What does Protestant identity in Christ mean for today's church leaders? In this conversation, theologian Beth Felker Jones explores why Protestant faith still matters in a moment when many are converting to Catholicism, embracing Orthodoxy, or deconstructing entirely. Beth unpacks the unique gifts of Protestant tradition: scripture as our primary authority, communal interpretation led by the Spirit, and the freedom to contextualize the gospel for new times and places. She challenges the myth of a "one pure church" before Protestantism and offers a compelling case for reclaiming Protestant heritage without fragmenting the broader body of Christ.

Beth also addresses church hurt with refreshing honesty, exploring how Protestant identity in Christ allows space for both brokenness and hope. From the art of retelling the gospel for new contexts to why justification by grace still speaks to our self-justifying culture, this conversation helps leaders think more deeply about what they've inherited and what they want to pass on. Whether you're navigating questions about tradition and authority or helping people explore their faith identity, Beth offers wisdom for embracing Protestant faith as a gift rather than just a default.

In contemporary fiction, retelling is very popular. There are fairy tale retellings, right? And the thing about these retellings is that some of them are great and some are terrible. And how do we know that? It requires familiarity with the original material. And it requires familiarity with the audience you're trying to reach and all of the pieces of that culture, right? The things that you can use for your retelling.

And so I think we're called to retell the old, story, right, in every place anew, and we're called to do it well. And that requires being good storytellers, which is a lot more complicated than anything that I can fit into a neat rubric, right, but it's also a lot more fun and a lot more interesting.

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

And I'm Terri Elton Today we're talking with theologian Beth Felker-Jones about her new book, Why Am I a Protestant? Beth is a professor of theology at Northern Seminary in Chicago. For many church leaders, being Protestant is just part of the landscape, something they inherited rather than chosen. But Beth invites us to think more deeply about what Protestant faith offers our world today. Beth, thanks for being with us today.

Thanks for having me, glad to be here.

So there seems to be a wave of younger people embracing Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism going on right now, or some of them just deconstructing and walking away from church entirely. You've watched friends, colleagues, and even your own parents convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. They're of course not abandoning Christianity, but seeking something they feel is missing in Protestant churches. What do you think is going on there, and how does it inform

you're writing of this new book.

Yeah, I certainly don't have a problem with people converting to Catholicism, as you say. That's not an abandonment of the faith, but it's not my own path. And ⁓ I think this trend has been going on for a while, and I've always known it's not for me. So I was interested in writing this ⁓ book for those reasons. It's hard to say what exactly is going on, but I think one of the things is

that people discover that the church has this rich and beautiful history and heritage, ⁓ all kinds of resources, liturgy, the wisdom of the ages, et cetera. ⁓ And they get a narrative that says, if you want to access that history, you have to become Protestant or Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. What I want to say is that beautiful heritage is for all of us. ⁓ It's not for Protestants. But of course,

Protestants have sometimes been guilty of acting as though it's not for us. And so I would love to encourage Protestants to recover that as well. I also think a lot of people convert because they're looking for ⁓ a kind of clarity about authority, right? The Protestant insistence that scripture comes first is something I love, but of course it opens up interpretive difficulty. And so I think it can seem really attractive to suppose that the church could solve that ⁓ interpretive difficulty.

for one. For me, that is not attractive though, because I don't trust the church. ⁓ I love the church and I think it's God's intended vehicle in the world. But I don't trust it to be my interpretive guide though. I'm interested in it. I want to pay attention to it. I don't fundamentally trust it.

So one of the things that you suggest about being Protestant doesn't mean giving up Catholic, the small lowercase C or the universal church. And I think rightly so sometimes Protestants are accused of fragmenting the church, right? So everybody has their own interpretation. this like, there's one ditch, one interpretation, there's another ditch, too many interpretations, right? So as you think about,

Protestant's place in the church universal or globally throughout time, right? What do you think are some gifts that the Protestant church can bring not only to the church universally, but to this moment in our history?

Mm-hmm. I think there are many. ⁓ And while it is true that fracture is a problem that comes with Protestantism, fracture doesn't always have to be viewed as bad. It can be a healthy and appropriate diversity. But I also like to remind people that there's no such thing as the one pure church once upon a time.

