Welcome to the Pivot Podcast, brought to you by Luther Seminary's Faith+Lead! Join Dr. Dee Stokes and Dr. Dwight Zscheile as they explore the ever-changing Church landscape.

In this episode, they are joined by special guest Rev. Dr. Blair Pogue. Blair is the canon for vitality and innovation in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, working across the state to cultivate discipleship and missional engagement for the 94 Episcopal faith communities in Minnesota.

Tune in as we gain a deeper understanding of why it’s easier for people to talk about the church than about God, how to help people discover and rediscover God’s activity in their lives, and how to shift from asking church questions to asking God questions.

Stay tuned for more episodes unraveling the complexities of this cultural shift.

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

Dee Stokes: How can your church pivot from a focus on membership to discipleship? One of our listeners wrote in to tell us how difficult it is for congregants to discuss God and or faith. By the end of our episode today, we'll share with you how you can help people discover and rediscover God's activity in their lives, and how to make a shift from asking church questions to asking God questions. Hello everyone, I am 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're excited to have the Reverend Dr. Blair Pogue as our guest. Blair is the Canon for Vitality and Innovation in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, working across the state to cultivate discipleship and missional engagement for the 94 Episcopal faith communities in Minnesota. Blair and I served alongside each other in ministry for 16 years at Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church in Saint Paul, where she was the rector or lead pastor. We wanted you to hear from Blair because she led a remarkable transformation of a 125 year old congregation. You know, often we hear questions from leaders of established churches, traditional churches, about how the kinds of pivots that we're discussing in this podcast actually happen in those contexts, rather than in innovative new church plants. Blair's story is about exactly that kind of journey. So Blair, welcome to Pivot.

Blair Pogue: Thank you so much. It's good to be here.

Dee Stokes: We're excited about having you, Dr. Pogue, and we want to just jump right in, if we can. Can you share a little bit of your journey with us? My first question is, did you grow up in the church?

Blair Pogue: I did not. We went to Unitarian Church for a couple of years and honestly, all I remember is the donuts. But it was through Young Life and especially through a mentor there, that I was introduced to Jesus and His way and found it incredibly compelling. So that was when I was 14 years old. But it's been a long journey. I've journeyed through many different Christian traditions, and I think I have a real heart for people outside the institutional church hungering for God. And I remember what it was like to be someone interested in Jesus going for my first Bible, walking into a Christian bookstore, and the person asking me, what translation do you want? I had no idea there were multiple translations of the Bible, so I'm just aware, Dr. Dee, of how much we take for granted in the church. And I think we're going to we're going to it's going to become really just evident all the all the assumptions that we've been making that we need to rethink and ways we need to learn how to translate the gospel for new generations.

Dee Stokes: I love your story because I grew up in Arkansas and I am familiar with Young Life, and it has changed a lot of young people's lives. It's a great title for that ministry, and they do a great work. Tell us about your journey when you first got to Saint Matthew's, how was that church? What what were they thinking? What were they feeling? What were you thinking? Why did God call you to that particular place?

Blair Pogue: So we came to Minnesota for Dwight to do his doctorate here, and I was doing a lot of discernment. When I got there, I truly did feel called to this particular faith community, but I was pretty astounded that that people just didn't really talk about God. They were the most wonderful people you could ever meet. But God was kind of the elephant in the room, and we had a lot of people who are well educated. The church is right by the Saint Paul campus of the University of Minnesota, but people felt very ashamed of their biblical knowledge, and a lot of people come up and whisper, you know, my child is asking me questions about God and the Bible, and I'm the only one here who doesn't know anything about the Bible. So I was eager to get this church into scripture, into the stories of Jesus and his life and his encounter with other people. And I also wanted people to just make some connections between their daily lives and what God was up to there. There was really not a sense that God was connected in any way to their daily lives, to the biggest challenges they faced, the biggest challenges that our world faces. So I did two things, and I can talk more about those if you're interested. The first is I got people dwelling in Scripture. They were used to somebody who was the expert telling them what a particular passage said, but they never really thought that they could engage with Scripture. And the other thing I did was to establish a culture of ongoing discernment and to give them the tools so we together could learn how to let God lead Saint Matthews. And I did a lot of different things around that, a lot of discernment processes, but in everything, try to get people to think more about God and God as being up to something in their lives, in their neighborhoods and in the church's neighborhood.

