American pastors want things fast, large, and famous... but the kingdom of God comes slowly, in small and mostly unrecognized ways." In this paradigm-shifting conversation, Dr. Michael W. Goheen challenges our deeply held assumptions about church growth and success. Through the story of a remarkable turnaround in a dying congregation, Goheen demonstrates what happens when a church stops chasing quick fixes and begins to question its cultural captivity to growth metrics.

Join hosts Dwight Zscheile and Terri Elton as they explore with Goheen how Western cultural idolatries shape our approach to church leadership, what we can learn from Lesslie Newbigin's missionary insights, and how ordinary church practices can be reoriented toward authentic renewal. Whether you're leading a growing congregation or struggling with decline, this episode will help you discern the difference between cultural definitions of success and genuine participation in God's mission.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• "Foolishness to the Greeks" by Lesslie Newbigin
• "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society" by Lesslie Newbigin
• "The Church and Its Vocation" by Michael Goheen
• "Becoming a Missionary Church" by Michael Goheen
• "The Imperfect Pastor" by Zack Eswine
• Dr. Goheen's website with free resources https://missionworldview.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Q4 Webinar: The Path from “I” to “We”: Extending Christian Community to the Neighborhood

Michael Goheen: Modern Western culture is every bit as religious and idolatrous as Hindu culture, as Muslim culture, as Buddhist culture. But the reality that he faced, and this is why that theologian believed he was somewhat negative, because he was constantly trying to push back against the myths of neutrality and the myths of a Christian culture. The reality is, most people don't believe that living in Western culture, and that is what's made. It makes it so dangerous for Newbigin. It's not that humanism, or what I call confessional humanism, is more dangerous than Islam or Hinduism. It's just that it's in some ways a Christian heresy. It's taking a lot of the dimensions of the Christian faith and cutting it off from the roots of the gospel and what it's, and making it seem fairly safe.

Dwight Zscheile: Hello everyone. Welcome to the Pivot podcast, where we explore how the church can faithfully navigate a changing world. I'm Dwight Zscheile and I'm joined by Terri Elton.

Terri Elton: We who live in the Western societies in the US are inheritors of a complicated legacy in terms of the church's relationship with culture. All around us, we see churches caught in identities and narratives that seem to be mostly coming from contemporary ideologies, rather than the gospel of Jesus, both on the right and the left. Sometimes people outside the church look and see the surrounding culture reflected in divisive ways, rather than the love and hope of Jesus. Embodying and bearing faithful witness to the gospel within any cultural context is not easy, and it seems especially fraught today.

Dwight Zscheile: That's right, Terri, and that's why we're so excited to welcome Doctor Michael Goheen to the show. Doctor Goheen is one of today's deepest thinkers about the relationship between gospel and culture. He's a leading scholar of Lesslie Newbigin and the author of many books on theology, mission, and scripture, including one of my favorites, The Church and Its Vocation, which is on Lesslie Newbigin's Missionary ecclesiology and the more recent Becoming a Missionary Church. Doctor Goheen is Professor of Missional Theology and director of Theological Education at the Missional Training Center in Phoenix, and professor of theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He's a pastor and church planter. Mike, welcome to the Pivot podcast.

Michael Goheen: Great to.

Michael Goheen: Be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, so let's start with a bit of your background. Can you tell us about your own journey into missional theology?

