Special Guest: Michael Beck.

Michael Beck: When we think of, you know, sustainability in the church, it's like we want to build a building. It's that Christendom, you know, mindset. Let's build the building. It'll be here, you know, 1500 years later. This is sustainability through multiplication and disciples coming to faith and making more disciples.

Dwight Zscheile: Welcome to Pivot from Luther Seminary. I'm Dwight Zscheile.

Dee Stokes: And I'm Dr. Dee back with you for another episode of the Pivot podcast. We're so excited today to have someone here who is near and dear to my heart. He's an author, he's a professor, he's a missional innovator. He happens to be the director of the Fresh Expressions House of Studies at United Theological Seminary. He's the director of Remissioning for the Fresh Expressions North America Movement. He's a cultivator of fresh expressions for the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. And he happens also to be co pastor of Saint Mark's UMC with his lovely wife, Jill. And that is none other than Dr. Michael Adam Beck. Hello, Dr. Beck.

Michael Beck: Hey, friends, Thank you so much. I'm honored to be a part of this.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Michael, take us back a little bit. How did you get interested in the mixed ecology and fresh expressions? And tell us a little bit about what you've done at the local level there in Florida.

Michael Beck: Yeah. So in the process of unlearning what I was learning in seminary, I'm just joking there. But I started to realize my first appointment that people weren't really coming to church. I was sent to a little rural congregation kind of in the middle of nowhere. No stoplights, no Walmarts, no, no Dollar Generals. And we had about 12 folks in worship and a community, a population of Wacusa, Florida's 47. So we weren't exactly going to become a church or anything because there were 47 people that lived in the whole community. So what we did there is we just started connecting with folks in the Diane's Diner, which is in the next town up, Hawthorne, Florida, and the Diane's Diner staff and servers where what Luke 10 would call persons of Peace that they were welcoming people that knew the community, knew the people in the community. We just started developing relationships with them and started a little thing, a little barbecue church right there in Diane's diner. And so we would have 12 people come in to worship on Sunday mornings. And within, you know, several months of that gathering, we would have 30, 40 people gathering to eat barbecue and talk about Jesus. And so it was very spirit led, instinctual. And then we started trying to find ways to bridge those two things. So we asked the Diane's diner girls and guys what church would look like for them and where it would happen. And so we created another more kind of conventional, if you will, worship experience with them in mind and started to live in this thing that today we would call a mixed ecology of church, where different habitats of church are happening by the power of the spirit throughout an area or a parish, and that that could kind of happen anywhere. So after doing that, a couple of congregations I got pulled into this movement and people said, Hey, you know what you're doing? It's called Fresh Expressions. And I was like, Oh, cool, there's a name for it. And then I learned all these super helpful frameworks that we have the loving first journey and, you know, minimal ecclesiology and some of those things that are really essential to the fresh expressions of movement.

Dwight Zscheile: Explain what the loving first journey is.

Michael Beck: Oh yeah. Thank you. So the loving first journey is this process that I think we've learned from missionaries who go into a community and they follow this, usually this kind of a sequence that begins with listening. So listening to God, listening to the community, loving and serving the people. So finding, you know, pain point need, whether that's isolation or food insecurity or just just being together. It can be many things. But we love and serve people. We build relationships with them over time as we love and serve. Then we move into exploring discipleship or sharing Jesus, as some call it. And that's where we find ways to introduce the gospel and build community around that. We see the risen Jesus kind of sitting in those communities and we're just building Koinonia around the risen Jesus. And then that starts to the church starts to take shape, and we start to do things like pray and worship and study scripture and have communion and baptize people within the fresh expression. And then we repeat. So as people mature in that journey anywhere, they may say, Hey, I feel called, What's my intrinsic motivation to go create a little Christian community with my friends and coworkers or whatever. So it's just that journey of listening, loving and serving, building relationship, exploring discipleship, church taking shape and repeat, and we call that the loving first journey.

Dee Stokes: So I want to ask you a question. You and Jill, your wife were co pastors of Wildwood UMC. So I want you to tell us a story about the wild ones down there at Wildwood. Share a story about 1 or 2 or 12 fresh expressions that you've had down at Wildwood?

