“When Church Stops Working” with Andrew Root
Show Notes:
This episode of The Weight is with previous guest Dr. Andrew Root. He joined Eddie and Chris in 2021 for a discussion about the religious lives of younger generations. In today’s conversation, Andy talks about how the decline in mainline Christianity in the United States is a result of a lack of faithful imagination in a secular world. God is no longer seen as a living, breathing being still working in the world. Individual churches have muddied the waters by focusing on their own story, mission, and vision, instead of simply telling God’s story. He offers the idea of churches living into a watchword instead of building ministry around a mission statement.
Andy (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a writer and researcher who focuses on theology, ministry, and culture. His most recent books include When the Church Stops Working (coauthored with Blair Bertrand), Churches and the Crisis of Decline, and The Congregation in a Secular Age.
Resources:
Follow Andy on Twitter and Facebook
Find all of Andy’s books here
Listen and subscribe to Andy’s podcast, “When The Church Stops Working,” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Transcript:
Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Eddie Rester. I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 00:04
Today we're talking with Andrew Root. He is a writer. He works at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. He teaches classes on theology and ministry, youth ministry, culture. And he's written a great book, 'When the Church Stops Working," and today we're going to talk with him about that work, but also his larger work about the church and culture in this moment.
Chris McAlilly 00:30
Yeah, the church in America, in the western, I guess, North Atlantic context--America and Canada--has been in deep decline for a number of...
Eddie Rester 00:40 No secret to anybody.
Chris McAlilly 00:40
... of years, and it's a bit of a crisis. And we've done a number of conversations about it. And even one with Andrew Root in the backlog. This conversation is really a way of kind of getting to the deep diagnosis of what's going on. We live in a secular age, and that shapes our imagination, what we see and what we don't see. And we talk a lot about kind of how do you get back to an understanding of God as being a Living God, who is the subject of active verbs, and who is still alive and at work in our communities, and in our churches, and how to kind of get a handle on how an awareness of God's action, you know, in our midst might help us find a way forward.
Eddie Rester 01:34
The book that he and Blair Bertrand wrote, "When Church Stops Working," I love the title of the book, because it works on two levels. When church stops working, is the level that we kind of know, and we've experienced decline. The nones are growing--N-O-N-E-S nones are growing. But the other level of this, when church stops working, which is what he's pushing us toward, is maybe it's time to stop adding programs and thinking about how we can build the church and stop working and start listening--to be still and know, and that within that being still, the story of what God is doing will surface again. I just think it's a powerful way, one that I think pushes us away. I'm tired of church mission statements. I've worked on them for months at a time I've. Every church I've been at, we've worked on vision stuff. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's the stories that are embedded in the church that tell of what God has done and will do.
Chris McAlilly 02:46
Yeah, I'm not completely convinced by Andy's work that churches need to do away with mission and vision statements. I do think there are reasons why a church ought to direct its action. But I do think there's something to be learned here about there being this prior step, this prior step to what we're doing. That really is an attentiveness and awareness to what God has done and is doing and our midst. I think, if you miss that, then what you decide to do, there's a tendency for you to, for God to be kind of the... How did he say it?
Eddie Rester 03:26 The byline or the product.
Chris McAlilly 03:27
Oh, he said that yeah. That God's a product that you're selling, or that God ends up being the mascot of your pet project. And then what you end up producing, or you end up you know, your action gets oriented in a particular direction that just looks like a reflection of the cultural frame that you're in. So either you're a conservative church, or you're a progressive church, or you're a church that looks more corporate, or your church that looks more whatever. And really, this is about trying to understand how God, how the living God has been at work where you are, and an awareness that the story that the church has to tell is not the story of the church, but rather the story of God. And so then he gives you some ways to get at that, thinking about being attentive to how people tell their stories on the ground and allowing that to shape our imagination for the future. It's a great conversation. Andy's a really bright guy and he...
Eddie Rester 04:25
He's brilliant. Let's just say he's brilliant.
Chris McAlilly 04:27 He's brilliant.
Eddie Rester 04:30 He's smarter than us.
Chris McAlilly 04:31 He's smarter than Eddie.
Eddie Rester 04:34 We can say that.
Chris McAlilly 04:35
No, he's smarter than us. But he's very helpful in terms of giving us some ways to think about what's wrong and also maybe how to move forward. So I hope you enjoy the conversation. We're glad you're with us today on The Weight. And if you liked the conversation, share it with somebody and leave us a review. [INTRO] The truth is, the world is growing more angry, more bitter, and more cynical. People don't trust one another. And we feel disconnected.
Eddie Rester 05:04
The way forward is not more tribalism. It's more curiosity that challenges what we believe, how we live, and how we treat one another. It's more conversation that inspires wisdom, healing, and hope.
Chris McAlilly 05:16
So we launched The Weight podcast as a space to cultivate sacred conversations with a wide range of voices at the intersection of culture and theology, art and technology, science and mental health. And we want you to be a part of it.
Eddie Rester 05:31
Join us each week for the next conversation on The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 05:39
We're here today with Dr. Andrew Root. Andrew, or do you like to go by Andy? which is...
Andrew Root 05:45 Andy's great.
Chris McAlilly 05:46
Andy. Andy, thanks for being here in conversation with us again. Welcome back to the podcast.
Andrew Root 05:52
Thanks. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me back.
