Dwight Zscheile is a professor of congregational mission and leadership at Luther Seminary, and his wife, Blair Pogue, is a priest and canon for vitality and innovation in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. They join Leader’s Way host Brandon Nappi for a conversation about their joint passion for engaging the innovative ways the Church is renewing its commitment to community and communion by meeting people where they are. Brandon talks with Dwight and Blair about their new book, Embracing the Mixed Ecology: Inherited and New Forms of Christian Community Flourishing Together, which unpacks the theological language of “mixed ecology,” and how this language can help us imagine what is possible in our church communities.
66: Embracing the Mixed Ecology of the Church with Dwight Zscheile and Blair Pogue
Host: Brandon Nappi
Guests: Dwight Zscheile and Blair Pogue
Production: Goodchild Media
Brandon: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. I’m Brandon Nappi. It’s so good to have you with us. It is October. The full October vibes are in effect. Leaves are changing. We have full Gilmore Girls vibes here at Yale and here in Connecticut. And the fall is my favorite time of year. Hiking through the New England forest is always so beautiful and powerful and this kind of, all the letting go that is required in life, but required of the trees right now as they surrender their leaves is such a powerful lesson.
This letting go, and the trees seem to be much better at letting go of their leaves than I am at any of the countless things that I find myself attached to in my own life. Autumn is also a time when the yarn and the fiber comes out in my house. So I’ve been crocheting for, oh gosh, 40 years or so, but I recently started knitting. And you can see some of the things that I’ve knitted if you visit my Instagram page, Brandon.nappi– or some of the crochet projects that I work on from time to time. But it occurred to me as I was learning to knit, which is a completely different thing than crochet, that it had been a while since I had allowed myself permission to be a real learner and to try something new and to be awkward at something and take a risk, even if the small risk was failing and ruining a little bit of yarn. But risk-taking and trying new things is something that on the one hand I value, but I don’t do as much of as I’d like to. And so as I learned, as I was learning to knit, I just realized what sort of an obsessive perfectionist I could be sometimes.
And that in fact being awkward in doing something new is an uncomfortable feeling. This is something that we encounter in our Leaders’ Way Fellows, as they are taking their very first steps in innovation, which might be a new skill set for them, conducting experiments in serving others, it feels a little bit awkward. There’s a little bit of a risk. There’s tons of imperfection baked into this.
Of course, all of this is the value of doing new things, of letting go of old patterns, letting go of the kind of perfectionism that keeps us ossified and rigid and static. And so this is what I love about the conversation that we’re going to have today with the Rev. Dr. Blair Pogue and the Rev. Dr. Dwight Shiley. They’re inviting folks within the Christian community to be innovative and to experiment with new forms of community and new ways of being together, new ways of meeting the urgent challenges and persistent aches of our world.
And so I’m really excited. They have been pillars of the Leaders’ Way and our residential program in innovative ministry. They’ve been kind of the beating heart and cheerleaders. And so I’m so delighted to have this conversation with them about their new book, which they wrote together, called Embracing the Mixed Ecology, Inherited and New Forms of Christian Community, Flourishing Together. They’re both graduates of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and Yale Divinity School. They met there and are married, and they do such incredible work together.
Let me tell you first about Blair Pogue. Rev. Blair Pogue is a canon for innovation in the Episcopal Church in Minnesota. Before joining Bishop Loya’s staff, she was the rector of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in St. Paul for 16 and a half years. And before that, she served rural and suburban congregations in Virginia with a special focus on Christian formation. The Reverend Dr. Pogue has a doctor of ministry in congregational mission and leadership from Luther Seminary. And Rev. Dr. Dwight Shiley is author of many books on congregational ministry, some of which include Embracing the Mixed Ecology that I just mentioned, Leading Faithful Innovation Following God into a Hopeful Future, Participating in God’s Mission, The Agile Church, the Missional Church in Perspective. As I mentioned, they’re both graduates of YDS. Dwight is a professor of congregational mission and leadership at Luther Seminary, and they live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
And we are just so thankful that they spent some time with us. I hope you enjoy this conversation about mixed ecology, innovative ministry, and being of service to a world that’s suffering so much and bringing love and compassion to meet the wounds of the world.
Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale Divinity School and executive director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
Blair and Dwight, welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. We’re so excited to have you here.
Dwight: Great to be with you.
Blair: Thank you, Brandon, for this opportunity.
B: Well, congratulations on the new book, Embracing the Mixed Ecology, Inherited, and New Forms of Christian Community Flourishing Together. Both of you have worked for so long in the space of pastoral ministry and parish life and innovation and adaptive leadership. And I love the plurality of experiences in this book. Can you share how it came about? I always love the Genesis story of book projects like this.
Blair: We both grew up outside the institutional church. And we were … met when we were, me on a high school campus, Dwight at Stanford University, by followers of Jesus, who introduced us into a whole new transformative way of life. So we mostly grew up without Jesus, without an experience of Christian community. And it’s absolutely been transformational for us. We want to share this with others. And we know from looking at all the research, fewer and fewer people are and will be going to church. It’s not on the radar screen. More and more people will not have grown up going to church. Some people have had bad church experiences. And what we do may seem very strange and foreign.