Michael Goheen: After seminary, I started life, my professional life as a church planter, and I was planting a church on the edge of Toronto and of course, the soil for church planting in Canada is much harder than it is in the United States. It's a much slower process. You don't have the Christian background that you have in the United States in the same way. And so as I was trying to plant that church, I went to Westminster Seminary and I was in a fairly confessional Presbyterian church, the Presbyterian Church of America. And what was guiding my own thinking at that time, as a young church planter was, on the one hand, the tradition of the Presbyterian Church, the Westminster Confession of Faith. And so I appreciated that confessional tradition. I appreciated that the confession was trying to be rooted in Scripture, rooted in theology, rooted in the tradition, but unfortunately written in the 17th century was just utterly irrelevant Uh, to to Canadian people. Um, but the other spirit at work, if I can say that in the Presbyterian Church at that time was the very pragmatic church growth tradition of the 70s. And that was extremely relevant. But it was theologically weak to say the to say it even strongly. And so that I found myself jumping backwards and forwards on the between those two things. And, you know, the relevance of church growth, the tradition of, of the Presbyterian tradition. And so I entered a PhD program. And in that PhD program, I started in systematic theology. The person who was my main professor and advisor was an ecclesiologist who had studied with G.C. Berkouwer, and I took a lot of courses on biblical ecclesiology, theological ecclesiology, Historical ecclesiology. Ecumenical ecclesiology. And I was intrigued. And I find myself with growing concerns. What is this thing called Ecclesia church that I'm even planting and trying to now, by now, trying to pastor. And I was really confused, to be honest with you. How can, on the one hand, I make a gospel that's relevant, but being faithful to the biblical theological tradition, that was my tension. An important turning point in my life was reading Leslie Newbigin's foolishness to the Greeks. And those first 20 chapters were 20 pages were life changing. I thought, what in the world is he saying here? He was talking about a missional dynamic that I could not get my head around. I did not understand. I read those 20 pages over and over again, trying to get my head around them and trying to share with my wife, listen to this. I don't quite get what he's saying here, but this is exciting. And I found an ecclesiology which was, on the one hand, deeply relevant to culture, but on the other hand, deeply rooted in Scripture and therefore critical of culture. And it hooked me. And I read gospel to the plural in the plural society next, and a few other books. And then I did something I would never that I've suggested to any of my PhD students. Never do this. I changed my direction. I was doing systematic theology. I moved to missiology. I had to put my dissertation on the back burner for seven years to understand this new discipline, called missiology, and read deeply into it, its history, and so on. And so it took me about 7 or 8 years longer to write my dissertation, but it was worth it. And that whole journey into missional theology then, would bear a lot of fruit later. And maybe we can talk about that later. But that's my journey into missional theology and ecclesiology.

Terri Elton: So I love that. Mike. I similar story around serving churches and the church growth movement and had questions deeper than that and found myself becoming a missiologist as well. And there's not a lot of Lutheran missiologists even at a Lutheran seminary, I might add. But I too, really was taken by Leslie Newbigin. Tell our listeners a little bit about who Leslie Newbigin is. Give a little bit more about that and why Leslie Newbigin's work still matters for us here today.

Michael Goheen: That's a that's a great question because after all, he died in the 90s. So that we're talking about over a quarter of a century ago. Right. And almost three decades ago, I could start by quoting a Princeton, uh missiologist who wrote a book review. He said he looked at Leslie than. He begins life and he says his experience is scarcely been paralleled. There's very few people who've had the experience that he has. And to me, most most people who've studied Newbigin have no idea of the breadth and the depth of his own experience. Um, that is significant. I think that, but it's hard to say all that he was, you know, if I say he's a missionary in India, well, there's lots of missionaries in India. But he spent 40 years there, and he deeply rooted in that, in that world for 40 years. I could say he's an ecumenical leader in the International Missionary Council, as well as the World Council of Churches that gave him a wide opportunity to travel to many parts of the world. He was a bishop in the Indian church. Um, after that. And that gave him a in a very important city and bringing the gospel to bear in public life. That was significant. But I think his biggest gift is maybe captured in language that I learned from Wilbert Schenck. Wilbert Schenck spoke of this language called the blessed reflex or reflexive action. Apparently, Wilbert says, it was very common in the 19th century. At the end of the 19th century. It was lost in the early 20th century as it got as the mission got tied up more and more with colonialism in the United States. And so I think that that language is probably not familiar to most people. But the idea of the blessed reflex is that the hope was that missionaries in their missionary experience, would understand a certain dynamic of the gospel and culture, and be able to bring that dynamic back to Western culture and enable people, the church in Western culture, to see their culture and their mission with a new set of eyes. And I think that is his incredible gift, that he's able to see Western culture with a new set of eyes. But even then, you still have a lot of people who've done that. What makes Newbigin stand out? And I'd say 2 or 3 things. I think number one, he was absolutely brilliant. I mean, there's few people that had the mind that he had. It was almost seemed like a photographic memory, and he was deeply brilliant. But again, I remember again, Wilbur Shenk saying, no, people have not taken account of just how smart he is. I was thinking to myself, there's a lot of smart people out there. Um, but then there's a second thing that is not so well known. This man was deeply, deeply rooted in Christ. One of the things that is quite remarkable when you study in his archives, I've studied in his various archives, and most people don't see these, but he's got numerous Bible studies and numerous sermons. He was a very sophisticated exegete and preacher and and has written a lot on Scripture. And also his prayer life was was very well known in India. and I asked him quite a bit about his own devotional life and how he oriented himself to Christ day by day. And I could share some of those stories, but it was just remarkable. His own spiritual practices and rhythms, how deeply rooted he was in Christ. And so I think it's that brilliance, that missionary experience, but mostly that wisdom that came from being so deeply rooted in the gospel that caused him to have a remarkable insight into culture. And I would just add to that. Well, that he understood well, and I think this is what makes him so relevant today. He understood the deeply religious foundations of culture, what he called the hidden credo of a culture. And he understood deeply that there is a deep religious foundation of culture in the West the myth, the myths of a Christian, or a neutral culture that cause caused us to miss that deeply religious foundation that we're as our. The United States is religious as any Muslim or Hindu culture. And so I think that he understood that. And by driving down to the depths of this hidden credo, he remains relevant today, because that credo remains very much. It's the the unfolding story is changing, but that those deep beliefs have remained. And I think that's what enables him to be very relevant today.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, we're going to want to explore that very idea a bit more in a minute, but I want to just kind of back up a bit to foolishness to the Greeks. And one of the statements that Newbigin makes in that book that's always been so transformational for me is when he says that, you know, there can be no culture free gospel, that the gospel is from beginning to end to end, always embodied in culture. But it also calls into question the presuppositions of every culture. And so, so newbigin I think, seems to be one of the the more helpful voices to to really stand at that intersection of gospel and culture in ways that I think in the American church in particular. But generally in Western Christianity, we often are blind to some of the ways in which culture is necessarily present in how we think about the gospel, but also is is distorting our understanding of the gospel. And so I'd love to have to have you kind of tease that out a little bit more, and kind of how Newbigin can help us think about that relationship of gospel and culture, and maybe some of the blind spots that we contend to have in the church.

