A Stark Reality | Church Off the Map | Lenten Series

Transcript

00:00:00:16 – 00:00:34:34
Clint Loveall
All right, Francis, thanks for being with us. I know this setup is a little formal, but we are recording it so other folks can watch. So that’s kind of the reason we’re here. This way. This is something we’re doing and, you know, it’s a little different than some of what we’ve done on Lent. We are focusing on the church, some of the struggles of the church, some of the evaluation of where the church is and this kind of grows out of something Michael and I were asked to do for the presbytery.

00:00:34:35 – 00:00:49:17
Clint Loveall
The presbytery was doing a series of workshops for pastors and laypeople on sort of reinvigorating re. They called it a number, what they call it.

00:00:49:17 – 00:00:50:42
Michael Gewecke
Evangelizing the congregation.

00:00:50:56 – 00:01:16:30
Clint Loveall
It was a reword, it was a renewing maybe. I don’t know what. Yeah. Shows you how much attention I paid, but we got asked to do one of those, and the one that we were asked to do was to focus on the challenges of the church and some thoughts about how the church could perhaps work toward meeting those challenges.

00:01:16:30 – 00:01:41:02
Clint Loveall
And so that’s what we thought we talked about. And obviously this is different. That was a lot of elders. There were some pastors, those were primarily people in leadership and they were scattered. And one of the things they had in common was they most of them at least had some experience, most of them current experience in churches where there was some struggle.

00:01:42:36 – 00:02:17:27
Clint Loveall
Small churches, rural churches, churches that had been through difficulties, churches where, you know, things weren’t going as well as people hoped they would go. And so fortunately, our context is is very different than that. We hope to be able to translate and fill in some of the gaps as we think about this for the next couple weeks. And part of the reality is in a place like first and we are very, very blessed here, we are insulated from some of the realities a little bit.

00:02:17:27 – 00:02:51:43
Clint Loveall
And you could say, well, why do we need to think about them? And we’re going to make a case later on for why we think that is. But as we get started, the place we started, which was very interesting and you and think about this if you want, I don’t know how well it translates, but we asked people who are at the workshop if you had to fish in in the scripture, if you had to wade through the Scripture and think of an image for your current experience of the church, what is it?

00:02:51:43 – 00:03:06:55
Clint Loveall
What’s the narrative? What’s the scene? What’s the story that sort of encapsulates how you’re feeling about the church right now? And it was it was interesting, but it was kind of consistent.

00:03:07:21 – 00:03:34:19
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And I wouldn’t say altogether unsurprising. The the pastors, the elders there were able to give voice to that season. And probably the one that stuck out to me most was one said, I feel like we’re the people of Israel in the wilderness. That we’re trapped in between here and there, and that there’s no discernable sort of relief from the moment that we were in.

00:03:34:19 – 00:03:54:27
Michael Gewecke
But the overall theme that connected all that was was this idea of struggle, of conflict, not necessarily internal conflict, but the idea of conflict even with culture, the sense that things have changed, that feeling that things are not the same as what they were even ten years ago. And what does that mean in our congregations?

00:03:54:30 – 00:04:17:06
Clint Loveall
There were there were probably round numbers, 15 churches represented, and nobody had a positive illustration. Nobody said, Oh, we’re taking over the Promised Land or, you know, Book of Revelation triumph. There was none of that. It was pretty sobering.

00:04:17:38 – 00:04:44:32
Michael Gewecke
You know, I don’t know if you found this as helpful as I did, Clint, but the frame for the series that we did there, and I think the thing that in some ways in my mind makes it very well situated for our conversation here during Lent is the frame for me was if we were going to look ahead as best as we can and none of us see into the future with 2020 Vision, we only see in broad strokes.

00:04:44:33 – 00:05:10:58
Michael Gewecke
Right? And if you’re going to begin outfitting yourself for the journey, that will be the future congregation. You know, I think about the kids who we all we gave Bibles to this fall, if you remember that scene. And for me, there’s something very symbolic about we’re not just handing them a Bible. We’re committed every time we have a baptism, we recommit ourselves to those parents and to those children that we’re going to be a place where the faith is passed on to the best of our knowledge.

00:05:10:58 – 00:05:27:19
Michael Gewecke
And so if we’re going to do that work, what are the tools and what are the places? And one of the things that we need to be doing now so that when they become elders here, they have the tools that they need to lead. What do the future leaders of this place need if they’re going to be faithful in this place?

00:05:27:19 – 00:05:57:30
Michael Gewecke
And the talk for me was very deeply rooted in that question of what? What things can we begin working on that later on down the road we can hand that the church will find useful. And in in the the sort of vein of that, I think what makes it particularly relevant here is because we might be tempted to think that the realities out there, however you frame out there, you could frame that as within the Presbyterian Church or you could frame that in the mainline church.

