How We Got Here | Church Off the Map | Lenten Series

Transcript

00:00:00:19 – 00:00:24:10
Clint Loveall
So as we get started tonight, this is our look at some of our history. And there is a danger in looking back, but there is also some wisdom in looking back, because if you understand where you’ve come from, perhaps you have some idea of where you might go or how do we how did we get here and where is here?

00:00:24:41 – 00:00:56:33
Clint Loveall
And we have been through a very interesting time in the church in the last few years. There has never been in my lifetime. There’s never been a point where we just hit the pause button on everything the church was doing and told the church, figure out something else. And there there was some real upside in that the it exposed some struggles, exposed some opportunities, forced the church to do some new things.

00:00:57:36 – 00:01:26:42
Clint Loveall
It takes away that reliance on doing what you’ve always done just because you’ve always done it. And there were some real upsides in that. And, you know, there were obviously downsides. But COVID over that period of time pushed the church in the directions of creativity and flexibility in a way that churches, Presbyterian, mainline churches for sure, aren’t always good at.

00:01:27:36 – 00:01:58:46
Clint Loveall
And so in trying to do that, it did show us some opportunities. It probably also showed us some weaknesses. And I’ll be honest, it hurt a lot of churches. There are churches in our neighborhoods. I mean, in northwest Iowa, in our presbytery, there are churches who really have not yet recovered and may not recover from COVID. It it moved the timeline up, I think.

00:01:58:46 – 00:02:18:09
Clint Loveall
And it showed us to some extent that the nature of the church can be brittle. We shouldn’t assume that the church is going to be okay just because it has in the past. And that’s a difficult reality, but it’s a good thing to know.

00:02:18:55 – 00:02:43:46
Michael Gewecke
So I think one of the parts of the structure that COVID revealed to be brittle was our willing us to be flexible and to learn. And let me give you an example. So it was about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, there was a group of pastors out at the Brooks and they were having like a conference and I was invited.

00:02:43:46 – 00:03:05:49
Michael Gewecke
So I went out there and they were having roundtable discussions. And the question that was the prompt amongst all these pastors and church leaders was what did you learn over the course of COVID? And so go at the table and people are talking. And the person who led off at our table said this. He said COVID was absolutely worthless.

00:03:05:49 – 00:03:22:56
Michael Gewecke
We didn’t learn a thing. We just had to wait to get back to do what we’ve always done. And I had to do kind of like one of these because that’s kind of against my constitutional nature. So I just kind of had to like, okay, he did say that, let’s try to engage that. And I said, okay. I said, None of us liked it.

00:03:22:57 – 00:03:48:16
Michael Gewecke
I mean, the walls, the separation, like that, the anxiety, bad total. I’m on the same page with you. Yes, absolutely. Okay. So but what about the things that you learned that you might do better when you did come back was the question I asked. And he said nothing. There is nothing redeemable in the whole experience. And I try and this is a young guy, I won’t make this clear.

00:03:48:16 – 00:04:16:03
Michael Gewecke
This is a really young guy younger than me. I think. So when you’re yes, there are people younger than me in church leadership. The point I make is it exposes the brittleness of our assumptions and expectations. The idea that this is the way that has to be when we when we make the mistake of talking about the things that we believe are true in the most deep and meaningful sense.

00:04:16:03 – 00:04:49:46
Michael Gewecke
And we mistake that with some of the things that we have occasioned with doing over the years. And we let the slippery slope happen where the true things of faith become true of all these other things so that they are inviolable, we suddenly find ourselves in an incredibly precarious and I think the right word is brittle situation, because then when, like in an earthquake or a windstorm, the building starts moving, that brittle foundation will be impacted.

00:04:49:46 – 00:05:15:52
Michael Gewecke
And, you know, I know that Clint has had this experience. I’ve also had some leadership experience outside the church here helping other Presbyterian churches post COVID. And I mean, just, you know, tell you when you’re sitting at the table and the conversation happening is how are we going to do the same thing that we’ve done with one eighth of the people who ever came?

00:05:17:07 – 00:05:24:14
Michael Gewecke
That is a very, very precarious position to be in this church. And that’s happening regularly in lots of other places.

00:05:24:37 – 00:06:03:07
Clint Loveall
I think the interesting thing, you know, COVID forced our hand, but and so it’s an extreme example. But if you’re talking about navigating change and if you’re talking about flexibility and the ability to navigate new circumstances and new situations, it’s in some ways it is easier to do that in the face of a full stop emergency than it is in the gentle slide into something new.