Michael Goheen: Yeah, I think one of the things Newbigin, I remember a theologian one time at a conference saying to me, you know, Newbigin just sounds like a cranky old man that's criticizing everything in Western culture. And I said to him, I said, it's clear you don't know Newbigin because Newbigin starting point was a love for the place, being for the place, not being against, but being for the place, seeking its shalom, living fully into that place and trying to contribute to the humanization of that place. And so that was his starting point. But he recognized that the danger of living into a place was the fact that idolatry at the foundation of every culture permeates every part of that culture. And so he understood well something that we don't, I think, in the West usually, and that missionaries and third World Christians are helping us understand that the deepest foundations of culture are idolatrous. And so he was constantly challenging the myths of a Christian culture, the myths of a neutral culture, that we understand these, this idolatrous, idolatrous depth. And so his question, how do you love and live into a place embodying and sharing that good news for the sake of the world, without taking on the idolatry that was his tension? Because there's that danger is once you see the idolatry, you're trying so hard to be faithful and avoid that cultural idolatry that you fear involvement and you want to withdraw. But then, on the other hand, as you get as you become deeply involved in the cultures, there's that danger of syncretism, of accommodating the gospel to the idolatry of the place. And so he wrestled with that tension, I think at this deepest level, at least for me, how to resolve it. And he himself uses this story, this story, to say how he understood how to resolve that tension. He talks about how early in his career as an evangelist, he wanted to communicate the significance of Jesus to Hindus. And so the question is what word do you use? Because language, like all cultural forms, is has both good insight as well as deeply idolatrous formation. So how do you use words to communicate the significance of Jesus? So he says, as a young missionary, he thought, well, Swami, that's a good word. Swami means Lord. And what what's better to say than Jesus is Lord like Kurios in the New Testament? But then he started realizing there are 30 million lords or swamis in Hindu religion according to one tradition, and therefore that word doesn't convey the significance of Jesus. So we tried another word, avatar. Avatar sounds great because that's God incarnate who's come in the flesh to establish the reign of righteousness and justice. Boy, doesn't that sound good for the coming of Jesus into the world to establish the kingdom of God? But then he started realizing that that was taken up into the cyclical worldview of the Hindus, rather than the more linear worldview, a historical worldview of the of the Old Testament story. And so he just and he started he tried a bunch of other words, and each word was shaped by the Hindu worldview and could not portray the significance and uniqueness of Jesus Christ. So he says, okay, I know what I'll do. I'll just talk about Jesus. I'll just share the story of Jesus. And he says he watched the crowds melt away, because when just talking about Jesus in this transient world is capitulating to the Maya, the Maya of Hindu, the Hindu religion, that this world is transient and ephemeral and it doesn't matter. And he says, what do I do? There's no words not shaped by the Hindu worldview. And if I use any of them, it distorts the good news. But he says, in language and in every other cultural form, you got to start with what you have, and you got to fill that cultural form with the content of the good news. And he loved pointing to the Gospel of John, especially John one. He wrote a commentary on John and he says, this is what John does. He says John is the best communicator of the gospel ever in the history of the church, because John took language like the logos, a great pagan concept that enabled and logos showed the religious longing of the heart to understand where order came from. But it was an idolatrous notion. But John comes along and fills that term logos with new meaning. It's no longer this rational, ethereal substance or something of the Greek worldview. Now it's the person of Jesus. And as the creator who's brought order into the world. And so he says, that's the way contextualization goes, not just with language, but all of our forms. What we have to do is we have to live into the forms of our culture, but recognize the idolatry and try to give new shape and new form and form, what Richard Bauckham calls a countercultural alternative, a way of being distinctive in those areas that's familiar to our colleagues and our our neighbors and our friends, but at the same time challenging to their very notion. So I think that's where he has a lot of help in teaching us the the how to resolve what he called this, this, this tension. He learned that language, I'm pretty sure, from Hendrik Kramer where tension, he says if we don't, if we're not experiencing tension between the idolatry of our culture and the good news and the biblical story. If we're not experiencing that tension, he says, we're going to become salt that has lost its savor, and we're going to lose that sense of being good news for the sake of the world.

