"It is precisely in moments of disruption, change, and uncertainty that God acts in scripture." - Host, Dwight Zscheile

In this episode of the Pivot podcast, co-hosts Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile are joined by guest, Mark Lau Branson.

Mark Lau Branson is the Homer L. Goddard Senior Professor of the Ministry of the Laity and has taught at Fuller Theological Seminary since 2000. As a senior professor, his work focuses on PhD students.

Leaders, if you're tired of navigating rigid church structures, this conversation empowers you to explore alternative questions and delve into scripture and community stories. Embrace disruption and uncertainty, as these moments align with God's actions in scripture. Mark's books offer guidance for leaders seeking a more hopeful future.

In our next episode, we continue to explore the key pivots the church needs to make today.

Content Upgrade: Chapter Exercise [Pivot in Posture] with Mark Lau Branson can be found on this episode's page on our website.

Dwight Zscheile: Do you ever think about what stories shape the life of your church and your leadership? What are the narratives that underlie the assumptions we make about what we should do as leaders? What's going on in the life of the church and how we should respond? What are the most faithful stories we can inhabit and claim in order to discern a hopeful future in a time of change and disruption? Hello everyone. I'm Dwight Zscheile.

Terri Elton: And I'm Terri Elton. Welcome to the Pivot podcast. If you are new here, this is a podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. One of the key pivots that we're engaging in our Pivot podcast is a pivot in posture from primarily fixing the institutional church to listening, discerning, and experimenting. We live in a time when many of the inherited structures, or the things we've been handed down from previous generations, are struggling amidst the major cultural changes, and we're shifting away from affiliations and participating in voluntary organizations, and they're moving towards individualization. We also live in a time when many people in Western cultures are culturally conditioned to seek the good without God.

Dwight Zscheile: This is why we are so excited to welcome today's guest, Doctor Mark Lau Branson. Mark is the Homer L. Goddard Senior Professor of the Ministry of the Laity at Fuller Seminary, where he has taught since 2000. Mark is the author of several books, including, most recently, Leadership, God's Agency, and Disruptions: Confronting Modernity's Wager, co-authored with Alan Roxburgh. He's also co-authored Churches, Cultures, and Leadership: A Practical Theology of Congregations and Ethnicities with Juan Martinez, which is now in its second edition, and Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry, Missional Engagement, and Congregational Change. We are so excited to explore with Mark how churches can pivot from a posture of fixing to a posture of listening, discerning and experimenting, and specifically what that might look like concretely in the practice of a local church. Mark, welcome to Pivot.

Mark Lau Branson: Uh, thanks for the invitation. It's fun with well over a decade of friendship to continue this kind of work.

Terri Elton: Yeah, it is fun to join here today. So let's just jump in to your new book. So tell a little bit about what is the Modernity's Wager hat you talk about and why does it matter to the church?

Mark Lau Branson: Yeah. This comes out of the same kind of things that you've both noted that, leaders are embedded in a story. They didn't create it. I'm not talking about guilt of any kind. It's just we're embedded in a story, and we take that story with us into how when we read the Bible, we take it with us when we're doing leadership tasks. So it's that story that leaders are embedded in that is incredibly powerful, deep down into habits, but often unconscious. And so what Alan and I are talking about, as Modernity's wager comes out of, a number of writers. But the idea is that in the Enlightenment, odernity's wager is that life can be lived well without God. It doesn't mean that you need to declare yourself an atheist. It doesn't mean that there's some kind of, our main critique isn't a matter of secularization and all of that involved. But the assumption is that our primary task, both of reading Scripture and of leadership, since that's our topic, that that is done without a sense of God's agency. I mean, we may say, yeah, God wrote the Bible. And so there's some things there. We pray in the first and the last of our church meetings, but actual active agency that God is the subject of active verbs and that that kind of understanding that not that the Enlightenment leaves us without God's agency becomes part of what we're arguing. And then the other part that comes on that that came out of the Enlightenment is a kind of technical rationality. I think we mainly name Jacque Lowell and Simone Weil and others on that, that if in fact, you don't believe that, um, God is a primary agent, if in fact you do believe that everything is controlled by cause effect within, um, a within a series of humans and events where we actually cause all the effects and so and that can we think about it then we cause it and it's those life can be lived with, well without God. And then technical rationality that leads us to definitions of leadership like elite leaders and, and other things that we've all been programmed into.

