What does it mean to pivot? How can Christian leaders help their congregations and organizations respond to times of chaos and crisis–faithfully and effectively?

Welcome to our first edition of the Pivot Podcast where today's theme is pivoting. With you today is Terry Elton, who I teach at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I'm Scott Cormode. I'm a professor of leadership at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, California.

I'm Louise Johnson. serve as director for leadership development for LEAD in Houston, Texas.

And we're going to start off today's podcast with a little case study. think, Louise, you're bringing the case study today.

Yeah, I had a great conversation. Well, I don't know if you'd call it great, but I had a good conversation with a pastor not so long ago, and she was telling me just about her day on a particular day. And she said that, like many of us, she's working from home, and so is her husband. And between the two of them, they're managing a three-year-old toddler who can no longer go to daycare and who, of course, has no idea why mom can't stop and play with her.

So she set up the scene and then she was talking about how in the thick of this, she got a phone call from a parishioner, a woman whose husband was dying in a local hospital. And she started to realize as she spoke with him about all of the tools that were no longer accessible to her and all the ways in which she couldn't tend to him. And all the while she could hear a toddler in the next room wailing.

and she's looking at the clock and knowing that she has to do video devotional in 10 minutes live on Facebook. So this is, I think, the kind of thing that so many pastors and church leaders are dealing with right now.

And that reminds me of a whole bunch of pastors that I talked to that are saying, what of what I used to do can I just continue to do only virtually? What do I need to let go of? And how do I do all of this in the middle of everything being turned upside down?

It's so easy to think about how, I know how to do this. I've been doing this forever. And then all of the things that I've been doing forever no longer work. And it's exhausting to have to think about each day, each new thing, each thing is something that is a new experience that I've got to reinvent my entire life each day. It's exhausting.

And so, right, all of us are called to pivot right now, to keep one foot centered in a kind of center of gravity, but to turn and to reinterpret and reintroduce the things that we know now for a different time.

So here we are, I've been keeping a log, which I don't know if that's good or bad of how long since we've been staying at home in our part of the country. And in the congregations and the leaders that I've talked to, that first pivot was really around organizationally. How are we gonna close our buildings and continue worship, especially during Lent, which many people have extra things going on during that time. And to do...

some brief things around programming or some of the other kinds of ministries, but so much was on just how do we organizationally shift to the main things that we're doing. And now that we're two weeks past Easter, not only is everybody exhausted, but the relational things that we started to do are starting to wear on us. And there's some interpretive work to going on. So I feel like part of the pivot that we have to do as leaders now,

is to say the organizational stuff needs to go over there, but our people are missing each other. The relational capital that we had for one another is being stretched. And some of our, does this mean is being asked at a deeper level, the further we get into this COVID-19 time.

Terry, you were telling us the other day about how things have been about Easter after your church. Say some more about that.

Yeah, it's it was been really interesting. We were listening for God, hearing God's stories during Lent and people were telling these rich stories. And then we hit Easter and it didn't feel like Easter. I don't know if anybody else felt that. But there was a slow sense of Easter didn't happen on Easter. And my pastor that is at our congregation loves the season of Easter. So she says we're going to become Easter.

And Easter is going to be this unfolding over a period of six weeks. And I think that that feels more like what is actually happening around us because Easter didn't come on a day. And now we're asking new questions. What does it mean to be on the other side of the empty tomb?

Yeah, one of the things I love most about the Easter story and the Gospel of John is that when Mary shows up at the tomb, it says that she shows up in the dark. And so there she is in the dark, in the dirt, among the tombs. And of course, that's such a contrast to how we typically celebrate Easter with balloons and yellow and tulips and bright organs and brass and all kinds of celebrations.

But I love that beginning of the text in John where Easter comes in the darkness. And I love that that's how it begins because I feel like God meets us there, right? Even on Easter day when things aren't all sunny and bright.

You guys had me thinking about how Easter is often a time when we not only celebrate the Christian holiday, but we think about it as such a, it is the moment when in our culture we think winter stops. And now we're done with winter and we can celebrate the coming of spring and all these things emerge, the bunnies emerge and the plants and all of this.

And the one thing none of us can do in this COVID time is emerge from our homes. And it makes me think about how Andy Crouch, who's a scholar whose work I really like, has written this wonderful essay where he talks about how we keep thinking of COVID as a blizzard. You we all go inside and we wait out the blizzard and then at some point we're going to emerge and it's going to be over. But he says, well, it's actually a little bit more like winter. It's going to be a series of blizzards.