00:05:57:31 – 00:06:23:56
Michael Gewecke
You could think about that in culture, you could think about that as a kind of secularism versus faith. You know, there’s lots of different frames you could bring to it, but however you want to do that, I think that at the end of the day, we have to be honest with ourselves that those forces live outside the walls and it won’t be forever, but that we will experience those forces ourselves in real direct ways.

00:06:23:56 – 00:06:47:20
Michael Gewecke
Secularism, You know, there’s a lot of things that the church will respond to. And we’re in this beautiful moment in which we get to with some momentum and with some joy and with some gratitude, with some good gifts. We get to pause and have a question about what are the fundamentals of church, what are the things, other non-negotiables, that a healthy congregation should have?

00:06:47:34 – 00:06:59:33
Michael Gewecke
Not necessarily because we’re lacking them, but because at the end of the day, if we’re going to thrive into the future, if we’re going to have the tools we need for the journey, it’s good to count the cost. Before you go.

00:06:59:33 – 00:07:25:24
Clint Loveall
Yeah, which circles back to our question why and not to presume too much about first press, but why does out there matter if things are going well in here? And you could ask that of any church. But the reality is structurally, obviously, as a member of a denomination, we’re connected to a bigger picture. But spiritually we should be concerned about the state of the church.

00:07:25:49 – 00:08:06:18
Clint Loveall
We should care about the struggles of congregations, the idea of the people of Christ, the reality. You know, part of that is it also is opportunity. Churches that have the wherewithal and the ability to push back on some of the trends I think are responsible to do that as hopefully a signpost, as an encouragement to others. And so for better or worse, I think churches need to be aware of the bigger picture.

00:08:06:18 – 00:08:41:15
Clint Loveall
It is not is not a very biblical model of church to put yourself under a dome and say, Well, it only matters what happens here, that that’s not a good model of how to be church and we want to do better than that. We are connected. Now. Those connections don’t always make things easier. A couple of a couple of realities as we begin, and I don’t know if these are new, if they’re not if they’re not new, I apologize if they are new.

00:08:41:15 – 00:08:45:21
Clint Loveall
Mm. Don’t be depressed. Oh, well, they’re a little depressing, I suppose.

00:08:46:17 – 00:08:47:54
Michael Gewecke
It is Lent I think.

00:08:47:54 – 00:09:26:27
Clint Loveall
Yeah, they’re very lent like we live in in denomination the Presbyterian Church USA in the recent past. So in 1983 there were two versions of Presbyterian, basically in North, in the south, they become what we now are the Presbyterian Church in the United States. But our history, even pre reunion that moment was called, has been a struggle. It’s been very near 70 years since the Presbyterian Church on the whole had more people at the end of the year than the start of the year.

00:09:27:07 – 00:09:59:27
Clint Loveall
We haven’t done that in the better part of a century. We’ve not shown a net growth. And I mean, as a denomination, we have in that time lost hundreds of churches, hundreds of thousands of members. We have had theological struggles, we’ve had structural struggles, We’ve had financial struggles, congregational issues pastorally, I mean, as as any large church would.

00:09:59:58 – 00:10:30:12
Clint Loveall
But we have had the experience as Presbyterians. And again, it may not be your personal experience, but our family experience has been shrinkage has been struggle. If if you are a Presbyterian, there’s a 95% chance that your church experience is one of decline. In fact, that’s probably more like 99%. To be honest. That has been kind of our family reality.

00:10:30:37 – 00:10:36:54
Clint Loveall
And and that’s bad enough, but it’s actually connected to something bigger, right?

00:10:37:12 – 00:11:03:07
Michael Gewecke
So if only that was just like Presbyterians missed the mark. That would be comforting. But the reality is sort of who you might consider. Our sister churches. The the mainline Methodist Lutheran churches have experienced the same statistical decline. And so you look across the board and you see that happening in churches that are a lot like us. But when I was becoming Presbyterian, because I think most people here know I didn’t grow up Presbyterian.

00:11:03:07 – 00:11:28:19
Michael Gewecke
I grew up in the Pentecostal tradition. So when I became Presbyterian, it was an interesting moment in the life of the church. And, you know, this this decline was something that people were talking about, but there was this kind of fantasy land of the community church where they have big lights and praise bands and everything is perfect. You know, if we could just capture what they’re doing over there, they have all the young people and all the energy and that’s great.

00:11:29:11 – 00:12:01:37
Michael Gewecke
And then now, today, if you look at this same statistical markers, all of those churches have experienced the same decline over the last decade as the Presbyterians at same or equal rates or greater rates. I mean, so there’s there’s this decline happening across the denominations, if only that was enough. Just recently, Christianity Today released a study. You know, how Pew and Barna do these sort of check ins?

