Welcome to the Pivot Podcast from Luther Seminary’s Faith+Lead!

Join Dr. Dee Stokes and Dr. Dwight Zscheile on a journey to explore the changing landscape of the Church. In today's episode, the co-hosts talk with guest Ted A. Smith, author of "The End of Theological Education," to gain a deeper understanding of the history of the voluntary association model of the church in the U.S., the cultural shifts taking place, what this means for congregational life and ministry moving forward, and where church leaders can find hope today.

Stay tuned for future episodes as we continue to unravel the complexities of this cultural shift.

If you're a pastor, lay leader, or simply curious about how faith communities adapt in changing times, you're in the right place. Let's embark on this journey together! 

Dee Stokes: Many churches and leaders are tempted to expend their energy trying to fix the inherited structures in order to reverse the decline of institutional affiliation, participation, and resources. Christ's local church will endure. Somebody say Amen. It will endure. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Dee Stokes: Amen.

Dee Stokes: But voluntary association, institutional structures largely can't be fixed. Instead, churches should focus on discerning and joining the Triune God's presence and movement in their personal and congregational lives and in their neighborhoods. This means presence, curiosity, deep listening, and experimentation. Hello again. I'm Dr. Dee Stokes.

Dwight Zscheile: And I'm Dr. Dwight Zscheile. Welcome to the Pivot podcast. If you're new here, this is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. In today's episode, we are excited to have Dr. Ted Smith with us. Ted is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Divinity and Associate Dean of Faculty at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. He's a Presbyterian pastor and the author of the provocative new book entitled The End of Theological Education. He's also the director of the Theological Education Between the Times series.

Dee Stokes: Well, welcome, Dr. Smith. Thank you for being with us today.

Ted Smith: Thanks for the invitation. I'm honored by your interest in the book and eager for a chance to think it through with you.

Dee Stokes: Awesome. As leaders here at Luther Seminary, we both know that enrollment in seminary education is on the decline and has been for many years. But more pastors are struggling with their congregations or leaving ministry altogether in light of cultural changes taking place in this moment. Something bigger is absolutely taking place. Not just institutional decline. Something touching on the basic paradigm in which the church, ministry and theological education have been predominantly organized for the past two centuries. We want to explore this foundational cultural shift more deeply in this episode, because it explains so many of the symptoms churches and their leaders are seeing today. So let's dive in, Dwight.

Dwight Zscheile: So, Ted, your book lays out three primary historical eras for the church in North America, what you call the "standing order" prior to the American Revolution, then the "age of voluntary associations" that emerged kind of around the time of the revolution. And now since sort of the 1960s ish, a period of individualization or what you've talked about elsewhere as the "age of authenticity," drawing on the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. So tell us about these ages and what are the key features of them for the church?