Dwight Zscheile: So Mark, let's hear a little more about kind of how that plays out in the day to day life of congregations around, I'm curious around kind of congregational decision making, how leaders go about their own day to day practice and particularly, you know, the sense of exhaustion and depletion that we've heard a lot from leaders in the last few years and how those things might be connected.

Mark Lau Branson: The expectations on leaders is that we can solve situations, challenges. Right? And so whether it's the students sitting in our seminary classrooms who expect us to provide for them, surefire ways to be honorable, faithful and effective leaders, those language, that language gets used all the time. And then even how we define effective and successful. And so, um, is the primary goal to make certain things happen inside the organization and dwindling membership, not enough youth, um, whatever it is that that then we're supposed to, in some way or another, come up with a tactics and strategies and innovations and, and inventions that, that solve that. And they're okay if we have a couple of failures. But overall our movement has to be progress. And the other issue of the enlightenment. If things need to be new, which gets wrapped up into all of our language. And so at one hand, we we quantify things. That's that: How many members, how much money things denominational reports look for. And once we're inside that, then we've got a primary control on our activities other than listening to God. And so it's that flip that is so unconscious. Um, and even those of us who for a long time have said, oh, we shouldn't be counting these things. There's other ways to measure mission, but we're still measuring something other than than the listening mode with God.

Terri Elton: One of the things I like about what you said, Mark, is. Uh, here's a little secret. I have been using some of your stuff in classes. Right? And so introducing these ideas to students, they nod. Of course, it's more God, of course, rely on God's agency, and yet they can't do it. Right. There's this force around that is kind of has them wired to lead differently or expectations to lead differently, right? So this is fun to hear. You're breaking up or bringing us into that so we can tear it down and really lean more fully into that. So what are some practices that churches and leaders can do. So they do attend to God's agency.

Mark Lau Branson: And this is where and you probably write into this too. Um, as soon as I name practices, which I totally believe in and see changes, they become tactics. Right? And so, okay, if I walk the neighborhood prayerfully, God's going to show me a new innovation. Um, we're still back in the same story. The same thing about, you know, both of us. Lectio divina. Okay. It's one thing to say, let's listen to God in text and to actually watch students be amazed that they hear the spirit through each other, through the word in the classroom. Kind of a surprise. Seminary, God shows up in the classroom. But even that then gets turned into okay, now we know the tactics to use. Right? And so the depth of these habits is just phenomenal. Um. And so when I say things like the habits are prayer, reading the Bible, loving your neighbor, I mean, that's all I've got, right? But then the prayer, for instance, we we pray through all of our church meetings. But when you ask the question, when was the last time that your prayer, the beginning or the end or in the middle of a church meeting, that God changed somebody's heart, mind, imagination? That that's what happened in the prayer itself. And that's just not our, that's not as common. Now, if we begin to move with that kind of listening posture, the Spirit will take a ride on anything we provide, right? The spirit really is up to the task. Um, but it's just those common, centuries old practices that then we just need to know, they get turned into tactics quite quickly. But all I've got for you is prayer, Bible and love your neighbor.

Terri Elton: So can I follow up on that? When I was thinking of practices, I was thinking like yoga, right? It's not an end. It's just a regular part of your routine, right? Or your rhythm of life. Would habits be a better way to talk about that? So to get it out of that technique kind of thing. Do you think?