So we’re very interested in learning how to meet people where they’re at. And we started to follow what’s been happening in the UK. We’ve actually been following them for many years and are just so excited about what our Anglican brothers and sisters are doing. Again, learning how to meet neighbors where they live, work, and play, to love them, to listen to them, and to share the gospel with those who are spiritually curious, inaccessible ways. So this has been a long journey. And to me, the fact that what used to be called the Fresh Expressions Movement–the language or the name for what this is keeps changing. In Minnesota, we’re calling them “New Christian Communities”. To me, the fact that this has happened in the Church of England is a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes. And so I just thought, God is really up to something here, and we need to go there and learn. So we made multiple trips to England, met incredible Christian leaders, and want to share their stories with people who are interested- -Episcopal Christians, Christians of any denomination, so that they too can think about what God might be calling them to, to meet spiritually curious neighbors. In this time where so many people are anxious, depressed, overwhelmed by what’s been happening in our country and world.
D: And I’ll just add to that, you know, Brandon, Blair and I both, you know, have served in the kind of traditional inherited church, traditional congregations for many years, and we love the traditional church and find it incredibly meaningful. And so, you know, the book really came out of our sense that we need both. We need both traditional congregations that are meaningfully connecting with some people. We need lots of different forms of Christian community to meet people where they are today. And it’s not an either or, it’s not a competition, it’s a both/and.
B: Yeah, you start the book describing the kind of disconnection that is afoot, certainly here in the States and maybe in many parts throughout the world, and it’s palpable this week, you know, just after the political violence that has, gosh, that has just blown America apart again. And of course you wrote this before the events of this week, and I just wonder why you chose to start there. I certainly feel it’s more applicable than ever. But share with me how you’re bumping into these profound experiences of disconnection in your own ministry and why you sort of position that right at the beginning of the book.
D: You know, I think our culture right now, like late modern Western culture generally, tends to really see the individual as just the basic unit of everything, and the individual as the ultimate authority. And so what I think we’re seeing is a working out of the trajectory of that over time, over generations, where what I think maybe initially was a great way to affirm individual distinctiveness over against just communal, you know, belonging or conformity, certainly, is now working out with a kind of hyper individualism and then a disintegration or a sort of unraveling of so many structures of connection in our society, right, that particularly in American society that have been built around assumptions of people joining together for common purpose,
sharing common language and structures and ways of belonging, and certainly technologies amplify that.
I think it’s a deeper cultural narrative, you know, so we’re seeing this incredible isolation and loneliness going on across Western societies. And I think if we’ve inherited voluntary association organizations as what worked for many years as a primary way for kind of people to connect and serve together and find purpose and meaning and belonging, those voluntary association institutions across American society have just been coming apart really the last, you know, 50 years or even longer. And the church being just one of those, right, so if you talk to people who were involved in scouting or service clubs or garden clubs or, you know…
B: The rotary.
D: The rotary, all of those, right, they’re all facing some of those same dynamics. And instead we find ourselves, you know, all staring at our screens. And we don’t know as a society how to join together other than I think in some very, you know, often very sort of tribally unhelpful ways where we, you know, are over against one another and we don’t know how to be together anymore.
And so I think for the church to say, you know, our mission as the church is about belonging and connection and love and communion, right, at a deep level. That is the God in whose image we’re created, the Trinity, right, is a God of communion, in which difference need not lead to division. And so how do we share that life and that promise and that love with people where they are today?
Blair: Yeah. And I think one thing, Brandon, we’ve seen a lot because I’m glad Dwight said we’ve been, we’ve served the institutional church all our lives, is there’s so many treasures there,
but people need a pathway. Coming to church on Sunday is just too much or our churches haven’t changed, haven’t learned to share our faith in a more participatory way or in a visual culture. And so we need a pathway and probably more than that, we need to learn to meet people where they are because what we do on Sunday, we know it’s meaningful, but to people who haven’t grown up with it, it seems very strange. They don’t know what’s going on.
And so I just, I find all the people around me, I play tennis with about 30 ex-Catholics, and people are just hungering for community, but more than that, for God and a way to discover God in community and not a community closed in on itself, but one that is outward looking like our God, outward-sending. Sometimes I find at least in the Episcopal Church, people are involved in this kind of work, want to stop with community, but what we’re really working on now is with those who are spiritually curious, how do you identify those who are spiritually curious? Because many people are. And then how do you share Jesus in life-giving ways, which at least here in Minnesota is a new muscle for us and something that feels vulnerable that we’ve not been used to doing. And we have been accustomed to thinking that faith is something private.