Ted Smith: Yeah. Thanks, Dwight. I think the first thing that I'd have to offer is the ritual academic disclaimer, right, that that broad periodization like this are just always going to be wrong in some way, right? There's going to be details that they miss. There's going to be realities that they obscure. But my but I agree with the German philosopher Theodor Adorno that we can't think without models like this. We have to have models to think with. And so the question isn't if the model is perfect, the question is if it can fail in ways that are illuminating. And so that's that's my kind of minimalist hope for this model, right? That it will fail in ways that are illuminating. But I do think and I think it does capture an awful lot, even as it fails to capture everything. One of the things to say is that in that period of standing orders, the core of that is that you've got a deep alliance between political, cultural, religious and economic interests. They're not differentiated yet, like they are in a fully modern society. And one thing that means is that individuals who are leaders in one of those fields can just move easily into another one. So you see, like in Puritan New England, people moving from being the pastor to the governor to the president of a university. Like that's a totally standard career path. That's not a career path in a differentiated society. Right? And I think these were shaped by the kind of European imaginations that the settler colonialists brought to North America. They were trying to kind of recreate the few, that is, standing orders of Europe. There was a very particular form of theological education in that model, and it was a model where everybody did theological education, whether they were at William and Mary or whether they were in Virginia with the Episcopal establishment, or whether they were at Harvard or Yale in New England with a more Puritan establishment. So it was the same curriculum. Everybody studied theology, and people who went on to be pastors studied pretty much like anyone else, and then just did a little topping up at the end. So that's that period of standing orders, the revolution and the the forces that led to the revolution broke that up, right, for a variety of reasons. And so what we get is the emergence of this society of voluntary associations. So in the local church, what that means is you get a shift from a kind of, you know, a state- funded local village church in New England or an Episcopal parish funded by taxes. Right. It's not really a membership based society in the same way. But after the revolution, all that shifts, and now you've got what we think of as a modern congregation where the members come together, they form it, their donations keep it alive. There's more or less democratic governance, but they have some kind of say so that voluntary association and then a whole network of those voluntary associations spread across the country. That's what Tocqueville sees when he comes here. And he's just blown away. He's expecting chaos. Like, how can you have any kind of society if religion isn't established? Well, the answer is the voluntary associations stepped in and they did that work. And theological education then becomes something that is set apart. It's different. It becomes a formation to lead these voluntary societies. And we get a new kind of institution. It's not just part of the Yale undergraduate curriculum. Now you've got a freestanding seminary, post-baccalaureate. Andover is kind of the first of those in 1807. And then that model spreads. And now it's Luther, it's Candler, where I teach. It's everywhere. And it through the course of the 19th century, it becomes these become professional schools as well. And I do think now we're in a time when that dispensation of voluntary societies is unraveling. And one of my arguments, I think so often when people think about church decline or decline in participation, what they're focused on or what they see is a decline in religion, and so they're looking at their religious piece of it. But what you've got to see is that every kind of voluntary association in our society is struggling right now, all of them. Whether they're religious or not. And that's the common denominator in the struggle. And because religion hitched itself almost entirely to the voluntary association as an institutional model in the U.S., that means our religious institutions are struggling too. And so the, you know, looking back at this history, for me, there's a sense of hope in it to say, we've been in a time like this before and people thought it was the end of the world and it wasn't. But there's also a calling to do that difficult work of discerning what God is doing in this time, and how we're called to join in that work of redemption.

Dee Stokes: Thank you, Dr. Smith. I think you've begun to answer this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. What are some of the gifts and challenges these eras brought to the church and the ministry?

Ted Smith: One of the challenges or one of the one of the gifts that the age of voluntary associations brought is that it could really accommodate a rich religious pluralism in a society, because, you know, we don't have just one established church. There's not just one, even one established religion. If you want to come here, you put get together with some people who believe like you do, and you can have a congregation of some kind. Right? So I think it could really accommodate that pluralism. I think it could, it also fit beautifully with the democratic impulses. People were just not going to have their religion imposed on them anymore. It was too basic to who they were. But a voluntary association can hold that and not just hold it, but then unite us with other people. So we're not these little atomized individuals flying around that Tocqueville was expecting. It's not that, it's not that chaos. It really came together. So those things, I think, are great strengths of the model of voluntary associations. I think the I think there are two deeply problematic parts of voluntary associations that make me not only lament their passing, and one of them is the homogenizing force of voluntary associations. So, for instance, in Tibet, a Buddhist community isn't, a Buddhist temple is not a voluntary association, right? It's a different kind of religiosity. There's a different institutional form for that. But when Tibetan Buddhism comes to the United States, there are powerful forces that press any religion, including Tibetan Buddhism, into the form of a congregation with a more or less professionalized clergy. So there's a kind of, there's a strong coercion that's at work in these processes that isn't always visible. And I think with that, you kind of lose some of the biodiversity, if you will, of religious expression. And that's true even within Christian families. Like this is not an easy fit with Catholic or Orthodox. And I think in some ways it's not an easy fit with Pentecostalism. So but all these things get homogenized. So I think that's that's one of the challenges. And then the other challenge is the way in which the network of voluntary associations and then the seminary as the place that trains all of that network becomes hitched to the project of a white settler colonialism. You see this most clearly in Lyman Beecher's kind of legendary address, "A Plea for the West". What he's doing is going back East to raise money for Lane Theological Seminary, which is in Cincinnati. He's going back to his kind of Puritan, post Puritan sources in New England and up and down the eastern seaboard. And his argument is, look, if, if, if we have a seminary, the seminary can train people who lead voluntary associations. And the voluntary associations are the key to winning the West, by which he means the Mississippi watershed, and winning it, especially from Native Americans and winning it from Catholics and pushing that white settler project. And then he's arguing, if we win the West, we win the continent, and if we win the continent, we win the world for Christ. So there's this kind of millennialist power behind that, that links the voluntary association to a project of Manifest Destiny, to the white settler colonial project. That's part of what charges it with its meaning. It's why it feels so important to us to be part of it. When that's exposed, I think we have to regard the whole kind of apparatus with greater ambivalence.