00:12:01:37 – 00:12:30:39
Michael Gewecke
For the first time in the history of America, they have been able to say that there is a there’s a date on the near horizon when less than 50% of Americans call themselves Christian. And they said if it continues at this rate, no one knows how far it will go, but it won’t be long until the spiritual group, the nuns and O any s people who say they have no faith affiliation will outnumber Christianity in the country.

00:12:30:39 – 00:12:52:51
Michael Gewecke
So you go from the Presbyterian Church to sort of the mainline church to the more contemporary churches, to Christianity as a faith in America are all experiencing the same statistical movement. So at some point you say this is reality. And at some point in that trajectory you have to engage with some of those deeper questions.

00:12:53:22 – 00:13:23:58
Clint Loveall
It’s it’s hard because it is always hard to diagnose something while you’re in it. But the people who study this and Michael and I have a ridiculous amount of conversations along these lines. We have hundreds of hours of trying to think through some of these and and reading. And the people who devote themselves to it really do believe that we are close to a tipping point, that we’re not going to be able to continue the patterns we’re in indefinitely before things start to crumble.

00:13:24:21 – 00:14:07:55
Clint Loveall
And that’s a scary idea, right, that the church could fall apart. I’m not I’m not particularly worried. I’m now, let’s say optimistically, ten realistically, 15 ish years from re retirement, I think there will probably still be a Presbyterian entity when I retire. If I’m this guy, I’m probably trying to make sure I have other bases covered. Now, I could be it could be faster than that.

00:14:07:55 – 00:14:31:46
Clint Loveall
It could be slower than that. But I’m I’m 60% confident I will be around and the Presbyterian Church will be around when I need to make that transition. I would not have that confidence if I were in Michael’s chair, just just for what it’s worth. And that’s that’s a couple of guys guessing at things that we can’t know.

00:14:32:04 – 00:14:54:12
Clint Loveall
But we if you’ve ever experienced that kind of movement in an organization, there is a point where the structure just can’t hold it up anymore. And we are. We are. That’s in our foreseeable future that that is not as far away as we hope.

00:14:54:12 – 00:15:22:17
Michael Gewecke
I think we’re off to a wicked strong start. Glad you’re here, aren’t you? I say that jokingly, but the reality is that the way into real generative, creative conversation is always through difficult ground. And some of the places where the church has failed is to have difficult, honest conversation where we’ve covered it up and said, Well, maybe they’ll come back.

00:15:22:31 – 00:15:46:19
Michael Gewecke
And when we’ve thought they, we’ve never defined it, when we said, you know, maybe at some point it’ll change and we put it on a wish instead of truly facing it and saying, Who are we called to be today in light of what gifts we have and in light of the place where we are and in light of what God is really, truly doing, who are we called to be in this moment?

00:15:46:19 – 00:16:20:04
Michael Gewecke
That’s a challenging question. And I would argue that we’re not making that up. The church has been doing that ever since Jesus Christ called the church into being by his ascension. And we Presbyterians, we came out of this big bang, this flurry of activity in the Protestant Reformation, Reformation, and we’re in a moment, which it would be hard it would be very foolish to call what’s happening to the Church of America Reformation, because that assumes that we know a thing while it’s happening.

00:16:20:04 – 00:17:03:28
Michael Gewecke
But whatever is happening is going to leave a long historical tale for the church. And if we look at that as an opportunity to see the Spirit of God working in creative, generative ways that we might be invited into as opposed to a dire saw, the death song that enables the church to have energy and joy and life and to push back, as opposed to what I think was very much the resonant tone of our conversation was folks who were just tired, just absolutely exhausted, that it’s been a long time and and the life and the energy and the energy of the church has only slowed.

00:17:03:50 – 00:17:39:23
Michael Gewecke
And in the face of that, it’s easy to think that death is the ultimate end. But we’re as we will talk over this entire series that the church is called by the Spirit of God, to grow that with the image of growth. The image of life is built into the scriptures about the church. And I think that this is actually a beautiful opportunity for us to engage in a new kind of thinking about church that is going to prepare us to be hands of feet of Jesus, as we’ve always been called to be in a radically changing culture.

00:17:39:23 – 00:18:06:41
Clint Loveall
So when you’re in a moment of struggle, whether this is a team, whether this is an organization, whether this is a business, whether this is a church, when you find yourself in a moment that by all the markers, things aren’t going particularly well. The question that gets pushed to the forefront is do we need to change? Right? And when you have a mainline institution, we have a long history.

00:18:07:26 – 00:18:33:48
Clint Loveall
We have a very developed theology. We have pretty deep rationale for most of what we do, not always, but most of the time what we do has roots to it. It’s been thought through, it’s been vetted, it’s been tested, and it has been hard for us. One of the things Presbyterians are not generally known for is our flexibility.