And so–and yet so many of our friends and neighbors, coworkers are spiritually curious and need to make spiritual meaning. And so we’re just learning how to share this, but it’s just a beautiful thing when traditional churches and these new Christian communities or fresh expressions are in relationship with each other, because the new Christian community can learn how to share the treasures of the traditional church with new generations, and they can feed back. This is what we’re hearing. These are people’s questions. These are their longings. These are their hopes. This is the language that they’re using. So what we’re doing in the traditional church can actually speak into people’s daily lives and their concerns. So it’s a beautiful two-way learning experience when this mixed ecology takes root.
B: As I was sitting in the green room just before this conversation here at Yale Broadcast Studios, I was looking at the wall and all the guests who sat in these seats around this table. And my eye caught a signature that I hadn’t seen before, and that was Vivek Murthy, our former surgeon general who graduated from Yale Medical School, but of course has been writing and speaking and talking at length about the kind of epidemic in loneliness across the world. That’s the greatest public health threat that faces the globe right now, and it’s an important reminder that we as people of faith have an important response and a way of gathering community in a particular way. And that particular way can take on many forms. So this language of mixed ecology, I wonder if we could spend a moment on that. That’s new language to me, but it’s not new language in a sense, or the idiom is not new. It’s scriptural, and the Bible is full of ecology, it turns out. Can you unpack a little bit about how y’all talk about this phrase, “mixed ecology,” and kind of the scriptural resonance of it?
D: Yeah, so we learned that language really from the Church of England in the UK, and it started out there when Rowan Williams used the phrase “mixed economy” to refer to the fact that there is this inherited neighborhood church parish structure, of course, which is disconnected from the vast, vast, vast majority of the English population today. But people don’t just connect by their neighborhood, they also connect in networks. And a lot of life is now played out through networks that are not necessarily that local geographical area. And so he talked about how we need ministry that is both still neighborhood based, but also network based.
And so over the years, the economy term was changed to ecology, which I think is a better term because it does express that kind of organic sense of, you know, ecologies have lots of different elements to them. There’s flows of energy and life and sustenance. They depend upon one another, and they’re all seamlessly interwoven, right? And so mixed ecology, I think, is a wonderful way to describe how, like, if you imagine a garden that have might have some like deeply rooted ancient oak trees that provide a lot of shelter that have been established for many years, and they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. But you also have lots of other kinds of plants, maybe that might be more seasonal, or strawberry runners that, you know, come out and maybe won’t last forever, but they’re giving life and bringing forth fruit. And so thinking about all of those pieces belonging together and sharing a common life together is actually the beauty of this idea of a mixed ecology.
B: I love this, especially because I’m a gardener. And this year, I don’t really grow any vegetables or any food in my garden, but I found just about a month ago, this beautiful squash plant just sort of taking over my garden. It’s wonderful. And I’ve just sort of let it do its thing. But, you know, I have the things that I’ve planted, you know, 10 years ago, old and strong, and these like new visitors in the space. And so I wonder if you could share some examples of how the old and the new are kind of living side by side. I mean, I think, you know, often the binary mind wants to, you know, sort of award a winner or like, this is the right way of doing it. That’s the wrong way of doing it, that they’re necessarily in competition. But what I sense from this wonderful book is that this is not a zero sum game, and these are not competitive expressions necessarily, right?
Blair: So, Brandon, I’d love to share a couple of stories from Minnesota. Our book is mostly stories from the UK, but we’ve been doing this work now for a couple of years. It’s long term work, and we’re starting to see the green shoots, which is so exciting. And what I’m seeing all over Minnesota, not just in the metro, but also in greater Minnesota in every possible kind of context, is this enlivening movement that’s happening. I’ll tell you a couple quick stories.
There is a church in Casson, Minnesota, which is outside Rochester, where the Mayo Clinic is located. And I think they were down to about 15 members in this church and feeling very sad, really starting to kind of see the end of the life cycle of this particular community, St. Peter’s. And then their deacon got involved in the local drug court and started to meet people. And this dinner started to happen. It now takes place every Wednesday. A lot of parents from the drug court are starting to be reunited with their kids again, so they come with kids. This dinner took hold. Kids are coming, so they started a children’s program, and the community has owned this dinner. So, the church doesn’t even pay for it anymore. So many people love this. I went to one of these dinners. It was like the kingdom of God. There were people from the drug court. There was the volunteer at the local library. There was somebody from the chamber of commerce. There were just people from every possible walk of life meeting over meal-breaking bread. They start with the Lord’s Prayer.
And more and more has happened out of this, but I think what I want to emphasize is the excitement in this traditional church. And recently, one of the leaders of this ministry, which is called “A Place at the Table,” said, “We used to just look at Sunday and feel a lot of grief about our future, but Wednesday is also our church, and we have all ages there, and we’re not in competition.” So, I see this all over with all these different things that leaders, most of them lay leaders, are starting. The people in their traditional churches are getting really excited about what they’re doing, and they’re feeding back what they’re learning, and they’re getting around and supporting these ministries. Things like spiritual practices in nature. We have a new Christian community called “Movies in Chat,” where they’re showing movies. They’re advertising on Meetup, which I think is brilliant. People are coming to discuss movies, and they’re intentionally picking movies like “Lars and the Real Girl” with just great content and having incredibly deep conversations.