Terri Elton: Yeah, that's really helpful. Thanks for that. And one of the things for me that newbigin is really significant is turning and taking those learnings and bringing them back to the Western society. Right, and shining the light on. And it was a time in missiology that we were thinking only as missiology as sending or, you know, in that kind of a posture. And this was a kind of look at your home base kind of response. Right. So say more. Newbigin once described modern or Western culture as the greatest foe to the gospel has ever faced. And and I think this seems strange, but it gets at, I think, some of the things you've said about some of the assumptions we come in with. So can you say more about that and what that means for us as we think about this work today?

S4: Yeah.

Michael Goheen: That's good. I'm just talking about this last night with my students. Um, modern Western culture is every bit as religious and idolatrous as Hindu culture, as Muslim culture, as Buddhist culture. But the reality that he faced, and this is why that theologian believed he was somewhat negative, because he was constantly trying to push back against the myths of neutrality and the myths of a Christian culture. The reality is, most people don't believe that living in Western culture, and that is what's made. It makes it so dangerous for Newbigin. It's not that humanism, or what I call confessional humanism, is more dangerous than Islam or Hinduism. It's just that it's in some ways a Christian heresy. It's Is taking a lot of the dimensions of the Christian faith and cutting it off from the roots of the gospel and what it's, and making it seem fairly safe. Um, it that's what makes it dangerous. It marginalizes the gospel off in the private realm and then allows this humanism. And this is especially true in the United States. It allows this humanism to shape the public life of culture and people. Christians are quite comfortable with that. You know, a muslim, a Christian living in Saudi Arabia would not be comfortable with saying, okay, the gospel is in my public life and the Sharia law that can govern the public square, and we're quite happy with that. And yet, American Christians would be willing to say that because of a sense of the neutral Christian nature of culture. And I use an example to try to shock people into this and saying, most people are. Most, many people are just willing to send their children to a public school without stopping and thinking that this is a catechetical training grounds that John Dewey, the father of public education, had a very he was very clear about his religious vision for public schools and what it could do to form people for the humanist tradition. He's very clear about that. And so my point is not that people shouldn't be involved in the public school. They should both as teachers and sending their kids there, but they should be aware that their kids are being catechized within that tradition. And the question is, how can we help form our kids catechetical at home and at church in the Christian story over against the way they're being formed in the Western story? So what, when he said, is the greatest foe the gospel ever faced, it's often maybe somewhat like the Gnosticism that Irenaeus faced, faced where it takes good Christian language, righteousness, justice, forms it in a different story, and then cuts it off from the gospel. And then what you have is you've got a culture that seems to be somewhat Christian, or at least neutral, therefore it's safe. That's what makes it so dangerous.