00:18:34:40 – 00:19:05:16
Clint Loveall
We we like to do what we’ve done. We trust what we’ve done. We’ve done it for good reasons, and at times we’ve done it with good results. But it makes it more difficult to answer the question, Do we need to change? Because one answer is that we’re doing it right. What we’re doing is faithful. What we’re doing is correct and we do it until there’s nobody left to do it anymore.

00:19:05:36 – 00:19:52:42
Clint Loveall
And and if death is the result, then then we stay the course until it happens to us. Now, you’re not going to hear that from us. But that’s an approach, I think a more a more thoughtful approach, a more realistic approach is to say what we’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. Why do we keep doing it? And so that’s I think that’s one of the fundamental core challenges that the church, you know, I don’t even I don’t even know if I could bring myself to say that the church has wrestled with it.

00:19:53:31 – 00:20:21:05
Clint Loveall
I think the church has suffered from it, but I don’t know if we’ve even engaged it enough at some of our higher levels to say that we’ve we’ve wrestled with it. We’re beginning to. But it’s late. It’s late in the game. The the mainline church, the Presbyterian Church, Methodist Church, Lutheran Church, if you know any of that. We’ve been inundated with discussions about human sexuality.

00:20:21:30 – 00:20:54:07
Clint Loveall
It was really ramping up as I was coming out of college in the early nineties. So it’s I mean, for for 30 plus years that’s been a hot burner issue. And we have in the Presbyterian Church, we have lost a significant number of people related to that conversation, although in fairness, we should say on, on every side of it, we’ve had people leave the church because of unhappiness on on every position that you could think of.

00:20:54:07 – 00:21:17:20
Clint Loveall
So yeah, that has been a reality for us. I think that I started my church career right at the end of the protected time. I got a year or so, maybe a couple of years in before all of a sudden it was we have this on Sunday and we have that on Sunday in the school activity or outside activity.

00:21:18:57 – 00:22:09:18
Clint Loveall
Yeah, Sundays are no longer it wasn’t that long ago that they were I don’t think I don’t know how you could defensively. I mean they’re just not anymore. That church is just one more thing that you can go do on a Sunday. That’s a big one. We’ve not handled that real well. That that’s tough to navigate. There is some fascinating research conjecture about the struggles and the gap that has developed, particularly in mainline churches, between corporate faith and personal faith and the need to try and move those back to a more integrated approach so that just coming to church isn’t isn’t the goal.

00:22:09:18 – 00:22:38:16
Clint Loveall
It’s a good goal. It’s just not a good enough goal. Yeah, it’s part of the goal, but it shouldn’t be a goal in and of itself necessarily. And then it should say, yeah, one of the things Michael mentioned touched on it a little bit ago, the idea that in a weird way Presbyterians have been optimistic though in another way we’ve hid behind that optimism.

00:22:38:16 – 00:23:07:49
Clint Loveall
When our young people started leaving church, we kind of said, Well, we hope they come back. When other people started leaving, we said, Well, we hope they come back. When churches started closing, we said, Well, we hope they reopen. And as it’s turned out, hope has not been a great strategy and we are probably not going back to where we were.

00:23:08:22 – 00:23:32:10
Clint Loveall
This has been another I have to be very careful because I I’ll go soapbox here, but we have had a difficult time admitting that some of the bridges we’ve crossed have burned behind us. And we’re just we’re just we’re not going back to the old days.

00:23:32:51 – 00:24:01:10
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. I would add there, though, I think it’s even more complicated than that initially. Sounds. It’s not just that the church has a long pattern of doing what we’ve done and that our choices have consequences. It’s that while we’ve been hoping that they will come back, the world has changed in a meaningful way. Let me give you an example.

00:24:01:10 – 00:24:24:45
Michael Gewecke
This maybe this helps illustrate the point. I try to stay connected to this. You can imagine when you work the majority part of your time inside the church that it it’s churches all you think all the time, right? Like this are what we do in our people and what and who’s in the hospital like that. That’s it’s easy to get trapped only with that.

00:24:24:59 – 00:24:47:43
Michael Gewecke
So I try to work hard to get my mind out of the church a little bit. And so there’s some places where I go where people go and they comment on news and they comment on stuff and they’re not Christian at all, that if anything, they’re anti-Christian. And you might remember that there was this story. There was a group of kids actually who were in Haiti on a mission trip and they were kidnaped.

00:24:47:51 – 00:25:09:57
Michael Gewecke
I don’t know. I see some heads now nodding, Good grief. And so these kids got kidnaped. They were held ransom. The State Department was working with the government there, which is very broken right now. And they were trying to figure out what to do. And these people online went on and they asked why in the world were these people in Haiti?

00:25:09:57 – 00:25:24:50
Michael Gewecke
And they said, well, they were on a mission trip. They said, what’s a mission trip? And so it’s when you go for seven days and you spend time and you serve people and they’re like, why would you do that? Is it for your school application? Well, no, because they believe in Jesus and they think that makes a difference.