Though some leading theologians will say that there was, right? Once upon a time there was just one church, and then the Protestants got in the way. I just don't think it's true, historically. Even in the New Testament, we see divisions within the church. Right? Do you belong to Paul or do you belong to Apollos? And we need to be able to be honest about that division, to recognize God's work within that division, to recognize the fact of unity.

as a possibility, even as we are also in many ways divided. ⁓ I do think that sola scriptura is a great gift that Protestant faith brings the church. Protestants aren't the only Christians who are interested in scripture or who think that scripture is authoritative, right? ⁓ perhaps one of the reasons Protestantism exists ⁓ is to highlight the reliability, the beauty, the authority of scripture, right? As

⁓ a trustworthy source of revelation and for me, more trustworthy than the church. Is it awfully complicated to interpret scripture? Of course, right? But I trust it. And I think that Protestantism invites us to do that and invites us to intimacy with God through intimacy with the scriptures in a really beautiful way.

So I wanna follow up on your trust or not trust church and that interpretive work. What I hear you saying, and I just wanna check this out, that you trust more in the community's charge of interpreting together the word versus a system or a structure or the church to do that. Or am I getting you...

No, I'll take that. The community's ongoing spirit-led charge to interpretation of scripture, along with a really appropriate and really Protestant humility about our ability to get that right. ⁓ And so when the Protestant reformers call us to be reformed and always reforming, that includes in our interpretation of scripture. So I'm not saying...

I've got my own interpretation right, or I think that Protestantism manages to, and it's kind of orthodoxy. But I am saying I'd rather do that hard work together, seeking the Spirit's guidance as we go, than be willing to say the Church is right. ⁓ And I could give specific examples of kinds of, Roman Catholic interpretation that I just, I don't think they are good interpretations of scripture.

I can give you Protestant ones too, but as a Protestant, I'm not obligated to those because I'm seeking the constant reforming power of the Spirit in the Church. Not that Catholics aren't also in some ways seeking the constant reforming power of the Spirit in the Church, Catholics have to deal with magisterial interpretations. ⁓ Even if those interpretations are reinterpreted, ⁓ they're not really free to say, wrong. ⁓

Well, so, you we live in this moment right now where the kind of individualist trajectory of the modern West seems to be sort of reaching new extremes. I mean, we see so much unraveling of established institutions across society, of course, the church being one of those, congregational participation being one, and a symptom of that are the decline in many places. We're all supposed to be on these sort of individual journeys of self-exploration and expression, self-discovery, with our own selves as the ultimate authority.

⁓ This has been blamed by scholars like Brad Gregory on the Reformation turned a subjective interpretation of scripture, ⁓ rather than the institution holding that on behalf of the people. So what do you make of that argument and how do you think about the relationship between the deep roots of modernity in subjective turn, if you will, and Protestantism?

Thank

Yeah,

so many good questions. I'm a little feisty about this ⁓ as well. And I think a right recognition that Christianity cannot rightly be lived in an individualist way also motivates some conversions away from Protestantism. ⁓ But again, I think we can say as Protestants, that's for us too. When I say I don't trust the church, please hear me. I'm not saying the church is optional. ⁓ I think it's a mess. We're meant to be engaged in together.

⁓ so yeah, I do engage with Brad Gregory, ⁓ in the book. And he very much lays at the feet of Protestantism, all the ills of modernity. ⁓ I would ask instead whether, ⁓ both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism were turning modern together at the same time. And I think individualism is one of the pieces of modernity was in the water in the 16th century. And it changed both the emerging Protestant church as well as the ongoing Roman Catholic.

church. so ⁓ one question I want to ask is just, is this really Protestantism or is it more modernity itself, ⁓ which comes first? ⁓ You can't completely say, of course, ⁓ but certainly these things were in the water. And ⁓ you find Protestant-ish ⁓ questions arising from Protestant and Catholic and even Orthodox thinkers at this time in history. Also, while

recognizing the ravages of individualism is a very good thing. Individualism is not all bad. ⁓ There's a biblical and theological sense of the dignity and worth of the individual that's tremendously important, right? ⁓ And so I think the answer is not to toss out the individual in favor of the communal, but to try to hold both together, as is so often the case with things theologically. ⁓

Brad Gregory argues that this turn to subjective individualist interpretation ⁓ inevitably leads us to fracturing and then to fighting amongst those fractured camps, and then to saying, we can't fight, so we must tolerate each other. And so we've thrown out truth. We're just in relativism. ⁓ OK, that's one way to read the story. But.