Michael Beck: Yeah, and my wife still is there, and she's definitely the better half of the pastoral package by all, all accounts. Wildwood was really kind of a cross-cultural appointment for us is it was a 1881 Methodist Episcopal South congregation. So one of the sad legacies of of Methodism is the split over slavery. And that denomination split off because they still wanted to own human beings. And so that was kind of the roots of the soil of that congregation and then the town itself. If anybody if our listeners are familiar with Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. She also wrote a book called Caste. Wildwood is named in that town. It was a sundown town, segregated, lots of racism, all those things. So when we came, we inherited a white congregation, chronologically mature folks, you know, everybody 80 plus around there and just a lot of of history and lots of isms to work through. And so we started to like connect across. There's literally like a railroad track, segregation, systemic oppression on one side and a different situation on the other side. So we started trying to cross that, create kind of anti-racism marches and unity marches and co-worshiping together and just building relationships with black and brown brothers and sisters. And we got together and collaborated and kind of renewed this Martin Luther King Junior Center there in Wildwood that was in disrepair. We started a little fresh expression there called Connect, where we would just get together, have breakfast for the kids. There was a little breakfast church on Saturday mornings. We do some arts and crafts, share Jesus story, go out, do some sports and stuff outside. And it was like a little church for kids and sometimes their parents would come along and that's their their only church. There was this little new Christian community there in the MLK. Well, that the Holy Spirit kind of from that began to make all these other connections. So we started a thing called Trap Stars for Jesus, for people that were stuck in a life of selling drugs. And so we would talk sometimes about Jesus in that gathering and other times we talk about how do you get a legitimate business license and worker's comp insurance and little micro startup businesses came out of that. But we really started to deepen relationships with people in that community, and we made a connection with Pastor Taylor of God's Glory Ministry. And through those connections, Pastor Taylor and his church plant, which is an African American Pentecostal church plant, moved into our, you know, 1881 Methodist Episcopal South congregation. And that caused some definitely a stir in and an exodus and then a reformation of a new kind of congregation. We had another kind of partnering congregation called Iglesia Goza and come along and then all of us, we lived together as one church, multiple congregations. And together we started what we call Taste of Grace, which is a dinner church. So we have a meal, Jesus story, time of prayer. And we all as equals shared the leadership of that. And we get people sitting around tables who maybe have, you know, a history of racism and stereotype thinking. And we get them around tables and we share stories and we focus on the gospel. And the Holy Spirit really started to heal these relationships and and transform decades and decades of of really dark kind of demonic stuff in that community. So then out of that, we just started a bunch of little fresh expressions, one in a burritos and Bibles in a, in a Tex-Mex restaurant, one in a tattoo parlor, which, Dee, you and I have shared in that experience together. And you led several people to Jesus that that in that gathering, remember. But so just a bunch of those I can talk about any, any more of them if you if you want to go deeper with one.

Dee Stokes: I do want you to explore this because I think it's important for our listeners to understand that these fresh expressions were not just the vision of the pastors, the paid people, right, do ministry. Let's talk about the laity in your church and the little old ladies and and people who have a passion that God has given them. And many times they sit in the pews and we as pastors don't listen to what God has given them, the vision that God has given them. But fresh expressions really is a lay led thing. So talk a little bit about that.