00:06:03:07 – 00:06:32:38
Clint Loveall
So in some ways, the fact that COVID said you have to do something different, you can’t do what you did last week is easier than you probably should do something different, but you don’t have to because when you don’t have to, you can just keep digging in with what you’ve done and kind of close your eyes to the fact that it’s not working entirely.

00:06:33:23 – 00:06:58:06
Clint Loveall
And so last week we introduced this concept, the idea of being lost and admitting when you’re lost. So this week we think about where does where we are lost look like. And if you don’t know what you’re looking at here, this is a different kind of map. You’re you’re familiar with the regular map. This is a topographical map.

00:06:58:06 – 00:07:25:48
Clint Loveall
And if you if you understand topographical maps, the the separate lines here show you not only your orientation, they show you the terrain. So these lines represent changes in elevation. And like over here on the left side, where you see they’re stacked very closely together. That’s a cliff. That’s a steep, steep bank. When you see more gentle, that’s a slope.

00:07:26:16 – 00:07:57:57
Clint Loveall
And so what a topographical map does is it doesn’t just tell you where you are, it tells you what where you are. Looks like. And that’s part of the conversation that we hope to have tonight. What does it look like where we are and where we’re going to make the case? Some of these are our opinions. So I would like to tell you their I believe them to be informed opinion.

00:07:57:57 – 00:08:27:12
Clint Loveall
Some of them are agreed upon outside of first press. And I suspect that for many of you, whether or not you agree with them, they will sound very different than a previous landscape of what you experience the church to look like, and that that will make more sense as we go. The first thing that has really significantly changed, we’re calling institutional suspicion.

00:08:28:13 – 00:08:57:39
Clint Loveall
We are from a tradition that put a lot of faith in institution, in seminaries, in colleges. Presbyterians started hospitals. We started schools. We love institutions. Up until fairly recently, we talked about ourself as an institution. We we found out that it doesn’t people don’t want that. So we quit doing it, but we didn’t change how we function. We are an institutional church.

00:08:58:30 – 00:09:16:55
Clint Loveall
We sell operate the idea of institution and the world has increasingly not only failed to do so, but become suspicious of institution. There is a lot of skepticism about institutions in general.

00:09:17:42 – 00:09:37:39
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, so to be clear, when we’re talking about what it looks like where we are, we’re talking about what the world looks like outside the walls. So we’re going to take appraisal of where we are. And I do think that’s exactly the case. And to make the point that we celebrate institutions, I think I’ve told some of you this, so I apologize that this is a repeat, but it’s burned into my memory.

00:09:37:58 – 00:10:09:41
Michael Gewecke
So one of the committee meetings where when you’re going through the process to go into seminary, you go to these committee meetings and people are asking you questions and they get increasingly more difficult and personal as you go with the ideas. As it gets more serious, they get to ask more questions. And one of the committee members somewhat agitated that I was from Oral Roberts University coming to a Presbyterian church, asked me quite bluntly and directly, Are you here because, you know, we have good health insurance.

00:10:09:41 – 00:10:34:21
Michael Gewecke
And I want to be clear, I was ignorant and didn’t know that. So for me, it was like marketing, like credit. I mean, I didn’t know that, but wonderful. That’s that’s why I’m here now. I but that speaks to the institutional reality, this idea that we’re all just trying to get inside the institution. Because if we can get inside the walls, then everything is good.

00:10:34:51 – 00:11:06:00
Michael Gewecke
The problem is the walls may keep the danger out. It also keeps the problems in. And we’ve in many cases border. We boarded up the doors and the windows. And here we are inside our institution. While society has largely come to the point of suggesting that institutions by definition of existing need to be tore down, there’s not a place that you can go on a 24 hour news network or a website where people are lauding the trustworthiness of the institution.

00:11:06:00 – 00:11:15:52
Michael Gewecke
And the Presbyterian Church has put a lot of eggs in that basket. And at some point we’re going to have to be honest about that.

00:11:15:52 – 00:11:47:51
Clint Loveall
Arguably, it’s the only basket we’ve had. The other thing about institutions, and this is true and you know, all of these things develop because at one point they were a strength. The case we’re making is that they’re perhaps less of a strength than they used to be. They may even be a weakness. The other part of being institutional is that we are pretty top heavy and we are slow corporately speaking.