Dwight Zscheile: So I'd love to dig into that a little bit more because I was curious, thinking both about that, that voluntary association ethos. But even the standing order before that, both being deeply tied to a basic Christendom kind of assumption or ethos, right? That the church stands in this position of cultural privilege and influence in society, in this case in particularly the white church. And I'm curious just to reflect with you a bit more on that, and both in the sense of national mission. I mean, it seems to me that mainline denominations retain some of that same ethos pretty deeply, even as it's become more secularized in terms of various forms of political activism, for instance. And then there's a there's a white Evangelical irror image of that that's feeding now into Christian nationalism. But say more about that.

Ted Smith: Yeah. I think you make a really important observation when you say that the standing order was linked to that white settler colonial project, right? No doubt about it. The Puritan sense of an errand into the wilderness was kind of one of the err myths that could, kind of that could give the settler project power. So the standing order is linked to it. And then so as I was just kind of playing out, is this new network of voluntary associations. So this is one of the things that I think really clarifies the challenge before us today. We saw in the last shift between really different social paradigms, major shifts in the social imaginary. We saw systemic racism endure across that shift. We saw a kind of nationalist project endure across that shift. So, you know, I sometimes read people who are like, well, the old order is falling apart. Hooray for that. Because the new order will be, you know, this kind of great redeemed, automatically wonderful society. We're uh. That is just not the way it works. I mean, I think sadly, the powers and principalities of this world are wily, and they can just crawl into and shapeshift to take the form of whatever the next social form is. So a deliverance. Some of my students, I think, think, well, if we could just get out of these oppressive voluntary associations and get to the space of authenticity and individualism, well, then we would all be past, you know, every mode of oppression. But that is just not the, that is not the case. I think what we learn from history. So I think that sharpens the challenge in front of us. If we really want to leave behind that deep alliance between the church and, and normative whiteness, we're going to have to undo it directly. It's not going to just happen automatically with this shift in social paradigm.

Dee Stokes: I want to thank you for that, for that thought, because. Can I share with you, respectfully, that I was a bit skeptical when I was reading your book and we still be new friends, I hope. Can I share that with you?

Ted Smith: Absolutely. Okay.

Dee Stokes: So good, because I didn't I felt like what I was reading was information for the white mainline church. And so my question to you is, what are the differences that you see in the narratives and experiences of marginalized communities during this history? And even now with the shift that you're talking about with theological education? Because my people still need theological education, we still need, um, we've been forced out. We've been not allowed to get what we need in history and we still need it. So can we still be friends?

Ted Smith: We can absolutely still be friends.

Dee Stokes: Thank you so much.