Eddie Rester 05:55
Yeah, last time, we talked a lot about youth culture and things that were going on in the work that you had done there. And we landed on a place where we're talking about narrative and storytelling for youth ministry. And I still pass that podcast along to other youth ministers, just as a way to think about restarting, reinvigorating, rethinking, what youth ministry can be in a world where kids' lives are very different than they were 30, 40 years ago.
Chris McAlilly 06:30
I feel like youth ministry, I mean, one of the things that I've picked up on your work, Andy, is just... Part of it is, if you're working with youth and trying to form young people in the faith, it's just extraordinarily difficult in this particular cultural moment. And one of the recurring themes in your work has just been trying to understand the depth and significance of the problem and to offer a diagnosis. And I wonder, you know, for folks who are less familiar with your work, if you could just talk about how you diagnose the problem in this particular cultural environment for the church. What's at the center, or at the deepest place of the crisis facing the church in the American context?
Andrew Root 06:30
That's cool. Yeah, that's, uh, yeah, it's a quite a complicated problem. But I think you can sum it down, at least in my work and the direction I'm trying to go, into really one thing. Or I guess maybe you wouldn't even see it, not as a problem, but as, I had an old professor would say, "the court generative problematic," which is just a mouthful of academic words to spit out there. But in other words, the potential, the opportunity at play, the challenge we need to address. And to me that challenge is ultimately one of how do we speak about a living God in a world where the categories for living God have been eclipsed? And that doesn't mean that God isn't still doing things or moving, but the imagination for a living, speaking, God has become harder for people to hold on to. And so that then we pile all sorts of things on that, that make that the case. And I think if you really just stripped down everything I'm really looking for, whether it's in youth ministry, or just broadly in pastoral ministry, it's how do we get back to, or how do we move forward in proclaiming the action of all living God and have our practices connect to that? And yeah, so that's ultimately it. I mean, there's so many dimensions to what happens there. Like, between the way the self is constituted in a different way, the way that connects to certain kind of forms of consumer culture that plays in, the ways individualism plays in within that. All sorts of things come about, but ultimately, that's what I see is our real challenge at play here.
Chris McAlilly 09:09
Yeah. So I think that, for folks that don't know Andy's work, I think one of the things that I've found helpful, a lot of people have talked about this moment, this cultural moment as a secular age. That phrase comes from Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor in the book, "A Secular Age," which is, you know 900 to 1000 pages. But just in a thumbnail sketch, you know, just kind of summarize some of the key dimensions of that, that you're bringing into your analysis of the moment.
Andrew Root 09:52
Yeah, well, you can see I'm kind of addicted to Taylor particularly descriptively, because that's really his whole project. He tries to explore what it means to live in a secular age isn't necessarily that fewer people are going to church, or that classic kind of Christian institutions, or just religious institutions, are weaker. That's all facts, I think. But that's not what he thinks it really means to live in a secular age. And what he thinks it means to live in a secular age is that our imaginations for the transcendent, our imaginations for kind of moral frameworks even, of what it means to live well, and the necessity of having some kind of divine reality set the terms for that, becomes--well, I've used the word already--kind of becomes eclipsed by something more natural and material. That the ways we make meaning, the ways we even think about the self don't necessarily need God. So the secular he's trying to describe here is a kind of... Well, one way he says it is a kind of fragile association of belief, where all belief becomes quite fragile. And we live in and out of systems of doubt, really, more than we live out of systems of belief. Or our systems of belief are intermingled with systems of doubt. And that's true, whether you are like a classic believer in God, or you're someone who doesn't believe. He thinks both those become fragile lies. Like, if you don't believe sometimes you have moments where you find yourself believing. And if you are somebody who does believe you have all sorts of moments where you're like, can I believe this? You know, am I just being kind of culturally impacted this way? Or is this really true?
Eddie Rester 11:25
And if you don't have some of that in the background, I think what you point to, is we miss diagnose...
Andrew Root 11:34 Yeah.
Eddie Rester 11:34
The issue. So what's wrong with misdiagnosing the issue? Shouldn't we just be working, at least trying to... If you've got a cough, shouldn't you deal with the symptom of the cough?
Andrew Root 11:45
Yeah, yeah. Unless the cough is a sign that you have, you know, cancer, and you should probably be dealing with that. Yeah, but this is... I'm really fascinated with this. And I suppose this is part of why there's so many books, and the books are probably too long and too complicated as they are. But I'm really quite fascinated--this is why Charles Taylor's book is, you know, 800 pages, and if it falls on your head, it will concuss you for weeks, you know-- is that what we think might be the problem, and even our best intentions may make things worse. And if we're not careful, just because you have good intentions doesn't mean you may not push things in a bad direction. And so I think what's really helpful here inside of his diagnoses, and what I've really tried to pick up and probably pushed to the nth degree, maybe to the point of annoying, is that the issue is not one of participation. The issue we face... We want to define secular like the media defined secular. I think our kind of knee-jerk reaction as we try to define that word is to think about it as "fewer and fewer people are going to church." And my point is, if that's the problem, then all of our practices were formed by that problem. And so then what the church needs to be about, what pastoral ministry needs to be about is winning back participation. And there's a kind of sense where we're in some kind of tug of war between religious spaces and areligious spaces. You know, it's kind of back to that youth ministry thing. Parents are more interested in taking their kids to all sorts of other activities than going to church. And then the response is, how do we make a youth group that they would choose to go to the youth group instead of going to soccer or something? Yeah, or baseball or drama or piano or just, you know, test prep. And I think that that malforms us, and where it really starts to malform us is that Taylor wants to articulate--and I just completely am convinced by this-- that we live inside of an imminent frame. That our lives are more framed by imminence than transcendence, and that it is harder for us to imagine a living, speaking God. So we actually fall into the traps of the imminent frame, when we say church is really about participation, when we, maybe over and against our intentions, turn God not into a God we must encounter, a God who is God, but into a product that we're selling.
