Are your church programs making the impact you're hoping for? If you answered yes, no, or not sure, this is the place to start. In this episode of Pivot podcast, hosts Alicia Granholm and Dwight Zscheile dig into why focusing on membership doesn't necessarily mean that people are becoming disciples of Jesus.

Guests Tania Haber and Jason Van Hunnik, two pastors who have discovered a way forward for their church, describe a mindset shift that orients church activities in a different direction. Net result? Individuals contribute to fostering faith that impacts everyday lives without the overwhelm of programs.

Episode show notes: https://faithlead.org/show/pivot-podcast/

Join us on social:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/faithleadfromluther/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lutherfaithlead

Dwight Zscheile: Do you ever feel like church programming isn't seeming to make much of an impact on changing lives in your context? Do you find it hard to sustain all the programs your church is offering? Are you wondering how to help foster a faith that matters in everyday life to people in your church community? In today's Pivot episode, we're talking to two pastors who, in wrestling with these questions over the years, have discovered a new way forward for their church. The shift they have led has generated a lot of transformation, energy and hope in their community. Hello everyone. I'm Dwight Zscheile.

Alicia Granholm: And I'm Alicia Granholm. Welcome to the Pivot podcast. This is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. We are really excited to have Tanya Haber and Jason Van Hunnik with us today. Jason is the senior pastor and Tanya is a pastor at Westwood Lutheran Church in Saint Louis Park. Tanya and Jason, welcome to the Pivot podcast.

Tania Haber: Thank you.

Jason Van Hunnik: Thank you very much.

Alicia Granholm: So today, let's talk about how you discovered a more impactful way of fostering faith in everyday life in your congregation and advice that you would give to other church leaders feeling called to do the same right now. Jason and Tanya, your congregation has been on a journey of rediscovering how to help people experience the difference Jesus can make in their everyday lives. Can you share about the journey that your congregation has been on over the last few years? How did this start?

Jason Van Hunnik: I can jump in to begin again. Thank you for having the two of us. It's a much longer story. Tanya and I have actually been together for, uh. Tanya has been at Westwood for 20 years and I have been here 19 and Tanya began as the senior pastor and now has stepped back in the last year, just in this last year into her new role. And I've stepped in, into this role. but I'll, I'll jump to about ten years ago, uh, we made the assessment that for a variety of different reasons, that, um, there was a significant gap between faith, and real life and said, we're going to need to engage this very differently. We believe that for several reasons. One of them was, the language of our congregation. There was a study that many of you are aware of from Christian Smith about the teenage spirituality back in the early 2000s that was done and talked about this moralistic therapeutic deism mush theology that sort of emerged. That was helpful for us when we, uh, gave language to what we had been seeing for a while, when we looked at things like our ninth grade faith statements and other conversation pieces, and that was very much alive and well. And one of the things, in addition to the moralistic therapeutic deism was the sense that, uh, teenagers are not these radically different folks from their parents or other adults. They are actually a reflection of those. And so, based on what we were, uh, seeing there and in a number of other places, if that was true, it was not just true for teenagers, it was in a number of other places. And so we said, the way forward has to be a deep step back and, getting clear about our theology. And so we began a journey focusing on the two great pillars of the Lutheran reformation of grace and vocation, not necessarily as a framework to answer everyone's questions, but a framework from which to begin asking questions that the congregation can step into a.

Tania Haber: A couple of examples that maybe other pastors could relate to, that we experienced in our early years here, which was, you know, as Jason said, 20 years ago now, but we started burying our older people and our, their kids, you know, people who are my age, Jason's age would come back for these funerals. Kids who were raised here, who were many of them were not churched anymore. And you know, Westwood has always had a good reputation. It's been a vibrant congregation for many, many decades. But we started realizing what what there was something that was missing. This connection wasn't happening, that people were not continuing these lives of faith. And even in our own confirmation classes. I remember asking one night to a group of eighth graders and their parents, do you guys actually think God is still in the world? I think we're talking about creation. Is God here? Is God a part of your life? Raise your hand if you think that's true. Very few hands went up, and that was a moment when I thought, wow, we are going to continue a tradition that maybe needs to be reexamined here. So.