I also wanted to mention something that is a new Christian community, but one that interacts with many traditional churches. We have a farm church called “Good Courage Farm,” and a lot of our faith communities go there, and they run these amazing formation programs where they’ll meditate on John 14 and 15 as they are pruning the vines. One lay leader said, “Wow, I didn’t know that vines needed to be pruned so often.” So, they’re bringing Jesus’ metaphors alive. They grow organic food or fruit, which is given to area food shells. They even raise ducks, so they can give duck eggs to a ministry we have that provides meals with the native community because they learned that duck eggs were part of the indigenous meals, which I thought was interesting. They do pie and prayer in the silo.
So, here is this new Christian community, but it’s a place where our churches are doing retreats. They just love what this farm is doing. They do regenerative agriculture. So, it’s just a beautiful thing. It just enhances the formation of Episcopal Christians, and it’s this beautiful blend. So, again, all over the state, and I could tell you a million stories, we’re just seeing that these churches, that many of them were really wondering about their futures and what does God have in store for us. These new things happen, and again, it enhances and enlivens the traditional church and is just a beautiful way to connect with all the people Jesus loves who don’t go to church.
D: Well, if I could just add a couple things on this. I think one way to think about this is these are ministries that are adjacent to the traditional worship and often programs in life that a congregation will have, but that are beginning to really form new communities where the expectation isn’t that those people are going to quickly come to traditional worship. So, one of the other stories is St. John’s in St. Cloud, Minnesota, an Episcopal congregation that doesn’t have regular clergy leadership. Maybe 40 people on a Sunday. So, like a lot of Episcopal churches or mainline churches, relatively small, and over the last decade, a lay leader there, through a series of experiments, started connecting with unhoused neighbors in the nearby park, started a breakfast, then found out that they were washing their clothes in the fountain in the park, and so started a Laundry Love ministry that’s been going on quite a while. Initially, just as a service thing, we’re just going to help you provide laundry services for you, but really, community started to form in that laundromat.
And so what she did was begin to add opportunities for prayer. And over time, as that community built, and they ate together and shared fellowship and prayer, then people wanted to go deeper. And so she now hosts in a local public library, Bread and Blessings, which is a very simple gathering in one of the rooms of this public library, open to anyone, where they eat together and they look at scripture and pray. And it has explicitly Christian content to it and engagement, but it’s also serving those basic needs for food, and in this case, also helping people with laundry and some of those things. And so those folks aren’t necessarily showing up on Sunday morning, and that’s okay, right? Part of the vision of this is that we can have actually these adjacent communities that are all part of one system.
Blair: And they’re not in competition. That’s what I keep saying. This is, I say, how many people live in Minnesota? How many live in the… And again, like Dwight said, these are not people who are coming to church. I just have to tell you something that just brought a big smile to my face. What I love about what Dwight just described with laundry love, Becoming Bread and Blessings, is the unhoused neighbors drove it. It took 10 years of Nancy and her team showing up, developing relationships for when they said, “We want to discuss a Jesus story together.” “We want to share our lives and pray. We want to break bread.” But now they’ve gone through some of the gospels and she said, “What would you like to study?” And they said, “Esther.” So I love that. They’re driving the… Well, they and the Holy Spirit are driving the bus, but I love that. She’s like, “Okay, we’re going to study Esther together.” But it’s just… And I love people from the library join them because they’re in a third space. They’re in a neutral space that feels safe. To many people, church doesn’t feel safer. What’s your agenda? And we love our churches so much. Sometimes we might come on a little strong if a visitor’s there. And so it’s so great to be meeting in libraries, coffee shops, other places that feel a little safer to people and where people are.
B: Tattoo parlors, I think you mentioned in the book, right? Tattoo parlors, yes. Yeah, Burritos and Bibles is another example. I love it. I think you call this the “loving first” model or the “service first” model. And this is not the traditional kind of sales funnel. Like, “Let me dangle this thing in front of you and because you like this, I’ll get you in the thing where I really want you.” Right? Right. I wonder for folks who are listening and maybe really kind of captivated by this loving people first model and these creative innovations in ministry, what are some of the things that you’ve noticed that these leaders or these new ministries have in common? I presume they all bring a kind of willingness to really listen to what’s happening in the community and what the spirit’s doing in the community and not just in the walls of the church. But you’ve seen so many of these things. What are some common sort of skills and practices that leaders in these ministries are harnessing?
