No, You're Not Imagining Things; The Times Have Changed for the Church.

Welcome to season 5 of the Pivot Podcast from Luther Seminary’s Faith+Lead!

Join Dr. Dee Stokes and Dr. Dwight Zscheile on a journey to explore the changing landscape of the Church. In today's episode, we delve into a significant cultural shift and unveil four essential pivots that can help your faith community navigate these changing times.

Discover the shifts in the Age of Association and the rise of the Age of Authenticity. We'll share real-life examples, pitfalls to avoid, and practical insights on how to adapt:

1️⃣ Pivot in Posture: From Fixing to Listening, Discerning, and Experimenting.

2️⃣ Pivot in Focus: From Membership to Discipleship.

3️⃣ Pivot in Structure: From One Shape Fits All to a Mixed Ecology.

4️⃣ Pivot in Leadership: From Clergy-Led/Lay-Supported to Lay-Led/Clergy-Supported Ministry.

Our free resource, available in the show notes, offers deeper insights into these cultural shifts and how to navigate them faithfully.

Stay tuned for future episodes as we continue to unravel the complexities of this cultural shift. Next week, we'll dig even deeper with an interview featuring Ted Smith, exploring the nuances of this transformative journey. Don't miss it!

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

Dee Stokes: You probably see in your local faith community that it might feel like doing church is harder than it used to be, that there are fewer people available to volunteer, that your congregation is less connected to your surrounding community and less connected to God and each other. The times have definitely changed. How do we understand what's going on and how do we respond? In today's episode, we're going to explore this. We're going to explore a key shift taking place in the church today. And four pivots you and your faith community can make in order to faithfully respond to the shift. Hello, everyone. I am Dr. Dee Stokes.

Dwight Zscheile: And I'm Dr. Dwight Zscheile. Welcome to the Pivot podcast from Luther Seminary's Faith+ Lead. If you're new here, this is the podcast where we talk about how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. The free download included with today's episode will give you an even deeper dive into understanding this cultural moment, the pivots you can make today and pitfalls to avoid in the process so you can find a link to it in the show notes. If you're a pastor, a lay leader, or a regional church or denominational leader, or if you'd just like to learn more about cultural shifts and the ways congregations can faithfully respond, you're in the right place. So let's dive in. So we want to begin by thinking about this cultural shift that's taking place. Christianity in America has primarily been organized really for the last two centuries around a particular institutional model, the voluntary association, that's actually rapidly breaking down in today's culture. People are dis-embedding from voluntary associations and institutions of all sorts in order to pursue individual self-expression. And this is something that's bigger than the church. It's taking place across society as a whole in America. And it started in some ways in the late 1960s, but it's really accelerated. It has a particular generational dimension to it where younger generations are much less likely to want to affiliate with, join and support voluntary associations. Now, I want to nuance that a little bit and that on the one hand, congregations and church, there's always a voluntary dimension to what they do. You know, it's not we don't live in a time of a state church where people have to join, but this basic model of voluntary association that people can freely join and support really has been the predominant model. And if you talk to people in other voluntary association organizations like scouting or veterans associations or, you know, service clubs like Rotary and things like that, 4-H, you know, you will find that they are facing some of the same patterns of institutional disaffiliation and decline that the church is facing.

Dee Stokes: I wonder why that is? So, you know, it's interesting that it is so and we're going to talk about things that people can do, but people have their own ideas about things and they have their own mindset as to what they want to do. And sometimes when you're a part of an institution, you have to be a part of the institutional vision, the institutional drive. And I think younger folks actually are interested in other things. And that may be why that they're not volunteering for some of these other organizations, the church included.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, absolutely, Dee. So I think on the one hand, there's a lot of loss involved in this shift, right? If those of us who have found those voluntary association institutions really meaningful, they're places of service, of connection, of belonging and really of meaning making, can lament genuinely their erosion and loss. On the other hand, they're also complicated, like any form of institutional church, they have certainly been exclusive in many ways. They've been vehicles for both a lot of good in the world and also some, you know, harm. And so if we look at this shift toward individual self expression, what some scholars are talking about as an age of authenticity, particularly the scholar Charles Taylor, and our guest for next week's episode, Ted Smith will will lean into this more. It's there is a freedom in the age of authenticity and individual self expression and a hunger for genuine connection that may not be mediated through these structures in the same way that are often, again, you know, hierarchical and sometimes can be really self serving. So I think there's there's a really freeing dimension to this as well as there's also the risk of people simply not ever connecting and having to go their own way.