Eddie Rester 13:28 Over baseball, yeah.
Andrew Root 14:09
You know, I think that ultimately then perpetuates the imminent frame and that the church is here to be a kind of religious service agency or to meet felt needs. And when it doesn't, then people get really disgruntled, but it just perpetuates that we're bound in imminence more than transcendence and so, being kind of formed that the biggest issue is participation could end up spinning the imminent frame more and more closed. And I think the objective here is to try to open this up to try to hear and listen and receive God's act again.
Chris McAlilly 14:49
Yeah. So you know, I think a couple things that you point to in terms of symptoms of the secular age... One is that the church and Christianity have less influence in society. One is that the sacred doesn't really set the agenda for the society. I mean, I think about going to Europe, in particular small villages, and you see the cathedral at the center of town. It really, you know, there's a sacred imagination that orders public space and public life. And then the third one--or I guess that maybe both dimensions of the first symptom--then there's this divide between the sacred and the secular, that you're talking about. Fewer and fewer people are going to church. And then there's the sense that belief itself has changed. The sense that it's either hard to believe, or you can imagine not believing in God. And all of those things create a situation where church people and church leaders get anxious. And the response to that anxiety, oftentimes, is more work to try to get more people. It's ginning up more programs. It's what do we have to do to get people back, you know, those kinds of things, and just all of that creates anxiety and this sense that we're not doing our job correctly. And I do think the freedom, or the the opportunity, I think of a diagnosis of the problem is deeper than you might think, is that it kind of frees you up to say, okay, maybe, really, what we need to do is come back to the center of what has been handed down to us. And it seems like one of the things that you're trying to do is to say, nope, God is the subject of active verbs. You know, God is a living God, speaking and acting. And in one of your--not the most recent book, which I want to get to, "When Church Stops Working," but maybe the one before that, which is a little bit more theoretical, I think of "Churches in the Crisis of Decline," being kind of in the background of this more recent work. You draw on Karl Barth, who is a German Protestant theologian. I wonder for folks who don't know Karl Barth you know, why is he a resource for you in thinking about kind of an antidote to the secular age?
Andrew Root 17:11
Yeah, it's, you know, Barth is a polarizing figure in his own right. So, you know, first of all, when you write 13 volumes and a bunch of other books, you turn some people off. You're just having so much to read. But what's fascinating about Barth is, in some sense, I think he's responding to what it takes Taylor 100 years later to kind of describe. I think, he senses this kind of turn towards the infinite frame and the way modernity has kind of shut out God in a certain way. And he particularly finds that he feels that acutely more than he can describe, and he wants to respond theologically to it. And he feels that acutely for two reasons. One is he's a pastor in a small, Swiss village, and he gets up to preach--and he's been educated in all the apparatus that the great intellectual German theology of the late 19th century, early 20th century--and he has this deep sense that he has nothing to say to these people. You know, that he has all the mechanisms to think about how do you interpret the biblical text, the history of the church, things like that, but just to proclaim the Word of God, again, that's all been deconstructed for him in some way. And he realized he has nothing to say. And then he also sees just a year or two later that all of his great professors have signed the Kaiser's decree to go off into World War One. And he starts to have this deep, deep suspicion that the way the theological, the way the theological construction has worked is that God has been made into the pet or the mascot of kind of German or just European imperialism. And that we've we flipped this on our head, that in some ways we feel like we're more powerful than God. Or he has a line where he says it's that "theology has become speaking of ourselves in a loud voice." And so he tries to re-read Romans again, which is a classic thing, all the great theological revolutions, at least in the West happens--you know, Augustine reads Romans, Luther reads Romans, and has this great breakthrough. And his big point is that God is God and that God is holy other, and it's somewhat of a nonsensical statement. "God is God," you know, it's like saying the sun is the sun or you know, blue is blue. It seems quite obvious, but inside the imminent frame the temptations to make God serve us, serve our ideologies, serve our cultural desires, serve maybe our own best intentions that get all warped. You know, our intention is to grow the church. Now God needs to serve that. We want our local congregation to grow. His reminder to us is really a profound one: that God is God. And that he thinks is a crisis. And so part of what I'm trying to get at in this book, is that we do have a crisis before us. But we think that crisis is a crisis to decline. And the real crisis is, how do we preach? How do we speak to a God who is God? How do you speak of a God who's so great you can't speak of this God? How do you respond faithfully to the Holy God when we are but sinners? This becomes the legitimate crisis. And I worry that our crisis is where, one, we feel like we don't have enough resources, we don't have enough relevance, and that's our crisis. And the point is, no, the crisis is how do we speak of this God who is God? How do we help a congregation live faithfully in response to a God who is God?