D: Yeah. Well, so, you know, listening is really key. So what’s often referred to as the “loving first” journey and certainly in the Fresh Expressions world is, you know, it begins with listening and it begins with listening to neighbors where they are. So often it’s, you know, the question is, who do you know and what do you know? So if you’re already spending time, like, so there’s a guy at this church in, you met this guy in Flora named Larry and he just was going to the dog park every Saturday at a particular time. And he got to just getting to know over the years, like all the people there in the dog park. And so that was where he began. And he ended up starting a Fresh Expression called positive praise. And he also prays where, you know, the dogs would run around and chase each other and the humans who wanted to opt into this experience in that park would gather for a simple, you know, sharing of a story about Jesus’s life and discussion and prayer. And so it’s who do you know? What do you know? Listening, loving people, if people are hungry or need their laundry done or they need, you know, they’re isolated and need some kind of just fellowship or, you know, experience of community together, begin there. And then as trust builds and community builds, there’s a kind of a baby step process of introducing spiritual practices and questions and discussion and ultimately even can be worship, often very simple and accessible ways. And so from there, then you can have church forming in these community spaces like the tattoo parlor in the case of the church in Florida or Moe’s Southwestern Grill from burritos and Bibles.
And again, it’s often it’s good to think of these things. They are experimental. They’re on the edge. You know, they’re not necessarily going to last forever. I mean, you know, one example in the UK was in Cambridge was a group of parents connected to a particular school. And these were parents who noticed that as the kids were dropped off in the morning, you know, people, the adults, the parents wanted to kind of linger and talk to each other more. And there’s a yearning for connection and community. And so they got permission to use the teacher’s lounge while classes were happening to just do a simple gathering. And they brought coffee and, you know, pastries or whatever and had fellowship and community. And over time, then just hearing people’s stories, spiritual questions started to come out. And they said, well, anyone who wants to stay after the time of just, you know, just having coffee and actually light a candle and have a prayer time and maybe look at a story from the life of Jesus, you’re welcome to do so. And if you don’t need to, you know, you don’t want to do that. You’re not ready. That’s fine. You can, you know, it’s an optional “spiritual extra,” as they call it often. But that became then a whole Christian community for a season. Then those families’ kids aged out of that school and then it became something different. Right. So that’s where, again, it’s more like a strawberry runner than like those in-gen oak trees that mature over many years. And we’re grateful for them, too. And sometimes the strawberry runners really need to be in the shade of those old oak trees of traditional churches.
So another quick story. This is a very old church that we visited in Ipswich, which is a small city on the coast in the east of England. And the church, St. Mary’s Head, was founded in 1300. So a very medieval church. Very cold. We were there in January. I can tell you, inside the sanctuary. But what they’ve done is they have started a whole bunch of ministries adjacent to, you know, the Sunday service that are connecting with people in a pretty socioeconomically distressed neighborhood with spiritual extras. So they have a top-up shop, which is sort of like a food bank. You pay a little nominal fee to top up your pantry for the week. But then those who want to can stay for something they call “Seeds of Hope,” which is, again, an opportunity to hear a story from the life of Jesus, discuss it and have prayer. Right. And so it’s intentionality around, I think, doing something that often I see American churches struggling to do. Often American churches will have outreach ministries that are meeting material needs for people, but don’t necessarily know how to bridge that kind of ministry with the spiritual, holistic spiritual side of those neighbors’ lives and yearnings, and also with their existing ministries. And so these spiritual extras and fresh expressions are trying to kind of engage the whole person.
Blair: Yep. And getting into that, I keep saying, what about soul care? We’re the church. It’s so great that we are serving meals, trying to provide shelter, food, but we’re not caring for people’s souls. That’s just crazy. One thing, getting back to your question, I work with about 30 people in Minnesota, mostly lay leaders. The name of our group is Mustard Seed. And what I’m noticing is these people have had a transformational relationship with God. They have an active faith life. So what we’re learning in Minnesota is historically, we have not done a good job in the area of discipleship, of apprenticing people into Jesus’s way of life, of helping them develop a relationship with Jesus. So sometimes we have to step back because this work comes out of being spiritually alive and wanting to share your faith with other people.
In Minnesota, I used a process called Faithful Innovation that I know you’re familiar with, Brandon, to basically prepare the soil for this work, where I got people, teams from churches engaged in spiritual practices, talking about God, which wasn’t something that we did in all of our churches.
B: Scary stuff, Blair.
Blair: Scary and developing an imagination for what the Holy Spirit might be up to in the lives of our neighbors. And through that, I could kind of see who was interested in going further. So Mustard Seed, our learning community, came out of the Faithful Innovation Learning Communities. Again, this work takes time. And where there is not a robust discipleship culture, that needs to be fostered first. But again, thankfully, as I go out to a different church almost every Sunday, and I do meet people, and it’s so exciting, who really have had a transformational relationship with the Living God, and do want to share their faith. They often don’t know how, they’re often understandably nervous about it, it feels vulnerable, but we’re training them how to do that. How to have spiritual conversations, how to introduce Jesus in just the right ways. And as Dwight mentioned, how to add a spiritual extra to things we’re already doing that doesn’t interfere, say, with the feeding ministry, but where people might be invited to come to a different room for 10 minutes after the feeding ministry is over to light a candle and pray together or explore more about Jesus. Most people agree that he’s a great spiritual teacher, and they’re interested in him. So can we give opportunities to do that for people to ask questions they have and not be shamed and to really engage with them in loving ways?