Mark Lau Branson: It can be, but as you know, even, you know, I'm going to put a squash on about everything because of the habits. Um, our habits then easily become tactics, right? Okay, I'm trying to create a new habit around my diet so that I lose weight. So I already know the goal. It's like almost all adaptive leadership stuff. Like it or not, adaptive leadership is about selling more Pepsi. Um, it still has the corporate goal in mind. Um, even for all of our language around, you don't know the goal yet. Um, yeah we do. We got to grow this church and get more kids. Um, we need more of our neighbors being friendly to us and maybe showing up. So. But but what you're asking is the right direction. That there's some. There needs to be a shift in our attention. What we're paying attention to, and it's that shift of attention when we're praying, reading the Bible, and loving our neighbor. Rather than those being tactics. Can we actually be asking God in, in a pairing with a friend who's going to help us reflect, just like Jesus sending the disciples out in together? What can actually help shift my attention? Can, and it is some kind of link between lectio and testimony and loving neighbor. That gives some openings to the spirit. And one of the things Al and I write about in the chapters on Acts is how important alterity is. It is almost impossible to have a shift of attentiveness if it's, if you're just with the same people. That it takes being in the midst of alterity of the other in a way that's attentive and vulnerable. That makes one more opening for the Spirit to get involved with us.

Dwight Zscheile: Well. So Mark, I want to follow up on that reference to Acts, because if the story, the imagination that we are culturally conditioned, at least in the dominant culture in America and in the West, is this secularized managerial tactical culture, right, that tends to bracket out God's agency. In your book with Al, you go deep into Scripture. Most of that book is a reflection on Scripture, and

Mark Lau Branson: You noticed that?

Dwight Zscheile: Amen. Right. You you talk about Jeremiah. The Gospel of Matthew, Acts and Ephesians. And I wonder if you could just take us and our listeners into some of those narratives. And what did you discover there that can be helpful for church leadership today?

Mark Lau Branson: So part of reading scriptures, is being attentive to what we bring to Scripture, right? Because we're going to we're going to bring stuff to Scripture. We're going to bring ourselves our discouragements, our mistakes, our hopes, our habits of all kinds. And so, Al and I are real blunt in what we're bringing to Scripture. We're bringing leadership questions and frameworks. So in each of those chapters, we name what we think are some of the richest current leadership frames. Right? So, um, for instance, how leadership does depend on alterity all the writing around diffusion of innovation does a lot of work with alterity. We bring improv again. There's a lot of it's like, again, if it's used with our current habits, it's not going to get you any place. But we still think any number of leadership theories - I think we use 11 of them in there - that we think are are provocative and generative. If in fact they're under God's agency as the primary mover, right? And so in each chapter, we walk in intentionally, overtly, with leadership theories that we want to be altered by the Spirit of God as we read the text. So, for instance, as we look at alterity, it's a critical theory and diffusion theory. If you walk into Acts and ask the questions, what is the relationship between alterity and God's agency and our church agency? You see all kind of things that you might not otherwise see. And so that's what we're doing in each of those chapters, we're naming how alterity, God uses alterity to change us, to convert us, whether it's Cornelius or in that encounter with Peter or Paul's encounter with Lydia. The church has changed in the midst of the Spirit's work in the world through alterity. So you're invited 11 times. But I don't need to.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, one of the things I hear you saying is you're inviting us to forefront Scripture as the primary imaginative framework, the primary narrative, if you will, um, in which God's agency is, is predominant, right? Um, we think about the book of Acts. The Holy Spirit is the primary protagonist, if you will, in the book of Acts over and over again and acting subject of so many verbs and so many sentences. Um, and then making that the primary framework and then we can use these leadership theories, um, to help enrich, and operationalize that in certain ways rather than the opposite, because I think it sounds like what's so often happens in the church is that the secularized frameworks are the primary operating, you know, lens through which we see things. And then Scripture, we kind of bring in to proof text that, if you will, or sort of buttress it sometimes to support it rather than the other way around. So say a little more about what that imaginative shift might look like for a congregation or for leaders.