Dee Stokes: Did you get resistance initially? Because what you're describing, how most church folk want the pastor to be the expert, that's probably a universal thing in some ways, right? Did you get some resistance initially when you tried to tell them, no, I'm not the expert. You, we're all experts. We all need to dig in to the word and study to show ourselves approved. How did that go?

Blair Pogue: I sure did. The first time I introduced dwelling in the word to the vestry, the top leadership body of my church. Everyone stared at their feet. But I tell people who are introducing simple practices like that to stick with it, because I think it took 2 or 3 times where everybody stared at their feet. And I did find somebody who grew up in an Evangelical Free church, and I got her on the vestry as soon as I could, as soon as one lay leader, one person who was not ordained, engaged in dwelling, everyone started to engage and it became so rich for us. It became one of our communal practices. And I, probably my best day was a couple months in. We were struggling with a budget line item, and the guy who had really fought me on dwelling in the word said, I wonder if we're the blind man. And we had just been dwelling in the story of Jesus healing the blind man. So it was really amazing to see how dwelling in Scripture, wondering what God might be up to, being curious about paying attention to the words and the images and the phrases that really jumped out at us, started to really inform people's imagination for again, what God might be up to in their lives and in our midst.

Dwight Zscheile: So for some of our our viewers or listeners who may not be familiar with the practice of dwelling in the word, can you just describe briefly how that works?

Blair Pogue: Yeah, it's a very, very simplified form of lectio divina, and often a passage, usually a story from Jesus's life is read two times with silence following each reading to give people a chance to really sit with that passage and to listen to it. They are then asked to share a word or phrase, or an image that really captured their imagination, or a question that the passage raises for them. And and I have to say, I it was really amazing. I started doing some formation with my adults, and we would dwell in the gospel passage for the coming Sunday. We used the lectionary, a three year schedule of readings. We'd dwell in that passage, and I just write everybody's question up on the whiteboard, and then we'd come back to those questions and talk about them, and an hour would be over. It was kind of the best adult formation that I'd ever experienced, because a very participatory. And it really got people engaging with Scripture, engaging with what Jesus was saying, and again, trying to apply it to their daily lives.

Dwight Zscheile: So Alan Roxburgh makes a distinction between asking church questions and asking God questions. And church questions are things like, how do we get more people to join our church? Or how do we meet a church need in the neighborhood? And then God questions are, you know, things like, what might God have been up to in the history of our church? Or what might God be up to in our neighborhood? And how are we gifted and called to join in? And part of what I hear in what you're describing is an intentional shift to helping the people of this church move from asking church questions to asking God questions. Do you want to say a little more about some of the ways that you did that?

Blair Pogue: Sure. Yeah. It's so easy to get sucked back into church questions, because I think that the people who are in our churches today truly love their faith communities. And they're worried, they're anxious. They often see that our churches are shrinking and graying. So I can understand why they default into church questions. Our big one at Saint Matt's was, "what are we going to do when the boiler goes bust?" Because that was going to be $60,000. But church questions to me and to all the lay leaders I've worked with throughout the Diocese of Minnesota are really, they're interesting. They're exciting, they're energizing. What might God be up to in our lives and the life of our church? And for me, the question I love is, what might the Holy Spirit be up to in our neighbors' lives? The neighbors, you know, a lot of us live in neighborhoods that aren't the neighborhood of our church. So we want to also wonder what's God up to in the lives of the people who live around our church? But as a person who goes to a different church every Sunday as part of the Bishop of Minnesota's staff, I can tell from the moment I walk in if there is excitement, energy and joy, which I name as the Holy Spirit's presence, or when you walk in and you can just smell the desperation on people's breath and they're just so worried about, you know, getting more people in the pews. But I think the faithful question is, what is God up to? And I found people of so many different backgrounds, theological, social locations, you name it, just really energized by that question and really excited by the fact that God might be up to something. And amazingly, in the mainline, I often find that God is the elephant in the room, and I find that stunning. But we often don't talk about God. But if somebody starts talking about God who's not the pastor or priest, other people get interested in that. One last thing that I did just I did a lot of work at Luther Seminary around the missional church. I just started asking the question as often as possible: What might God be up to? And what might God be up to in this or that? Whatever we were discussing. And it was when a lay leader started to ask that same question that it really took. And we really got the diffusion of innovation, the diffusion of that word. And other people started asking that question. And that was a really exciting time for me.