00:25:25:04 – 00:25:59:28
Michael Gewecke
Like that may seem strange to you, but I want to submit that’s the plurality. That’s the majority culture of people my age could not answer what a mission trip is, but I think we like to assume that our thoughts and experiences are largely shared. But I have colleagues who serve Presbyterian churches across the United States. The majority cultures of the cities where they serve believe that Christians are against them and not for them for any number of reasons.

00:26:00:09 – 00:26:23:34
Michael Gewecke
And so we have to, on some level grapple with the reality of that. And I’m not trying to be a harsh, but I am trying to make the point that at some point we have to put aside the questions of what things are we going to return to and we need to begin to orient our self. And what I think is a fundamentally different landscape.

00:26:23:51 – 00:27:00:27
Michael Gewecke
The great news is the encouraging news is the church thrived in the most inhospitable culture that could exist. You remember that the Romans hunted Christians and this is where the church took root and grew. I have no fear for God’s church. God is in charge and the church grows even in difficult times. But this is where Presbyterians, I think, missed the mark because we’re head people, we like to think and we and we really analyze and we look for causes and we try to make sure our reasoning fits all of the different categories.

00:27:00:27 – 00:27:25:12
Michael Gewecke
And the problem is we’ve become fixated on diagnosing the problem. We keep looking for it. Well, what’s the one thing we need to change? Is it the flavor of coffee? Do we need to teach our people in seminary a different sermon style? Do we need to get trapped sets in every congregation? Will that fix the problem? Right. We had all of these logical What’s the perfect solution?

00:27:25:12 – 00:27:57:59
Michael Gewecke
Conversations? And we’ve done it so long that we’ve begun to think, in my opinion, that identifying the problem would solve the problem and it doesn’t work. Sitting and thinking you’re saying over a thousand times just means your brain has cycled a thousand times. We haven’t come up with a solution yet. We haven’t found the perfect diagnosis. And I think if we make that our majority effort, we’re going to quickly find it doesn’t lead us anywhere new.

00:27:58:46 – 00:28:27:00
Clint Loveall
So probably maybe ten years ago, eight years ago, at some point, I read a really interesting book. A Man is he’s a wilderness rescue guy. You know, he goes out and they he helps people get found. A hiker gets lost, skier gets hurt. He’s the guy they send out or one of the guys goes out. And he got interested in the question through this rescue work, who makes it and who doesn’t?

00:28:27:41 – 00:28:58:27
Clint Loveall
When you get lost in the woods, his really very bottom line question, who lives, who dies? And so he began to study it. And this question really led him to the book that I read. And it’s very interesting. He said there’s a very typical pattern for what happens to a person who is lost. They get lost. They are lost.

00:28:59:45 – 00:29:29:07
Clint Loveall
And way down the road, they admit they’re lost. And the difference between being lost and admitting lost is the survival window. The shorter that window is, the more likely that person makes it. He said What happens with many people is you look around and you say, Well, I should have gone to my camp by now, but I haven’t.

00:29:29:07 – 00:29:48:01
Clint Loveall
That’s weird. Well, it must be a little. I must not have gone as far as I thought I did. It’s probably over that hill. You go over that hill and there’s another hill. He said, Oh, well, I guess it’s that hill my camp is on. And we talk ourselves into these things. And survivalists call this bending the map.

00:29:48:02 – 00:30:17:45
Clint Loveall
There are multiple hundreds of stories where a person looks at a map and they say, Well, there’s supposed to be a lake right here, but there isn’t. But I know where I am. So that lake must have moved in the lake must have dried up. The map might be wrong. It’s called they call it bending the map. And bending the map is when you change your circumstances is to fit your reality.

00:30:19:12 – 00:30:46:21
Clint Loveall
So you convince yourself that you are where you want to be, but you’re not. The opposite of that is people who realized fairly quickly, I don’t know where I am, and if I don’t know where I am, the chances that I’m going to guess the right direction in a circle is very small. I need to be right here.

00:30:46:53 – 00:31:17:24
Clint Loveall
I need to find water, I need to find shelter, I need to start a fire. I need to prepare to be here until someone finds me or I figure out how to go somewhere that I know where I am. And interestingly enough, children survive being lost often better than adults, because when a kid’s tired, they lay down. Kids don’t really know where they are spatially most of the time, so they don’t panic about it.

00:31:17:24 – 00:31:42:43
Clint Loveall
They curl up, they stay where they are. Instead of getting more and more and more lost. And kids have a higher success rate of being found in many cases than adults do. And it’s very interesting, as I read that book, I’m I’m decent outside. I mean, I I’ve been lost and I didn’t like it. So I’m pretty careful about trying not to get lost again.