To insist on toleration amongst fractured camps ⁓ is itself a kind of truth, is itself a moral good. And where Gregory thinks ⁓ toleration evacuates all moral good, I want to say that it is itself a moral good. That Protestant toleration or modern toleration, both Protestant, Catholic, et cetera, ⁓ privileges the good of peace over and against the good of interpretive clarity.

If God is resistant to interpretive clarity, which I think God is, that's a bargain I'm willing to make.

So talk a little bit with us about how authority works ⁓ in Protestantism, especially relative to other Christian communities like Roman Catholic or Orthodox. How does Protestantism empower people who might not otherwise be empowered? And where does this authority, how does that work?

Authority works, of course, in extraordinarily messy ways, right? And I think as humans sometimes we want to clean up that mess and so ⁓ we're prone to trying to elevate certain voices or figures as our authoritative interpreters of scripture rather than dwelling in the mess, right? Sometimes instead of a pope, Protestants turn to best-selling Christian bookstore authors, right? Of which...

I'd rather turn to the Pope. If I have those choices for sure, there's much to be learned, right, from the Pope's. Less to be learned from some best-selling Christian bookstore authors, though some, of course, are lovely. ⁓ dear, I'm off the topic. So how does authority actually work? I think it works in communal ways. It works in discerning ways. It works through the power and the presence of the Spirit. It works through ongoing

spiritual growth and our ability to recognize that in each other, right? When we see the truth of scripture embodied in lives, that is itself the kind of authority which helps us to recognize that we're interpreting well rather than poorly, right? ⁓ As the 20th century theologian George Lindbeck famously says, it's not just about saying the right thing, right? ⁓

When the Crusader cries, Christ is Lord, while he cuts off the head of his enemy, ⁓ he's saying a thing that's propositionally true, but because he is not embodying it properly, ⁓ he's in fact making it a lie. And I think that embodied authority of holy people, people who love God and one another, ⁓ as well as humans are able to in this broken world, ⁓ helps us to interpret scripture along the way.

I like my classic authorities, Scripture first and then tradition, reason and experience to help along the way. ⁓ But it's never a matter of just running things through a neat rubric and getting the right answer. It's always more complicated than that. And I also think it's important to note that I believe scripture has a center, which is reasonably clear and margins, which are much less clear. And so going towards that center is always going to be more authoritative.

than arguing about how to clarify margins that are perhaps un-clarifiable. ⁓

So I wonder if you would tell us a story or give us some practices about how you see that being lived out. Because I think you get at the messiness of this and it's like when you say those words, it makes sense, but boy, is it messy in lived communities, right?

And I think God just loves messes, right? The incarnation is kind of ⁓ that in some ways. The last chapter of the book interprets several biblical passages ⁓ for Protestants. And one of the passages ⁓ is from Ephesians. And I talk through in interpreting that passage the ways

that once I did not like Ephesians, I associated it only with wives submit to your husbands and hadn't really read the rest of the thing very much, And how I came to love Ephesians ⁓ in a process of reading it in community, right, with a small group of very smart, very faithful, very interesting women who made all kinds of observations about the text, which helped me to imagine what it might mean to embody something like, he has torn down the dividing wall between us.

⁓ not just as a concept, but in our lives together ⁓ in which we're at work. And so I tell that story of reading the text in community, ⁓ not to give the meaning of the text, but to help us think through how messy Protestant hermeneutics might work. And when I say it's a mess, I'm not saying we don't get anything. I'm not saying there's no truth, right? ⁓

if scripture is the revelation of God. ⁓ I think we could expect that it is multi-layered, that there is endless truth therein. ⁓ And so we can have a humility while also embracing a confidence in the way God speaks in the word.

Well, I'd love to talk with you a bit about justification, right? So if that was in some ways the heart of the Reformation, the teaching on justification by grace through faith, it seems like in this cultural moment, as Christianity has diminished in the culture in America and in the West, there's a lot of other ways people are trying to justify themselves, right? Through ⁓ various kinds of, know, whether it be

diet or fitness or consumption or posturing on social media, you know, all those kinds of things. So, so how would you think about how this kind of ancient core doctrine of Protestant teaching that's of course, affirmed now by other traditions as well, ⁓ speaks to this moment?