Eddie Rester 20:39
So what does that look like, when we talk about the church today? Because I feel, I think every pastor, every church feels it, well, we just need to add this. If we just have contemporary worship to go with traditional worship. If we could just, you know, have fireworks in the sanctuary and people rappelling off the balcony.
Chris McAlilly 20:59
Dude, whate are you doing in Jackson, bro?
Eddie Rester 21:01 I, you know...
Chris McAlilly 21:02
Y'all are shooting fireworks?
Eddie Rester 21:04
We're trying some stuff. Are you behind? Or if we can get our budgets, if people could just give more. You know, so there's this more, more, more thing. And I think we've proven pretty well, more. You know, so there's this more, more, more thing. And I think we've proven pretty well, it's one of those things of we've lost that fight, but people don't want to admit we've lost that fight.
Andrew Root 21:21 Yeah.
Eddie Rester 21:22
We got the best facilities, best musicians, best everything, and it's not answering the issue. So how do you, how does the church, how do we begin to actually address what's at stake here?
Andrew Root 21:40
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm sure your listeners are gonna hate this. Because, you know, in some ways we're addicted to, "we have a problem." And I think this is part of being maybe late modern, upwardly mobile people who have have gleaned a lot of goods out of a kind of a consumer capitalism, which, you know, like, I'm case in point, right? Even the way we kind of train our children, too. You know, like you hear, I guess it's back to that youth ministry thing of really busy families. And one of the justifications of that is, well, at the very least, you know, I want my kids to learn how to work hard. And so there's a certain kind of sense... Or, you know, you watch Shark Tank, and everyone's trying to justify that they are the person to invest in because no one works harder than them. They work 24/7. And so there's two dynamics to this. Is one that we do have this sense of what you do when you're in a crisis, is you just work harder, and you do more. And so if you feel like you're losing market share in your church, you just have to work harder, but don't work just harder, work smarter, too. But that smarter, of course, is like, optimize your action, so it gets the most results. So I think you need a very different form of action that you kind of called Good. And there is the deep temptation that we just have to do more. But part of the reason we feel that way, is because I think we ultimately, at the very beginning, have the wrong story. Or we think that the church has to find the story, or that the church is, one of the things I say is that says like the church has to starve its own story. And you will hear that from different consultants and people who are kind of thinking about how to help the church forward. Depending on what community you're in, there's eight churches in your community, or for churches in your community, and people will drive 45 minutes to go to church. So you got to figure out what your story is. You got to have your story, which at a certain level is just brute fact. Like it's true. But at another level, that warps our theological commitments, because the church has no story. The church's story, it doesn't have a story about itself. The church's story is the story of God's action in the world. And the church doesn't even get to be best supporting actor, you know. The church is narrator, which is a really important job, to witness to the world and narrate to the world God's action in the world. But the story is about God, and it is about God saving the world. And I think why that becomes so important is because when we think it's about us and the story has to be about us, then what of course happens is that we downgrade God's story. And I mean, this is kind of full circle, is then the best you can do... So then what happens is God becomes your product that you're selling. And when a product has no story... This is why when you watch documentaries or movies about Apple or something, it's never just about the iPad, iPod, you know, it's not about the product. It's about the personalities who built it. It's about how crazy Steve Jobs is. Or I just watched the movie, the Canadian movie, which is a classic Canadian movie, about the Blackberry. It's classic because Canadians just love to crap on themselves, and it ends with Blackberry at 43 or 68% of all cell phone business in like, 2014 or something, and then now has zero. Like 0%, and that's how the movie ends, and you're just like... I love Canadians. There's no gloss of kind of national pride or anything. But that whole movie is not about a Blackberry. I mean, it is, but it's about the personalities behind it, you know. So the only story you can have for a product is its user guide. And that's no story at all. But yet, you see how this has affected our theology, is that when it becomes really about winning people to our churches, then theology becomes essentially a user's guide, which just becomes propositional. And it becomes what Charles Taylor calls excarnate. It doesn't live. It doesn't frame our lives. But if we get correct on whose story we're really interested in, and whose story we're trying to be formed to, which is God's story and the story of Israel and the story of the raising of Jesus from the dead, then all of a sudden, we have a different place within this. And it starts to give us a different form of action, I think, too. And this is where I think people will hate it. And we can, hopefully, we can tease this out if you want to, but that this form of action becomes an act of waiting, and what it means to really wait. And that is a form of action. It's a form of attentiveness. It's a form of resistance in some ways, but it isn't a hyper, work harder, go faster. It is a stopping. It's an actual stopping. I'm mesmerized by the Psalm 49, most famous, one of the most famous lines of the Psalms, "Be still and know I am God," from Psalm 49, which is about a crisis going on. And one of the ways in the Hebrew to interpret that text, which I find really, really insightful for our conversation is, "Be still and know I am God" can be interpreted as, "be still and put down your hands." That's really interesting, that in the midst of a crisis, be still, put down your hands, stop fighting God, also stop just doing crap. Just put down your hands and be still. Wait for me. Wait to encounter me. Wait for me to speak. And in the book, we really do try to claim you know that the church starts, the first command that starts the church is the command of Jesus to the to the men on the road to Emmaus, which is to go to Jerusalem and to wait. That's the first command. We love Acts two and the whole Pentecost experience and you know, thousands being added to the number, but that's the work of the Spirit. And it's contingent on the human act to go and to wait.