Jason Van Hunnik: I would add, it was really confirmed for me that we were on the right track in year one of this I had to a group of people together, um, business types, entrepreneurial types, and about 4 or 5 of them testing out some things with our approach and asked them all about connecting their work and their faith. And I'll never all of them had similar things to say, but I'll never forget, one of them had to say, this gentleman, a lifelong Lutheran regular attender since an early as a child, this is not just the Christmas and Easter thing. He his response to me was, it's entirely too noble of an idea that my faith and my work have anything to do with each other. At that point, it was like, if a core person, that's their language, that it couldn't have any clearer of an assessment, that not only were we not counteracting something, we might be contributing to the problem.

Jason Van Hunnik: Yeah, I think we a lot of people use the word compartmentalize, which is Jason's example. They're people for a long time have been putting, you know, faith in this box over here, churches over here, my family's here, my work's here. And how do we start? A whole new world view that integrates those. Right?

Dwight Zscheile: So I love that you began theologically. And, you know, often, I think church leaders are tempted to begin with organizational fixes or, you know, thinking at that level without actually grappling with some of the deeper questions of what does it mean to be the church in today's culture? And how does gospel relate to culture, not just how do we kind of tweak how we do church, right? So I'm curious, say more about what that journey then look like because I'm hearing from you. You really started with some listening. You were hearing things. And out of that listening, you identified we've got a theological problem. How did you then begin to engage it?

Tania Haber: Yeah. In a number of different ways, I would say, I think the first thing that needs to be stated is that we didn't have a ten year plan. What we had was a statement that said we got a problem, and anything we do has to be about addressing this gap. So that's the first statement I would make. And then we just stepped into it as best we could and tried to evaluate. One of the core things we were evaluating was really around language. That's really what we've been watching for. Will people begin to do that? And we really engage the question of roles. First one of the challenges sometimes I think with the understanding of this idea that we are claimed and called, and that's really the language we began, it was sort of always there. And yet we just hammered away on this core language of and the waters of baptism. You have been claimed as a child of God by God's grace alone. And each of you in all the realms of your life have been called to be God's hands and feet in the world. And sometimes I think when the conversation gets going around this idea of calling, there are certain assumptions that need to be unpacked, that drive the train. One of the the things that I hear often is people say, well, there's one primary place that I'm called to, and my task to be faithful is to figure out the particular way my gifts lead me to that spot. And so people start doing sorts of assessments of, uh, talents and gifts and interests. Nothing wrong with that. We said. Instead, we have an assumption that you are called wherever you are right now. And so if that we got to establish that language and then get after inviting people into that question. So again, there are a whole number of things we set out to engage ourselves this theologically. We also said if, authenticity is going to be critical for us as a congregation to get at this, we had what I would describe as an honor and shame culture. And for us to get to the place where we actually talked about our actual journeys, not just our joys, but also our places of pain and sorrow and, doubt and ambiguity, we have to establish that sort of gracious culture. And so there's been a whole I talk about a whole realm that had to get significantly more contextual. In the past, it's been too much, I think the church does vague language that all of us nod our head to, but none of us mean necessarily the same thing. And it really doesn't begin to bridge that gap. So we had to get a whole lot more specific. We had to address leadership challenges. One of the challenges, I think leaders we have, my experience, maybe I'm speaking just for myself. We've been kind of subtly invited to be the great answer givers to all the questions of life, which leads us to sort of sermons that are we give vague statements that everyone again agrees to, as opposed to inviting real questions that each people have the capacity to answer by themselves or with others. So I don't know if that gets at exactly what there is at least four realms in which we said, we've got to address this, and I can talk specifically about any of them, but that's where that's at.

Tania Haber: Yeah, I'll just chime in that I think Jason raised the preaching moment. We've realized what an important. That's kind of our biggest bang for the buck as pastors, when you know you have your biggest audience to shape language and worldview with. And so we've taken that preaching moment very seriously, both creating the culture ourselves in being extremely vulnerable from the pulpit in ways that have, as we say, moved the needle. How can we do things that actually move the needle a little bit? And I think we've tried to model that in our own preaching in some, some pretty powerful ways where I think, you know, people who I'm not I'm not sure I started out my career preaching like that. You know, I came in with a three point model or whatever we were taught in seminary, and I preach very differently over the the decades now.