00:11:48:09 – 00:12:16:15
Clint Loveall
When Presbyterians, when something comes up, we say something like, Well, we’re going to form a task group. They’re going to study it for two or three years, two or three years. The world is a very different place. Again, COVID has shown us that there just aren’t organizations that generally have that kind of time, that kind of luxury, that standard operating procedure for Presbyterians.

00:12:16:33 – 00:12:57:09
Clint Loveall
We we move slow, We think slow. We try to be careful. We try to be cautious. But that that history means that we have a difficult time navigating change, especially rapid change. And we live literally in a world where, if you want right now to know what the stock price of something is in China, your phone will tell you if you want to buy and sell that stock right now, you could we we live in an instant world and we are a kind of plodding, top heavy institution.

00:12:57:43 – 00:13:24:39
Clint Loveall
And it’s been difficult. It it is a tough way to be right now. And that’s not to say that it’s necessarily wrong, but it is difficult. It is certainly out of step. And it’s been it’s been hard. I roll my eyes whenever I get a thing from the denomination that says, we’re going to look into this for the next three years, because I think by three years from now we’ll be on to something.

00:13:26:24 – 00:13:38:36
Clint Loveall
Yeah, it won’t matter what we need. We need three weeks and even that’s a long time in this day and age. So that’s been a struggle for us.

00:13:39:10 – 00:14:09:30
Michael Gewecke
So we’ve talked a little bit about institutions, you know, those hierarchies and structures. I think we also need to be honest about the reality of tradition, especially for millennials. Let’s just pick an age and under your 35 to 40 years old, the younger tradition has a very, very low impact on life. In fact, so much of youth culture revolves around breaking tradition, and that’s always been the case to some extent, I realize.

00:14:09:45 – 00:14:36:57
Michael Gewecke
But we live in a moment in which, realistically, every group can gather non geographically. It doesn’t matter how minority that group is, everyone can find each other in some non geographic virtual space. And so because of that, the traditions that we’ve handed down, I remind myself often or try to that within just a couple generations from now, the way it worked was you were born into a family with a trade.

00:14:37:13 – 00:14:59:34
Michael Gewecke
You were taught that trade and you were going to do that trade and if you got lucky, you would succeed and get married and have kids. And you would keep that cycle going. Right? The tradition was not just this idea of handing down the faith tradition, or we support this football team or whatever it was life. It was literally what your life would be built around.

00:14:59:49 – 00:15:33:48
Michael Gewecke
And today those traditions are being dismantled and they’re not being dismantled with the idea of grief and sadness, they’re being dismantled. But the idea of freedom, look, we’re going into new territories where we’re putting out all of these old bad things, right? And so in the midst of that cultural movement where people who say no, but there’s valuable things in tradition, there’s good things to hand down, but the problem is we aren’t even close to speaking the vocabulary of the people who are largely trying to dismantle tradition as an idea.

00:15:33:48 – 00:16:00:55
Michael Gewecke
Yet along our own traditions that make sense. So there’s an interpretive reality there. How do you hold on to those things in a moment in which everyone’s trying to throw away old things? And how do you speak about those things in a way that is actually meaningful to them and not just off putting? And I think that that that that real suspicion and that desire to destroy tradition is a thing that at some point we have to face.

00:16:01:51 – 00:16:32:43
Clint Loveall
It’s not it’s not entirely age driven, but it is largely age driven. If I tell someone we are a traditional church and we haven’t changed much in the last hundred years, somewhere around 40 is a dividing line of people who say, That’s great and I want no part of that. It is not entirely age related because there’s culture involved.

00:16:33:09 – 00:17:00:45
Clint Loveall
But that message that we stand at the long end of a line with deep roots and practices and we continue to do those things too at some level because we’ve always done them. It is a tough sell for the young people of the West of America that that is even when our traditions are good, it is tough to be traditional.

00:17:01:26 – 00:17:33:37
Clint Loveall
People love new, they love novel, they love different, and there’s not much that you could label new novel and different about the Presbyterian Church, which again, is not a bad thing, but it brings with it a certain difficulty right now. And ironically, we have some great traditions, we have some aspects of who we are and how we do things that should set us up for success right now.