Dee Stokes: Sure. Sure.

Dwight Zscheile: So we're going to unpack again that shift from what we might call this age of association from really the time of the American Revolution all the way up until really the late 1960s and and er. And I think there's a generational dimension where Baby Boomers in particular, you know, grew up in a culture that was highly institutionalized and fought against institutions. But still, the default is to engage and serve those voluntary institutions, whereas Gen X and younger have grown up with a very different relationship where those relationships to institutions are treated with much more skepticism, with a kind of detachment or really even in some ways actually a hostility and a really deep skepticism. So. So one of the pitfalls in this moment is for church leaders to assume that the voluntary association model of denominational church is the only way to organize the church. Of course, we know in church history that's not true, Right? There's lots of different ways to organize church, and we need to think about a very different, more broad imagination in today's world. So that leads us to the first of our four pivots that we want to invite you and other leaders around the church to consider. And that's a pivot in posture. So the temptation is that what we should focus on is fixing the voluntary association form of church of institutional church to bring it back to some previous era of glory or whatever. And you probably have, you know, experienced congregations who have a deep nostalgia for a period when, you know, there were more young people involved or people showed up and engaged in different ways. So the danger is trying to fix that old form of church can very easily miss what God is actually up to in the present moment. So the pivot needs to be from fixing, in other words, from trying to reverse a decline of institutional affiliation, participation and resources toward listening, discerning and experimenting, right? Because we have full faith that Christ's local church will endure. Yes. Even. Yes. Amen. Right. Even if the voluntary association institutional structures can't be fixed to take them back into a previous era. So the opportunity here is actually to shift our focus on discerning and joining the triune God's presence and movement in people's personal lives, daily life, and in the life of the church, the local church, and in their context, their neighborhood, which really is a pivot in posture toward presence, curiosity, deep listening and experimentation, which is what we do to learn when the answers aren't clear ahead of time.

Dee Stokes: Now, Dwight, if I was in church, I'd say, "say that again," because you just emphasized the whole point of the Pivot is that we must follow and discern the Lord's leading, not just in a church, not just in the four walls of an institution, but everywhere at work, at home, in our communities and our neighborhoods, wherever we go. And that is a major, major shift or pivot that we have to do.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, and if I could just build on that, Dee. So one of our assumptions is the Triune God is active in the world,within the gathered

Dee Stokes: Not just an assumption, not just an assumption.

Dwight Zscheile: Yes, it is a matter of faith.

Dee Stokes: Praise the Lord.

Dwight Zscheile: Amen. So. So. And yet there's been a lot of focus on, you know, how God shows up within the gathered life of the community and God shows up there, absolutely. ut in this time, where a scattering in many ways of breaking out of the boxes of how church has been done, we really need to help our people. Imagine how God is active, you know, and there's a there's a dimension to this that's really important, I think, for church leaders to to realize as well, which is in at least the late modern American culture. We live in a culture that tends to seek the good without God. And people then assume, well, we can fix this on our own, right, through our own agency so we can get really busy trying to come up with managerial solutions and trying to get more programs. Maybe people will engage. The more programs or better techniques, a better website to lure people. We can get caught up in this sort of very frantic amount of activity that actually never stops deep enough and long enough to pay attention to how God is moving and to recognize the new life that God is actually bringing forth even in this transitional period, right? And I think it's important that we what we can recognize there is a certain trajectory of institutional decline, but really it's better to think about it as a transition, right? God hasn't gone anywhere. Christianity will not disappear in our context, but God is doing a new thing that we need to pay attention to. We need to to discern, to to watch for to listen for and to to join in our local contexts.

