Every generation inherits the same task: figuring out how to receive an ancient faith and pass it on in a language people can actually hear. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm open a new season of the Pivot Podcast by asking what spiritual formation looks like when it draws on centuries of Christian practice, the Book of Common Prayer, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rhythms of liturgy, without losing people along the way. Drawing on Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered and the idea of incarnation as an ongoing act of translation, they trace the line between tradition, which stays alive because it keeps finding new expression, and traditionalism, which freezes a particular cultural moment and calls it sacred.

Along the way, Dwight and Alicia talk honestly about what keeps churches from doing this work: the fear of getting it wrong, the pull of comfort and familiarity, and a habit of experimenting freely with children's and youth ministry while staying far more cautious with neighbors outside the church. They ask what it means to trust the Holy Spirit with something as fragile as change, and what's lost when a church becomes a museum rather than a living community. It's a thoughtful start to a season built around one question: how do we make the ancient new?

• The Parable of the Talents
• American Congregations by Mark Chaves
• The Book — Practicing the Way
• The Book of Common Prayer
• Christianity Rediscovered - Orbis Books

I'm excited about this season because you know this is a conversation I don't think we have often enough in the church. So often we'll have conversations about, you know, other things in the church, but but really wrestling with what does faithful contextualization look like in our time and place in all the myriad different contexts because it's not one answer, right? And we live in a culture that's in modernity that's still about standardization and find the solution and apply it everywhere and all those things.

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

And I'm Alicia Granholm. We're starting a new season today focused on a question we're hearing across the church. How do we make the ancient treasures of the Christian tradition accessible to people in today's world? Rather than trying to address the church's challenges through abandoning ancient wisdom and practices, we really want to explore how we can claim those gifts. But doing so isn't as always I'm gonna start that.

But doing so isn't always easy in a rapidly changing cultural context with different assumptions, ways of relating, and language. So how do we make the ancient new?

So this is not of course a new dilemma. ⁓ Core to the Christian faith is the incarnation, God's word taking on flesh in a particular time and place. But the thing about incarnation is it's always specific. It's always a particular language, a particular culture, a particular neighborhood, a particular moment in history. Paul writing to the Corinthians wasn't writing to us, and yet it is somehow for us as well.

Every generation has to figure out what it means to receive the tradition in their own hands in their own time and pass it on faithfully both to neighbors and to the next generation.

Theologians of Christian Mission call this work contextualization, the embodiment of Christian life and witness in changing historical and cultural circumstances. What we mean is something closer to what a good cook does with an old recipe. You make the food with what you have for the people at your table. But for the church, this process is guided by the Holy Spirit.

So this season we'll be spending time with spiritual practices, with liturgy, with scripture, with core doctrines like the Trinity, and with how the ancient treasures of the faith speak to today's longings, losses, chaos, and despair.

Today it's just the two of us, Dwight, starting where we think everything starts, with the simple yet strange claim that Christian faith is always embodied.

So Dwight, what do we mean in saying the faith is always embodied? And why does that feel like both a comfort and a challenge for today?

So I think we sometimes don't take seriously enough the logic, if you will, of the incarnation that God, you know, moves into the neighborhood to use the wonderful language from the message translation of John 1, joins us where we are, shares life with us. ⁓ and that process though means taking on local culture always. So the myssiologist Andrew Wallace talks about incarnation as being like an act of translation.

the word becomes flesh. It's translated into flesh, if you will. But he makes the point that, you know, language is always particular. It's always of of a particular people in a particular time and place. And what's powerful about Christianity is that initial act of incarnation as translation leads to repeated acts. And so even by the time we get to the Bible, the New Testament, it's already translated into Greek. It's not in Aramaic, which Jesus and his

followers would have been speaking in first century Palestine. So so that process of incarnation and translation and cultural adaptation is really integral to what it means to be Christian. And I think we can look through Christian history and say when the body of Christ is speaking the vernacular, is contextualized, is incarnate within local life and culture, it thrives. And when it doesn't, then it tends to struggle.