Jason Van Hunnik: So one of the examples, there are a number of them, we began introducing and we had done a little bit before hand, interview sermons, where we would invite people. We do it in a number of different ways, but invite people into their roles and say, how do you what are the joys? What are the challenges? How do how is this a way that your neighbor thrives? That's a one of the primary language pieces that we do. And then how does your how do your faith confessions actually define your role, whether it be in your family life, in your work life as a citizen, as a friend. And I think we've done all of those numerous times. And it's interesting in that most of our people, first, they're surprised, I think, that we care enough to ask them about joys and challenges, uh, which gets to a larger assumption we have that the issues of meaning are the entry point for most of our folks. Many of our folks have lots of different layers that they can put up, but most people have this deep and profound question of, does my life really matter at all? And so for us to actually invite them into speaking is already an acknowledgement of that. They do pretty well with those two pieces. The third piece of how do others thrive, depending on which sector of the economy, for instance, in the jobs they some do really well, others struggle a little bit more. And interestingly, as we saw that the place that we have to do the most nurturing or it is most challenging for them to speak about, is how does your to give language to how their faith influences that which again, was just further proof of our sort of talent. So that would be one we've done other things called affinity groups, where instead of just having a small group thing, which is what we do at other times we've put people in, we've had family affinity groups where we put people in different, this is the parent role. This is the children of parents who are aging, and we've done all those sorts of things and had them kind of a process by which they have conversations with each other. We have sectors of the economy we've put people in, to say, here's the health care world, here's the education world, here's the corporate world. And we've invited them to do those pieces. And what we've seen there, interestingly, is that the transformation begins to occur with some of those techniques. A lot more we could say about that. But I remember, for instance, I knew we were getting someplace and with several examples. One was a person in the corporate world came to me and said, I know that this coming week I need to let someone go on my team because I'm a corporate lead of a team. How does one do that in a faithful way that is still honest. And one interestingly that they would ask me, I'm a pastor. I've never been in the corporate world. I don't know. But I know that group you're with probably has the capacity to engage each other, which gets into this leadership question of, everyone in that group has leadership capacity around that. How do they navigate that with each other as opposed to us as pastors? Our role is to be framing the questions from this particular perspective that, each of us is claimed and called to be God's hands and feet in the world, seeking the thriving of our neighbor.

Tania Haber: I'll say, you know, on these interview sermons, I think one of the more powerful series that we did was a couple of years ago during Lent, where we had we interviewed somebody who was running a business who had gone bankrupt. We have talked with a woman whose son died of AIDS, which raises all kinds of issues. We've talked to, you know, someone suffering depression, another young family who's just overwhelmed with the busyness of life, how, and when people are willing to share their stories, when they're willing to be vulnerable because we'd modeled that, okay, I can get up there and do that. And then we're with them asking the questions of, so where has God been in the mix of that? And I think we both had people will say to us, even thinking about talking about this in an interview sermon, being the person up there has forced me to put language around my pain, around my questions. So how do we get people to actually stop and think about it, and then put language around it so they can go out in the world as articulate people of faith, you know? So I think these interview sermons have actually not only help the congregation, but help the people who have had to do it. Another just little example where we've worked on the language piece. One year we were talking about Christmas cards. Good time of year to talk about it here. You know, everybody sends their nice picture. Here's what my kids did this year. You know, here's who died. Here's who's sick. We said as people of faith is there, you know, it's Christmas. Is there is there a different way of looking at this? And this gets at the worldview question that Jason was talking about. And so we did a session on what might a person of faith say in a Christmas letter? And then we we went through this just in an hour session, and then we invited people during a coffee hour one morning to read their Christmas letter. And it was a powerful, moving experience. An older woman got up and talked about she had been through divorce that year, and this is not something you'd probably write in your Christmas letter unless you stopped. And she beautifully talked about her pain, her kids' pain, the hope, and talked about how God was in the mix and mailed that out to 100 people, you know, so I think as people of faith, as we learn to articulate how we can go out into the world as Jesus' hands and feet, you know, it spreads. And so how do we help find help people find words to do that?

Dwight Zscheile: I wonder if I can just follow up on that briefly. So, I love the way in which you've been welcoming, in a much more participatory way than is often the case in congregations, the voices of the people. Right? Giving people even very publicly, like in sermons, a chance to share their stories. How do you also then help them connect those stories with the biblical and theological stories, the stories of the faith and deepen their ability to make Christian spiritual meaning out of those experiences? Again, if what you started with was a theological challenge that people struggled to do that. So how do those pieces come together?