Terri Elton: Yeah, the domestication of the gospel just takes out all the radical nature of of what Jesus said or what we actually profess. So thank you for that.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, and it seems like one of the dimensions of that in modern Western culture is this public private split. And in Newbigin was really emphatic about the gospel as public truth and truth as a person, not an idea. So I wonder if you could help us understand those things a bit more.

Michael Goheen: I hope.

Michael Goheen: So. Um, I remember one time as a as a brand new Christian. I was talking to the best professor I ever had. Uh, a Jewish rabbi who was teaching, uh, teaching Jewish history at Florida Atlantic University. And he said to me, the difference between the Jewish and the Christian faith is the source of reliable truth. He says, we as Jews believe that the source of reliable truth is found in a person and historical events. And the the narrative of those events forming a story. That's what we believe to be ultimate truth. But you Christians believe that truth. He says, ah, it's very similar to Greek thought. You believe that truth is found in ideas that are outside of history. And as a brand new Christian at that time, I just nodded my head and say, well, he must be right because he, you know, and I didn't challenge it, didn't think. And it wouldn't be until I started studying ridderbos in, in in seminary, but then later Newbigin where he makes this exact point. He says the difference between a Christian vision of truth and a Western humanist vision of truth is the source of reliable truth. But his point, his point was exactly the same as the rabbi's point. He says truth is found in a person and in an unfolding story of what that person is doing in history, culminating in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the fullest revelation of that story. And in the events of his incarnation, his death, and his resurrection. And he says that stands over against the idea of truth as ideas that stand above history. He was strong about that, and he believed that this this was one of the problems we had in the Christian church, and I understood. I remember that story, I remember. Okay, the difference we have with Jews is not the source of reliable truth. In a way, it's where the clue is to reading that story. Is it the Exodus or the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ? But we have the same understanding of the story. So his notion of truth was that the Bible tells the true story of the whole world and the language that he used about Jesus. It's very carefully chosen in the title of one of his books. And I think it's I think it's brilliant when you start to think about it in light of pluralism, he says, there is a finality to Jesus Christ. An historical finality in Jesus is the fullest revelation of God and his purpose for the entire creation. That's the good news. And if God has revealed and accomplished his will for the entire world, then either that's true or it's not. And if it is true, it has significance for every human being at every time, in every time, at every time in history, in every part of the world. It's true for all people. And the story that is being told is the story of the Creator God, not a religious story that belongs to some small tradition, but it's telling the true story of the whole world that begins in creation and ends in the new creation and centered in the finality of this man, Jesus Christ. Therefore, he was deeply concerned about this fact value dichotomy at the heart of Western culture that made the gospel in the biblical story tastes, values, opinions. Kind of like, you know, I love chocolate ice cream and Dwight loves vanilla ice cream. And I say to Dwight, well, chocolate ice cream is the truth. And Dwight kindly just smiles and says, you got your categories wrong. You don't tell me your taste is the truth. But that's how people say when you say Jesus is the truth. You're enforcing your taste and preference on me rather than telling me the truth. And Newbiggin say, If Jesus Christ truly is the author of history and will be the judge at the end of history, this is a pretty important fact that people need to know about to live in this world. And so he stood against this public private fact value, faith, knowledge, religion, science kind of dichotomy that has engulfed our culture. And so he purposely chose this language. And he used to like in the 60s, he spoke of the gospels, a secular announcement. He was stealing the word secular from the 1960s. It's a secular announcement. Well, then he changed his language when the word public started becoming important in the 80s. And he says it's a public truth. In other words, the gospel is telling us about what God has done for the entire world. And this is true for all people at all times, in all places. And so that's why he used the language of the gospel as public truth.

Terri Elton: So let's turn now. Many of our listeners are leading congregations or some local expression of church. What can you say to our church leaders that are leading those places? And if they want to really be cultivating this missional posture, because at some point it's just got to hit the it's just got to land, right?

Michael Goheen: First of all, there's no shortcuts.

Terri Elton: I was going to say it's hard work. Is that what you were going to say?