And so you think about the reformation in part was about this very thing. ⁓ so many revival movements in history have been about a renewal of the church's ability to not just embody but also communicate the gospel with people in a particular time and place. And then of course the downside of when we've gotten it wrong in the church, like colonialism, all kinds of moments where, you know, that work of cultural affirmation and in

engagement in translation hasn't happened and people have been forced to become culturally different in order to become Christian, which is a betrayal of that logic of the incarnation.

Yeah.

So, you know, I'm thinking about that ⁓ famous line from the church historian at Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan. He said, Tradition is the living faith of the dead, and traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. So where do you see traditionalism in today's church, Alicia, and what are some of the risks of it?

Yeah, that's a great question, Dwight. And I wanna first start with the definition. I always like starting with definitions of words because I think it's really important for us to talk about what specifically we mean by it, right? Because Tradition is the belief in and adherence to long-established customs, beliefs, and practices. Traditionalism is fixing the cultural expression, right, of those things in ways that really render them antique.

And inaccessible to other cultures, culture changes, other generations. And it really looks like hanging on to and clinging to cultural forms and customs that were for a particular time and place and language and people, and believing them to be just as meaningful and as accessible today as they once were. And that

is such that creates such a risk. And I think ⁓ one of the first times I really came across that distinction ⁓ was when reading Christianity rediscovered Christianity discovered rediscovered rediscovered by Vincent Donovan and he's a Catholic priest and he was in East Africa and he he believed himself to be bringing the gospel to the Messai ⁓

People in East Africa. And what he realized along the way was in fact he was bringing Western Christianity to the Messiah. He was not bringing the gospel. And the whole book is about his discovery of doing that very thing, right? Of traditionalism, of bringing the rites and the customs and the language and the practice that he personally found very meaningful to a very different cultural context. And thinking that that was bringing the gospel.

⁓ the saving grace, right, of of Jesus and the message, the good news of Jesus Christ. ⁓ when in fact it wasn't. And his journey of of discovering really that difference between bringing a gospel message that is incredibly accessible to people, no matter the time, the place, the culture, the language, ⁓ and bringing traditions that ⁓ are meant for a different culture, a time and place, a people and a language.

And I just I remember reading that for the first time decades ago. ⁓ and it was such a a clear picture, right? I really felt like one of the ways that we we do this well in the church, I think, is when it comes to youth ministry or children's ministry. We recognize that ⁓ children and youth and families, not not all congregations, but a lot of congregations recognize that.

Hey, let's let's do something different so that the gospel message of Jesus is accessible to children, youth, and family. We don't often do a good job of this though when we're thinking about our neighbors outside of the church. And you know, a a common example of this I really think of is music. And I was this last weekend at church during our worship service, we were singing a hymn.

And I recognized in the tune of the hymn that in fact this at one point in history had been a bar tune. And I really wished we would sing it like it was meant to be sung as a bar tune, because in fact it would have been sung with a lot of gusto, a lot of enthusiasm. ⁓ and right, a lot of our of our writers of hymns took bartoons because they were accessible to a very specific people and time and place.

And we've institutionalized them. And with it, we've actually removed a lot of what at one point in history was very meaningful for the church and made you know, singing worship songs very accessible to people. Today it's quite different. Most people don't listen to what we would now call hymns on the radio, you know, in any given day. It's not on their regular stations. Some people do, ⁓ but not the majority.

so I think that is a is an example of ⁓ of a common way where we see traditionalism show up in the church. And as you mentioned, a risk of it really is that we present the gospel in a way that what we're actually presenting are customs and cultural norms rather than the gospel itself, and in ways that is are very inaccessible to people and ⁓

When taken to an extreme, it leads to terrible times in the history of the church, ⁓ where we see forced, you know, ⁓ what is the word I'm looking for? Forced conversions, where we see forced conversions, where we see manip people being manipulated under the name of the gospel. ⁓ and that's that's just not how God has ever shown up ⁓ in the world. And specifically when we