Dee Stokes: Amen. Amen. Let's join God in what we're doing. Sounds biblical to me.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, and and that's where I think our scripts need to be biblical scripts, primarily more than just the scripts of modern managerial, you know, kind of fixing and technique, right? Which is often what I think people will sometimes assume leaders should be doing. And that's the framework that they've been formed in culturally, catechized in, if you will, when in fact we need to actually go deeper into the biblical narrative and do spiritual and theological work in this time. Now, that might sound kind of fuzzy, right, when you know you're responsible for leading a local church that can't maybe pay its bills in the same way or can't find volunteers. And there's a lot of pressure under that. I want to just name that, that this is not an easy shift. This is not an easy pivot. And the more we spend our energy trying to prop up an old structure, the more crushed we're going to be by its collapse because there isn't any quick fix to this. It can't be fixed on a deep level. So the new life is going to come through actually paying attention and helping the community pay attention to the spirit of God's movement in daily life and in the neighborhood. And that really sets up our next pivot.

Dee Stokes: So our next pivot is focus. And this is a really interesting pivot. I find myself being fascinated, but I also find that I've been preaching this for a long time, that Jesus called us, assigned us, commanded us to make disciples, not members. So inherited patterns of institutional membership often have assumed that we are discipling folks rather than being intentional about cultivating discipleship. And what is discipleship? You know, I try to tell people it's not a class we call discipleship class, Sunday school, Bible study, those kinds of things. It really is following Jesus in the power of the spirit, right? And that's not optional for us as Christians. Discipleship is being transformed into Christ's likeness, communing with Christ to become more like Him. And we can't simply just do that in a Sunday school class or in a Bible study. So churches that thrive will orient their communal culture around practices and relationships that connect faith and daily life. We keep saying this about connecting our faith to our daily life, not just when we go to church on Sundays. And also we need to answer some questions about meaning and belonging and hope and purpose. What I found is that people want to belong before they believe. And so that was not the pattern, always in church. I'm a church girl. I love growing up in church. I'll never leave the church, no matter how dysfunctional it is or has become because the church will stand. But people want to understand how to belong even before they believe what we believe. And that has to be okay for the church to embrace that. Um, this means learning God's story in Scripture and embracing and embodying a holistic gospel. Um. Congregations: What should they expect or what should pastors and leaders expect of their people? Um, some social contract around supporting institutional church or cultivating faith in daily life? I believe it's the latter: that we should cultivate a faith that transcends all of our lives, every part of our lives, our going, our doing our, our, our everyday living that we should be living sacrifices. Romans 12:1-2 tells us right? And that we should do it in our everyday living and not just once or twice a week.

Dwight Zscheile: No, absolutely. So so I just want to build on that. So I think the you know, if functionally a lot of people's experience of church has been you know, the church has asked me essentially to support it institutionally, to join, to maybe pledge to serve on a committee and again, for some people generationally in particular, that's been highly meaningful to do those things. And the focus hasn't been on how do I actually live faithfully as a follower of Jesus, as a parent, as a child, as a neighbor, as a citizen, as a as a colleague at work, you know, in all the spheres of my life. And the questions that that are emerge really from those experiences aren't really at the forefront to how the church responds. And I have to say, I've heard so many stories over the years from, you know, from everyday disciples, lay people, you know, in congregations who will just talk about how disconnected what they have to wrestle with and the questions they are carrying, you know, is from what they experience in the life of the church, right? It's just not connecting to their daily life. And so so I think this shift that you're describing is really important to say, like how do we take Jesus and following Jesus in an identity as a follower of Jesus, as at the heart of what we're focused on in what we do as church?