Mark Lau Branson: Yeah, that's a good question. Um. of the most difficult challenges we have as professors and pastors is the question of how do people learn? Right. We've, I don't know when it struck you, but I remember I've always, you know, from my teen years have been told that I'm a good teacher. And then that gets rolled into the Christian conversations of I've got a gift of teaching. Okay, now I know who I am and what I'm supposed to do. Now, that came through the grid of what I was experiencing in school, right? Teaching means explaining and talking, telling people, describing things, sometimes testing them. But you know, you can't do that too much in church. But that's what teaching meant. Teaching didn't mean how people learn, although that was supposed to be the outcome. And because teaching was often related to preaching, I also had an overblown confidence of what preaching can do. I don't know about you, but I haven't seen preaching change much. And I'm 74. So I've, I've, I've preached a lot and I've listened to a lot of sermons and a lot of it incredibly valuable, including some of mine, but the kind of learning that goes to our bones and activities that shifts our imagination, is, it happens less often, right? So what I started noticing even before I became a seminary prof when I was 50, I did start noticing there were times when in corporate reading and meditation on Scripture, people's grids seem to shift. What they were paying attention to shifted a little bit. Whether that was some level of a little bit of self-critical or maybe I was, I misunderstood that maybe it was anything from, you know, I got I've really been wrong or that was a stupid idea. There's all kinds of things that I would see happen, and they would happen more often in a group. When we were away from the church Sunday school room. But somewhere or another scripture was part of our conversation and we started seeing things differently. So that's why Lectio Divina became something. Every time I'm in a classroom, I'm leading Lectio Divina because usually the Spirit will run with it and do something with the people in the room that they start seeing. Wow, this, this. Our exegetical skills aren't the only thing that matter. We put a lot of time and money in seminaries into exegetical skills. I'm totally convinced it's valuable. But what shifts is this Spirit engaging the conversation, a group, not just individual, in a way that shifts what might, shifts attention and therefore a potential step. And so. What I'm after is how do people learn how to in a way that shifts imagination, shifts your bones, shifts your next steps, and then the next thing has to do with testimony, which is another practice we need. Um, but testimony, not in the way of, I'm all for "here's how I met Jesus". We need a lot of those stories. But I'm wondering if when I was talking to my neighbor about this, if that wasn't the Holy Spirit. So a testimony can be an "I wonder" statement from normal everyday life. And we need to encourage our the people in our churches to do that kind of testimony. So it's that kind of link between listening to the word, lectio, being in the neighborhood, doing "I wonder" testimonies that that shift more openness and awareness and hope in what the Spirit's doing. Did I talk around your question or did I?

Dwight Zscheile: No, I think that's exactly right. Um, how do we get at that deep, deep learning? And, um, and I think that's actually a great segue into what we wanted to wonder about with you next.

Terri Elton: I want to say two things to tie that. My sense is you believe learning happens in community. And by listening to God and my neighbor. Or others. Right? And I think, um, I have found that your book, uh, Memories, Hopes and Conversations that introduces. Appreciative inquiry has been a way for our students, my students, that I've taught to lean into this with the curiosity that has preference, listening versus speaking and preferenced hope, or where's God doing something among us, that does that posture shift, but it also stirs people's imagination and gets us out of the technical and into a new imaginary. Right? So say a little bit about what it is and why did you land there? Why was that so important for you in your work?