Look at Jesus' life, you know, Jesus was born into a very specific time and place and people and language and lived in that way. You know, there's as it says in Isaiah, there's nothing remarkable about him. And the stories that Jesus tells in the gospel are all incredibly accessible to that time and place and people because they were agrarian, because, you know, they used coins as money. ⁓ it was

very accessible to people and that to me is still Jesus' invitation to the body of Christ today is to really be able to share the good news of Jesus Christ in a way that is incredibly accessible to a very specific people, time and place. Are there other places where you've seen traditionalism in the church, Dwight?

Yeah, so you know, I'm Anglican and ⁓ the Anglican tradition coming out of the English Reformation, of course it's roots, you know, very deep in the history of England. But in the English Reformation, one of the things that ⁓ the One of the great artifacts of this process of translation and contextualization, of course, is the Book of Common Prayer, mm-hmm, which is beautiful. ⁓ the language, the original language, Thomas Cramner.

And ⁓ and what's really remarkable to me is that there are churches that use basically Cramner's language. So, you know, a a version of that from sixteen sixty two, still, you know, basically in ⁓ their church's worship, so that people would come in like twenty first century America and use what's essentially like Shakespearean language is one way to think about that. Not the language of the people.

And I always say that if Cramner were actually alive today and experiencing this, he would be quite puzzled, ⁓ amazed, and probably quite frustrated because the very kind of beautiful act he was doing of finding ordinary language, of of the common life of of England at the time that he was doing this in the sixteenth century has somehow gotten frozen and fossilized. And, you know, I got a catalog from a publisher, you know, sometime last year, ⁓ and th it was

How do we navigate that, you know, and I think I'm glad you brought up the ⁓ the example of Donovan and Christianity Rediscovered because one of the things that's so powerful about that book, and any of our listeners or viewers who haven't read that book, I encourage you to go back to it. But he was humbled in a way that I think the church often isn't in this process. He trusted the Holy Spirit was working among the people with whom he was in ministry and mission and very quickly realized.

He needed to get out of the way. I mean, he was bringing God's promises to them in in engaging scripture with them, but he learned very quickly they had to to own the work of translation themselves and find cultural expressions that made sense in their context and that he needed to not control it, basically. And so that's I think one of the temptations that we see in the church through the the years is the temptation to sort of control and fix things.

in a particular moment, it might have been a glorious moment, right? Yes. I mean, you know, I think, you know, the English language probably was at its peak in the in the time of the sixteenth century, early seventeenth century. But ⁓ but you never want to make people have to migrate out of their native culture in order to to access the church, to understand the gospel. And the whole history of colonial mission, the one of the core errors of that was

that the colonial missionaries were making people European culturally more than they were simply, you know, translating the gospel and ⁓ doing the work of cross-cultural, you know, interpretation and allowing the gospel then to come alive under the ownership of the Holy Spirit and the people who are receiving the word and translating it into their own local contexts.

Yeah, thanks for that, Dwight. Where do you see congregations genuinely receiving the ancient practices, not performing them or museumifying them, but really being formed by them?

So I think this is a really interesting time, ⁓ of openness actually to a lot of ancient practices. So I think the phenomenon of practicing the way, John Mark Coomer that has just exploded in popularity w worldwide for I think by a lot of people who are looking to anchor themselves in ancient ways. And ⁓ what they've done in practicing the way is make those traditions very accessible and very contemporary for people. Mm-hmm. So

There's a lot of interest among evangelicals in liturgy and ancient practices. and I think in a lot more and more mainline churches also, there's a sense of needing to reroot that a kind of secularized focus on social justice isn't sustainable on its own without deeper spiritual roots. And I remember when my wife and I, you know, ⁓ first went to serve a congregation here in St. Paul a number of years ago, one of their

the leadership had this call, they said, we want to go deeper, because they were in many ways, you know, a very social justice focused congregation that also was looking for deeper spiritual roots for some of their practices. So I think there are a lot of churches that, if we're honest, you know, you used that word antique earlier, the aesthetic forms of how church is done can be pretty antique, honestly, ⁓ anachronistic. And