Dee Stokes: Why do you think it is so difficult for some folks to talk about the Lord, or to talk about their faith in God? Help us.

Blair Pogue: That is the million dollar question, because I try to. I try to have friends who don't go to church, and I just have to tell you they are hungering to know God. They are just, they're dealing with all the same things you and I deal with just hurt and betrayal, betrayals small and large, breast cancer, divorce, you name it. And they're trying to make spiritual sense of their lives. And, you know, it's funny, there's kind of this feeling I felt in the mainline, in the Episcopal Church. Like, we're this worry about imposing our faith on other people. And if you've ever encountered Episcopalians, I don't ever see any Episcopalian, ever doing that. But I think we have, as somebody who didn't know Jesus, who met someone who did and wanted what she had and saw the joy and the energy and the curiosity and the love that was sacrificial in just the way she lived her life. We have so much to share, and I am it is. But I think it is a growing edge for a lot of people in the mainline and in my particular denomination to learn how to talk about God with as much excitement as they talk about the keto diet or the new Netflix series, or to talk about God very naturally. But otherwise, why are we putting that under a bushel, so to speak? Yeah, so.

Dee Stokes: I would agree with that. I tell people, if you have a boyfriend, you get on your girlfriends' nerves talking about your boyfriend because you love him, and if you love Jesus, you ought to get on people's nerves talking about Jesus. And, you know, me as a black female, I've grown up in an environment where we talk about Jesus all the time. We talk about Jesus at the dinner table. We talk about Jesus all the time. I mean, so it becomes natural when you grow up in that atmosphere. And so maybe that's a part of it, is it's not a natural thing to do because maybe they haven't grown up in that. But again, I think you're I think you're onto it. The more we talk about Jesus, just like we talk about everyday things, the more infectious our love for Jesus becomes. And now we infiltrate, if you will, the totality of society. And this is why this conversation is so important, because we have the answer. And if you're stepping off the cliff, I hope I would tell you, wait a minute. Don't step off the cliff or the curb or whatever outside when it's raining. And we have the answer and we need to tell people what the answer is. I want to ask you, going back to your time at Saint Matthew's, what did the church have to let go of? Was there? You know, sometimes you have to unlearn things and change is very difficult at times. And sometimes you have to let go of things to actually move forward. So tell us maybe some things that they had to let go of and then tell us some stories. We want to hear stories.

Blair Pogue: Sure, sure. Well, I love what you just said. And one of the questions we put on a card, we had something called Pocket Practices, where we put spiritual practices on business cards so people could take them and hand them out and keep them in their wallet. One was, "What might you need to let go of to have more bandwidth for God and others?" And that was one of our Lenten questions. Um, so, you know, I think the biggest thing to let go of is relying on our wisdom and learning. I think the hardest thing for my congregation, which was very gifted, a lot of wisdom there, and we wanted to tap all of that giftedness and wisdom. But learning how to let go and truly let God lead, and learning that discernment worthy of the name takes time. It takes really listening to scripture, a lot of prayer, listening to everyone, really encouraging everyone to speak in the room instead of in what we called parking lot conversations at my last church. And I think that's hard for people who are used to getting things done. And I have that impulse in myself, just wanting to get things done. But I think we also had to look at everything we were doing, all of our different ministries. And when I first got there, Dr. Dee, someone described Saint Matt's as being like a crab with a million legs running in a million directions. We were busy and I think we felt really good about ourselves in that busyness, but we had to let go of a number of those ministries, and we had to think about how God might be calling us into ministries where we weren't just giving people stuff, but we were receiving as much or more than we were giving and we were giving ourselves. So we actually did a lot of training in deep listening, because it really made a difference in showing up and listening to people that we were getting to know in the community, whether they were unsheltered people that we were housing at our church or people we were feeding at Loaves and Fishes. We really wanted those relationships to be more meaningful, but we had to let go of a lot of our ministries. We had to let go of a lot of committees. I don't know that God is really excited about committees. I think God's more interested in ministry teams, and I learned that people are willing to make a commitment to something that really matters for a specified period of time. They don't want to be on a ministry team for life. Like a lot of the people in our church end up getting onto something and they can't get off it. But I really tried to focus people's gifts and passions and to just change the whole culture so that we weren't just having these meetings that were like Groundhog Day, where we were saying the same thing over and over, but we were really discerning what is the Holy Spirit leading us to do here. We were really being very focused as well in, in how we were following that leading.