Tania Haber: I can just talk about the interview sermon itself, just the process, maybe that that makes sometimes when you hear people getting up, you would say, hey, we'd just like you to talk about this and show up on Sunday morning and we'll hit it. That's not how we do that. Um, we'll sit down and meet with them, have the conversation. When I do that, my process is to talk with them. We'll probably talk for an hour. I come back to them and say, I'm going to begin by preaching a certain period of time based on the text that we have for the day, then I'm going to invite you in as essentially the sermon illustration. I'm going to ask you these questions, and I'd like you to repeat these things that you've already said to me, with that, focusing on those pieces. And then I will close this off. And at the beginning and at the end, what I will always say, because the point of the interview sermon isn't just to have that person tell their story, even though that's in there. It's also, we'll aways say, "if you were here, how would you be saying these sorts of things?" So we're inviting them to tell their story, but within a framework of a sermon where it is still my task as a pastor to continue to frame our Christian confessions, what would make the connection to the text? Sometimes we're able to do that with the people, but if they're not, if we will be doing that at the beginning and or the end to so that it is still in a certain sense, a sermon. proclamation is going on in those moments. Does that help?

Dwight Zscheile: It does. And I'm curious, for instance, for the affinity groups, I'm sure there's probably a lot of, of rich wisdom in those groups. But again, how do you help people from simply defaulting to what the culture provides, which is some version of moralistic therapeutic deism, you know, as they're trying to make meaning out of that? Do you, how does Scripture function in there, or spiritual practices that explicitly help them connect to to Christian faith?

Jason Van Hunnik: In the affinity group, there's always a scripture that we begin with, we'll have some other pieces in there and some questions with that. And so we're seeking to make connections with those pieces. We've got prayer at the end of that. We have a particular prayer that is significant for us here, which is the prayer of good courage, which we sort of stumbled upon and have been surprised at how definitive that has been for people. I don't know if people are familiar with the prayer of good courage and prayer.

Tania Haber: It's sometimes called.

Tania Haber: Yeah. So God, you have called your servants to adventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us through Jesus Christ our Lord. In addition, anytime we do those affinity groups, rarely are those just off on their own. Oftentimes everything is integrated so that, for instance, when we did the sectors of the economy group, we were preaching, every week on the topic as well. So they're hearing sermons and that is helping to frame that. We're seeking to frame it within the affinity group itself with Scripture, prayer and other pieces in addition to their own conversation. So part of this, I would never, one of our beliefs here is that to to break that that gap, this is an all in integrated approach. We don't believe in the let's talk about this for six weeks and suddenly some magic is going to happen, or, we're going to have a small group over here, and then it's going to like through osmosis spread. There's a much longer conversation about how it is every piece. So we to talk about the affinity group approach and what goes in there is one part of a larger reality that they're swimming in. That's kind of the goal.

Tania Haber: Yeah. I mean the the affinity groups. Danicca Olsen, our youth and family person, has, for example, taken kids, youth, families, parents, grandparents and worked this whole vocation thing in, in that whole area. So just affirming what Jason said, every, every person, every program, staff leading the ministry, this can't just be part of a staff that says, well, this will be your thing. This is all of us getting on the same page. And no matter what we do, no matter you know how we're working with people in the congregation using the same language and understanding the grace and vocation thing that we're doing pretty deeply. I'll just throw in, in my new job that Jason mentioned, that we kind of switched roles a year ago, and my new job, we were laughing about it yesterday, that it took me hitting retirement age and yet saying, wait a minute, I don't think I want to or maybe even should retire, to realize that we hadn't really paid attention to what is sometimes called the third chapter of life. And so that's just one more area now, that's my new job, to look at and say, you know, there's this wave of baby boomers, for lack of a better term, coming through our country who are asking questions of who am I and what should I be doing and what's next. And I think there's a worldview of, well, I'm retired. You know, I should get a place in Arizona, and there's nothing wrong with that. That that sounds great, too, but I in addition to that, there are questions as people of faith that I think we as the church are equipped to not answer, but to bring people together and ask the questions, frame the questions for them. You know, we have we do know how to ask the question: who am I? You're God's claimed and called child. You know, what should I be doing in the world? Well, you know, for people who have their health and some resources and a desire to impact their families and the world. We've got a calling and if we as the church aren't helping them talk about that with each other and giving them encouragement, nurturing that, we're missing a huge area of ministry that I feel like I've just kind of, because I'm one of them, come into that and said, wow, we got to be doing this. So it's a new area that we're excited about pursuing in this whole vocation journey.