Michael Beck: Yes. Thank you, Dr. Dee. Every one of these things is actually led by laity. So my wife and I serve more as encourager, cheerleader, supporter. And as you said, it's more. More about the church has been really good with extrinsic motivation. Like you should do this because the Bible says it, you know, go. And we're trying to flip that and discern people's intrinsic motivation. So questions like what is the Holy Spirit calling you to do as a follower of Jesus? That through the waters of your baptism, you've been ordained as a priesthood of all believers, right? So we try to keep that simple, like what group of friends do you hang out with? You know, where do you do that? What do you all do together? And then how might you think of that as a little form of church? So to give you an idea of some of the the the elderly saints who kind of got into this movement, Larry was 70 years old when he when he planted paws of praise, which is church and a dog park. And he was like, pastor, I don't get all the tattoos stuff and all that you're doing over there at MLK. But he said, I take my dog, the dog park, his dog's named Rocky, we gather with my friends on Saturday morning. We talk about sports and the weather. And there's there's a really good football team in Florida called the Florida Gators. And then there's some other sub substandard ones, not that great. So we're there talking about that. And and so Larry is like we started to say, Larry, what if that could become like a little church, a little Christian community that you lead? And so Larry leads Paws of Praise. And we teach our laity how to do a Jesus story. So it's just a five minute little telling of something from Jesus life or a teaching of his that's really significant to that person and their personal kind of testimony with it. And then we give them some questions like, if this Jesus story happened today, what would it look like? And then everybody that's there Christian, not Christian, whoever, you know, Buddhist, whatever, they can all get into the conversation around Jesus. So, Larry, like he's really serious. He's borrowing my commentaries. He's like, you know, Pastor, I got a what do I say about this? Like, because for the first time, really in his life and this is a person gone to church his whole life, he's been unleashed to actually be in ministry in a way that's life giving to him, that it's not just I'm sitting in a pew and I'm consuming, you know, he's doing the stuff like he's leading the prayer and he's leading to Jesus and his friends are liking and engaged and, you know, dogs are running around doing that. So we come in, humans have passing of the peace, dogs have the sniffing of the butts, and we try not to ever get that crossed up. And Larry's planting a little church right there and the dog park. So I've seen people 70, 80 years old start these things and I've seen people that are 18 and 19 years old start fresh expressions of church with their friends in a in some little corner of their life around something they would already do. So I think what you keyed in on there is like the most hopeful explosive part of the movement is that it really does unleash the whole people of God to be in ministry.

Dwight Zscheile: So say a little more about how those folks get equipped to do this. And you mentioned, Larry being a lifelong church person. But I think in many congregations who aren't used to this type of thing, if you said, you know, start a form of church at the dog park or the yoga studio or wherever they hang out, that would seem like maybe an intimidating thing to do. I mean, seem like a tall order. How do you help them be equipped to do this, coach or mentor them?

Michael Beck: Yeah. So first we use all the conventional church ways that you would use in any congregation. So we preach mission, you know, every week somewhere we're trying to turn to help people in a, in a contemplative way discern what God might be calling them to in their daily lives. And so through our Bible study, we turn that into underground seminary, where we want to cover one big, missiological theological idea, because if we're going to unleash people as priests and apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers, we need to give them the tools and the the learning around that. So all those conventional ways are one way. But my approach with it is low upfront, like training and investment, high ongoing support, which is kind of the fresh expressions way. So it's like you have an idea, is it a good idea or a God idea? And the way that I kind of evaluate that is do you have a team? So if someone's bringing me an idea, do you have a team? No. Okay, let's start there. Let's get together a little team. Do you have a person of peace? Okay. Do you have an idea to go in a tattoo parlor or do you know the shop owner or one of the artists who's saying, hey, you know, come do something in my tattoo parlor? And then I, I try to discern, do I have the relational, like, credibility and bandwidth with this person where I can guide and help shape and walk alongside them as they create this thing, cultivate this thing. And so the couple little tools that we do you teach: like Jesus stories. How to tell a story like we just do. Really simple stuff. I get my teams together, we read Frog and Toad out loud to each other, and then we we talk about how we were animated in that and how we used our voice in our face. And then we, we, we read scripture and then we say, "Why don't you read scripture like you just read Frog and Toad?" and here's how you tell a story and like set the tension and grab people and then tell your story. And then here's questions you can use. So they're just really super replicable, simple tools. I think if we make it too complicated that we kind of do it a disservice. I think Jesus made the church so easy that any follower, any disciple, could cultivate, you know, more disciples and create new community. I think to be faithful to Jesus's design, it needs to be that simple. So and the discipleship is happening in the fresh expression. So as people are learning through, you know, conversation and social cues and we do dig into scripture when it evolves to that place where we're ready for that. But it's also just how we live together, Christian and non Christian. And we're like trying to presence Christ, the aroma of Jesus and that and people are being discipled and shaped and formed just through the basic interactions that are happening in the communities themselves.