I want to put that into conversation with this kind of process of ongoing faithful cultural translation. And some of this isn't super hard. ⁓ even the simple things like a website or what graphics do you use, you know, ⁓ typography, music, ⁓ how is your worship space decorated? And it isn't to say the alternatives of are either a very kind of antique, out-of-date, old-fashioned, or stripped.

all that out and it's just this sort of very contemporary because I think the other problem people have sometimes is they will abandon some of the richness of, you know, those those, you know, antique fur vernaculars, if you will, or ways of speaking. So so it's not that we never want to sing hymns again, but they're great hymns. We love them. But there are ways to kind of make them new and also to use new music as well. So

So it's it's a complicated process, I think, that we engage in in the church, but It feels like this is a moment because society feels more chaotic to a lot of people and can test it in certain ways, that People are looking for roots, which I think is a really great thing. I think it's a movement of the Holy Spirit right now ⁓ because we do need deeper roots. The roots that we have been drawing from in modernity are have proven themselves to be quite shallow. You know, the

the myths that that technological progress and you know will just lead to peace and harmony and the end of war or whatever. ⁓ or, you know, whatever the the different stories that are that are out there that are actually becoming more pr revealing themselves to be more and more bankrupt. So let's talk about this from a leadership perspective then. what fears keep people from doing this process of making the ancient new?

And what does it look like from a leadership perspective to move a community through those fears?

Yeah. I love that question. And I actually want to go back to something that you brought up about Vincent Donovan and his humble trust of the Holy Spirit. Because I believe one of the fears we have that keeps us from engaging this is about making a wrong choice, messing up.

⁓ doing it the wrong way, right? So there's this idealization of perfectionism, yes, even in the church. ⁓ but about like there is a there's a right way to do this, we want to do the right way, we want to please God. I think it does come out of a sense of, you know, really wanting to to honor and worship God in in the right way. And

Inherently then there there is a mistrust then of the Holy Spirit. And I think that you know, going back to the the parable of the talents, right? Three people get different amounts of talents. And when the the owner comes back and is like, Okay, how'd it go? What'd you do? First one's like, I multiplied it by ten. The next one's like, Well, I put it in a bank and I doubled it. And the last one's like, Well, I hit it because I was afraid.

And I think that that's the posture a lot of us unintentionally, right? Like we're not gonna consciously say, Well, I'm actually afraid of what God might do if I embrace this. but I think subconsciously our behaviors actually reveal that in fact we are. We are afraid. We're afraid of messing up, we're afraid of what might happen, we're afraid of doing it the wrong way. And so one of the scripture passages that we

love to to use when thinking about ⁓ what it can look like to follow the holy spirit is acts 16, right? And Paul's ⁓ journey with his friends ⁓ as they're trying to share the good news of the gospel and all the times that they run into the Holy Spirit closing the doors and yet they continue to travel.

But when we read that passage, and if you haven't recently, I encourage you to do so because when we read that passage, nobody thinks of Paul and his companions as terrible leaders, making terrible choices. Like nobody reads it that way. And yet, that is how we approach following the Holy Spirit ⁓ in our daily lives, but really in particular in the life of our churches. really, we're

We're not really open to allowing the Holy Spirit to close doors. We don't really want to try anything new. We don't necessarily want to ⁓ try and go a new way. We wanna, we, we know something that has worked historically. And so we lean more into things that are comfortable and familiar than necessarily opening ourselves up to something new and different. And I think that.

Again, I I wanna use the example of children and youth in ministry because we actually do that and we're okay doing that in many congregations in children and youth in ministry. We're very okay with experimenting with new and different ways to engage families around the gospel. But when it comes to our neighborhoods and our communities, we're much less comfortable engaging in new and different ways and being open to what the Holy Spirit might do, especially around spiritual practices.