Ted Smith: I'm glad. I'm really happy for the question because it lets me, speak about the series "Theological Education between the Times" series as a whole. I think that's it's really important to see this book as part of that series and part of what which includes, say, Willie James Jennings book After Whiteness. It includes Keri Day's book, Notes of a Native Daughter, Elizabeth Frazier's book, Atando Cabos, Maria Liu Wong's book that's coming out soon on Becoming Wise Together. So we've got, it's a richly diverse set of authors that are speaking to many, not all, it's not comprehensive, but that are speaking to and from many different social locations. Part of what I felt like I wanted to do in this book was, in a way, to parochialize my own whiteness and to parochialize the white mainline denominations. So I do speak, the book is aimed especially at those people right? But it's trying to at, at my people. It's trying to do that, though, with the self consciousnessness that I think was missing from many of the books like this in the past, which were in fact aimed at and coming from that world, but really mistook that world for everything, right? For the whole and or well, it's, it's the whole and then there's some little side reports, you know, but that's not the way it is. And so to go ahead and speak with particularity about this part of the larger church without pretending that this is the whole. And so, like I say, it's a particularized and parochialized whiteness in those ways. That's one of the hopes of the book. I try to do that in the intro and then, but I think the context of the series as a whole is really important. We all tried to kind of lean into our particularity in writing these books. So what are some of the differences? The second part of your question that I think is really important. I think one thing I'd say before I'd talk about difference is to note the pressures, the homogenizing pressures that are at work here, the coercive pressures that I was naming before that, that really, they do bear down on all of our communities in different ways. And that's because, as I try to argue in chapter two of the book, a lot of it has to do with kind of neoliberal economic, political and economic structures. And that's coming for all of us, right? And it does shape the kinds of selfhood and community that are possible. So I do want to name a certain shared context in a political and economic reality, even as we acknowledge really, really significant differences. And I think those differences and part of that is that one way you see that is declines in participation and affiliation, really ranging across pretty wide spectrums of American institutions, across lines of race and class. And one of those places where I see it in particular is that there is, across lines of race and ethnicity, there is an association between class and affiliation. So wealthier people are just more likely these days to be part of voluntary associations, more likely to be part of the church. That holds across race and class. But with that, with that sameness noted, I think one of the differences that really matters is the difference in access that has been there historically and that there are, I think, part of the work right now in taking theological education out of a professional model is to push it into a much more democratically accessible model. I think that's going to and I think that's going to cross lines of race and class and ethnicity, and it's just going to be essential, that kind of decolonizing of knowledge and of access to theological education. So I think that's what I think there's a way to do that in the, in the present social order. But we're going to have to really press to do it. Is that, I don't know if that's an adequate response? Come back and tell me more or demand more from me.

Dee Stokes: Yeah, so, I think the statement you made was, and correct me if you're if I'm wrong, that more of the mainline white congregants will be more interested in volunteerism than maybe their people of color. Is that kind of what you're saying? That there's more, but there's more of them. So I see that that could be true. Right? But what I see in the Black church, I'll just reference that, is there's this holding on of this volunteerism, um, because we find favor in that, if you will, we find a calling in that we find substance in that, um, sometimes it turns into a job, and that's not what it was intended to be, but there are folks hanging on to that because they just find a place. And especially among Baby Boomers that don't want to be pushed out of the church, if you will. Baby Boomers tend to hang on and internalize those volunteer positions, almost like a job.

Ted Smith: Yea

Dee Stokes: And don't want to let it go and allow younger people to come. And we need the young people in the church, right? Don't. But don't allow them to come in and take their place because they're, um, hanging on to it so strongly. Does that make any sense, what I just said?

Ted Smith: Oh, that makes total sense. And I do think, I don't mean to suggest for a second that there's a, that the voluntary association ethos is stronger in white communities. I think at this point, at this point in history, I think it's probably stronger in black communities.

Dee Stokes: Yeah.

Ted Smith: And it's closely but it's closely tied to respectability, right. To be a member of one of these voluntary associations and then to be an officer within it. So it's and it is so that's a key part of respectability politics, right? So Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham diagnoses that I think beautifully in Ladies of the Club. And we also see I think a critique of that from Black Lives Matter and from some younger black leaders. Black Lives Matter is not really a voluntary association, right? That's not its internal form. And I think there's a wariness of having that kind of form that grows out of a resistance to, to the, to the, to the kind of leadership that has often been there in voluntary associations. So I think there's a complexity really in all our communities. But I the analysis, you name of an older generation being deeply invested in the voluntary associations, serving in them and holding office and them being part of their identity, that's absolutely true. And I do think the higher standing of the voluntary association in black communities is one reason that we're seeing a greater percentage of black students across the ATS right now, because there's still a desire for and an interest in and a belief in the legitimacy of theological education as professional education.

Dwight Zscheile: So I'd love to explore a little bit more this new era of individualization, as you talk about it, that we're in now, and what is emerging in terms of a post professional, both model of ministry as well as theological education, like what are you seeing in that landscape now and what are you excited about and what are you concerned about in that?