Eddie Rester 27:34 Right.
Chris McAlilly 27:35
Yeah. So in the midst of crisis, and the midst of I think about cultural fragmentation, that then gets mirrored in the fragmentation and splits and fractures that we've seen across multiple denominations over the last 25 or 30 years. You can think of the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians and Methodists, all the churches are fracturing. And what you ended up seeing is, you know, cultural expressions of the church that... I don't know, I guess from where I sit, look like mirror images of kind of cultural realities kind of wherever the place is. So if you're in a more conservative and rural setting in America, you're gonna find a more conservative and rural form of the church. And if you go to an urban center, you're going to find something that maybe, you know, looks like a reflection of that particular cultural environment. And in that, you know, I think churches feel the need and the desire to kind of have a distinctive story, to have a way of understanding themselves that's unique and responsive to their particular mission context or their mission field. And that leads back to this conversation. And also clarity, so that what they're doing is not only distinctive, but that it meets the needs of that environment. And that leads a lot of churches and a lot of pastors and a lot of congregations in the direction of a mission or vision statement. Talk about where that comes from, in terms of why churches adopted mission and vision as a kind of an idea. You know...
Eddie Rester 29:16
Categories. A category of being, almost.
Chris McAlilly 29:18
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Because it's a time bound kind of thing. You know, you can kind of look back to the 60s and 70s and 80s to corporate American culture and the way in which mission and vision statements kind of take hold in that environment and then gets kind of replicated in churches. Talk about that development, and then also kind of your critique of it.
Andrew Root 29:37
Yeah, yeah. You know, and I don't have a full-blown history and like, who wrote the first mission statement in a church or anything like that, and so, someone has to do that work. Honestly, I think that would be a really fascinating, fascinating thesis to just like really get under the hood of when did this this all happen? Where does it go back to? But my deep pond from doing other researches is that it really is a kind of 1980s reality. And it is a reality where kind of the big corporation and even the big kind of overseeing denominational church in a kind of centralized, standardized capitalism that exists, when that all falls apart, and there becomes a much more kind of neoliberal capitalism perspective and small businesses can become big businesses quick, that what really becomes important is that you make your intentions very clear. That in some ways you try to streamline bureaucracy and go straight to a sense of kind of mission, what we're about what we're going to do. And if you don't get clear on your mission, in a kind of deregulated 1980s business world, well, you could be eaten. Like it is a Darwinian war, at the kind of business level, and if you're not really, really, really on point with why you exist and what you're doing, well, then you're going to be overtaken. You know, even a little company, our second reference of Apple here, you know, like, Apple in a garage in Palo Alto can maim, and pretty severely, IBM, which, you know, in the 60s, 70s, no one thought that could ever be possible. IBM was, like, you couldn't touch it.
Eddie Rester 31:17 Untouchable.
Andrew Root 31:17
Yeah. But by the mid 1980s, and by the late 1980s, it's very possible. So I think it kind of comes from that kind of dynamic. And in some sense, we even say this at the most small level, where we think individuals should have mission statements. You know, like, you should be writing your own goals, and you should be be living for those. And at a certain level, to be completely honest, maybe that's just the case, and the church will always be an institution, and institutions do need to know why they exist. And it gets weird when it's just individual, but you know, any kind of collective maybe needs that. But what I worry about again, is it shifts the crisis, like the the story that has to hold us is the story of why our church exists. And that makes... It has this effect of turning us in on ourself. Even if it's like, this is supposed to be our mission, it's still really about us. And, I do think there's a way that the gospel, the working of the God of Israel, takes us out of ourselves. And, so this is why I'm trying to contrast this with a kind of watchword, which is very hard for Americans to get their minds. You talk to Europeans, and it's the more common word people use. But really, it has a different orientation. Instead of being like, how are we going to optimize our action, it's again, a more of a passive move to stop, to wait, but to wait on watch, to wait attentively. And my perspective is that a watchword usually is born out of the stories of the community. And it's gonna take some leadership to help kind of frame this, but that people do have these stories of God moving in their lives. And there are ways that then a watchword becomes a kind of synthesis of the way that God has moved, that then leads the congregation to go out into the world and, with this watchword, look for God acting. And I think that will form us better than just a mission statement.
Eddie Rester 33:21
If mission statements were going to fix, solve the crisis, they would have solved the crisis by now. I keep coming back to this. I mean, if some of the things that the church has thought would bring people back would solve this, that level, the symptom, it would have happened by now. And I think we've had 30, maybe 40 years of churches spending a year, a year and a half, writing a mission statement, core values, all of those things. When I think about watchword, I think about a practice that was given to us about a year and a half ago, which was to go ask your church members, what's a moment when you remember a story of the church really being the church--the church you are most proud of, or when the church really felt like it was moving. And in our church, what came out of that was a flood in the late 1970s, where this church rebuilt basically a neighborhood and mucked at all the houses and did that and they talked about Hurricane Katrina. And the story that really arose was this church that rises up in moments of deep crisis. Is that kind of what you're talking about when you're talking about watchword?