Jason Van Hunnik: And we've preached on this quite regularly to say, our understanding of worldview is that everyone has a narrative that defines who they are and that defines things like, what do we mean by meaning, purpose, success or failure? There's always a narrative that defines that for us. And the gospel has very particular claims on the definitions of all of those. And the worldview around us may or may not connect, oftentimes not so much. So we will literally give examples of that whenever we can. One example, we gave for some of our families was around the college cheating scandal that you may remember, where wealthy people were finding ways to skirt the system to get their kids into, I forget what schools, USC or Harvard or Stanford or wherever it was. And so we preached on that and said, there's we heard a lot of people name one problem with that, and I would name it as well. It's like how people can utilize their finances to do all these things to skirt the system. But I very rarely heard the second, and the second one was, why would it be worth it for people to risk their finances and their reputation and to do something like that? And very rarely that gets asked because the worldview is, well, that's the where success is found. If you can get your kid into a particular type of school, that will get them into a particular type of job, which a particular type of income which brings about, then you can live in a certain neighborhood and that brings around a particular sense of happiness. And we said, I'm not sure the life, death and resurrection of Jesus has the definition of meaning success, purpose that is related in any way, shape or form with that story, it's a very different thing, and you can see people begin to make those connections with that. We've used, so, you know, for instance, you could connect that to the message of the cross is foolishness. And that those are very different definitions. That's one example. We've had others that we've done as well. I hope that helps a little bit in how we think about that.

Jason Van Hunnik: And I say early on we would just say, you know, it's putting on a different set of glasses. It's a it's a whole different way of looking at the world than we hear the whole rest of the week when we're out there. And so how do we really help people see differently, see their life differently? I remember one of our elementary teachers, said that this, this whole notion of vocation, she's another person, you know, around all her life in church. And all of a sudden she saw her classroom as one of the places that she could see, see differently because of some vocation work that she'd done here and is a different kind of teacher and interacts differently with her kids because of that, had not made that connection before.

Alicia Granholm: I love this hearing the stories of people starting to, shift their worldview and really see, you know, their surroundings and, what God had already called them to from a different perspective. So I'm curious, so, like you, you know, many churches were using programs, continue to use programs as a way to foster faith in everyday life in their congregations. So why do you think that wasn't really working for your church and congregation?

Jason Van Hunnik: Yeah, I mean, I can make guesses. I mean, the first statement is, is based on language. Why? is the second question. The first reality is it wasn't. The language demonstrated that. And I'm certainly influenced, other people, I forget the names and the quotes but have said if you have no language for something, it's not true for you. So that's the first piece. S ome of my assessments are, my guess is, one, the church has been entirely too vague. We use big words that have very little meaning in reality for people's specific lives, their actual, real, everyday journey. And so I think we were way too vague and didn't engage that, I think that had resulted in frankly, one of the steps for us is to, is to build trust with people that we would actually do that. I think that the expectation of the church was extraordinarily low, of what's possible for most of our people. That will not, people most people, I think, don't, you know, when it comes to people abandoning church, some of them are feel that they've been harmed and that's legitimate for some, no question. Others just have very low expectations. It just doesn't matter. And so we needed to begin to do that by actually addressing this sort of piece. I think third, the leadership problems that we have been trained in sort of a hierarchical model where somehow I'm seen as this, spiritually mature person and the rest of you are spiritual children at best. And I'm here to import knowledge into you because I'm closer to God than the rest of you. I think that's incredibly harmful. Instead of saying you have incredible capacity. and so I'm not going to pretend that I have that, but I will preach from a particular worldview and frame questions, making assumptions for one thing that the God has created you and all that exists, and God profoundly loves you. That has been seen most, most profoundly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And you profoundly matter in what God is up to in the world. And that in and of itself, that issue of meaning gets skipped over way too much. My sense is, when we've preached on that and that issue of meaning, you can it's almost intimidating the way you can hear a pin drop. There I can remember several sermons where the level of silence was a little bit like, all right, this better be good. You're in now. Don't play. Don't play games here. Now, this better be good. So, I mean, those are some of the those are some of the whys that I can think of. You have to probably go to studies to do that, but those are what we've seen.