Ted Smith: Well, I'll answer, but I do want to push it back to you two, because you're going to be seeing things that I am not seeing. And so I'd love to hear what you're seeing. So these are some of the things, though, some of social forms that feel to me, well adjusted or better adjusted to the, to the, to this social imaginary of authentic individuals. I, see it in very I see it in megachurches frankly, um, which often they're, megachurches, even if they're a congregation in a denomination, they don't function like an older voluntary society. You could be a member of a megachurch for years and not serve on a committee. Right? You might be part of a small group or something, but , you know, the committee structure is the essence of the voluntary society, and that's often just not there in those. And so that what, what the megachurch becomes is a place where individuals can come for expressive worship, that kind of and also for kind of working out their authentic self for doing that kind of self work. And it can happen in big worship. It can also happen in small, really intense Bible studies, small groups, prayer groups, service groups. And I think the mainline has tended to kind of scoff at this as a consumerism because they're not members of committees. But I think the, the place to push back is to say. And so this is just consumerist religion, but I'm not convinced that serving on the property committee automatically looks more like following Jesus than going being part of a small group Bible study. Right? So I think we have to kind of disabuse ourselves of some of our, of our biases. So. So the megachurch is one model that seems better adjusted to it. And if you noticed, if you look around at, you know, the religion, the religious landscape right now, what is like what you see is that the larger congregations are growing and there are mega-churches that might identify as Lutheran or Presbyterian or, you know, that they're not necessarily nondenominational or evangelical, but they're often growing. Those larger congregations are. And and it really is I think that institutional form, more than anything, that is driving that. So that's one place where I see this kind of growth. Another place is in the very, very small. So something like a house church or the Saint Lydia's Dinner Church in Brooklyn that Lutheran pastor Chris Scharen leads. These organizations tend to have very little institutional overhead. So there's not a, there's not a huge committee structure that there's not a rally day and a big Christian education ministry that has to be sustained. And so again, what they do is create space where people can come and work out their authentic selves. So I'm seeing lots of growth in those kind of areas as well. So those are two those are, they're different in scale. But what they have in common is that neither one of them looks a lot like a voluntary association. And I've already talked too long. But the quick worry about the megachurch is it can become a kind of consumerism, or it can become a place where you go to be seen, and they rely too much on charismatic leaders. And so you get, you know, Mars Hill, Hillsong. I mean, it's just it's littered with examples of problems. Right? And I think the, the small house church model, the risk there is that it's it's just a kind of it's a small friend group. It's not porous enough to outsiders. It can't really be welcoming of strangers in a, in a deep way. And it just becomes too homogeneous. So and both, neither of them has really found, this is interesting, even with the great wealth and institutional power of megachurches, they're really having a hard time making it to the second generation. And I see that with house churches, too. So neither of them has really, I don't know that, I don't think we have yet a durable, institutional form that really fits with this age of authentic individuals. I'm not, I'm not seeing that yet. What are you all seeing?

Dee Stokes: Well, I don't want to tell you what I'm seeing. I want to know what gives you hope in this unraveling. What, and let's move in that direction. We can tell you what gives us hope. I think, um, I want to know what gives you hope. And maybe we can go in that direction.

Ted Smith: Yeah. I mean, what gives me hope for the church is that the church is not our creation, and that sustaining the church is not up to us, and that God. You know, I read the church in many ways through the Old Testament. God makes covenant to redeem the world through Israel. God. God works through the church. But that's not because we're righteous. It's not because we've got it all together. It's because this is how God, in God's great love, wants to woo the world, even through such broken vessels. So that's the main source of my hope, is that we have a wily, persistent God who will not quit loving us. And so there's going to, there are going to be institutional expressions of that.

Dee Stokes: Yeah. Love it, I love it. Here's my hope. May I share. Yeah that that a black female for context can go to a gas station, was directed by God to go to this gas station, because I was thinking about going to a different one and I needed something from a particular one. I said, well, let me go to the other one, close to my hotel at the beach on Father's Day, and run into a biker who asked me to get him some Gatorade because. And I was like, well, why can't you go in the store, you know, and all kinds of dissent? Well, I haven't paid for my bike yet, and I need to. And this is a white male, millennial or younger, and I'm not. And he asked me to buy him Gatorade. Can you? He's trying to hand me money, so no, no, I'll take care of it. I go in, the Gatorade is buy one, get two free. So I have my hands full with Gatorade coming out, right?

Ted Smith: Yeah.

Dee Stokes: And and he's like, here's my ...no no no no no. I just want to bless you today. And then I say to him, Happy Father's Day if you're a father. And as I'm going back to my truck, he yells at me, "I lost my dad this week".

Ted Smith: Oh my goodness.

Dee Stokes: And so I ministered to him. In that moment. That's what gives me hope.