B: In so many of my conversations with leaders who are aspiring toward innovation, there is a kind of assumption around size and that what they create ought to be big, and it ought to last forever until the kingdom. But what I hear both of you saying is that size might be intimate and there might be a seasonality to this. And I wonder about some of those misconceptions that you bump into as you’re teaching innovation and the mixed ecology, what sort of, what are the pitfalls in terms of our misconceptions that we have around what does new ministry look like?
Blair: You know exactly what you said, and it’s interesting to me, even with our traditional churches, that we think they should go on forever and not perhaps have a life cycle. But yeah, the other thing I’m finding with the mustard seed innovators I work with, and that name was intentional, this is as small as a mustard seed, that sometimes a lot of these folks are lay leaders and sometimes even the clergy will kind of like, where are the deliverables? How do they deliver? How many people are you getting? Why isn’t this flourishing right now? This work takes time. It’s on God’s timeline. And as Dwight said, listening to people, developing trust in an age where there is so little trust, this takes, it takes so much time to develop these relationships.
So that’s one thing. Be on God’s timetable and just really, nothing needs to be forced. Listening to people is holy. Finding intentional ways to love them with a partner is holy. And then see what the Holy Spirit does in that. But do offer opportunities for people who have a deeper spiritual hunger to have that hunger met or to tap into that.
I think also one of the things they always say in the UK is limit the number of Christians from the traditional church who come to the Fresh Expressions. Sometimes they can take over and they can speak churchese or keep telling people to come to church, keep inviting them. And that’s not what this is about. Again, some people do hunger for something deeper and find their way into the traditional churches. So these can be a wonderful pathway. But that’s … we’re not about filling the pews in the traditional church. We’re about meeting people where they are and sharing the hope that is in us when people are curious about that and are asking us questions.
D: A couple of thoughts on that. So partly the question I think is why are we doing the innovation? And as we’ve listened out across the churches in different places, we hear a lot of different motivations for that. And if the motivation is essentially to kind of fix the established inherited church system, particularly those institutional expressions that are, as Blair mentioned, at the end, nearing the end of their normal institutional life cycle, I think, is the most important thing. So as culture changes and things like that, that’s not a particularly helpful motivation. The motivation has to be more actually a gospel motivation, a spiritual motivation to share good news that transformational encounters with the living God that we know in our own lives. And so part of what the churches in the West, I think, need to learn coming out of the long legacy of Christendom of cultural and social privilege for the church and establishment, and particularly in the kind of dominant culture, you kind of Euro-, you know, European based culture, is how to be led by God rather than controlling all the outcomes and controlling and managing everything ourselves. And so if innovation is another managerial technique to kind of fix institutions that are reaching their sell-by date or declining so you can get that boost of growth, you know, a market share or whatever, like that, that’s not the right narrative we want to be living in. And I think the spiritual work that God is calling the church to in this season is relearning somewhat like, perhaps, the people of Israel in the wilderness, how to be led by the pillar of cloud and fire or trust that the manna will arrive in the morning or find that water coming out of the rock, right? It’s deep spiritual work, learning how to trust in God’s presence and agency and person rather than our own resources and authority and solutions all the time.
B: Well, that’s really powerful. And of course, I’ve seen you both at work so gracefully among our Leaders Way Fellows each year. And what’s striking about how you both teach is your core conviction that we need contemplative and spiritual practices to be the container for an encounter with God. And that is to say that like the encounter with God is the basis of all of this, right? Because some of the critique that I hear that might be really fair, levelled against various church innovation projects is that they bring with it a kind of sort of capitalist and Christendom and colonial import, right? And so I love that you’re centering this in an encounter with the Holy Spirit.
And of course, as I look out into many digital spaces and social media spaces, there are many, many souls out there in the world teaching spiritual practices from a secular perspective, from the yoga perspective, from the somatic perspective. This is an age of flourishing of various forms of spiritual practices, even outside the church. And yet, sometimes within the inside, we can be a little reticent or embarrassed for many different reasons to share them. And yet, wow, we have such a treasury of spiritual practice to share. So I love that you sort of orient all of this around that encounter.
And one of the things that I would love you both to pick up on is a theme that I’ve heard from, I don’t know, about 20 bishops or so that I’ve talked to over the last three years in launching our Office of Transforming Leaders. And you both have been such inspirational supporters and collaborators in that work– is the invitation to risk. I’ve heard almost every single bishop I’ve talked to, Episcopal bishop, here in the Episcopal churches in the United States, talk about their hope and prayer that their own clergy will take more risks. And there’s a whole series of reasons why clergy don’t tend to be natural risk takers. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the kind of healthy spiritual risk that’s involved in all of this, and how you help folks when you’re teaching, folks to kind of take a little bit of a leap.