Right, our Protestant justification by faith alone, by grace alone, through Christ alone, right? And a doctrine that I think 20th century ecumenical work has shown we very much share with other traditions, though there are real differences in how we share how that works out. ⁓ It's a little bit out of style, right? Justification by grace alone. ⁓ Because it can...

lead to characteristic problems when we emphasize that and not other things. If you emphasize our justification all the time and forget to talk about our sanctification, right, that's a characteristic problem that we rightly want to correct. But in correcting it, I don't think we want to let go of the doctrine. And whenever people start to suggest that it's maybe something that just gets in the way of our actually living holy lives, I want to say,

Let's remember the worst connotations, I'm echoing your question here, Dwight, the worst connotations of the idea of self-justification, right? Self-justification versus justification by grace alone. Whenever I try to justify myself, I'm in trouble, right? Whether it's through one of the ways you've named or just through my stubborn assertion that of course I am right and you are wrong, right?

and that I have gotten it right, look at my works, and despair, right. This just doesn't work for us. ⁓ That doesn't mean we don't have things to learn from post-Reformation perspectives on justification, but I think they fit together with Reformation perspectives better than we sometimes act like they do. The fact that Luther reads Paul

and says, this really speaks to me when I think about the requirements the church puts on me when I go to confession, right? The fact that he does that, I think is the way we're supposed to read scripture. It's also the case that Paul's not talking about going to confession in medieval Roman Catholic churches, right? He's talking about other things, but to draw the parallel is something we're meant to do. And then we too can draw the parallel to the ways we try to justify ourselves.

diet man. mean, we want to justify ourselves with our diet. Isn't it the worst to sit down to eat with people who are justifying every bite they eat, right? And don't eat. ⁓ As though everything that was created by God weren't good. ⁓ Not that there aren't, know, ⁓ smartness, discernment, etc. Right? About how to partake of said goods, but.

⁓ we can't save ourselves by eating right. I'm sorry to report though. Yeah.

Following up on that, you talk about the difference between justification and sanctification, right? we can, the ditch, I'm a Lutheran. Our ditch is we spend too much time on justification, like I'm by grace, and then we don't do anything else, right? So where's the sanctification? How does this fit together as you think in a healthy way in a Protestant view of the world?

reading Luther is a great place to start because Luther has plenty to say about our sanctification and he expects our sanctification. He just wants us to be really, really clear that our sanctification is not the basis of our justification, but that it goes the other way around, right? And I think this is true of every great Christian theologian, right? You'll find them holding justification and sanctification together, even if a particular emphasis there might tempt us to not.

hold them together? And so I think my answer is again, just hold them together. ⁓ Protestant theology, in my opinion, rightly says, make a distinction, right? So it's really clear that you're not doing good things because, and that's not what is making you holy in God's sight. Make a distinction, but then also you need both. And it's in some ways as simple as that. And of course in practice,

much more difficult as we try to actually preach it and teach it and live it out. ⁓ But it's an extraordinarily bizarre misreading of Lutheranism, which I know that you're not doing at all, Terri, to suggest that Lutheranism isn't interested in good works. Of course it is. Though I have one joke in my repertoire. Do you want to hear it? It's anti-Lutheran, but it's a joke, so it's not. Baptist pastor goes to Lutheran pastor on his deathbed and says, brother, are you sure that you're saved?

Lutheran pastor says, of course I am. I've never done a good work in my life. ⁓ It's funny because it's so bad, right? Of course it's no decent, right, right, pastor, whatever, whatever says such a thing.

Sorry.

was thinking the answer often that I have with engaging Luther is your good works are for your neighbor or for our communal good, right? Like there's a sense of we're called to live together, which is kind of what you were talking about before, right? This, does it mean to share life together? And that gets me to my next question as we think about contextualizing this witness, okay?

So the Protestant church around the world takes many, different cultural forms and expressions, even within Lutheran, even particular theological genre within that. So as we think about the vitality in a global Protestant churches, especially in the global South, how might you help us think about Protestantism

allowing for greater flexibility or freedom to contextualize the message of the gospel, the witness of the gospel in different places in today's world.