00:31:44:13 – 00:32:13:31
Clint Loveall
But as I read that book, I couldn’t help think about church and and he he had no theological content at all. But everything I heard him say, I thought of churches who keep plugging away with what they’ve done since 1950, like it’s still 1950 without admitting they’re not where they think they are. They’re not in the landscape that they that they used to be.

00:32:14:27 – 00:32:45:30
Clint Loveall
They are in a different place and they bent the map to justify being in that place, even though it clearly doesn’t work. So accepting where you are and planning to be there until you have a better answer is this vital thing. And Michael’s right. You know, we’re fascinated by the question, how do we get here? How did we get here?

00:32:45:30 – 00:33:12:46
Clint Loveall
But when you’re lost, how did I get here? Is way down on your priority list. That’s a thing to be figured out when you’re safe and warm and fed and not broken leg, etc.. How we got here isn’t unimportant, but it’s not the urgent question. The urgent question is how do we be here? What is here like and what would it take to thrive here?

00:33:12:46 – 00:33:48:01
Clint Loveall
And Michael and I stumbled on this quote in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This is what he says about the church. By sheer grace, God will not let us live even for a brief period in a dream world. And I believe that too many congregations are attempting to live in that dream world and it is extremely unlikely to be productive.

00:33:48:01 – 00:34:24:59
Michael Gewecke
Consider that for just a moment. By sheer grace, God will not let us live even for a brief period in a dream world, we often think of grace as being a good thing. We think of grace as being a free gift. It’s the source of our salvation. Bonhoeffer here is calling us to see costly grace, that God’s grace, God’s gift to us is God won’t allow us to live in a false curator and comfortable belief of what the world is, when the world is actually fundamentally different.

00:34:25:15 – 00:35:05:56
Michael Gewecke
And I think what makes this map bending so insidious for the church is the reality is we’ve gotten lost and we’ve never moved our buildings are exactly where they’ve always been. A lot of the church people, we live exactly where we’ve lived. We got lost and we didn’t know it because everything outside our walls, our witness field, the evangelistic field, we’re called to serve as witnesses to Jesus Christ has changed and we bend the map because we will that to be the exact same as what it was.

00:35:06:32 – 00:35:33:36
Michael Gewecke
So the sooner to make this practical, the sooner then that the church reckons with what we’re doing, produces the results that it produces because it’s what we’re doing is the same moment that we can begin to ask the question, what could we do to be witnesses to this place if in fact the church and here I want to make it clear, I don’t think we’re trying to hone in on any particular church.

00:35:33:36 – 00:35:59:47
Michael Gewecke
When we say church here, we’re not saying First Presbyterian Church in particular, when the Church of Jesus Christ is willing to see the world as it is and not live in a dream world of what we hope it might have been or what wish it still could be, if we could see it for what it is, then maybe we could make choices about how we will be witnesses in the world that actually is in a way that is compelling because that’s God’s work in us.

00:35:59:58 – 00:36:14:27
Michael Gewecke
It actually would allow us to change what we do and why we do it, and that it wouldn’t lead to perfect results. We’re not prophets. We don’t see what’s ahead. But it would enable us to have those conversations which would bear fruit.

00:36:15:28 – 00:36:43:51
Clint Loveall
When I got into the church, there were lots of things I realized I didn’t know anything about. It’s a weird it’s kind of a weird reality of pastoring. They teach you to do some things and then they drop you in a job that asks you to do lots of things that nobody ever asked If you know anything about, like read a budget or lead a meeting or figure out marketing and communication.

00:36:43:51 – 00:37:16:12
Clint Loveall
None of those are in the seminary track. They’re all in the pastorate. And so I realized relatively quickly that there was a significant gap in my kind of practical knowledge. I bought a bunch of business books and started reading about marketing and management and things that I thought would be helpful and were. But one of the books I read had this wonderful section and the title was long.

00:37:16:24 – 00:37:44:33
Clint Loveall
If you keep doing what you always did, you’ll keep getting what you always got and you you could argue that yes, that’s true. If nothing in the outside world has changed, we keep doing what we’ve always done and we don’t keep getting. So it’s a little bit of a different problem. But it there’s wisdom in that that that if you ask in many cases the church why do you do this?

00:37:45:59 – 00:38:26:49
Clint Loveall
The honest answer is, well, because we already were doing it. We always have done it. And I was really challenged by that idea that the church sometimes fails to be thoughtful and to be intentional about the decisions it makes, and it instead brings forward the past because it doesn’t know really in many cases what else to do. And, you know, the reality is, well, there are two realities that are competing, I think.

00:38:27:25 – 00:38:56:49
Clint Loveall
I don’t I’d like to think this isn’t true at first press but if you went into a number of Presbyterian churches in the area of the state, the world, the country for sure, you could with reasonable accuracy, think it’s the 1950s, there would be a pipe organ, it’d be a bulletin, there’d be some people in suits and dresses.