Blair: Yeah. You know, Brandon, you just really, as you know so well, you have to lead the way. You have to be practicing your faith. And it’s, as you know, in ministry, it’s so busy. Most of my colleagues are doing one funeral after another right now. And I’ve had so many tell me, like, I want to be involved in this innovative work based in spiritual practices, but I have no bandwidth for it. But what I’m seeing is it’s one thing to talk about all this happening in the UK, and it is happening, and it’s so exciting. But once we’ve started to have things taking root on Minnesota soil, it’s been a game changer. And so people are starting to see it. We’re sharing those stories.
But, you know, it wasn’t … I went to a wonderful divinity school and got a very rich theological education and I’m so grateful for it every day. But I never had any training, even at the parish level, in how to apprentice people into spiritual practices. And what I find with people inside and outside the churches, there’s nothing better than engaging in contemplative practices in community and then debriefing them together and hearing–what did the Holy Spirit do? What did everybody learn? We just–I just had an innovator retreat. And we were we were going into the story about the paralytic being lowered in front of Jesus by his friends. And I had them do an Ignation exercise where they were putting themselves in the story. Oh, my goodness. All of a sudden, there was someone there who had been in Vietnam and he said, I was paralyzed. And I he shared. And another woman was like the tile maker and everybody, everybody had a different angle. And this faith is meant to be lived in community. So many people are doing DIY religion and this, you know, but they’re doing it on their own. And there’s such a loneliness there. And we all know, as well as your listeners, what a richness there is in studying scripture or doing whatever kind of practice and hearing how others experience that.
I had a number of grad students at my last church where by the grad school campus of the University of Minnesota. And so many of them said to me, what I really want, I love the people here. The service doesn’t do that much for me. But what I love, what I want, is to just do a spiritual practice and community debrief it and have a meal together. And it’s a lot more organic and to them feels less performative.
But to train our leaders, this is new. This is risky and vulnerable. It’s also really exciting. But I think having that you’re a spiritual practice daily to enable you to put yourself out there. Sometimes things come together. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes things come together differently from the way you imagine. But I think you have to you have to know why you’re doing this and you have to you have to learn to trust the Holy Spirit’s leading. And that’s not always an easy thing to do. I was used to being the cruise director for many years in my churches and people expected me to be the cruise director. So it’s a really different model to learn how to let the Holy Spirit lead this new Christian community or your traditional church.
D: And I’ll just add a couple of things on the risk question. So absolutely Amen to everything that Blair has said. But when you do these experiments on the … on the edges of the church’s life on the side, you know, we always say the experiment should be inexpensive. Don’t make them big things that either mess with your primary worship service initially or cost a lot of money. Those are ways to kind of reduce the risk and then help people have a space where you can make mistakes and fail. And the church doesn’t blow up. Right?
So positioning all of this work appropriately on the edges, sometimes a little under the radar screen, you know, small teams of people who are willing to try things and then to give space and permission and protection for them. And that’s really important, both at the parish level. If you’re, you know, the clergy are overseeing the congregation. But even more also important at the diocesan level or the larger structure to say, you know, it’s important that we have space for these multiple things going on. And, you know, fortunately, you know, our bishop here in Minnesota is very much about that, saying, like, we’re going to have these different forms of church and that’s normal. And it can’t all fit in the one box. Right? And so, so a role like Blair’s, you know, in a system is really important. And having some people who are dedicated to focusing on this is really important because a lot of parish clergy, well, to say nothing of bishops, our diocesan staff are so busy managing the inherited institution that, you know, it can’t come from them. It really has to come from lay leaders, people that the system hasn’t been paying attention.
And I think the Holy Spirit is raising up. And we’ve seen this so many places, amazing leaders who are very marginal to the established church. And often that’s their social location, their cultural background. The Holy Spirit is working through these leaders and the systems and the bureaucracies are not necessarily designed to receive their gifts and empower them. And that’s, I think, really important system work that needs to take place today.
Blair: These are not people who want to serve on diocesan committees. We’ll just put it that way. And with Dwight was saying, I always say no t-shirts, no banners. Like that asks for a big fail.
B: You know, I’ve quoted both of you when I’m meeting with my leaders, way fellows, when they’re in the early stages of listening and ideation around what their innovative ministry project might be. And I always quote you both by saying “an inexpensive experiment that doesn’t blow off your church.” So thank you for that.
What might you say to some of our seminarians? We have a lot of seminarians who listen in the podcast, a lot of potential seminarians who are contemplating a life of ministry, and particularly those seminarians who might be here at Berkeley and at Yale Divinity School, and they’re in the midst of studying. And in some ways, their preparation for ministry looks pretty traditional. In some ways, they’re preparing for the traditional model, and yet maybe they have a heart for innovation and they’re curious about mixed ecology.
How would you encourage them? What advice might you give to them as they’re both deeply entrenched in the tradition, which is incredibly appropriate, but also sort of curious about, gosh, how do I form myself? How can I prepare myself for the kind of mixed ecology ministry that you’re naming so powerfully?