In the book, I borrow an image from Anglican theology or Episcopalian theology, ⁓ an image which Episcopalians don't use in precisely the way I'm using it, but ⁓ the images of one tree with many branches, ⁓ An image which lets us think about unity in the one trunk of the one tree ⁓ together with diversity as the branches rightly go out in different directions. ⁓

And I have a plant up here on top of my cabinet, and it has some shoots going towards the window, because that's where the light is, right? ⁓ And it has some shoots sort of trickling down, sadly, on the other side, which are a little bit withered. ⁓ And I think that kind of organic metaphor could really rightly help us think about ⁓ appropriate contextualization, appropriate difference. ⁓

even, you know, this isn't any tree that we know of, right, different kinds of fruit being born ⁓ north, south, east, west, different kinds of goods, and all of us being able to learn from each other ⁓ from those goods. In the book, I also interact with a Roman Catholic theologian named Lamon Sanne, ⁓ and Sanne's recently deceased theologian, originally from West Africa, spent much of his career in the US.

And he talks a lot about how Christianity translates, right? How it ⁓ is meant to live in every culture, in every time and place, and to belong authentically to that culture. And this is one of the beauties of the gospel, and it's one of the ways that God loves messes, I think, right? It can't all be sorted into one cultural idiom or one mode. And then the beauty comes when we get to learn from each other.

⁓ T.S. Eliot, right? I'm not getting my quote quite right, but the end of all our exploring is to arrive at home and know the place for the first time. ⁓ When we get to visit different parts of the church, ⁓ we know our own part better, but we also bring back, right, ⁓ beautiful things. So ⁓ I'm a big fan of contextual diversity, and I don't think it gets in the way of unity. ⁓

when people narrate it as though it must get in the way of Unity, I'm a little bit impatient.

Well, so I just want to draw you a little bit more on that because it seems like this is a moment when one of the reasons why a lot of churches are struggling is that they are contextualized for a different historical moment. Yes. And they're struggling often to do that work of translation that Lama and Sanna talks about so well ⁓ in mission in order to speak the gospel to their neighbors. so ⁓ how do you think about the freedom that

exists within Protestantism to do that kind of work of adaptation and translation and how the Holy Spirit is both forming the Church always as well as reforming it and kind of that dynamic between the two.

I'm going to use a metaphor, and it's one I'll be writing about in the future. It's something I'm fascinated by. And it's the metaphor of retellings of stories. I'm fascinated by retellings. So in contemporary fiction, retellings are very popular. There are fairy tale retellings, Cinderella but in an android society with a queen on the moon, ⁓ or what have you.

And the thing about these retellings is that some of them are great and some are terrible. And how do we know that is a really interesting question, right? It requires familiarity with the original material ⁓ and it requires familiarity with the audience you're trying to reach and all of the pieces of that culture, right? The things that you can use for your retelling. And so I think we're called to retell the old, old story.

right, in every place anew. And we're called to do it well. And that requires being good storytellers, which is a lot more complicated than anything that I can fit into a neat rubric, right, but it's also a lot more fun and a lot more interesting. One of my favorites here is ⁓ a retelling of Pride and Prejudice called The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It was done as a vlog series a while back. don't know where you can get it now, somewhere, I'm sure.

But anyway, it retells the story, right? ⁓ And it's so fun to see whoever's done it ⁓ thinking, how do you translate X into here, right? How do you translate five daughters into contemporary California? They don't. They're like, nobody would have five daughters. They don't know a lot of Protestants, obviously, right? And so they make Mary a cousin and Kitty a cat. How do you translate Lydia's... ⁓

horror, right, in running off with Wickham. It's difficult to do because we have different ideas about sexual morality and what marriage looks like, right? But they turn it into Wickham threatening to release a sex video. ⁓ It's a really well-done retelling and why? Because the parallels are good, right? Because the person has thought well about what to keep and what to throw out about.

what translates and what doesn't. And I think that's what we're called to do. And it's an enormously complicated, enormously human, enormously embodied task. The answer is not to throw out the old story though, is part of that, right? Same story, new place. And how does that work is a lot of fun, a lot of So read some retellings is maybe my first suggestion here.

I could imagine a bunch of confirmation or middle school kids pulling out a parable from the Bible and pulling out a contemporary context and having to put that together as a beautiful exercise and inviting that kind of imagination.

come

up with something terrifically fun that I could never come up with, right? I can say, translate this for me, but I can't do the work of a 14-year-old not being a 14-year-old.

So in your book, you write about some dangers that are inherited in Protestantism. So I'd like you to say a little bit about what those are and how we might avoid them.