00:17:33:37 – 00:17:55:10
Clint Loveall
And we will come back and hit this hard at another time. But they’re they’re not helping us because I think by and large, we don’t know how to talk about we don’t know how to translate the idea of being traditional to people who aren’t particularly moved by it, in fact, are probably suspicious of it. That’s a challenge.

00:17:55:10 – 00:18:26:38
Michael Gewecke
So one of our core cultural values is novelty, or you might also say entertainment. And there’s a particular sermon that you preach that I think illustrates this well, talking about some of the reformed distinctiveness and you’re talking about joy and gratitude. And you called this image which made me laugh. Then it still makes me smile. Now, the idea of Calvin and these early reformed theologians writing extensively about joy and every picture you look at them, it looks like they’re dying from boredom.

00:18:28:21 – 00:18:59:09
Michael Gewecke
That I love that. Because in truth, Presbyterians and reformed folks do have a long, long tradition of recognizing how important the laughter and life and vitality and joy is as part of our our lived experience. If we gather in a place like this, we should have some fun or we didn’t do it. Right. Right. But that said, we live in a moment in which people are better at delivering fun than we could hope to be.

00:19:00:07 – 00:19:26:03
Michael Gewecke
I mean, I know that this is not probably the target audience, but you may have grandkids or kids. You know that Ticktalk was only on the horizon two years ago, and today they are beating major TV channels in terms of viewer time. Know what Ticktalk does? Well, it gets you hooked into things you like. And we won’t talk about the tech side that.

00:19:26:04 – 00:19:56:11
Michael Gewecke
But the point is, it’s all novel. Every time. Every time you swipe, it’s going to be something new and unexpected. And so we in church are people who do have a reputation, which, if we’re honest, we’ve somewhat earned of being staid and being not not lifeless. That’s not fair. But but we are. But but we don’t have that constant churn that this that these technological mediums offer folks.

00:19:56:31 – 00:20:10:31
Michael Gewecke
So in a moment where everybody’s looking for the next thing, we’re sitting here trying to in some way speak into it. And it is a challenge for us because it’s not a vocabulary that we speak natively.

00:20:11:47 – 00:20:52:30
Clint Loveall
Yeah, we are well steeped in historic patterns and again, that’s a good thing. There is a lot right about that. But the reality is if you go into your average Presbyterian church and say, Hey, good news, everybody. We’re going to do a bunch of new stuff, you’re not going be deafened by applause, most likely, right? We we are a little bit change adverse and that’s tough.

00:20:52:30 – 00:21:25:39
Clint Loveall
You know that the church is sometimes kind of a museum. In fact, if you go to Europe, many churches are museums. If you go out east New York, the big cathedrals, etc., many of them are tourist attractions. They’re not living communities full of Christian life. There are artifacts and remnants of a different time, and people view them as such.

00:21:26:02 – 00:22:00:21
Clint Loveall
Just I mean, just a quick think about this. In your lifetime, how many of you would say that the world is a very different place than your childhood? Now, how many would say that the church is equally a different place? Right. It’s we’ve which again, isn’t isn’t an insult, but it is something to pay attention to. The church is not a museum.

00:22:00:21 – 00:22:37:06
Clint Loveall
Michael’s said this really well in other contexts. We have the future of the church. No last week, Jan and this morning Cindy sits with 15, 20, 30 kids. We’re not a museum. The future of the church, if there is one, is is in some part in churches right now. That doesn’t mean we can’t go find other people, but some of who we will be in the following generations are sitting in pews already and we have to be serious.

00:22:37:06 – 00:22:48:45
Clint Loveall
We are not simply preserving the past. We are working on the future and the church always has to know that it’s doing both of those things if it’s going to do it well.

00:22:49:08 – 00:23:09:57
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, and I don’t want to belabor that, but I do want to make one quick comment because I think this is a thing that we couldn’t have done at that talk that we were doing at Presbytery. But it sits here in this room. One of the things that this congregation continues to I think, excel at and do well is to recognize that we are always living at the edge of welcoming other people.

00:23:09:57 – 00:23:39:03
Michael Gewecke
And I just want to turn your attention over here to this gallery saying on the wall, Well, point out that is the thing that you see on every young families refrigerator that’s on purpose. Like it looks like some kid try to turn that into a paper airplane or something and then stuck it to the wall. That is beautiful because that means that some kid got to have their thing on the wall of the church.