Mark Lau Branson: So again, this, I call it accidental, but I think it's more the Holy Spirit. I was in Asia, first Bangkok and then Manila, um, with some urban friends doing a bunch of learning and, and, uh, exploring. And, and a friend from Manila talked about appreciative inquiry. And a friend in Bangkok did, so I encountered this in other cultural context. Um, and it was amazing hearing their stories about how they were gathering, in totally different environments, stories that were using Appreciative Inquiry. So when I got back, and this was right when I was in my first term at Fuller Seminary as prof. Um, I thought if it can work that cross-culturally because it works with story, which all of our cultures have, although Western are getting, we pocket stories and media. That's what it's novels and TV rather than normal everyday life. Um, but if we can get stories going, then there's more of a chance of participatory listening and learning. So that's kind of a basic, what I started learning about appreciative inquiry, in just the way it's described, it does come out of American management theory is one of the shocking things, but it was a counter to strategic planning named the problem. Describe the possible solutions. Try one. Evaluate and repeat. Instead, it is going after stories of any of the way things that were generative. What I was also seeing as I researched it, was it, just like adaptive change, it also gets folded into control. Whether it's through nostalgia or whether it's through we're doing appreciative inquiry. We're going to end up with a program to raise our attendance and take care of the teenagers. Um, so it is it's subject to the same habits. So we can't kid ourselves that we found a technique that steps outside of that. But as I started reading scripture with this question of appreciation or gratitude, gratitude is just all through Scripture. And in fact, when we as believers start losing our gratitude to God and each other, things go powerfully wrong. We invent other things. Um, you could say the Enlightenment that was part of moving away from God. It wasn't there was not a gratitude for God's role in life and world. So gratitude is actually a way of it's an epistemology. That when we are grateful, we learn other things, and if we're not grateful, we're not going to learn those things. And if and then again with. When you link God's agency to it, you know again I'm always taking here's a leadership theory that comes out of modernity. But what happens when you roll God's agency into it? If you are grateful to God and you're creating conversations where God's agency is part of the conversation, or at least part of your awareness, even if it's not named in the question, then you start creating the language. This is social construction, the language that again lets you see things. And let me give you an example. When I'm at a particular church, rather mixed cultural church, um, was at first asking questions around how do we keep more of our teenagers involved? Normal questions. It's a management question. It's a come up with strategies question. We had the teenagers and the older adults. Anybody over 60, I think, was our role. Um, sit down for a half hour lunch and ask each other, who are the important adults in your life in your teen years? For the teens, that was their current years. For the 60, 70 year olds, they had to think back. That was all we did here. Who are the important adults in your teen years and why? That created more conversations around God than anything we'd done in the Sunday school lessons or youth group. So again, it was creating: Who do you appreciate? What adults did you appreciate? And it completely reoriented the church's solution of we need the right youth director with the right programs. So it's that kind of discovery. You start being aware and again, the Holy Spirit runs with this stuff. When you create an opening, an awareness of gratitude and how goodness works, and then get those stories onto the surface.

Dwight Zscheile: So that's great, Mark. Share a little more for our listeners who may not really know much about Appreciative Inquiry, like, say, more about like how how does it work? What are the practices? How is it organized? Like what does it involve? If I were a leader thinking, gosh, I want to try this in my church, what might it look like?

Mark Lau Branson: So first you got to buy the book. Um, you both are aware my wife helped. Nina's done as much work with this as I have. But the whole last section of the book, we provide any number of everything from retreats to meetings to sequences of meetings of how to how to try things in your church that use appreciative inquiry. So there's loads of guidance there. I can remember in several churches where basically when that question was asked with a group in Indianapolis a year and a half ago, all we did to start with was name a time when you had a deep sense of the Spirit's activity in your church. Any time in the last, you know, ten, 20, 30 years. What was happening? Why do you think that God was was rolling with it something just as inarticulate as that? Right. And then watch them tell stories, and they always tell stories they've never heard before from each other. Because it shifted from the successful drive or the numbers in the room. It's a question about when did you have a deep sense of the Spirit doing something among us? Um, usually once that happens, you create an energy shift in a room where they can move away from tactics. Um, their latest annual plan or their vision, mission planning statements, which generally aren't especially helpful. Um, and then you try you can try other questions that can be more thematic. So you go from a general question to some thematic question, what what mattered the most to you when you were a teenager? Um, but again, I'm not after I'm not specifically asking a God question. It may end up that way. It's totally fine then to say, were there times that any time in your teen years where you wondered more about God, or felt more engaged with God? Um, no right answer. Again. You're just asking for stories. Um, but you're not asking for problems to be solved. It's not what went wrong. Why aren't our youth coming, um, or any of those kind of things? You're you're wondering and you're wondering with thematic questions. And then if you have a way to capture some of that, and then you sit around and you start reflecting, we've just asked three questions, um, around, let's say our theme was intergenerational relationships. And we're just plugging away at that from different ways. That can be inside families. It can be inside clans, it can be inside of school systems. It can be any number of ways. We just after what goes on intergenerationally. That then is, as you asked, early on in our conversation, what are the kind of experiments, um, that might keep these conversations going? Again, I don't want to come up with the plan and the tactic, but why don't we see if some of the teenagers, one of the churches I was with, um, if some of the elders will invite teenagers into their homes. Let's just see what would happen if we create conversations not in the church, but off in the neighborhood. Um, and if you're doing all of that, obviously there's plenty of Bible passages to read around youth and adults or around family life or things like that. Just to see what happens when you're listening and wondering together. It can be around money. Money doesn't have to be all about meeting the budget. When has money, had a significant role as good news to you? Has God reshaped your thinking about money sometime? So you again, you're trying to shift the way people are seeing things by the kind of questions you ask.