Michael Goheen: Yeah, there's no shortcuts. And I think of one of our one of my colleagues who teaches for us Here is a fellow named Zack Eswine, and he's written a book called The Imperfect Pastor. And he says, American pastors want things fast, large, and famous. And I would add easy. And he says, but you look in the in the Bible, and the kingdom of God comes slowly, small and in mostly unrecognized ways, and I would say difficult ways. And so I think that's the first thing that fostering a missional posture is going to be slow. It's going to come to a lot of small, mostly unnoticed actions. I think that's the first thing to say. But let me I don't know how much of how much to tell my story here, but I think this maybe is important. I taught a course at Calvin Seminary in 1999, just as I finished my dissertation, and I'm spelling this out. This is what it means to be church in Western culture. And I'm trying to figure this out and, and and all of a sudden, I see students coming up to me with six hours left in class and they said, okay, this is I've never heard this before. This is exciting. What does this look like? And I mean, that's what people are asking, what does this look like? And so I had six hours left. What do I say for six hours of class. And so what I did is David Letterman was in style. So I pulled out my David Letterman and I said ten things I would do differently if I church planted and pastored again. Those ten became 13. And I kid you not, this is, um, at the end of the second one of those classes where we're driving home. My wife was with me. She's been in the class and she says, boy, we did everything wrong when we church planted and pastor, didn't we? And I said, yeah, we did. And she said, boy, I'd love to. Church planter and pastor again. And I said, well, not me. I said, that's not for me. But the very next day I got a call from a broken down church and in, um, that was, I mean, it was dying. It was down to 50 people, older people. It was in the middle of a very poor part of Hamilton. And they said, we're just losing people fast. We can't get a pastor to come. We heard you say that. If you if we close this church, that we have no right to call ourselves the Christian Reformed Church, a missionary church. So if you believe that, then will you come as the preaching pastor? And since we can't get a pastor to bring any one of your students that you want because we can't get anybody anyway. So I called two of the best students I had. Both of them were interested. What would it look like to take an older, dying, more mainline kind of church into a missional, into a missional life? And so we went to that church. And to make a long story short, we started with those ten things which had now become 13, and we started working with them, and we started asking, what did it mean to implement these various things within the church. And make a long story short, what we saw in the next decade was the church explode with mostly conversion growth, where we were able to deal, have some pretty dramatic stories with some people that came to Christ. One of the biggest drug dealers in the city, coming to faith in Christ, and we saw had some pretty dramatic things. I've never seen God work like that in my life and may never see it again. And but it was quite exciting. But what we were asking ourselves is what I learned from this dissertation of Newbiggin. Does this have any feet on the ground for a church that is dying in the middle of the city and one of the poorest areas of Hamilton? And so I can't go through all those 10 or 13 things would take a long time. But I would I would say things like, we we attended to worship. How can we make sure that every part of our worship is orienting people to the world and presenting a God that's bigger than the gods of our culture, including the Lord's Supper, for example. How do we orient people to the world constantly? Uh, Sunday by Sunday, by Sunday, in every part of our worship. And we looked at the reformed liturgy we had, which was a fairly liturgical church, and we asked how to orient people to the world. We started a sermon series on the biblical story. And we the way I tell the biblical story, it's deeply missional, and we preach that for two years. And that began to orient people to the to the world. We started a discipleship program and increased the number of small groups the way we did church member, church membership. We started making it much more difficult to become a member and started demanding more as people came into the church. And so shockingly, that didn't hurt us in terms of numbers one bit. I think it helped. And so we started to disciple people and helping them understand their culture, helping them understand what it meant to be a missional people. We started looking at training people for their callings. We started doing various things on helping them understand culture, reflecting on their missional identity. In other words, we started implementing all these various things that I learned from Newbigin. And the reality is we saw something happen faster than we ever expected, because I had an opportunity to do this again ten years later in the Vancouver area. But the church wasn't so broken down. It was much healthier, and we didn't see this kind of explosive growth. We didn't see what we saw was gradual renewal that we appreciated, but nothing so clear. But to me, it's it's not so much looking for new things Sometimes missional church literature reminds me of that old church growth leader literature. What is the next new thing for the structures and the leadership? That's going to be a bang, and it's going to make a have a fast, large, famous missional church. And I think that's not what it's about. It's about taking the normal practices of the church, preaching the Lord's Supper, worship, discipleship, fellowship, and reorienting it in a new way towards the world. In other words, nourishing God's people for the sake of the world and finding ways to remind them constantly of that in discipleship, in worship, and so on. So the thing is, there's nothing there's there's no silver bullet, there's no shortcuts, there's no nothing exciting. You know, I think Americans love things that are new, shiny and exciting and that will help us quickly. There's none of that. It's just rethinking all the aspects of what it means to be church in a missional way, to orient the people for the sake of the world. And then I would just finish with the extreme importance of prayer. Um, newbigin's. Some of Newbigin's strongest stuff that he wrote was on prayer, and the man himself was a deep prayer. And, uh, you know, he would say, you can't have a missional church unless you are praying, unless prayer is at the very heart of that church. But, of course, pragmatic North Americans prayer that doesn't that seems like a waste of time when you can be putting out energy. And I think that, you know, prayer is going to be extremely important. So sorry I can't offer a silver bullet.