And we're going to be here for a while. But it's almost like it's a little ice age and it's going to stay so long that by the time that we're done with this, it's going to end up feeling like things have changed that will never be the same. And we keep longing for that moment when we can finally have the blizzard be done and we can go back to things the way that they once were. Things will never be the same. Some things will be the same, but many things will never be the same again.

And it's just so hard for our congregations because we've never encountered a situation where things won't be the same again. And so we keep expecting for it all to snap back. so Terry's idea and Terry's pastor's idea that it's a process that was going to have to live into Easter. That really makes a lot of sense to me.

The other thing that came up when you were talking, Scott, is as I read scripture through this time, how were the disciples trying to change their mindset? They had been following Jesus and Jesus had been among them and saying, the kingdom is coming, the kingdom is coming near, and now there is an opening. And they're trying to lay down their old ways of thinking.

but they weren't quite sure what the new thing was yet. And I feel like one of the tensions that I hear congregations and church leaders going through right now is, I don't think we're going back to what we were, but I'm not sure what we're going into yet. And so I think that the moment we're in is do we pivot to kind of just do a little bit of jazz on what we used to know?

Or do we pivot and really open ourselves to a new thing that God is doing among us?

But one of the things I keep thinking about as you were talking is this idea of mental models. We all carry in our heads these mental models of how things should be. You picture a car, it's supposed to have a steering wheel, it's supposed to have four wheels, it's supposed to have all these pieces, and that's our mental model of what a car should be. And you show me something else and it might be something, but it ain't a car. Well, in the same way, we've got all this mental model of what church should be. Church should be a place we go to.

Church should be a place where we sit down and we have a worship service. We sing to God, we pray to God, we have Eucharist, we go afterwards and we talk to each other. And the way that we can tell each other are doing well is because we can see each other. And all the mental models are breaking down because none of these things of how church should be are now possible to us. It's like there's a social contract that says the pastor will do these things.

And the church will, the congregants will do these things and we all know how to be church. was like we're in a dance and all of a sudden the music has changed so much that the dance that we've all been doing cannot possibly continue. And so the social contract itself has to be reinvented, but it has to be reinvented on the fly. And so it's just difficult because we have all these different assumptions of how we do community, of how we do worship, of how we do

Eucharist of how we pray for each other how we care for each other and every one of them is being reinvented all at the same time Any one of them would be easy to reinvent but the reinventing all of them at the same time. It's just so overwhelming

reminds me a lot of one of my favorite scripture texts that I turn to again and again as I'm navigating change with different kinds of communities. And that comes out of Isaiah 43. And in the middle of that chapter, God says through Isaiah, God calls to mind the kind of seminal story of Israel, the story of the Exodus, chariot and horse thrown into the sea. They cannot rise, they die. God calls that

story to mind, which of course is the story that defines Israel. It's how they understand who they are. It's how they understand who God is and it's how they look for God to act in and through them. And in Isaiah, God calls that story to mind and then says this, do not remember, do not remember or consider the things of old. For behold, I am about to do a new thing. And of course,

One of the things that I love about that is that the new thing God is about to do is hard to perceive if you're not letting go of what was before. So the invitation in that little section in Isaiah, I think, is to let go of the mental map that the Exodus created for the people because God is going to act in very new and very different ways. And if they're so framed by what was before,

then they have a difficult time moving toward what will be. So I love that directive as hard as it is. And then if you jump back up to the first part of Isaiah, I think what I really love about that is that I think God sets the stage for the kind of hard work that has to happen there when we have to let go of what we have known and who we've been and how we understand ourselves as church people.

And there's this beautiful little David Ha song that says, do not be afraid, I am with you. And the text talks about how we walk through waters, right? And I think for Israelites, literally they were crossing over the Jordan River. But if you've ever been in a river, I'm an old canoer. And so I know what it is to be dumped out of your boat in the middle of

a river and have the water kind of coming up right to below your nose. You're on your tiptoes and you can feel the pull and the drag of the river. And God says, when you walk through waters, when you pass through waters, they will not overwhelm you. And then he goes on to talk about when you walk through fire. And of course, if you've ever been a leader in a community and you're in charge of

leading the changes that need to happen, you know that sometimes that can feel like the lick of flame on every side of you. And so Isaiah talks about how when the fire comes, it shall not consume you. And so I just love that part that God gives two different pictures of the kind of difficulty that change is. And it's not the promise that this isn't gonna be hard.

that there won't be grief and loss and pain in the midst of this, but the promise is that God will not let those things win the day. That at the end of the day, that God's love and God's care for us has the final word.