Ted Smith: It's a hope that we are always caught up in more than we know. And that the deepest currents of what we're caught up in are love and are the love of God. For this world. Yeah. So sometimes it's visible like that. That's just. That's just beautiful.

Dwight Zscheile: So, you know, in this podcast series, we're talking about a series of pivots for the church to make. One of them is pivot from this sort of one size, one shape fits all, really kind of voluntary association model to a mixed ecology of lots of different expressions of church of various sizes that are connecting with people in the neighborhood. And, and so part of that is, again, recognizing that so much of the energy in the voluntary association model was to just maintain the institution, and that people did find that meaningful, as you talk about in your book. And it wasn't necessarily really about connecting deeply with people's yearnings, their longings and losses, like in the story that that Dr. Dee just shared. And church has got to figure out how to do that very directly, where people are in the neighborhoods in today's world. I think that's to me what the opportunity is in some of this. And I'm curious, you know, one of the most powerful chapters in your book was the book on renunciations. And you you begin that chapter with a beautiful quote from Emily Dickinson, that renunciation is a piercing virtue, the letting go, a presence for an expectation. Powerful words. So talk with us a little bit about some of the renunciation both the church and theological education should make in this season.

Ted Smith: Yeah, well, thank you for quoting Saint Emily of Amherst. Yeah, that she can say that in, what, like, 15 words is just astonishing to me. What a what a gift. Yeah, I do think there there is, it is a time of discerning, as you all say in the intro, it's a time of of experimenting. I think it is also a time of renunciation. And here, in articulating that notion of renunciation, I've learned especially from Sister Meg Funk, a Benedictine nun in Indiana who's drawing on desert, the traditions of desert mothers and fathers, and John Cassian. And it's kind of collection of that in particular. And I, I do think that in this time between the times, part of our work is just to make a series of renunciations. We have to let go of things before, we have to loosen our hold on some things of this world before we can open our hands to receive what's next. And we might not even know what that is. We have to, the renunciation comes first. I think the first renunciation for the for the church is this, you know, ancient American alliance between the church and whiteness and the kind of white settler colonial project. And that that is just that is much more complex than saying that you're for diversity or something like that. Right? It's it's a it's a deep, deep dismantling that is an ongoing project. But to renounce that before we build, I think that's key. I also think. There's, you know, in the book that part is very specific to theological education. In theological education I think we have reached a point where it is very difficult to offer professional theological education, the kind of MDiv model without external inputs, without some kind of artificial supplement. And one way schools get that is from endowments. My own school depends heavily on an endowment. One way is by selling off land or libraries or whatever, whatever we've got, so that we get that supplement and we see that across ATS right now, across every kind of institution. Another way you see this happening is through an extractive labor policy that turns all faculty into adjuncts, or pays them as cheaply as we can, and then asks people to live really at poverty level in order to do this work that is treated as professional work. So that too is an artificial supplement. It's in the unfair labor practices. And then the one that I'm deeply concerned about is student debt. When we fund our schools through, when they are afloat on an ocean of student debt, it is this should be a moral crisis for our schools. And it should be, Dr. Dee, this gets back especially to something you were lifting up earlier when at the same time, what's what's happening at a macro level in ATS schools is we've got a more diverse population than ever before, and what we've got is greater indebtedness among students than ever before. This should be a, this should this should be a moral crisis for us. Right. And so I think part we can and especially that's true when we're sustaining historically white institutions or institutions that that continue to have majority white faculty. Then it's just like a transfer of wealth, right? And that that's a that's a deeply problematic model. So I think part of our renunciation that we have to make is to figure out a way to do what we are called to do, to participate in God's, the sharing of God's wisdom, which is the saving knowledge of God, which is what I think theological education is. We have to figure out a way to do that without indebting students or extracting through unjust labor practices. And there's a way in which, like, well, what does that look like? And I kind of think, I don't know. I don't know, but we're not going to know until we have to know. We're not going to know until we say we're not going to do that anymore. And then we'll just figure it out, right? We have to let ourselves experience that crisis. And I think for congregations here, I'd want to I'm not going to be too quick to tell, you know, as a former pastor, current in a way, current pastor myself, but I'm not going to be too quick to tell congregational leaders what their renunciations are in their space. But I do think it needs to be an active category for them to think about. What are we called to renounce now? What do we, where are we? Holding on to the powers of this world as if they were a source of life. Like that's the question, right? And then where can we let go? And that's that's just difficult work. It's spiritual work. But every time there's been renewal in the church there has been a moment of renunciation. And it looks it's going to look like the cross. Like we know that at least, right? It's going to look like Jesus. So it's not like we're just guessing without any help.