Than we are with families that are already in our congregations, maybe. ⁓ and this level of comfort with experimenting ⁓ with different ways of engaging Christian practices ⁓ with youth has long been embraced by the church. and yet we're really uncomfortable allowing for that kind of experimentation with our neighbors in our communities. And

I think that ⁓ when we move through these fears, right, I think that ⁓ I think another thing that is true right now is that people are really exhausted and people are tired of being tired. And church is a place where there is a lot of familiarity and comfort. And that is okay. I'm not opposed to comfort. I personally love comfort.

And yet Jesus is our comforter. And I think it we can get this wrong when we rely more on comfort from the the forms and the cultures and the rituals that that we have as a way of worship than we do finding our comfort in Jesus. Because and why I think this is an issue is because ⁓

Throughout scripture, God is on the move and God is a sending God. And Jesus sends out the disciples. And in fact, Jesus says to his disciples, because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples, right? And that is actually the commission for every follower, disciple of Jesus. And yet that is not what we see in the church today. And I think that ⁓ an element of that is because.

we are uncomfortable. We're we're not willing to be uncomfortable ⁓ sharing the gospel with our neighbors in ways that are accessible to them. likely also in part because, especially if we grew up in the church, that might not be how the gospel was shared with us. We for some people, they are born into more traditionalism and ways of worshiping and being church. and

I think there's this invitation today ⁓ for really being able to listen and meet our neighbors as they are where they are with the good news of the gospel and an invitation of trusting the Holy Spirit, which ⁓ we see throughout scripture. And I think our congregations are being re-invited to trust the Holy Spirit with our ancient traditions and finding new ways.

Of embodying them today as the body of Christ. What about you, Dwight? What have you seen?

Well so let's let's like peel back some of the layers of this because ⁓ on the one hand, you know, the the fact that particular cultural forms are comforting because they ⁓ they act on us over time, right? So you think about the fact that many congregations, even those who have quite contemporary worship, will use the kind of King James version of the Lord's Prayer, which

on one hand is really weird. If you were like a new person coming in, never been in a church before and you're like, why did they suddenly start speaking, you know, archaic language, right? It's simply because it's in people's hearts. It's it's heart language, if you will, over time. So there's there's that element to it, which I think I wanna always you know, we always want to kind of recognize and respect. ⁓ but there's also the risk of ambiguity of if we're going to do that work of translation and change ⁓

into the cultural different cultural forms. What if we get it wrong? What if we disappoint people? And I think there's pressure in a lot of churches, you know, the primary pressure is take care of the established congregation that's there, ⁓ which is, you know, understandable, right? They should be cared for. and the care of the neighbor who's not there becomes maybe secondary or tertiary at best, right?

So ⁓ so I think that process becomes, you know, one that can be difficult for people to navigate when they're feeling this strong sense of loyalty to the people who are loyal to a particular cultural form. And I'm I'm thinking about, you know, some of the sociologists who have studied American congregations, you know, Mark Chavez's book, American Congregations, that came out many years ago. He basically said from a sociological perspective, what American congregations do is

pass on particular cultural tradition. And and so there is something around that that people get f engaged in and normed around a particular cultural expression and set of rituals. Sometimes that's ethnic, sometimes it's you know, any variety of things. And the gospel is embedded in that particular cultural form ⁓ because it's always embedded in culture. There's no culture free gospel.

And then to ask them to renegotiate that can feel like it's the loss of the very thing that brings them there. If you say, like, we're gonna sing different music or we're going to, you know, change what the building looks like or we're gonna use some different language or whatever, it can feel for people who have been there for many years that that's just too much loss when there's so much loss in the society right now. So I think that's the backdrop as well.

Yes. And I think it's the reason why Jesus needs to be at the center.