Dee Stokes: Can you tell me a story of a congregant who may have had... It's like the light clicked on and all of a sudden they really understood what you were saying and really caught on really quickly.

Blair Pogue: Yeah, that's a great question. I had, you know, I had people who, I guess what I, where I went to immediately was there were people there who kind of, I think, felt kind of alone in their faith because nobody was talking about God, and they really wanted to support the community, but they just became really energized when we really started to talk about God and started to engage in practices together and say, that's what we do. As followers of Jesus, we're living a life of practice. I think we did this really neat process where we realized that we were taking so much for granted, including, we assumed people understood the shape of the Christian life and the practices that comprise it. And that really wasn't true. So we did a long discernment process with small groups where we had people dwelling in Scripture and then talking about a spiritual practice that was important to them, or one that they felt was really important to following Jesus. And it astounded us that eight spiritual practices emerged clearly, and they became our way of Jesus. And we tried to go deeply into each of those practices. And I'm thinking not of an individual person, but the leadership team as a whole just came alive. Being part of these discernment groups that were super creative and reading the transcripts and really engaging these practices. And for the first time I asked somebody, somebody asked me if she could be on the vestry emeriti, like she was having so much fun. Have you ever had anybody in leadership say, I want to keep going, I'm loving this. This is so energizing. But I saw a lot of people over the years just really start to come alive when they engaged in these practices, and especially in small groups, where we would go in depth into a practice and really try to apply it to our daily lives. For example, I did a class on hospitality and everybody was very honest about the barriers to hospitality for them. Um, so we really we really unpack those. And then we really tried to offer hospitality to people without, for instance, thinking our house had to be absolutely clean or we had to serve some great food, but really trying to invite people in that we didn't know to offer hospitality to strangers, um, we did a lot of things like that where we would try experiments in our lives, come back and share them, share how that went. And that seemed to be really energizing for people because I think I don't, I don't know in your church, Dr Dee, but where I was there just really felt like there was a disconnect between Sunday and Monday. And I don't think people were always able to make the connections between the preaching and what we were studying and how that played out in all the things that they were facing in their workplace, in their families and their neighborhoods. So I think these simple practices, these small accountability groups really helped. And I remember one thing I did was I started I called them Way of Jesus Vocational Groups. So I pulled people together. I pulled the business people into one, the social workers and teachers into another. And I tried to get people together with people who are in a similar vocational path, where again, they could dwell in Scripture together but also share their their joys and their excitement about their vocation and their challenges and see each other as a support network.

Dee Stokes: Yeah.

Dwight Zscheile: So one of the things that I'm curious about in hearing about all of this Blair, and that shift from asking church questions to God questions and people becoming being more or less comfortable talking about God is is the impact that culture makes in that. And Dr. Dee you referenced this earlier. One of the things that Saint Matt's was blessed with was members from a lot of different cultures around the world, particularly a lot of global Anglicans who found the congregation. And they had been influenced in particular by a woman from Uganda who was there before, long before we arrived, Beatrice Garabanda. Say a little bit about how the cultural diversity in the congregation helped open it up to God's Spirit.