Dwight Zscheile: So that sounds like a really energizing type of conversation to have, and a and a fun and potentially playful kind of conversation that isn't focused on fixing the institutional church and can free us into some imaginative spaces we might otherwise not go in.

Mark Lau Branson: Yeah, I was thinking not long ago at the church where Nina and I worship La Fuente Ministries, which is a, bilingual Spanish - English, intercultural immigrants of all kinds of status. And we were meeting with the leaders and they were wanting to rethink leadership. And we just said, okay, there's different things leaders need. Maybe some things that leaders do. Oh, they you know, they teach us they they provide pastoral care. Notice they shifted into the elite professional thing. They, I don't think they used the word program, but it was along that line. And so I just asked, who do you know around the church who has clarified something for you, who has helped you understand something? And they started naming people other than the pastoral team. Now the pastoral team we've got are great at this, but along with them were other names. Who are the people that you see are really good at just connecting with others in the church? Or who do people go to when they're just needing a good conversation? So you notice, I mean, from the book with Juan, we talk about leadership as interpretive, relational, or implemental or management. Notice all of those are getting named. So all these different spheres of leadership - by asking, where do you see this? - is a type of, appreciative question. And it completely shifted how we are understanding leadership at the church. And so they've moved from talking about pastoral care to congregational accompaniment. So our language even had to shift. Otherwise we quickly go back to elite, technical leadership. So again, appreciative inquiry questions shifted attention and therefore shifted the church life.

Terri Elton: I like that. And I'm serving in a church very part time that's re-imagining itself. It kind of saw an end and decided not to die and thought we might change. And one of the things that they're really good at, they started with the deep listening to themselves and neighbors. And they've not stopped even though the campaign or the official time. And so as I sit around conversations, I find myself highlighting, "hey, do you hear what you just said and how you are helping each other make meaning of that thing in your life? Isn't this what we're called to do together?" like that interpretive...

Mark Lau Branson: That's great.

Terri Elton: But. But I think sometimes we think it's "we got to do the campaign". Rather than just be listening. And my leadership role was to name, to reflect back to them the good ministry they were doing with each other. Right?

Mark Lau Branson: No and that's a leadership role shift. Right. What you're doing is you're noting where they're doing things. I think this phrase may come from elsewhere, but first time I heard it was from Al Roxburgh talking about poets of the ordinary. So what, poets help us see and name, right? And you're doing that. You're seeing and naming in a way that doesn't leave them wanting you to say the next explanatory thing. It prompts them to talk more about what they're perceiving. That's great.

Terri Elton: Now I work with a pastor that is strategic and intentional like I am. So we've been setting the stage and doing all these experiments to put story in the middle of everything. Right? But to help them claim that is what's been really fun. So anyway, just an example from my world.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Mark, one last wondering with you. I'm thinking about energy and how in the in Modernity's Wager it's all up to us on some level, and I think a lot of leaders feel pressure to bring the energy to fix it all, to get everyone involved, to carry the burden of, again, as you're talking about being that elite professional leader who has all the answers, but what you're describing is a shift in energy, in the location and the source of that energy. I wonder if you could reflect on that with us a bit.