Individualism, I've already talked about, I think balancing individualism and community is important. Fragmentation as well, in some ways we've already talked about. ⁓ We cannot be ⁓ complacent about fragmentation at Unity matters. So even as we look for the goods of contextuality and difference, I think we have to be able to think truly about Unity. And I think we can do that in terms of mission, in terms of fruit.

⁓ in terms of telling the one story, the old story, right, in new ways. ⁓ So individualism, fragmentation, and authority, we've also talked about to some extent, right, how do we do this hard work together of interpreting scripture well ⁓ when scripture is really hard to interpret well. ⁓ And I think that too is a kind of you know it when you see it, or you try to know it when you try to see it. ⁓

⁓ complicated human activity of living well together. So they're real problems, but I think they can be approached creatively together in ways that are faithful and interesting.

So this is a challenging, but I think also opportune time to be the church, right, in today's world. What would you say to church leaders who might be listening to this or watching, who are struggling to minister in this kind of environment? And what would be maybe some things from the Protestant heritage that would be gifts for them as they're navigating this kind of season?

When I started writing this book, I didn't expect it to be about church hurt, but it kind of is, right? It's about, ⁓ for me, being very honest about the brokenness and the pain that the church has caused. ⁓ And I think for all of us who live in some way in the church, that honesty is absolutely required, right? If we're gonna deal with church hurt, we have to face it head on. We have to call it what it is, ⁓ evil.

when the church has been and is evil, and then we have to seek repentance and new life. ⁓ And I think we are invited to do that as Protestants in ways that insist on ambiguity and complexity. I'm not saying other traditions don't also have ambiguity and complexity, they certainly do, right? But the temptation can be to try to navigate these things by getting the answer right. And I think

The answer instead is to tell the truth ⁓ and to live together and try to love each other in the midst of the mess. And so vulnerable truth about messes ⁓ and honest seeking of the Spirit for healing from the messes are notes of hope for me ⁓ as I think about participating in the church, leading in the church, loving the church, ⁓ even though it's a mess.

So.

So why were you surprised by the hurt or what was it that opened up that moment that became bigger than you had anticipated?

think it's the cultural moment we're in. So I agreed to write the book and then I was a couple years late. And by the time I got it done, we were talking more about church church than we had been when I agreed to write the book. But I was hearing it so much ⁓ from people at church, from my students, right, how hard it is to deal with the pain the church has inflicted. And it couldn't help then but come in, my own church hurt as well, come into ⁓ being part of what the book's about. So I hope

what it is is that I was able to respond to a thing we care about right now. And I'm sure I've done so imperfectly, but I think that's ultimately what happened.

Yeah, I appreciate that and I can think of how do you love, for those of us that are faithful followers of Jesus, that believe we are supposed to be part of a community, how do you continue to participate in following this God you love in a organization, quote, a human community that's broken, that's justified by faith alone?

right, but is messy, is not always embodying what you see. And I think we, the church, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, you name it, have not always done well in embodying the forgiving practices, the reconciliation practices. I'm thinking of a story in our area right now of a community that

thought they were doing good around abuse of children, and what they were doing was insular and was actually more harmful than good, right? And how do you name that hurt and work for a new way? And I think all churches are struggling with that, but we Protestants have a particular kind, a particular way that we can both experience it and respond, I think.

I think so too. ⁓ The church is already and not yet, right? For whatever reason, I think we forget that when it comes to the church. We expect it to be already. We expect it to be right and pure and good. And I think we're seeing a lot of calls to purity and to rightness. ⁓ But we can't get there without acknowledging the brokenness ⁓ and remembering that.

As we seek rightness, we seek it by grace and not by our own perfect practices, which just as you're saying, we often intend for good and yet are so far from. And so I think a kind of eschatological vision of the church, right? I reminded that we're not yet what we're called to be is really important for dealing. ⁓ The church is faith and not sight, at least partly.

Well, thanks, Beth, for this rich conversation and for your work. And I hope that this has felt like an honest conversation to folks. And thanks for sharing your wisdom about what you discovered in this book.

Thanks so much. love talking about it and grateful to be with you all.

And to our audience, thank you for joining us on this episode of Pivot. To help spread the word about Pivot, please like and subscribe if you're catching us on YouTube, leave a review on your podcast platform, or share Pivot with a friend. See you next week.