Tania Haber: Yeah. I'll just add, you know, as lead pastors kind of trying to staff a church for this. I think it was not working because staffing wise, you can never hire enough people to run enough programs. You know, you get caught in that hamster wheel and the kind of staff person that was hired, back in that day, I think is different than the staff that we look for today, just from the people, you know, like us, who end up hiring program staff. We're not looking for the staff who have all the answers, who are big event planners. I mean, we have big events, but that's that's not where the change is happening. I mean, that's where these affinity groups, some we don't have necessarily year long ongoing small groups, but we do use a lot of small groups. Every fall we've done a series that has put people in small groups for this kind of pretty deep, impactful conversation.

Jason Van Hunnik: And everything that we do with series, it will always then be what's the next angle to address that we haven't? It's not first of all about what's the liturgical year? Even though we fit that in, we still are a liturgical church in the sense of we're in Advent right now and we'll be in Epiphany, but everything is about framing it towards addressing what's the next angle by which we get into this worldview, using our theological lens of grace and vocation.

Tania Haber: When I think, you know, I'll compare it to a smorgasbord. But there's, you know, you can have a table with a lot of different options and everybody kind of picking what they want, and people will lean towards certain things. And I think we're looking at, a meal that looks at things a little differently than that. You know, it's not a huge list of programs with 20 staff doing this and that.

Dwight Zscheile: So I want to reflect back a couple of things I'm hearing, and one is how deeply you're claiming your own Lutheran confessional tradition in framing all of this work, right? I mean, think about priesthood of all believers and for sure, grace and vocation, I mean, so those of us, those of you who are listening, you know, whatever your theological tradition is, you know, consider what you can, you know, claim out of that tradition in order to to discover this hopeful future. I think that's something that we often don't pay enough attention to. We often think, well, we've got to just look forward. But actually what you're doing is, is really carrying forward from the past some of the core work that Martin Luther was really about in his own time. And so that's, I think, a really, really important thing. You're being, in a sense, more traditional here.

Tania Haber: You say, I remember one year when we ordered, like, 200 catechisms from our church publishing house, and they're just like, what are you doing out there? Um, yeah. But, you know, I was going to add that in the new member classes, the Luther quote, "wherever you are, there you are called," has it's washed over people. I mean, it has struck me how much, when people hear that, how affirmed they feel, I don't have to go out looking for this other thing that God is calling me to do, that I am called right where I am. This is like, this is the good news, right?

Dwight Zscheile: Amen to that. Absolutely. And so, so another thing that just occurs to me is, you know, going all the way back to years ago when the Reveal study, you know, was used across a lot of churches and asking the question of, well, you know, if you're more active in church programs, are you growing spiritually? And they found that actually that was not the case, which sort of blew up a lot of churches' operating model sense. And so you're actually presenting a different kind of focus where you're there's a clear, set of questions you're asking about about meaning and purpose and vocation and providing some language for people to begin to actually articulate that, to make meaning out of it. And that that is, in a sense, the core work of Christian leadership today. And I'm thinking of Scott Cormode from Fuller Seminary, who writes a lot about this, is that Christian leadership is about helping people make spiritual sense of their experience in their lives and, and actually, you know, live into more adequate and more faithful categories, narratives, you know, the lenses of the glasses, if you will, to use your analogy, Tanya, for making, spiritual sense of life. I'm just curious, what has this freed you from? I mean, focusing this way, engaging this way. Like, what's different now for for the church and for you as leaders? Um, compared to the smorgasbord approach or the program approach that was there previously?

Jason Van Hunnik: Yeah. I mean, I do think about all of my work a little differently. I think it's, um, I mean, we're we're a large congregation, but I think it's taken away the, um. The measurements that are not as important. I mean, we really want to hear from people how their lives out there are being changed. And that doesn't mean then that I'm all excited that 100 people came to this event. You know, I think we evaluate things differently. We ask different questions when we do evaluate, which is all the time. Yeah, like I said earlier, it's shaped shaped the way that I preach, the way that I think about myself. Even Jason and I going through this transition, which is a little bit of a weird thing that we've done here in our own roles, is part of this understanding of how we are called. And this this made such perfect sense to us and we throughout this crazy idea one day to our congregation and they understood it. I mean, I think it fits this understanding of, how we use our gifts and different roles and different life stages. And, so I would say it's affected every aspect of how I see myself and how I do ministry here.