00:38:57:14 – 00:39:36:03
Clint Loveall
There’d be a liturgy that that church has done for 40 years. And it is church is one of the few places that people with nostalgia can go to. And it’s not terribly unlike in many cases, what they remember. Now, there may be fewer people there. In fact, statistically, almost certainly. But it feels the way it used to. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that except when it keeps us from admitting this is not the world that we used to have.

00:39:36:43 – 00:40:08:58
Clint Loveall
We live in a vastly different place. You believe that this little thing alone is a game changer? Imagine going back to yourself 30, 40, 50. However many years you want, and try to explain this to your former self. It would make no sense. It is a different world and we are not likely going back. We are where we are.

00:40:09:52 – 00:40:33:52
Clint Loveall
So what does it mean for the church to be here now? What does it mean to change some of what we do? There’s another Bonhoeffer quote that is really good. It says Only the fellowship that faces disillusionment with all its unhappy and ugly aspects begins to be what it should be in God’s sight begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it.

00:40:34:48 – 00:41:02:43
Clint Loveall
Only the fellowship, the church that faces its delusion and its unhappy and ugly aspects begins to be what it should be. If we don’t do that, we can’t be the fellowship that we are designed to be, that we are invited to be, and the reality beneath us, whether we feel it or not, whether you feel it or not, is one of struggle.

00:41:03:59 – 00:41:45:46
Clint Loveall
Some of our foundation is cracking and it’s coming. I it’s coming. Whether or not things in some places are going well, whether pastors are doing well or musicians or choirs or whatever, churches, daycares, buildings, those those things aren’t enough in and of themselves. There are no simple answers. And the benefit to a place like First Press is that the best time to prepare for something difficult is while things are going pretty well.

00:41:46:37 – 00:42:16:24
Clint Loveall
It is really hard to prepare for crisis when you’re in it. And so over the next several weeks, we want to be raising some of these questions. We want to be sharing some of these issues. And the idea is not to cry about, you know, how come things aren’t good anymore? The the idea is how do we look forward in a way that gives us the best chance to be the kind of fellowship that God would have us be in the place.

00:42:16:48 – 00:42:37:37
Clint Loveall
And in the moment that we’re in, because that’s that’s really our task. And I would argue that task is never changed. That has always been the task of the church. In some ways. It’s difficult now, but it’s never been easy. Being a church has always been hard. It’s been hard. You know, we don’t have people dragging us out to go throw us in front of lions.

00:42:38:16 – 00:43:10:33
Clint Loveall
I mean, times have been worse, right? We, the churches, the church has served a lot of waves. We’ve been through a lot of waters. The water we’re in is pretty choppy right now, but that’s old hat for the church. And so that’s that’s part of this conversation, part of this this series that we’re working on is what does it look like to think about being the church in the near future?

00:43:10:33 – 00:43:13:13
Clint Loveall
And we hope that’ll be helpful.

00:43:13:55 – 00:43:46:17
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, I think my only I have a few concluding thoughts. The first is this conversation could in some ways feel like a convicting, maybe even at its worst in salt, in the sense that the church has had its best people working on this for 60 years. And it’s easy to put our identity in the thing and to hear people talking about statistically it’s not going well can feel very personal.

00:43:46:21 – 00:44:13:13
Michael Gewecke
It can feel like, well, we fail. And I think that’s not the right frame. And let me give you an example. I’m sure all of you have seen this the time when the new daughter in law comes with the new baby home for Christmas and everybody at home in the family is trying to figure out what does the new baby mean because it means we can’t be loud while the baby’s trying to nap.

00:44:13:13 – 00:44:39:45
Michael Gewecke
And it means that, you know, this baby only gets the organic milk and. Right. Like everybody’s trying to serve that awkward social. What are you with me? That’s where the church is. We’re all constructively trying to figure out. These eighth graders are absolutely nuts and they’re addicted to screens. So how are we going to figure out how to connect with them and pass the faith on to them?

00:44:39:55 – 00:45:02:04
Michael Gewecke
Because that’s kind of annoying for everybody, including their parents of a middle schooler, by the way. But do you see what I’m saying? This isn’t about who’s failed and who’s not. And should we feel guilty and should we be down our assault? But that that’s not the conversation. The conversation is let’s stop trying to figure out the perfect diagnosis and let’s start working in the field where we’re planted.

00:45:03:05 – 00:45:27:19
Michael Gewecke
Let’s look around us and let’s continue that task. And if in 20 years, whoever the leaders of this church are, and I sure hope that they’re the kids who are in middle school right now are the leaders of the church, if they could get held or given, rather, a tape of this conversation of this series in 20 years, if they receive this, would they be doing the same thing then?