Mark Lau Branson: Yeah. So I use, you probably heard, I use the word generative a lot, which is an energy word, energy word. And it's something I've gotten a little better at recognizing because it's not necessarily enthusiasm. Often we think energy of the leader is you've got to be on the stage revving things up. You've got to watch the drift of. And we talk about being good at reading the room and keeping the energy in the room. These are all normal things that we we've all understood as part of leadership. And, what I've had to start paying attention to is energy that I wasn't looking for. Right? And I don't. And I'm not always really good at that. But it is the reading the room thing. What's the spirit doing here that wasn't what I was looking for? And so as I started with that, simply as a framework of going into a classroom or into a church of saying to help me see what you're doing is a way for me to say, "where's the spirit energizing things," not "where am I finally getting the next step in my curriculum accomplished or in my management accomplished?" But I do find that depending on the tradition. So we're in a Nazarene Holiness church. Latinos, so it can be a little bit Pentecostal at times, which I'm all for. I'm not sure where Lutherans or others, most detect their Holy Spirit energy, so I'll leave that to.

Terri Elton: They're not always sure either, but I'll just put that in the.

Mark Lau Branson: But those are the things our traditions have ways of understanding that all of our traditions need to be reshaped. You know, Pentecostal churches often just rev it up humanly. I mean, we know that any, any Pentecostal pastor or Holiness pastor knows this is human revved up. So whatever the habits we're bringing, what we're trying to do is shift what we perceive and then what we help others perceive, Terri, what you were doing, so that we can say: was that the Holy Spirit? Was the Holy Spirit shifting that? So I've got one of my good friends at church, runs a gardening company. He's just he's amazing at that. And he's one of the best preachers we have. Um, and in a recent sermon, he was he was very vulnerable about some of his story, but it's the very kind of thing that could easily lead to no energy. You know, it could be, wow, this is a drag. But because our church has probably more capacity than others, so many of them have suffered so much through immigration and other discriminatory practices here that they already know life comes out of death. So they do listen differently than other, than other congregations, and they will "Amen" things that you will be surprised to get an "Amen". So how do we help do just what you're doing? How do we help the attentiveness to the Holy Spirit energy, even if it's a wondering? I wonder if so-and-so's comment is trying to help us see what the spirit is doing, or if the spirit was prompting that? This is all, this is what the very meaning of discipleship is, means we're learning. We note that in our chapter on Matthew that the making disciples doesn't mean making learned people. It means making learners. It's a posture in the world with God. That's what we're after, and that's where has to do with the energy, the listening, the role of leaders. All of that's tied up there.

Terri Elton: I appreciate what you said at the end there, because I want to speak up for my Lutherans for a minute. We're, I think, much, it's more natural, let me just say it that way, to go to the Spirit's leading us to believe God's in death. And so when lament comes, creating space to just come together and maybe slow the things down, or let tears flow when it's not okay in other places. But I have never thought of it in the way you just said it. That that's an energy that could come from the Spirit, right?

Mark Lau Branson: Yes. Absolutely right. Lament is right in the middle of where God lives.

Terri Elton: Yeah. So thanks.

Dwight Zscheile: So Mark, thank you so much for being with us today and for sharing your wisdom. Now.

Mark Lau Branson: You're welcome. Thanks for the questions. This has been energizing for me.

Dwight Zscheile: Wonderful. So if you're a leader who feels weary with expending a lot of energy trying to fix institutional church structures that don't necessarily seem designed to help people follow God in contemporary culture, we hope this conversation gives you permission to ask different questions, to look deeper into the stories of Scripture and community, to listen to stories within the church and in the neighborhood. And we hope that by doing so, you may begin to discover a more hopeful future grounded in God's agency. It's precisely in these moments of disruption, change, uncertainty, even death, that God acts in Scripture. So Mark's books can help you on this journey as a leader and as a church. Also in our shownotes for this episode, you can find a free download of a tool called the chapters exercise that you and your congregation can use that walks you through how to trace God's movement in the history of your church as a community in order to discover a faithful way forward.

Terri Elton: Mark, I too would like to thank you for just being with us and bringing us into your thinking a little bit, and I want to thank the listeners for tuning in to this episode, and we encourage you to join us next week as we continue to explore these pivots that the church needs to make.

Faith+Lead: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith +Lead. Faith lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at FaithLead. org.