Blair Pogue: I'm really glad you mentioned that. I just want to say a little something about Beatrice Garabanda, who is a Luther Seminary grad. She was a phenomenal woman. I got to know her. And a couple weeks into my time at Saint Matt's, when I was brand new, she died, which was just really hard for all of us. She was a follower of Jesus and the things she did, the stories they're still being told today. I mean I heard these stories for years. For instance, there was a young man from the church who was on a mission trip, and he was in Costa Rica, and I think he was on a raft. It went over. He went under the falls for more than a minute, a couple of minutes, I think, and they assumed he was brain dead. And someone called back to the church. It was actually as everybody was gathered in the parish hall after church, Beatrice stopped everyone and prayed a prayer that people are talking about to this day. And this young man is now an older man who's married with a couple of kids, doing very well. But she and so many other members of my congregation from the global South, from Jamaica, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, we had a South African family for a while. They were so comfortable talking about their faith. They knew God was active in their lives, in their world, in the church. And so I think they had a lot of influence on all of us, and they really modeled the way of Jesus. So it is very helpful to have people like that in your church.

Dwight Zscheile: So another thing I want to ask about is the word energy. You've used the word "energy" quite a bit in this conversation so far, and what I'm hearing you talking about is not the energy of a leader coming and getting everyone excited about everything and trying to get everyone involved in activities, but really helping people trace and name and experience the energy of God. The Holy Spirit is the Christian way of talking about that in many ways. Talk about that shift. And then for you as a leader, what did it mean to go from having this expectation that you would bring the energy to get everyone excited and get the church going, to really helping everyone tap into the energy, the Holy Spirit.

Blair Pogue: So I, that was a huge shift for me. I've spoken about this elsewhere, but for years I kind of operated like the cruise ship director and again was trying to bring the energy and I, I loved being a priest, but that was just exhausting. And so I think as the congregation really came alive spiritually and really tapped into the Holy Spirit's energy, that was so freeing for me. I felt lighter, I, everything became more sustainable. But also we really began to understand ourselves as a ministry team, the body of Christ. I wasn't it wasn't all on my shoulders. And I think a lot of pastors and priests feel like that today. They're really tired, still coming out of Covid, but they feel like so much is falling on their shoulders and they're doing all the work. And I think when people come alive in God, they they really step up in, in their daily lives and church. They want to tap into that energy. It's really, it's really freeing. It's really it gets everybody going. So it's a huge paradigm shift and it takes time. And I think just really, really having people experience God's presence and power in their lives is such a game changer. And I think there are things out there that I used that are very simple resources, but so helpful. For instance, I had every leader I could get to read Grounded in God by the Listening Hearts ministry. Read it because again, I think it's easy to take, um, just things like, "how do you discern God's leading" for granted? And this book just walks you through what are signs that the Holy Spirit is present and pointing you in a certain direction? How would you know that? What would be happening? How can you use Scripture? How can you intersperse speaking with silence and prayer? And it's a gem of a little book, but I think just apprenticing people into all these simple practices that make up the Christian life is very important, and it does bring a real shift in the energy. And then again, as Dwight said, it's not falling on the priest or pastor. It is truly a shared ministry and people want to be a part of it. They they do sense what I keep naming is energy, which really is the Holy Spirit's movement.

Dee Stokes: I love it. Tell our audience what pitfalls to avoid.

Blair Pogue: So this work took a long time. I think culture change takes a long time. So. And I can, I can be impatient. So see it as a long term game. Yeah. And just God will be faithful. I remember, you know, I had these amazing parishioners from the global South who were able to talk about God, who engaged in spiritual practices regularly. Um, others were getting interested. But then God sent me these amazing people, um, and so I was able to, you know, God really provides. But again, I think that that long game the other thing, Dr. Dee, in my impatience, I remember there was a ministry that was kind of dying out, and I tried to end it too early. Um, we had done some discernment, but a lot of times people have to see a better future emerging before they're willing to give up things that are familiar to them, including just ways of being at church together, or the fact that they might just worship on Sunday and then maybe not pay much attention to God during the week, or see where God's at work, in their workplace or their neighborhood. So that was that was a helpful learning for me, is sometimes you have to be patient and wait until that better future starts to emerge, perhaps in individuals, perhaps in groups in the community, until other things can be let go of.

Dee Stokes: How do you incorporate God questions now in your position that you have currently?