Terri Elton: No, I actually want to tie what you just said to where you started. If if it's an ecclesial identity crisis, right? Then this is a different type of catechesis, right? It's a different type of formation to this new kind of understanding of church.

Michael Goheen: And if I can say something to that, um, I lost over the last 12 years, I spent a lot, a lot of time looking at the early church's formation process, especially the first two years before baptism. And in many ways, we've oriented our missional theology here at Phoenix after that, because what they were doing in those first two years is, number one, saying this is the gospel. Number two, this is the biblical story. Look at Irenaeus's Catechism. This is the biblical story centered in the gospel. This is the West. This is the Roman story that you've come out of as pagans. And this is not your story anymore. This is your new identity in this biblical story. And what we want to see is we want to see you change and become like Christ, because we are missionally oriented to the world. And if we are not like that, then people are not going to join our ranks. And so there was a sense of the missional identity of God's people. There was a sense of the of the story that shaped our identity, a sense of not being shaped by the cultural story and forming people over against that idolatry for the sake of mission. It's that kind of discipleship that is so essential. And if I had time, I'd go through and say, show how so many of those elements are missing in our discipleship today. And I think that's I've just finished a book on that, and I started it as an academic book. And then I narrowed it down to pastors, and I said, no, no, this has got to be for the laity. This has got to be for Bible studies, where I look at gospel, biblical story, missional church, and a missionary encounter with culture at a level where young where new Christians can come to understand those things. Because I think that's what's at the heart of early church discipleship.

Dwight Zscheile: Well, we'll be very excited to hear more about that book and to read it when it comes out. But I just want to, as we wrap up note, something really important that you're inviting us to, which is a deep reframing for church leaders of what the work is. So, you know, I think a lot of churches are caught in this very modern Western temptation to try to fix and manage and solve it ourselves. Right? Because underneath that modern Western creed, if you will, is this deep assumption that we can save ourselves. But moving to a posture of prayer is the antidote to that. It is the the, the moment at which we turn over our lives to God and trust in God's agency. And so for our our viewers and listeners who are feeling perhaps worn out by trying to fix or maybe exhausted or kind of at wit's end with some of how the culture has even shaped our leadership narratives and frameworks. I invite you to into that posture of prayer, which I think is what we all need to be practicing these days in a much different and deeper way. And then to be much more reflective about how the myths of our culture are, in fact, shaping us personally and communally as church. Because unless we have this gospel and culture question in a much more direct way, you know, we will spend another generation trying to manage the decline of these institutions, and we will miss the great opportunity to follow God into the future that God is, has promised, and is bringing forth. So thank you, Doctor Goheen, for this framing for us. Yeah.

Michael Goheen: You're welcome. Good to be with you. Thank you. Yeah.

Terri Elton: I appreciate your expertise Notice in Leslie Newbigin and Missional Theology, and the way you've invited us to freshly bring that into the 21st century, into our challenges today. If people wanted to find out more about your work or learn more from you, is there a place they can go to online?

Michael Goheen: Yeah, I do have a.

Michael Goheen: Website and it's going to be it's going to be getting better, I hope. I've put a lot of resources on there for free. Um, it's missional worldview, one word mission worldview.com.

Dwight Zscheile: Wonderful.

Dwight Zscheile: 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 or if you're listening, head to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It really helps.

Terri Elton: And as always, the best compliment you can give us is if you liked this episode of pivot is to share it with a friend. So for this week, I'm Terri Elton, with Dwight Zscheile signing off.

Faith+Lead voiceover: The Pivot podcast is a production of Luther Seminary's Faith+Lead. Faith+Lead is an ecosystem of theological resources and training designed to equip Christian disciples and leaders to follow God into a faithful future. Learn more at faithlead.org.