Dee Stokes: I want to ask you this question. You talked about people sharing a story of Jesus and then sharing a testimony, and that seems to have gotten to be more and more difficult for Christians. You know, how do you talk about that? I think with your folks.

Michael Beck: Yeah. And just put my little Wesleyan spin on this, okay. Because this was a massive part of the primitive Methodist movement was a heart strangely warmed to personal experience of God's grace that you can share. And that was the most compelling thing about the movement is like people could say my life before Jesus, and here's my experience of God's grace and, you know, kind of where things are now and when I'm just going around doing home visits and stuff. Like you said, a lot of times the story is, Well, my parents brought me a church with our with our more inherited group, right? And then I just kind of started going to, you know, Bible study or whatever and worship, just always have known Jesus. Right? And that's that's the story. And so I try to try to help them think at a deeper level, like where were little moments, pain points in your life where you really felt the Holy Spirit move or take you in a different direction and helping them kind of think about that? I think it's easier with folks who have no experience of church or the people in the new Christian communities because it's real, like just plain. This was really transformative for me, and I didn't know anything about Jesus or what I did hear about Jesus wasn't so great, or I had this really negative experience with Christians. And so I find the people in the new Christian communities really can articulate really easily and naturally their kind of journey of faith and that just becomes part of the community. It's it's normalized in the community. So everybody just when you answer the questions right, you start to bring yourself to it and think, speak into like, I think Jesus is, you know, this and that and this is how Jesus been at work in my life.

Dwight Zscheile: So tell us more about all of these fresh expressions at Wildwood and other churches that you've been a part of. How I'm curious about life cycle. Are they things that, you know, they get started and they just go forever? Or do you find that there's, you know, they last for a season and then maybe they they evolve into something else or stop and give us give us some more stories and and some pictures of of what that looks like.

Michael Beck: I think they have a life cycle that looks a lot like the life cycle of churches that we see in the Book of Acts and the primitive Christian movement in that there was like pockets of multiplication and flourishing, you know, in Jerusalem, and then it moves out to Antioch and then it's like really bubbling up there. And then it's out like the seven churches in Asia minor and and spreading like that multiplication and flourishing and then kind of going underground in Jerusalem maybe a little bit. And so I think they do have a life cycle and, you know, tattoo parlor church is 11 years old, I'm running out of places to get tattoos. I didn't think when we started it we'd still be doing it 11 years. And that was not my thought process. My thought process was like, wow, there's a lot of people in tattoo Parlor Church who have never heard the gospel in tattoo culture. And here's an opportunity that God's opened for us to share the gospel in a tattoo culture. And it's just has been really it's been one of those ones where we've had hundreds of baptisms through that, which is just, you know, all the Holy Spirit. But some of them, like I am tired of eating burritos. We've been doing Burritos and Bibles for ten years. I've had my fill of burritos and all you can eat chips and salsa, but you know, it was something that at that. Time was really energizing. Oh, this is cool. Church is kind of boring. Or maybe some people thought, I'm never going to go to church and never have been, but we're going to eat burritos and chips and salsa and talk about Jesus. I'm in on that. That sounds. And then to help them think, Hey, by the way, this is church, what we're doing right here. So I have seen many of them die. And I think that's an important thing is that we need to let them die, celebrate them, you know, give them a good funeral, celebrate the fruit of the people who came to Christ in that, and then those people who went and started new things. So it does follow kind of like in a practice based network society that practices that people engage in in seasons of their life. So we, you know, like soccer moms, soccer parents started a cookies and juice thing on tailgates during soccer games. And will that continue on forever? No, because they probably won't be, you know, soccer parents forever. Right. But it's it's in embedding or kind of the gospel springing up in those in those practices and the way the Holy Spirit's already at work in community. So I think when we think of, you know, sustainability in the church, it's like we want to build a building. It's that Christendom, you know, mindset. Let's build the building. It'll be here, you know, 1500 years later. This is this is sustainability through multiplication and disciples coming to faith and making more disciples, if that makes any sense.

