. no, you just destroyed that little planet. You know, whatever it was. And it was it was very, very safe. There was no pressure. Now, what if instead we had built a grandstand in the church parking lot and invited all of her friends to come and watch? And they had all built signs where they were cheering for her and they held up fat heads with her with her face on it. Would that, you know, that is the most supportive thing you could do, right?

No, it would be terrible because now all of a sudden you're making your rookie mistakes in public. What do we do when we introduce a new program at our church? We bring in a logo and theme music and we say, come watch us make our rookie mistakes where it is the least forgiving place to do it. We need to find what in restaurant world would be called a soft launch. You often open your restaurant before you have the grand opening and you get all the kinks out.

And then you invite the world. So when this youth minister was trying to work on lament, she started with a with a with a group of middle school boys. And then she went to the whole middle school group. And then the parents, and then the whole congregation. Find some soft launch, some place where you can work out the kinks. Because what'll happen invariably is there'll be some word you'll use, something you'll say that

Is innocent in your mind, but somebody will react negatively to it. And you'll have to find a better way to say it. And you get all of that done where it's safe to make your mistakes. And then you launch it in public. That's probably the biggest mistake that I've seen congregations make ⁓ in trying to include ⁓ create new programs like this.

So as we bring the conversation to a close, I wanna just focus a little bit on leaders and we hear from a lot of pastors and other church leaders, as I'm sure you do as well, a sense of the weight of being responsible for stewarding forms of Christian ministry, Christian community, congregational life that are really calibrated for a different world than they find themselves in and really are struggling with ⁓ their own sense of burnout sometimes, their own

Losses, if you will. and and that sense of responsibility for meeting expectations that people have to keep things the way they are. And yet, as you're talking about we need to keep adapting and changing. What would be your words to a leader who finds herself in that kind of situation?

Well, the first thing I have is empathy. It's really hard out there. And

Anybody who tells you differently is missing. I mean, you're obviously it's really hard out there. And so I want to recognize that first. And so my prayers are with those people. What can we do about it? Number one is to me, I don't know how to be in ministry without being in community. They're finding people who I can be honest with, finding people who can tell me the truth.

Finding people that will support me, finding I think the way we have constructed ⁓ Christian leadership, especially pastoring in the United States, is just too individualistic. And that it was never meant to bear the weight. ⁓ no individual was meant to bear all that weight. And so part of the problem is we discover that individuals can't bear the weight that they were never meant to bear.

And they feel somehow responsible. And so finding community is important. The other is one of the practices that we spend a lot of our time talking about is reinventing the notion of Sabbath. We tend to think of Sabbath as a as a day of rest. But when you look at the Hebrew people and when and the gift of Sabbath, I would argue that Sabbath is a healthy rhythm.

Of labor and rest. The Hebrew slaves had were working seven days a week, and of course, they were ⁓ had lots of labor. And so of they, of course, it was emphasized the idea of rest. But when it's taught when especially ⁓ we hear the creation story, God's labor and God's rest are intertwined with each other. And we need to learn how to labor well and we need to learn how to rest well.

And the image that I've had for my own, I can't speak for anybody else, is that there are times that I have what I would call junk food labor and junk food rest. What I mean by that is there's times that I eat, but it's junk food and it's not really going to be ⁓ nourishing for me. And there are kinds of labor that are really nourishing, and there are kinds of labor that are just, you know what procrastination's like. I'm still at work, but it's not, it's junk food.

And there's a kind of rest. For me, I know, for example, that if I'm just flipping channels on the TV, I might as well just go to bed. Because that's a junk food rest. I find that rest for me needs to be something that fully engages my mind, but fully engages my mind on something very different. So for example, I mentioned earlier that I'm a basketball fan. I watch basketball the way that a coach watches it.

⁓ I'm constantly, you know, having this whole conversation with myself. My whole brain is engaged in it. And I find that very restorative.

Every person has to find what's restorative for them. And so for me, I would respond with empathy. I would respond by talking about we can't have an individualistic understanding of ministry. And I I would respond with building healthy rhythms of labor and rest.

Well, Scott, thank you so much for the richness of this conversation and for your work as well, which is I think such a helpful reframing of what it means to lead Christian communities today, being deeply anchored in ancient ways, but also responding precisely to what people are struggling with and yearning for.

Well thanks for having me.

And to our audience, thank you for joining us on this episode of Pivot. Email us questions at pivot at faithlead.org. And to help spread the word about pivot, please like and subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube, leave a review on your podcast platform, or share pivot with a friend. We'll see you next week.

Pivot Podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith. FaithLead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God's future. Learn more at faithlead.org.