Without a doubt. I don't think there's any way we can move forward without Jesus at the center. But but let's take we've talked been talking about the Holy Spirit, ⁓ but let's actually make that our view of Jesus Trinitarian as well, because the the Holy Spirit is the one who needs to guide that process of ongoing adaptation. And ⁓ and so if if the promises of Christ are not embodied in accessible ways to the people who are there.

then the church does become a museum, it becomes a monument. And you know, you we can travel around the world and visit a lot of places where that's primarily what it is, museums and monuments. ⁓ rather than a living community. Yes, they can be quite beautiful. They can be quite beautiful. And we can appreciate them as cultural treasures. Yeah. But that's different from vital Christian community that is transformational and and and facilitates and kind of cultivates these encounters with the living God in today's world.

Yeah. ⁓ Dwight, what are you most hoping this season opens up for the people listening and for yourself?

Well, I'm excited about this season because, you know, this is a conversation I don't think we have often enough in the church. So often we'll have conversations about, you know, other things in the church, but but really wrestling with what does faithful contextualization look like in our time and place in all the myriad different contexts, because it's not one answer, right? And we live in a culture that's in modernity that's still about standardization and find the solution and apply it everywhere and all those things.

And so for us to kind of ⁓ lean into the the dance, if you will, of doing this work, I think is important because it is dynamic, it's full of risks. You know, I I've thought of this as, you know, if if you think of the way of Jesus, as the early church referred to Jesus, ⁓ the people of the way, right? That's incarnation. Then you've got ditches on each each each side, and one of them is a

under contextualization where the gospel isn't actually incarnate in the local culture and people have to migrate out of their native culture to join the church or to hear the gospel. They have to learn another language, if you will. So that is one ditch. And the other ditch of course is over contextualization where we lose the distinctiveness of the gospel and Jesus is not actually clearly embodied. And then we end up simply with s with syncretism or accommodation.

And we see a lot of that going on as well. And so it's possible to to fall into both ditches at the same time. And I think what we want to focus on is what does that, you know, that path look like, that path of following Jesus look like in our time when many of the inherited organizational expressions of church and cultural forms of church aren't necessarily accessible to people who don't have who aren't formed in those churchy cultures, if you will.

And we're also looking for deep, faithful expressions of the tradition. So, you know, for a while there was the swing toward let's just get rid of everything in church that looks churchy. And ⁓ I don't think that's the solution either. So so I find often the conversation around this is paralyzed in an either or that's really unhelpful. It's either we just dig, you know, double down on very traditional things and

seal ourselves off from the neighbor who for whom this is inaccessible, or we just kind of throw out the tradition and we just embrace whatever's emerging in the culture. And that is also no solution, as we know, right? That vacuum gets filled with all kinds of other stories and narratives and commitments and values and beliefs, ⁓ and then the church's witness gets distorted. So so I think this what we're really talking about is the is the conversation

Between gospel and culture. And ⁓ and that's a conversation that the church often doesn't have as directly as it should. You know, like the gospel is always culturally embodied, but it also exists in tension with culture, with every culture. And so for us to faithfully be the body of Christ, we've got to work that territory and and explore that together. And it's going to involve some experimentation, probably. But the other piece I would add is.

If you look at Christian history, the challenge is when Christians do this in isolation from Christians in other cultures, that's where you get big mistakes. You get things like colonial mission. ⁓ you get some of the great kind of ⁓ moments when the church really lost its way because it wasn't talking to people who were also faithful Christians, but had a different cultural perspective. So the promise of a kind of

intercultural multicultural conversation and discernment around this amidst a world church that is also increasingly present even in every context becomes actually one of the most interesting moments that we're in right now. We have Christians from many cultures in many places living in proximity and we often miss the opportunities to actually do this work together. And I know we see this in our our

classrooms here at Luther Seminary with students from around the world. It's great fun to have conversations about these things when students are bringing very different cultural perspectives but have a shared commitment to scripture and to the gospel.

So this season we'll be unpacking these ⁓ things as we go along. And ⁓ to our listeners and viewers, we're glad to have you along the ride.

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

Pivot Podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith Lead. FaithLead 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.