00:45:27:19 – 00:45:46:28
Michael Gewecke
Because if we could build a church and I mean, we well, if we can build a church by the way we treat one another, by the way we talk to one another, by the way that you do your ministry here, if we can serve in such a way in which they are formed to do that work, then praise be to God.

00:45:46:28 – 00:46:11:54
Michael Gewecke
That would be an incredible gift for a church to always look around and ask, How can we be planted here? No matter what here looks like? And I think that that’s that’s my hope is that as we go into this series, this is a heavy conversation. I realize that. But my hope is that you can see, even at the end of this conversation, the glimmer of light for all the talk of death we’ve had.

00:46:11:54 – 00:46:42:10
Michael Gewecke
Remember, we’re resurrection people. So there is light and that light is Jesus Christ. And the work that is going to happen here is unbelievably exciting. We just have to be willing to look at in the face of disillusionment and allow Jesus Christ to show us something else. And if we could be courageous enough to do that with one another over the next couple of weeks, I hope that we’ll find there’s a lot more encouragement on the back end than struggle that we’ve had on the front.

00:46:43:44 – 00:47:18:36
Clint Loveall
I think I hope most of you know this Michael and I tend to work really well together, get along really well together. One of the Michael, generally speaking, maybe leans more optimistic than I do. But one of the interesting reversals of that is when we have this church conversation, I am a little more stubborn. I, I think there’s I think there’s still a chance for Presbyterians.

00:47:18:36 – 00:47:41:24
Clint Loveall
I, I think I don’t know how, but I think there’s a chance we figure it out. We make some progress, we get some things nailed down and and we, we find a way forward. Michael O thinks less. He he does. He doesn’t agree.

00:47:41:27 – 00:47:43:31
Michael Gewecke
I’m not. I’m not saying us, but yeah.

00:47:43:31 – 00:48:13:55
Clint Loveall
Yeah, yeah. I so it’s a it’s a strange place where I’m unwilling to concede that we’re as far down the ladder, I think, as Michael. But I say that because the thing that we wholeheartedly agree on and the thing that we will hit really hard in the coming weeks is when you boil down the church’s problems, they’re not money.

00:48:15:46 – 00:48:49:08
Clint Loveall
They’re not fundamentally theology, they’re not worship, They’re not the things we point to as markers. The church’s fundamental problem is that in the midst of a messy time, it forgets to be the church. It fails to be the church. When the church is the church, it’s got very little to worry about. And when the church fails to be the church, it’s got very little chance.

00:48:50:29 – 00:49:22:28
Clint Loveall
And and one of the one of the things I think we see over and over and over again is that when you get right down to it, a whole lot of our problem is that we’ve looked at our problems instead of at our calling. And we’ll make that case. I’ll just warn you that that’s coming pretty heavy thing in the next in the next few weeks, we’re we’re going to hit we’re going to ring that bell loud and often, but we start the conversation.

00:49:22:28 – 00:49:36:18
Clint Loveall
Yeah, we realized we had to get into some of the not fun stuff to get to get there. I promise some of these sessions will be much more upbeat than this one. This one’s a little of a downer. Maybe in some ways.

00:49:36:34 – 00:50:01:57
Michael Gewecke
If you’re on a cruise ship and people stop coming and another cruise ship has all the people going to it, you ask what things do they have that we need to get? And when culture shifts and people start going into different forms of entertainment and COVID shifted people’s worldview, by the way, the content that we can write, all these things that church real church leaders, I’ve got friends.

00:50:01:57 – 00:50:18:45
Michael Gewecke
What’s the new program that we need to start that either looks political or that looks like the news or like that is a real temptation. The real temptation is what do we have to do to get them into that? Do we have to have a raffle? And you’re like, Well, what’s the thing that’s going to solve the problem?

00:50:18:45 – 00:50:40:48
Michael Gewecke
And the problem is everything that the world does, the world does better than the church. They just do. That’s their job. Their job is to do it and they do it better than the church. The only people who should be able to do church are the people in the church. And we we on some level, it is a question of faith.

00:50:40:48 – 00:51:10:39
Michael Gewecke
And I think we’ll we’ll hit this in some of the conversations about the. So what is you know, if we’re people of faith, do we trust that this is God’s church and if we do, then being church will be enough. And if you’ve ever seen a living church, it’s compelling. It’s compelling. And when people come around and love and serve one another, and when a person who doesn’t really look like they belong in that church shows up and people in the church beeline it for them to make sure that they feel welcome.

00:51:11:13 – 00:51:14:58
Michael Gewecke
And when that happens, that has a way of shaping your soul.

00:51:15:14 – 00:51:18:10
Clint Loveall
Well, now you’ve just given away the. No, I didn’t.

00:51:18:28 – 00:51:21:30
Michael Gewecke
I’m trying again to come back. Come back.