Dee Stokes: Christianity should be a lifestyle, right? It's not just something we do, it's actually something we live. Um, just to give a quick example, um, I was at my friend's church one time and, and we do this and we're, we're being exclusive sometimes in our language in church, right? We, we use flowery language. We use, um, I'm thinking of all kinds of examples, but, uh, I was doing a wedding one time in a methodist church. And the, the folks who were conducting the wedding, the ladies who were running it said, we're going to meet in the narthex before the service, before the wedding. And everybody looked at me and says, "What is that?" I said, The lobby or the vestibule like somebody. And we use all of this language and people come into church and feel disconnected. So I was I was at my friend's church and this is how we take membership to a different level. He he was taking up the offering and he told people that if they weren't members that they didn't have to give. And I said, "Why in the world would you do that?" Because you have, now he set it up by saying, if you give, oh, the Lord is going to open up the windows of heaven and all of these things are going to happen and he's going to bless you. And if I'm a visitor, I want that blessing too, right? Is that for members only? And so even how we conduct ourselves in worship sometimes, um, comes across like this is for certain people, it's not for other people. And so we must change even how we do that, I think.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, in, in the series of the course of this podcast, in the coming weeks, we're going to be really unpacking a little more of this question of how do you actually form disciples in contemporary culture, not just members of a voluntary association institution, right? And a couple of things on that that I think we want to keep in mind. It's a lot a lot of it is about providing really concrete, accessible practices for people to take on in daily life. And I'll just tell a quick story on that from a church that my wife and I served in Saint Paul for many years, and we had really developed a vision of what we called the way of Jesus, because we as we listen to our people, we realize they didn't have a clear picture of what actually it meant to follow Jesus in daily life. So we came up with practices in language that made sense to them, you know, things like simplicity, the practice of simplicity or the practice of discernment or finding yourself in God's story. But even that, we realized wasn't landing concretely in people's lives. And so we ied an experiment which was coming up with what we called pocket practices. And these were simple spiritual practices that you could print on a business card, you know, sized piece of paper, right? And we would do them in church together. And then we'd hand out these business cards with the practice on it for people to take home and try during the week. And we found that this had a huge impact because, you know, like this one nurse from who worked in an E.R., like she would come to church, you know, in her scrubs after her shift, and we'd say, how are you doing? And she'd pull out this "be still" prayer, you know, pocket practice. You said, this is how I get through my shift, you know? And it was landing in people's lives in ways that some of the abstractions that we kind of pastors tend to feel very comfortable with, you know, weren't actually landing.