Andrew Root 34:39
Yeah, and this is where like my own deep theological commitments to the theology the Cross are really important in this claim that God is a minister who moves from death to life, is that usually these stories have that kind of dynamic within them--this kind of movement from impossibility to new possibility, from what is lost to what is found. You know, so even the kind of story of a flood and that kind of standing in the breach of that and things coming out of the willingness to kind of bear that loss. I think those are usually kind of signs that there's a watchword coming here. You know, the examples I often use maybe too much is the civil rights as its own kind of watchword and it's when the when the Montgomery bus boycott is not going well, and Dr. King has woken up by a phone call that says they're gonna bomb his house, he's got an infant in the house, and he can't fall back asleep. And it's not going well. Not only is his life threatened, but just the whole boycott itself, he feels like it's not going well. And in the midst of not being able to get back to sleep after his life being threatened, he prays, and he confesses to God that is not going well. And he hears God say, "Martin, when there's no way, I'll make a way," and that becomes the watchword. He's preaching sermon, and using this kind of phrase, when there's no way, God makes a way. And it encapsulates a much bigger story. But it becomes a way that knits a community together with a certain vision, when there's no way God makes a way. And you're aware of what that means, the backstory of all that. And I just think that forms a community in a much richer way than just, you know, whatever kind of the reason we exist, and we're different than the Methodist Church down the street.
Chris McAlilly 36:00
And I think that in some ways, there's a kind of ecumenical dimension to it, because it's not like we have different views of the atonement. It's more like we're all on a playing field that has now been decimated of the theological imagination that God can be an actor in the world, and all of us are going to lose our children to the secular age. And so in a certain sense, kind of every church, every adjudicatory, every denomination is kind of faced with this dynamic where now we have to help the next generation imagine what it might be for God to be the subject of active verbs. And part of that will entail an act of memory of the way in which the living God has been encountered by our people, in a particular place, at a particular time in the past. And I have a question, but Eddie's got a comment, I think.
Eddie Rester 37:23
As you said, it, I'm thinking that's the that's the Old Testament, right?
Andrew Root 37:26 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eddie Rester 37:27
I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking, all they did in the Old Testament is point back. You know, over and over, they point back to the God of creation. Over and over, they point back to the God who saved the people, took them through the waters into the promised land, the God who brought them home from exile. I mean, over and over, they repeat the deep stories of you know, Andy, as you were talking about, of death to life, these moments where it was impossible. When Abram and Sarai couldn't have a baby, and yet, he became the father of the nations. And they point back. I think, sometimes mission statements are so aspirational, which is what they are. They're supposed to. They present us the best version of what we could be out in the future, which is great. But a lot of times, what we need is to know fully the story of the God of resurrection, who already has been at work in his people.
Chris McAlilly 38:26
Yeah. Then Samuel took a stone and set it on Mizpah and Jeshanah, and named it Ebenezer. And then he said, "Thus far, the Lord has helped us." You know, it's that kind of thing. It's the sense of, you know, God has been the God who has helped our people thus far. And if you have sense of, you know, God has been the God who has helped our people thus far. And if you have that kind of a memory, that shapes what you can see. I think that's part of the sense of the beauty of the phrase, "watchword," the sense that, you can remember something that God has done, but it also frames your vision. The thing that I think about is, there was this time, Eddie when I really wanted an old single cab F-150. And I started looking on the internet for, you know, single cab, you know, like a mid 1990s, you know, granddaddy.
Eddie Rester 39:17
That's the perfect truck, the perfect truck.
Chris McAlilly 39:19
Grandpa, you know, work truck. And then once I started looking for these things, I saw them everywhere. You know, it became the thing that I was looking for. And that's one of the ways in which you use the concept of a watchword, is the sense that there's a memory of an encounter with the living God, but it becomes a frame that shapes our vision and our attention moving forward. I guess, talk about that, the way in which it's not only a memory, but it's also kind of a frame for attention.
Andrew Root 39:50
Absolutely. And I think this is what we inherit within the imminent frame is is a kind of observation blindness, you know, that the way the cultural reality... Like, you even just kind of said, you know, people get kind of sucked into the secular. Well, the truth of the matter is we are, too. We are secular people in the kind of Charles Taylor frame. And so we have this imminent frame as well. None of us get to escape it. But the question is, can you look through that imminent frame and see things that are happening with it? Or is there a kind of observation blindness? You all know that experiment, I mean, people have seen it all over Twitter, online, of the famous observation experiment where the person in the gorilla suit... So they have people in a circle passing a basketball, and they tell someone who's watching this to count how many times people in black or white shirts catch this basketball. So they concentrate on that, and then someone in a gorilla suit goes behind and does a dance. And it's some crazy statistic, like 75% of people never see the gorilla in the frame, in a frame that they're watching, because they're trying to, they have observation blindness because they're counting the basketballs. And in some sense, what a watchword does is help you have a different way of looking into the frame, of being attentive to something else. Because if you're not, if we don't form people that way, then they'll just count stuff. I mean, to take this to a different level. And this is what happens. This is like the secular issue that's participation. You just start counting how many hours, how many people, how many... And you lose that there's these crazy events of God's act within the frame of our congregational life, but we're not paying attention to it because we think the problem... You can see how I can... If you view this the wrong way, you make it worse, because it's not as if God isn't moving and acting. It's that you have to invite people. Historically, all the Christian practices of prayer and meditation, of reading scripture, is to open our purviews to see that God is moving and acting here. And I think sometimes we just think, well, we do those things when people are committed. We do those things so they become members. We do those things so our church can grow. And is this really about a way of seeing more than it's just about a way of locking down people's interests? So yeah, it absolutely is an opening up.