So that makes me think of Louise in this pivoting time when we've moved away from the logistics and maybe even literally the technical part of pivoting. Maybe the really important move is to deeply move into the relationships and to listen to the people around us and to hear their lament, hear what the water is that's coming up to their ears, hear

what they're missing or what they're longing for. And one of the lovely little practices that might be a takeaway or one of the possibilities that we might think about of pivoting is to say, as you're talking with someone and you are on the edge of that lament or that longing is to say, tell me more. Tell me more about why you're missing that or how that was important to you.

I think one of the other ways that I've begun to think about the time that we're in and how to negotiate so many changes all at once is to understand that the grief and loss that comes before us, oftentimes when people are at their wit's end comes out for us as anger. It wasn't too long ago that I got an email from a person who was upset with something that I wrote in a letter and he just came at me and

The end directive was for me to lead, not follow, because he felt I was listening to directives that weren't important or significant. And one of my colleagues said to me, he said, how do you follow that up? How do you respond to that? And I said, well, first of all, I'm not going to, but I said, second of all, the question that always comes to my mind when I hear that kind of anger is,

What is the grief that's talking? What's the grief that's behind it? And can I set aside the anger for a moment and get to the grief?

You're absolutely right. I think about how the times of change, well, Ronald Heifetz likes to say, people don't resist change, they resist loss. And in this moment of change, the reason this moment of change is so hard is because of all the loss. And anytime there's loss, there's a grief process. think about how there's lots of ways to talk about grief, but like the five stages of grief, the first stage is denial. None of us can, can possibly get past the denial. mean, none of us can get to,

can still live in denial about this. I mean, we're all stuck at home, but as people go past denial, what's the next stage? It's anger and blame. I was thinking about a, one of my students who is a chaplain and about six or eight months ago, she was telling a story about how she had been, she was chaplain at hospital and she was told to go sit with a patient. A patient had just had a miscarriage and she was all alone. And so she comes in and she introduces herself.

And the woman's putting on her shoes and she says, I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to God. I don't want anything. So the woman said, my student says, fine, I'll just sit down next to you. You don't have to say anything. You just need to know I'm here. And while the woman's putting on her shoes, she starts railing at the student, at God, at the hospital, at everything. And my student said, I couldn't possibly take that personally. It wasn't about me. It wasn't about God.

She says, that's the grief talking. And so in these moments when we are reinventing the social contract, in these moments when we're experiencing all this grief, there's going to be times when there's gotta be a safe place for people to express their anger. And it turns out our pastors, our church leaders are often the people that we trust will never leave us. And so we can express that to them. But there are times that

It feels like, wait a second, I'm trying to be kind to you and you're just getting all angry at me. And at that point I have to say to myself, that's just the grief talking. So what do do? mean, it's not enough just to say to yourself, that's not the grief time. What do I do in that moment when somebody is saying I'm doing it wrong? Well, oftentimes if we're reinventing the social contract, let's just make it discussable. I am working with a church right now where one of the things that

they're doing is they're trying to figure out how to reinvent young adult ministry. And so they've just simply said to the young adults through their various forms that they have through Zoom and through Facebook and through some social media sites, they say, we're having to reinvent this. Let's reinvent it together. But by making it discussable, all of a sudden it takes a lot of the starch out of it, takes a lot of the steam out of the room and allows them to talk together about it rather than thinking, oh, the pastor's got to have it all figured out.

or the leaders gotta have it all figure out. So one, you you were talking Terry about things we can walk away with. One thing we can walk away with is that we can make this social contract discussable. We can ask people, how do we reinvent in this moment? And we can talk about it together rather than making any kind of assumptions.

I think we can also make discussable this timeline. Is this a season? Is this a blizzard? Or is this the beginning of an Ice Age? And I know the same pastor that I was talking about had a leadership team meeting this last week. And with the council, the decision-making body, and the leaders that were taking on all kinds of new things in this time, they just talked about, what do you need to hear us talk about?

And how do we talk about the stages of this knowing that we're not going to turn, it's not going to be like a light switch, that once the governor says you don't have to stay in your houses anymore, we're all going back to worship. In fact, there are many in that congregation that will not be back to worship for over a year because of their vulnerability. And it was said out loud in the midst of that meeting. There was grief, there was loss, but it also felt honest.

And it felt like that opened up the opportunity to then move forward on each of those areas.

Well, thank you, Terry. Thank you, Scott. It's been a rich conversation as we think about what it means to lead in this era and particularly all the ways in which we're being called to pivot. That's the name of this podcast, Pivot, and this is the end of our first episode. Thank you.