Dee Stokes: Yeah. Wow. That's beautiful. Really beautiful. So we've talked now about two of our pivots, posture and focus, and our next pivot is structure. So going from sort of this one size fits all to a mixed ecology and just a shameless plug. You and I just finished a course on fresh expressions so you can go to our faithlead.org website and you can find that course on on fresh expressions. It is out there now so we'll plug that here. The term "church" church conjures up for most people kind of a particular institutional expression. It has to do with the building, staff, programming on Sundays, on Wednesdays or whenever else you go to church. Even how you do church, like you come in on Sundays, you actually know what you're going to do. You're going to sing a happy song. You're going to sing a sad song. You're going to take up an offering. You're going to have a sermon, an altar call, perhaps, and then you're going to leave and maybe you enter and you have coffee. And so it conjures up all of these kinds of things that are actually a little bit too narrow, not a little bit, a lot too narrow for today's context. People want more. Most of the time people are coming to church to experience intimate relationships, which actually probably do not happen in larger groups, but could happen in smaller groups. How do we get them to to be in those groups? How do we get them to really experience that kind of intimacy with other people and with God? So one size or shape does not fit all. And so we need this mixed ecology, this we need the inherited church, and then we need things branching off from the inherited church. Fresh expressions is one of them. Um, and as the director of the Seeds Project, our Seeds fellows are doing things of this nature. They're having different kinds of meetings and gatherings and using their artistic abilities. We have a lot of creatives, a lot of artists who use their abilities in arts and dance and tap and, and just being creative in spoken word and different kinds of things to give God glory and to expand the kingdom and to address these issues that we're talking about today. And so we have to go where people live, work and play. We have to be incarnational. That's a lot. That's a real big theological word. But all it means is Jesus moved into the neighborhood and so must we. We must go to where the people are instead of holding signs and having the people come to us, we must find out where the persons of peace are. We teach you that in our fresh expressions course and and teach you how to prayer walk and all of those things. But we have to listen to God and we have to understand there are different ways of doing church.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, absolutely. And so even if we think about the landscape right now and the American church, we see this shift towards smaller and larger, if you will. So there are a lot of small communities that are resiliently hanging on. Maybe they don't have a pastor or certainly a paid professional pastor, but they have a community of people. Maybe it's 20, 40 or 50 people who are are practicing the Christian thing together. They're connected. They're able to sustain their life without a lot of kind of, you know, programming and committees and structure and all of that. And on the other hand, we see this move toward, you know, megachurches that are connecting with a lot of people in today's world and not asking a lot of institutional maintenance from their members. Right. The focus tends to be in many mega-churches on faith and daily life, small groups, as providing that more intimate connection. And a lot of staff to do actually the institutional maintenance. But it's that midsize congregation, that program size congregation that has been predominant in American context in many ways coming out of the 20th century, I think that's under particular stress right now. And so I think we should we should look at the landscape and say we need mega-churches, we need micro churches. There's definitely a resurgence in interest in micro churches, even people coming out of megachurches and starting micro church movements. Um, we need churches of all sizes and shapes and they belong together. It's not a zero sum, you know, one size fits all competition. But actually, if we want to reach all the people in our context, we're going to need a lot of different expressions. And that's where the Fresh Expressions movement, which emerged in the UK where there's an inherited structure of traditional congregations of a parish system that's simply not connecting with the vast majority of people in the neighborhood, right in the parish, that they realized we're not going to get rid of those. They have a place. And alongside them and out of them, we need church in, you know, cafes and connected to schools and where people are, you know, doing hobbies or playing sports or have particular passions or showing up in particular community spaces. And that all belongs together, right? So this idea of a mixed ecology is a big shift, particularly for denominational churches that in the 20th century tended to embrace a highly standardized model to the point where, again, some denominations even made available standard architectural blueprints for that mid-size program church from the denominational office. So you didn't even have to hire an architect. You could just get it. You know, it's why a lot of churches look the same, right, kind of cookie cutter kind of franchise ish model, standard hymn books, standard worship resources, standard Sunday school curriculum, standard clergy training. You know, that was all a product of a mid-twentieth century model that, again, at the time worked pretty well and isn't working for us today, right? We need much more diversity, much more contextualized or incarnate, you know, local expressions of Christian community.

Dee Stokes: And the pandemic should have changed that. I heard a bishop say that we all have a small church now and we all have a global church, which is interesting, right? It became smaller, but it also became larger because we all had to use technology to get the word out. An example of what we're talking about. I was coaching, um, a pastor in Ohio several years ago, and I want to say the model for church has been that the vision comes from the pastor and then everybody else kind of grabs a hold of that vision and kind of runs with it and volunteers. But what is always been prevalent is that the folks in the pews actually have ideas too, and they actually have vision and they actually hear from God. And so as I was coaching this pastor, she had a woman come to her and she says, I was at another church and I had this idea and she was a lay person. And she said the pastor just wouldn't let me do it. And I want to know if you'll let me do it kind of thing. And she told her what it was and she allowed her to do it. And it became a tremendous hit. The the ministry, which was out of the church, was a prom dress ministry. As we all know, proms are a big deal in America and prom dresses are expensive. And so this woman wanted to collect prom dresses and give them out to people in their community and they did it out of the church. And so it brought people to the church. It got people connected to the church, and that ended up being even a fresh expression within the fresh expression that the pastor was going to was doing already herself. And so my point is that the people in the pews have vision, have ideas and hear from God, and we must address those and allow them to do what they do so we can't squeeze them out of what's going on in God's kingdom.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah, and that really does lead us into our next pivot.