Jason Van Hunnik: You know, I think I would say that. I mean, I think there's ways we could talk about, like, we we don't do this this way or this that way. I think I think, Tanya, you're naming it that, probably what it freed us from was being stuck in certain boxes, certain expectations of what a role was. So we have worked very hard to not be a we are much less hierarchical as a structure here, and it's much more gifts based. And that that includes us as pastors, that includes the staff, that includes the congregation. Um, and that has freed up us up to be much more creative and to have a much greater imagination, because when you actually have everyone's gifts on the table instead of one person who has to be this way there you're pretty limited. And so that's been one of those we could probably talk about particular programs that we don't do the same way. B ut I think that's what I would talk about. It's, it's there's a, for me personally, the meaning in this work as risen, I see the connection. It's still hard. It's challenging; there's days that I wonder what in the world is going on. But, I think that has been most significant to work in, a different kind of partnership with staff and with the congregation. And some good things have really come of that.

Alicia Granholm: So there are other church leaders out there who are feeling this call and this tension with our culture right now, and they're really feeling called to lean into helping people in their congregation discover the difference Jesus can make in their everyday lives right now. What advice would you give to them if they find their selves in that place right now?

Tania Haber: Yeah, several. It's a that's that's a long answer. I think, I think the first thing I would do is step back and assess, where is the challenge? Is there, maybe your challenge is different than ours, but first of all, is the do you have do your people have language to connect? Maybe Westwood's an anomaly in that regard but maybe it isn't. So I think to figure that out and then to say, if that's our challenge, at least this is how we've done it, orient everything you do towards that. I think to get at that, you there needs to be a combination of unpacking assumptions and defining terms much more clearly. What is the role and the purpose of the church? What's the role of the pastor? What's the role of other staff? What's the role of laity? There are I think that's one of my tasks as a pastor. I got to keep asking, we did this because why? And oh, these are why. Well, is that really true? Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't. If it isn't, how do we unpack that? I think, I probably should have said this first. I think, Dwight, you named it. Get really clear on your theological toolbox, if you will. Get really clear on that and say, does what is the connection between your theology and the challenge that you see? And again, for us, it is the gap between faith and real life. And we did not say grace and vocation because we wanted to show how Lutheran we were. We believe that was the, a particular way to engage what we didn't understand, but now we would call the worldview problem. A nd that that is our theological tools. That is common language, even if we haven't used it well, to get at a very different definition of purpose, meaning success, failure, etc.

Tania Haber: Yeah, I would just add that the culture I think that the culture that, has been created here over the last decade is very different than the culture before. And I think, we've mentioned kind of what that looks like. And it's it's messier. It's more chaotic. I believe we've created a safe place where people can ask the hard questions. The church isn't the place of answers. It's a place of asking the really important, deep kinds of questions. And so to create a culture where you can do this, kind of work, I think is, is part of a first step. And Jason mentioned, that all of that is, you know, looking at your basic assumptions, looking at your theology creates, creates a culture where people are willing to share their stories and, to put their lives out there to see how God is in that mix. Right.

Jason Van Hunnik: I would, I would. One other thing I would say is sometimes when we've talked to others about what we've done, they've heard this as like, here's the main thing the church does, and you guys are having this kind of other piece, and this is the deal. There's nothing in the church that is not about that. Mostly directly, but indirectly in some capacity. You can't. There's no part of the congregation's life that is not related to living out this idea of calling and addressing the challenges that keep us from doing that.

Tania Haber: You know, and I'll just add because I'm not sure if we've mentioned this, but I think, I came into vocation, when we started this, thinking it's about my vocation and my life out there. And as, I've learned from both Jason and our congregation as we've talked about this, is that we have, we are claimed and called as Westwood. Our church has a calling and a very specific contextual vocation. One of our members on the, the video that is about vocation talked about his family has a vocation. And what does that look like, and what conversations has that brought up with his kids and spouse? And so I think the vocation thing, it's not just about me and my vocation, but we have a corporate vocation, to look at as well. And that's, that's helped Westwood, Westwood's vision become more clearly: What are we called to do in our community, right?

Dwight Zscheile: Well, Tanya and Jason, thank you so much for an incredibly rich conversation here today. Appreciate it.

Tania Haber: Thank you.

Dwight Zscheile: Thank you. And thank you all for tuning in to another episode of the Pivot podcast. 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.