Dee Stokes: Thank you for calling out these moral issues. Um, we're quick to point to corporate America's CEOs and the amount of money they make, but we are not quick to point out that student tuition continues to rise at every institution. Um, and outpaces inflation. Um, we don't call that out as a moral issue. So thank you for pointing out some. I'm going to ask you about the sermon that's in the middle of your book next. But I want to quote something that caught my eye on your Amazon page for your book. I want to I want to quote that and read that, if I may, Smith refuses to tell the story as one of progress or decline. Instead, he puts theological education in eschatological perspective, understanding it in relation to its ultimate purpose: knowledge of God, knowledge so deep, so intimate that it requires and accomplishes our transformation. This knowledge is not restricted to a professional clerical class, but is given for the salvation of all. Seeing by the light of this hope, Smith calls readers to re-imagine church ministries, church, ministry, and theological education for this time between the times. I appreciate that in that description on your page. So the sermon in the middle is a kind of theological and spiritual inflection point, where you point the reader toward God's presence and promises. I want you to say more about that, but I appreciate the fact that all of this that we talk about, you know, whatever points we're trying to make, if presence and transformation aren't the point, what is the point?

Ted Smith: Well. Amen. Right. And and that with presence and transformation there is both grace and judgment. And they are held right there together. They are inseparable in the love of God. And yeah, so I hope the sermon embodies I mean, this is such a this is such a great question. This is like the question I dream about that somebody will ask. So thank you so much. Yeah. There's a sermon in the middle of the book and it's meant to be, um, it's meant to perform a kind of theology of history, I think, one in which God, the word of God breaks into history, breaks into the historical narrative, and in, in Jesus, in the word, and transforms the whole timeline. It's meant to be an argument against narratives of progress, as if we're just going to this brave new world of authentic individuals and it's going to be so great, in which case the Word of God would be at the end, right? That's the goal towards which we're driving. But I do not. And that narrative of progress, it's kind of hard to find these days, but it's still out there. But you'll also what's much more common is a narrative of decline. Right. Which is it's not a narrative of decline. It's not an empirical kind of comment. A narrative of decline is a theological worldview that once God was present in a powerful way and now we have fallen away or something like that. I think it's a fundamentally flawed theology of history that imagines God present in the past in a way that God isn't present now. And so that's why I wanted to have this in breaking of the word in the middle. So there's a historical narrative, an in breaking of the word that interrupts that. And then the last chapters are meant to be like, how do we respond to the word breaking into our midst, which I think is the task of Christian life? But there's, we try to do better, but these are incremental changes. It doesn't add up to a big narrative of progress. And when we fail, it doesn't add up to a big narrative of decline. Because exactly what you're saying, Dr. Dee, there's still that presence that that God breaking into history with love and judgment and redemption all held together.

Dwight Zscheile: Amen. And I think that's a wonderful place for us to wrap up, really leaning into God's activity and God's promises amidst so much change. Here at Luther Seminary, we have created Faith +Lead as a way to experiment with what post professional theological education might look like, particularly in Faith Lead Academy, where we have non-credit online courses that learners can access and work through at their own pace. I think we all, across the world of theological education, need to do a lot of experiments right now to figure out how do we live into this new, really moment of opportunity, as much as it is a moment of unraveling? And thank you so much, Ted, for your wisdom. The new book is The End of Theological Education, is published by Eerdmans. Where can our audience find you online?

Ted Smith: Well, I'm I don't know if it's just a sign of my age. I'm not I'm not very active on the socials, as the kids say. But I do have a, I have a web page with my faculty bio that they can find at Candler. So that's just Candler School of Theology, Ted Smith. And I'm also glad to respond, as best I can to email from your readers, Ted dot smith@emory.edu.

Dwight Zscheile: Wonderful. Thank you again so much for being with us today. In next week's episode we're going to continue to dig into the implications of some of these shifts we've been talking about today, and also the pivots that we laid out in the last episode. Thank you for tuning in today, and we'll see you next week.

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.