Dee Stokes: It does. Yes. Leadership. Leadership matters, people. Come on, somebody say amen. Leadership matters. It always matters. And so there's this pivot now from clergy led lay supported to lay, lay, clergy supported, and yes, set us up for it. So there are increasing numbers of local churches who are already led by choice or necessity because of the shrinking number of clergy. So as the professionalized model erodes, the future will be largely laid, led and clergy supported rather than clergy led and lay supported. So here's a huge opportunity for us to reimagine leadership and to decentralize leadership. Right? In ways that faithfully mobilize all the gifts of the body of Christ, all the gifts we need, all of the gifts working together for maturity, right? Ephesians 4 tells us that God has given these gifts to the church, not just to clergy. But God has given gifts to all of us, to everyone in the church, and we need to utilize those gifts together for the maturity of the church, for the work of the ministry until we all become mature in Christ Jesus. And so this is a. This almost is a shift that we cannot wait on any longer. Like this is happening. But it needs to happen even more. And here's what's happening that I see even in my own denomination, that we're afraid. We're afraid of this shift. Right? And maybe part of the fear is because it will shift the financial model. Which is another pivot. But we won't talk about that today. But it will shift the financial model and people are afraid of that. Pastors in particular, who have been paid full time by churches and all of those things, some of that will go away. But we need a decentralized model and we need to support the lay folks who have vision, who have dreams. And we need to come up with a plan as clergy as to how to do that.

Dwight Zscheile: Yeah. So, you know, in some ways we're catching up to what the Holy Spirit is doing in both other parts of the world where the church is growing. You think about many places in the majority world there are, you know, local evangelists and catechists who are functionally leading, you know, local expressions of church, and then a pastor who oversees maybe a dozen of those and, you know, can't be in every one of those local churches, every week, obviously. And so it's a very much a leadership multiplication model, a grassroots empowerment kind of model. And that's been the case in immigrant and marginalized communities in American history and today as well. So this professionalized model of ministry is, you know, is one way to think about how to organize ministry. But if it's, if it's a kind of monopolizing of the ministry. Right. Where, again, the expectation is people's job is to, you know, support the institution and the professional clergy do the ministry for them that has kind of run its course, right? So we need to have a much more of a biblical model. I think of the whole gifts of the body of Christ being empowered and set, set loose. And then if you are a pastor and you're listening to this thinking, well, wow, what do I do then? Like, what is how does my job shift? You know, I think there's really important work to be done in equipping and releasing those lay leaders, right? So in the micro community movement, the leadership is lay lead, you know, and there are pastors who oversee, who equip, who connect and encourage and mentor and coach raise up those leaders. It's really important work. Fresh expressions are mostly lay led. An there's a really important role for clergy to be equipping and discerning and coaching and all of that with those lay leaders, right? So it's a shift in in what the role is more from being a coach, being an equipper, vision caster, a trainer and educator, than to being a doer who kind of does all the ministry oneself.

Dee Stokes: Yeah, we need it. We need it now.

Dwight Zscheile: We do. We do. So. So I think one of the things we want to wonder with you all is our listeners in this podcast is what is the Holy Spirit doing in, in this, this landscape in our time, right? Where we have this cultural shift from what we might call this age of association of Voluntary association, forms of church that again served well for a couple centuries and has begun to really break down in this age of authenticity or individualization. And God, What are you doing in the midst of this, right? What are you bringing forth, right? As people increasingly disconnect from institutional church to to be on a journey of self discovery. Right. And there's some real risks in that and some downsides in that. And we'll be unpacking that. And we want to wonder, God, what are you doing in this? And so so the four pivots, just to remind you again that we've highlighted today and it will be unpacking in the coming weeks, are a pivot in posture from fixing to listening, discerning and experimenting, a pivot in focus from membership to discipleship, a pivot in structure from clergy led from one size fits all to a mixed ecology and a pivot in leadership from clergy led, lay supported to lay led, clergy supported ministry. So the Pivot podcast is going to dig deep into each of these, and we're going to do it with thought leaders and scholars and local practitioners from a variety of contexts who are wrestling with living into these pivots in today's world. So if you want a deeper understanding of these shifts, download the free resource in the show notes for episode 46. So next week we're going to feature an interview with Ted Smith, who has spent a lot of time digging deeper into the nuances of the cultural shift that we've been describing today. So if if you like us, feel more equipped to face a challenge when you know more of the history underneath it and really what's going on, you won't want to miss Episode 47. Thanks for tuning in and we will see you next week.

Dee Stokes: See you next week.