Dee Stokes: Amen to that. Let's move our conversation now, Dr. Beck, if you would, to fresh expressions in North America, like what are we seeing? What challenges are we seeing? You know, how's it going? Even in the fresh expressions movement.

Michael Beck: I think the greatest challenge that's my my daily reality is the tension between the inherited mental model of church and this kind of fresh expressions way, because in a Christendom world we have been able to just do church in this very attraction or build a building, come and you know, the Pastor shepherd person kind of oversees all of that. And so people really have to this is, you know, a stretch to conceive of these things even as church. And I think the my approach has been, you know, care for the center, experiments on the edge and help people in that inherited system see the fruit of it, help them stay connected to it and be a part of it. They might not show up at tattoo project, but they're praying for it and they're they're covering it in prayer and helping resource it. And so I see a really, really cool thing happening where denominations are starting to realize, hey, we need to like restructure for this. We we, you know, things haven't been going so great, especially just speaking for main lines. You know, maybe there is something to this and there's a way that it can all live together. And I think we we will see more increasingly in North America. I think the UK is kind of they're from our future. So there, you know, ten, 20 years ahead of us and and the decline of Christendom really, and all of those realities. But they're also ahead of us in this very missional way of thinking where they've made, you know, the mixed ecology a major expectation of of their ecclesiology. We'll see that here in North America will see lots more churches, but smaller churches and different churches and churches that are connected to inherited churches. Probably bigger churches are going to be more not the norm, but the blended ecology will be the norm where you have anchored inherited congregations with maybe like a little network of little new Christian communities and homes and workspaces and third places out in the community.

Dwight Zscheile: So if if I were one of someone listening to this podcast and say were just an everyday disciple in a congregation who's been restless with kind of the way church is usually done and have a sense of connection into some other community outside the church, what would be your counsel as to some first steps that I might take to begin thinking about starting a fresh expression?

Michael Beck: Yeah. I mean, I would start with just getting a small team of people together. The whole congregation doesn't have to be bought in on this. These can be little low cost, low risk experiments. I get that team together and really pray and ask the Holy Spirit together, "Is there a peak group of people in our community? Is there a third place? Is there a something that God's calling us to?" Right? And then I like to have people do a people map where they try to map out their community, where those things are happening, maybe with a whiteboard or stick up notes or whatever, just to try to get a sense of what the community actually looks like. And then we start to ask questions like, Is there a cool. Third place, maybe our team and we'd invite others. We like to go hang out in that third place. A coffee shop, a dog park, a tattoo parlor, a community center, whatever, and just connect with people and hear the stories. Or is there a person of peace who we know, a yoga instructor, the tattoo parlor shop owner, Adrian, the manager at Mo's Southwest Grill, that there's like an openness and a peace exchange happening that God might be calling us in to go further with that relationship. Is there a practice, something we like to do together like we would do even if no one else came? And you know, whether that's getting together for a run. We have a runners church, church 3.1. We run A5K, we pray, we do a Jesus story, we do our five K, we go back to life. Is there something that we could do together and bring in those spiritual elements? That's where I would start.

Dwight Zscheile: If I were a pastor in a local church, what would be your counsel to me? If I wanted to help this kind of thing happen in my place.

Michael Beck: My counsel would be just learning through failure. Don't cause too much disruption to the to the normal ways of going about being the church. But I'm looking for those people with the shining eyes who maybe have like a real passion for people outside the church or still have some connections and some things going on. I try to get those people on a little team and then empower them and start to talk about, you know, what would a monthly meeting rhythm look like for us where we could get together and just talk about ideas that we're having around fresh expressions or just to pray together for a period and kind of really discern what God might be calling us to. And then I mean, I hit it pretty hard from the pulpit, from the teaching ministries. I you know, I like to have a slogan in my church. No pew potatoes that we're all going to be involved in mission at some level. And whether that's you're supporting it through prayer or you're resourcing it or you're just encouraging people or you're the ones that are going out starting it. Like we get to do this together as a as a congregation and the things that we start out in the community, the inherited congregation should feel a sense of pride about that. In connection to that, they're unleashing something that's changing the community through their participation in the life of the traditional church. And I always tried to not diminish that right. People have made incredible sacrifice and given their blood, sweat and tears to this these congregations that they love. And I try to help honor that and their their faithfulness in that, but also stretch them to think about let's think about the next generations. Let's think about the people that are never going to come into this space, no matter how good we do worship.