Blair: I think it’s really important to be able to see and experience some of these new Christian communities and to have time with their leaders. I went to a program called Learning from London run by Bexley Seabury. Dwight’s going to be doing the same thing through Luther. So we went, we experienced quite a few of these new Christian communities, and then we had time to talk to the leaders, and that was invaluable. I’ve been sending a team every year from the diocese to London, and it has just transformed these lay and ordained leaders, and now they come back and all the alumni gather and they share the new stories and where they went. It has really changed the way clergy lead. The clergy who just came back, they are just convicted that they must center discipleship. That is the most critical thing. That was their key learning. But there are also so many great resources out there. Michael Moyna has a book called Godsend and a website called Godsend that has tons of videos. It’s all free online, and I use a lot of these training videos at Mustard Seed meetings about how to do this.
There’s a wonderful new book by Shannon Kaiser, the head of Fresh Expressions North America, called Opening Space. And the nice thing is she’s in the mainline. She’s a Presbyterian pastor. Sometimes I think people in the mainline will read about Burritos and Bibles or Tattoo parlor church in one of Michael Beck’s books or Michael Moyna’s book. And they’ll be like, I could never do that. But Shannon comes from a Presbyterian church in Northern Virginia that noticed that there were no community meeting spaces in Herndon, Virginia, and bought this office building and started a community coffee shop. And then everybody from the church, including the clergy and staff, started having all their meetings in the coffee shop.
I just want to echo what Dwight said, though. I’m finding we went through a transition when our new presiding bishop came in, and a lot of the new Christian communities around the nation tried to find out–they had no idea where these other communities were. They had met some people at national church gatherings. And so far, the head of our farm church told me that I’m the only person she’s learned of so far that is on a diocesan staff working with innovators. So I think you need … each ministry context is different. Each state is different. Each region of Minnesota is different. I think you need somebody on the ground. What I can do for clergy and for lay leaders is I can run learning communities where people interested in this work can meet each other and network. And we can do just in time learning. And then they can go out and stay in touch with their clergy. But it’s super helpful to have somebody bringing them together.
But again, lots of resources out there. But I think more and more, you know, visiting places that are doing this is really critical and experiencing and having the chance to debrief with leaders. Every week, Fresh Expressions North America has a newsletter come out and there’s a different story about a fresh expression somewhere in the U.S. working with groups from prisoners to parents. And so you can find out more about these communities and ideally connect with one that is close to you.
B: And I wonder if you have any final words of encouragement to a leader who might be curious but hesitant, hesitant that this is this is a new form that might not be embraced by their community, hesitant about what their life is. Hesitant about what their leadership might say. Hesitant about what how their colleagues might react in ministry. All these layers of self-questioning and doubt that I find leaders have to wade through in this process of innovation. You know, what encouragement do you give to leaders when they express this and when they’re in your classrooms?
D: I would say, first of all, just being really clear on why, you know, and having both that deep rooting in your own faith in Christ and experience of the Triune God as to the urgency of actually sharing that experience with others who aren’t going to connect into the traditional structures. Like, that’s, I think, really important. And then it’s finding some people, as Blair’s described, you know, it’s –she spent the last several years traveling around Minnesota finding these amazing folks called to this work and then knitting them together into community. I think if you feel like you have to do it alone without any connection from anyone else or support. That’s going to be very hard, right? So it’s much better to walk with others in doing, you know, that that process and supporting each other is really critical.
Blair: Can I just add to that to say it just blew me away. So mustard seed meets every four months we meet all over the state and at our we had a retreat recently and they said we want our regular meetings to be longer. How many people do you know who want a longer meeting to watch the energy as they’re connecting, they’re sharing ideas. They’re with people who are doing similar things on the edges. It’s so critical to have a way to bring those people together because they can feel–even with a team–alone, isolated. It’s what I’m doing crazy. Nobody around you understands what you’re doing. So just critical to bring them into some kind of community with other people of faith who are again trying to do a similar, similar experiments reaching out to neighbors in love.
B: Dwight and Blair, I’m so thankful for your ministry. Your book, Embracing the Mixed Ecology is already a blessing. We’re going to use it with our Leaders Way fellows this summer. So we’re going to buy 40 copies and dig into it together. But I’m just so thankful for the work you’ve committed to really trailblazing work. And it’s made such a difference for me and our community here at the Leaders Way. So thank you. And I wonder if you have a prayer blessing to share with our listeners as we depart.
Blair: Thank you. I’d love to share a Fresh Expressions prayer that came from the Church of England. And we use it at the close of every Mustard
Seed meeting. Let us pray.
Gracious God, keep us ever mindful of your presence, thankful for what has been and excited for what is to come.
May we walk in humility, always hungry for more of you.
Open our ears that we would always hear you. Break our hearts for what hurts you.
Holy Spirit, lead us always to where you need us to be. Equip us to be a courageous movement, telling stories of hope, and proclaiming in fresh ways the good news to this generation, to the glory of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
B: Amen. Thank you both so much.
D: Thank you for having us.
Blair: Thank you, Brandon.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydividendy.yale.edu.
Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events. Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom, and compassion.