Chris McAlilly 42:18
And it has to be done. I mean, one of the things that I hear you kind of inviting is that this must be done again, and again, in each generation. There's a generational component. And this shows up, especially in the first book, "The Crisis of Decline," "Churches and the Crisis of Decline," where you talk about, I can't remember, this elder and younger pastor that Barth had a memory of. Or it was like an active memory in German Protestantism of this story. Would you mind? I mean, just, I know, it's a crazy and a long kind of healing exorcism story in the first generation. But I'm interested in the way in which one generation becomes, you know, a watchword in one generation that needs to be heard again in a new generation by new, younger and another generation. I wonder if you could talk about
Andrew Root 43:09
Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the things people often miss about Karl Barth is they think he's just kind of a pinheaded academic, but there are these deep pastoral realities that play for him. And one of them is these people you're referencing that they're called the Blumhardts, Blumhardt the elder and Blumhardt the younger. And when Barth's trying to figure out, like, we have to start all over again, we need a new theology. How do I speak to people? He ends up having a conversation and then starts reading the Blumhardts and it's really impactful to him. But Blumhardt the elder, who was dead before Barth could meet him, and his younger son is a generation older than Barth. But the whole story goes, that he was a pastor, 19th century Germany. And, you know, he's just doing his thing. And for the most part, it's a, you know, it's an uphill battle. You know, I think the most exciting thing he's done is being on a committee to change the hymnal. Like that's kind of been his thing. Nothing really exciting. Except he gets word one day that there's a young adult in his congregation, a young woman who is manifesting really weird behavior. And he goes to her and she is. And it ends up being a kind of year long process of realizing that she has demon. And it's fascinating because it's very on Hollywood. I mean, I don't know, we're past Halloween, guys, but this would have been a great Halloween podcast release. because it's very Hollywood and very non Hollywood in the sense that he never, Blumhardt the elder never goes into demon fighting. You know, he never addresses the demon directly, but there's all sorts of just weird, weird stuff going on. And he just prays. He just keeps praying for this young woman and praying for this young woman and then trying to you know, get on with his pastoral ministry. Well, it goes on for nearly a year. It's Christmas time. And then he gets word that she's not doing well. And he goes, and he prays for her. And when the demons would start to say nasty things to him, he'd just go home. And you know, I just I imagined that conversation, going home to his wife like, "Why are you back early? that you were gonna be praying for her?" "Yeah, the demons started to be mean to me. So I was just like, I'm not going to put up with this crap. And I just went home." And it's just weird, you know? But he finally, at one point he, this demon gets cast out, after prayer of the community. It gets cast out, and there happens to be a demon cast out of her sister, too. And as the demon comes out of her sister... It's, like, weird the way it's reported. Weird, like poltergeist stuff, like her neck just about turns, this voice comes out of her that's inhuman, and she yells, "Jesus Christ is victor!" when she leaves. And this whole story has galvanized the community. Like this woman was part of the church. They know this story. They know this experience. The whole community has been praying for her. And "Jesus Christ is victor" becomes the watchword. That's what he calls it. Then for the next decade, they live out of this sense that Jesus Christ is victor. And so Blumhardt the elder is known to, when he would address people, go, "Hey, good to see you. Jesus Christ is victor!" Like, he was always living out of this watchword, this whole community was. And it didn't just mean like some generic slogan like I don't know, "Made Fresh," or something like that. "Jesus Christ is victor" was connected to this huge story, this huge sense of what it meant for this woman to be overtaken, and for God to act in this way. And it really formed the community. But his younger son takes over his ministry, and he kind of takes on a healing ministry after this, of prayer. And he realizes that this becomes completely... Well, it becomes instrumentalized. People start using these words as magical words, and they kind of start looking for these acts and miracles. And he realizes in a moment that he needs to renew a different watchword, and in prayer, he has a watchword that comes to his community, which is "Die, so Jesus Christ might live." It's a different kind of move. So the point of this is that we need this watchword. This watchword is interconnected with how God acts. But the watchword is only for a time. It has to be renewed through the stories. And so sometimes it might last a generation, sometimes it might last months. And you know, I know pastors who really live out of this, and they'll say, you know, often it's like five years, and all of a sudden, a new watchword comes. But there's a certain attentiveness you need to have to the stories of your community, that helps you find this watchword. And so yeah, I think it has to be renewed because the people have to connect it to not necessarily their own experience, but the experience of the community. And when it becomes too far away, then it needs to be renewed.
Eddie Rester 47:55
One of the things that I think about and again, as we started learning the stories in our church, is that we also went out in the community and learned pain points in the community. And how does our story, who, at the heart of who we've been through the years, that watchword, how does it then begin to connect to the pain point? Not all the pain points, you can't solve... But how does that begin to reach and touch the pain points in the community? When you think of the watchword of "Jesus is victor," that speaks to a lot of pain points, in a community, not just about what the church can do, but about what--again, it's past the imminent frame into the transcendent--what God can do.