Dee Stokes: I want to go back to something you said before. Our listeners may not know that you and I used to work together with fresh expressions, and one of the things that I always like that you said was you sometimes celebrate failure. And one of the things you said earlier was things have to die sometimes, right, to come back and be reborn. So talk about celebrating and learning from from failure. I know you mentioned it before, but but from the aspect of, you know, things dying and coming back.

Michael Beck: Yeah. Failure, the other F-word, you know, in traditional congregations, people just feel this heaviness right now, right? Like if we make one wrong in many congregations and I know there's a bunch of thriving attractional congregations out there, but in many congregations, I'd say the majority, there's a sense of heaviness. And like if we make one wrong move, you know, we could not be here next year. And that's a really hard place mentally to do anything innovative, right? And so failure in this experimental, iterative, iterative way of prototyping, these little experiments, these little Christian communities, it's expected, right? So I try to honor failure and celebrate failure and talk about the Bible is the story of human beings failing forward with God and certainly not our human success story. Right? It's about us blowing it. You know, we get a garden and we messed that up. We get a covenant, we kind of right finally, you know, we get Jesus and still, I mean the church, you know, but failing forward. So like in our Gather Grow Go team, we kind of reorganize our leadership to make room for this in our churches. And we have a failure fest. So we have a commitment that if anybody names a failure, we will stop the meeting and we will stand up and give a standing. Oh, that. Was that a failure that you just said there, Dr. Dee? And we will we will clap and celebrate that. Because if we're not trying, then we're not. If we're not failing, we're not really trying. And. And are we learning from our failures? Like we don't want to be frivolously, you know, blowing things up and trying stuff. So creating that kind of a culture. One of my Edwin Friedman, I love to read his stuff. Family systems theorist talks about imaginative gridlock and how when you get stuck in imaginative gridlock, you just keep doing the same stuff, trying harder that it just keeps feeling more and more pressure and nothing's working. And what teams really have to do in that is play and experiment and get out of that gridlock. And you like play your way out of that and you fail your way out of it. So yeah, expecting failure and celebrating failure and helping people kind of have a different way to think about it, I think.

Dwight Zscheile: So you have authored nine books, if I understand correctly. What are some of your latest books and how can people find them?

Michael Beck: Yeah, so I've written quite a few books just on fresh expressions in general, and those are all out there, Fresh Expressions of the Rural Church, Fresh Expressions and Digital Age. A Field Guide to Fresh, Fresh Expressions. Last year I got to do a really exciting My wife calls those books church nerd books, by the way. She's like, Can you write a not church nerd book that actually want to read? So I wrote last year a book called Painting with Ashes, and got to just kind of share my story and look at saints across history who took like their deepest struggle, brokenness, wounds and rendered that to God to bring healing to others. So that was a really exciting book. But coming up this year in May, we have a book coming out called The Five Congregational Personality Types, and it's my attempt to help congregations see how the A-test kind of gets embodied. And five factor personality psychology in congregations. There's a communal kind of personality and understanding those personalities and loving people in their type can help us then explore dark sides, places where we might have weaknesses, where we're not fully embodying the fullness of Jesus in the world. So I'm really excited about that book. It's coming out in May.

Dwight Zscheile: So are we. We're very excited to continue to learn from you and with you, Dr. Michael Beck. It's such a blessing to have you on the podcast and to hear your stories and your wisdom, and may God continue to move through you and through the communities that you are helping to lead as you cultivate this really flourishing variety of ways in which God's church is connecting with people in today's world. Next episode we will be looking at the mixed ecology through the lens of church history and exploring ways in which God's Spirit has used a variety of forms of Christian community coexisting together in different places in order to serve God's mission. Look forward to seeing you then.

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