Blair Pogue: So I, that's one of the things I talk about a lot. I am doing or leading a process called faithful innovation, that comes out of faith+ lead, all over the diocese. I have 17 churches that have been through or are in this process. And what I'm seeing is kind of what I was talking to you about a moment ago. In the people going through this process, we're asking God questions all the time, and we're always like, at the end of the day, we always say, where did you see God at work today? And so there's a lot of energy in this work which is around listening to God, other church members sharing their spiritual stories and neighbors, and then trying small, low cost experiments to learn more about what the Holy Spirit's up to in the lives of the church's neighbors and the neighbors of the people who are participating. So I think, again, when you start to see this energy, other people start to get curious and want to be part of it. But every church I go into, I just really try to raise those God questions. And the funny thing is, people are really excited to talk about God. They almost just need to be given permission to do that, but they really want to go there. They really want to do that, but it's just not their normal default, interestingly enough.

Dee Stokes: Sure, sure.

Dwight Zscheile: So one of the things I hear you talking about is a really almost like a strategy for change. That's very much bottom up. It's grassroots. It's not top down. And it really focuses, it seems like, on simple practices that anyone can do and creating an environment in which it's relatively safe for people to to take the risk of trying those things. But that over time, as those practices become habitual, then you start to get this, this deeper change in the culture of the church taking place. You want to say a little bit more about that?

Blair Pogue: Yeah. One of the things I did after we had developed that way of Jesus, I mentioned with eight spiritual practices which included simplicity, prayer, reconciliation, generosity, gratitude. I approached different people in the congregation and asked them to speak or write about a particular practice. And I'll never forget there was one gentleman in the congregation and I said, would you write a short reflection on the spiritual practice of simplicity and what that looks like in your life? And he said, I'm the last person who should write that essay. I want to engage in that practice, but it's so hard for me. And I said, you are the person who needs to write this essay. But what I noticed is people really read those essays, or they would come when other parishioners would speak about their experience of trying to simplify their lives, to make more space for God and others, or their struggle with financial generosity or whatever the practice was. It was so great to try to get people, one, engaged in the practice, but, two, talking about it. And that really, really helped a lot. The other thing, I think I alluded to this earlier, but I started doing this faith formation time where a lot of it was dwelling in Scripture, and we did read various books about the Christian life and had questions applying what we were doing in life. But I would also give people homework. I started that a couple of years before I left and people would come back and after prayer, dwelling, and a check in, I would say, okay, this is a shame free zone. Who did the homework? And half the people forgot to do the spiritual practice. And then the others were talking about what happened when they tried that practice during the week. I had people doing things like praying for their coworkers when they were sitting in the office, or trying to see everybody they encountered through God's eyes, or taking an e- sabbath that week. We did all kinds of different things. One week they were trying to pray the be still prayer a couple of times a day. And so the neatest thing is we started to learn more about each other's lives in, in this practice. So and we also started to learn what God was doing all over the Twin Cities through what people were sharing. I, for years, you know, my, my passion has been adult formation. And I ran a little seminary for 400 people in my church before Saint Matt's. But I realized that if I look at what I did through the lens of discipleship, it actually wasn't that effective. We were. We were hearing about Jesus. We were learning about Jesus. But I, my learning is how how do you make discipleship actionable? How do you take Jesus' teachings and this way of life he's inviting us into? And how do you help people actually practice it? So I think something like the homework is really helpful, and people knowing they're doing it in a loving community where there is not judgment, but we're we're in this together, led by God, but we're trying we're trying to live this Christian life. So that was that was a big learning for me.

Dee Stokes: Would you do one? Do us one favor and encourage our audience to do what you've told them to do. What encouragement would you give them? We're going to wrap up the show here in a second and just encourage them. Exhort the audience one last time to come to know God, to talk about God, to talk about their faith. Just encourage our audience. Would you do that?

Blair Pogue: I would love to do that. To me, this is high stakes work. People are depressed, anxious, lonely, searching for God. We have been given a treasure, a pearl of great price, and we need to share it. And we need to help the people entrusted to our care show up as followers of Jesus in every space of their lives, and it will make a difference.

Dee Stokes: Yes. Amen to that. The questions we ask reveal our true, our reclaiming the value of naming God's activity in our lives and neighborhood is to start intentionally asking God questions every time you gather. Culture change happens through practices that become habits, transforming people's way of seeing and experiencing the world. Dr. Pogue, we thank you so much for being with us today, and in our next episode, we will continue to explore the key pivots the church needs to make today. Thank you for tuning in. 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 dot org.