Chris McAlilly 48:43
Yeah, and I think that that's where something that points a church or Christian community outward towards their participation in the larger story, or the larger work or mission of God in the world. I mean, ultimately, what God is aiming for, it's not the renewal of the church. The renewal of the church would be for the flourishing and the renewal of the world. You know, there's this sense that God desires to make all things new, and the church is maybe a vehicle or it's kind of the plan or the instrument of that renewal. But I do think, you know, the... I think a lot of times the work that we do around mission and vision, in a church context, it is important. There is a sense in which we need to understand why we exist.
Chris McAlilly 49:36
Both as an institution and as a community or body or collective. And yet, if it's only about us, you know, I mean, I feel like that's just too small. I think that the reminder that a church doesn't... I mean, you said the church doesn't have a story. It's not the story of the church. It's really the story of God. We're stewards of that story and the way in which that story manifests itself, how God shows up and reveals God's self to us through time. For folks who may want to cultivate that kind of attentiveness, what have you seen that's helpful? I mean, maybe kind of moving the conversation in a more practical direction as we seek to kind of set it down.
Andrew Root 50:23
Yeah. And I wish I had even more practical handles. The practical handles I have are from pastors who have done this. A guy I know, he just retired. But he led his ministry this way, is a guy by the name of Mike Woods that people should look up. But one of the things he told me that is really clear about what... He would have never called it a watchword, it just functioned that way. But he's like, Well, yeah, that's what we've done for years, is this kind of sense of a watchword. But he says, what you have to listen for is, first of all, be very curious to the stories in your community. Always have time for people to tell you their story. Like, there's nothing else, you know. Don't be rushing to something else. I mean, I know, functionally, sometimes we are distracted, or whatever. We gotta pick kids up from daycare or whatever. But he's like, just remember that a huge piece of this is to hear people's stories, so have time for that. And then he says, be really aware. Notice when people start saying things that sound like biblical texts. And he says, like, that's the kind of sign that there's a deep story here. When it all sounds like they're talking like the Bible, be aware of that. And that just may be the first moves of this watchword that's coming. And then he says, you'll never really know what it does until it does it. So he tells a story about early in his ministry. There's this couple teaching Sunday school, and he's just out of seminary, and he's like, I know what I'm supposed to do. Everyone's supposed to follow my lead. It's "the teacher teaches the teachers" kind of model. And these people are teaching seventh graders, and they're never following his lesson plans. And he finds them in weird places. He finds them like in the boiler room of the church, and then he finds them always under the table. And he's like, "What the heck is going on?" thinking like, "I gotta fix these people." And yet all these kids love the class, the seventh graders, and then these people who are far out of seventh grade--they've been teaching this class for 10 years. They keep telling him, he starts hearing that every time it's their birthday, even if these people have now graduated from high school and are in college, this couple, the Jorgensens, calls them and sings them happy birthday. Mike's like, "Gosh." His first response is "I wish they sang me happy birthday." Like, he starts to realize there's something there. So he finally talks them and is like, "What are you guys doing? Because I think you're pretty amazing." And they're like, "No, no, we're terrible teachers." He says, "No, what are you doing?" I mean... "People are... This seems beautiful." And they're like, "Well, we're terrible, because we only have one lesson. And the only thing that we teach the kids is that nothing can separate you from God's love, that nothing can separate you. That's all we keep telling them." And then they tell the story about how they had their own son, who was hearing impaired. And, you know, the struggle of dealing with, in the 70s, with the issue of kind of ableism and how it affected him. But they they got him through. They got him through college, and he was newly married and he died, he got an infection and died. And they used to tell him all the time, this kid, nothing can separate you. Nothing can separate from the love of God. B"ut that nothing can separate you from the love of God" became their own story, their own watchword because of this pain that they were in. And so Mike hears the story and he tells his senior pastor at the time, and they start preaching it. They start thinking about it. They start using this, "nothing can separate you," and people know the Jorgensons' story. They know the loss of their son. They know that means something. And it becomes the watchword that they always come back to. And then Mike says that this woman in our congregation got sick, and they're not sure what happened. But maybe she got Lyme disease or something. And she ended up committing suicide. And at her funeral, they preach, nothing can separate you. And it just changes the community. And he said it was just this attentiveness to who they were, and listening for when they said things that sure sounded like Bible verse, and then being really willing to kind of echo that story. And, you know, there's a lot of discernment in that and a lot of bravery into that. But that really shaped the community. And then he said three years later, we had to find a new watchword. Like, you know, like, there's a sense where it's time to renew it. But that's, I guess, you know, it's not a real practical, like, "do these four things," but it really is, I think, a disposition of being curious and attentive and listening.
Chris McAlilly 54:45
Yeah, I think that's so helpful. And I think that's, you know, a good word for anyone that feels like the church is in crisis. You know, anyone who is struggling and feels like maybe I need to do 75 more things, to come back to the disposition of waiting, listening with curiosity and awareness of the way the living God is at work in our stories, particularly in the moments of pain where it feels like we're moving closer towards the cross. And out of that, it may be that we can discover what it is that God's been doing. And that might help frame what God might want to do with us and through us in the future and help us to see it. I really appreciate you Andy. Thanks so much for taking the time to be with us. Thank you for offering your wisdom and kind of opening up some new ways of thinking for us today.
Andrew Root 55:33
Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's always great to talk to you guys.
Eddie Rester 55:36
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Chris McAlilly 55:45
If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]