00:23:39:18 – 00:24:01:46
Michael Gewecke
It’s messy and quite frankly, we’re not going to win better homes and churches. We’re not. And I hope that we don’t because if our space is always pristine, it looks like no one lives here. That means no one lives here. And we want our kids to have that sense. So what does that look like? Well, you know, that’s the funny thing people in churches want to talk about.

00:24:01:46 – 00:24:21:28
Michael Gewecke
Well, we need to have more screens or need to do blah, blah, blah. But kids, they still put their stuff on the refrigerator at home. We’re not talking about rocket science. Right. But we are we are asking ourselves, what would it look like to make a home for people who are Christians in the next generation? And that is a generative question.

00:24:21:28 – 00:24:32:20
Michael Gewecke
And it is a question I think that the church does well to return to to move us beyond that idea of locking down the historical moment and always seeking to live forward into the future.

00:24:33:01 – 00:25:04:08
Clint Loveall
I think we foreshadowed this last week. You know, we do live in a time of somewhat limited resources, time and treasure people are more divided than they have been with their time. We mentioned the Sunday morning thing. People are have lots of compelling reasons and ability to give of their treasure. Volunteerism is down. One of the one of the interesting things and this has been pretty well true across the board.

00:25:04:08 – 00:25:35:51
Clint Loveall
One of the interesting things in the aftermath of COVID is that people volunteered for stuff less than they were, so we were all glad to get back above board and start doing things again. But it’s somewhere in the in the reality of being able to clear our calendars. People decided not to maybe completely fill them back up again and volunteerism and to some extent, financial contributions in lots of places have reflected that.

00:25:35:51 – 00:25:56:38
Clint Loveall
It will be interesting to see what happens with that, but many churches are are struggling to meet budgets. You know, at a denominational level, we pay a thing called per capita. That’s our per member cost that we send on to the denomination that goes up every year. There’s never been a year. They said, Hey, good news is going down.

00:25:57:03 – 00:26:21:23
Clint Loveall
It’s just that’s not us and that’s not going to happen. But the church is kind of struggling and lots of congregations are asking the question, How do you do more with less, or how do you do the same with less? Or how do you do less but make it matter more? Those are real struggles and we live in a part of the country where that is.

00:26:22:15 – 00:26:37:17
Clint Loveall
That is the common story. There are 43 churches in our presbytery, 30 something. There’s 40, 30, and there’s some number of churches in our press.

00:26:37:39 – 00:26:41:02
Michael Gewecke
And okay, to be clear, it goes down every year.

00:26:41:06 – 00:27:08:25
Clint Loveall
I want to say it’s not that I don’t know that, it’s that that number changes and I’m not sure what the latest change. I think when I got here it was 48. Now we’re down in the thirties. I might have even been 52 when I got here, but my point is that is if you could sit the leadership of those 30, 40 churches together, almost all of them would tell you that’s the boat they’re in.

00:27:09:01 – 00:27:23:07
Clint Loveall
They’re not sure how they’re going to they’re a furnace away from a crisis. There are this away. There are that away. There’s struggling. That is very true in the Presbyterian Church in this part of the world.

00:27:24:14 – 00:27:54:37
Michael Gewecke
Next thing that we have that is a challenge for our context is leadership. I’ll be very brief on this, but essentially we live in a moment where there’s two extremes happening. On one hand, high quality leadership has never been more highly compensated before. That is right now. If you’re an excellent leader, there are people who will pay you unimaginable amounts of money to lead, and you won’t be surprised to find that churches are not the majority industry of high paying leadership jobs, as you can imagine.

00:27:54:37 – 00:28:19:24
Michael Gewecke
Right. And then on the backside of that, you have the less interest in church, less interest in the younger generations. So the downside or the opposite side of the spectrum, not only are there more demand for leadership, seminaries have never had less students in remember the history and that Princeton Seminary where I graduated, which is kind of considered to be no flagship kind of Presbyterian seminary type.

00:28:19:24 – 00:28:25:03
Clint Loveall
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We probably you went to Princeton, everybody, you know, for a minute.

00:28:25:04 – 00:28:28:19
Michael Gewecke
I never say that he likes.

00:28:28:20 – 00:28:29:01
Clint Loveall
No, but I like.

00:28:29:02 – 00:29:01:37
Michael Gewecke
Saying he likes pushing the button. They have less than 50% Presbyterian student body. Their student numbers have never been less. They just hire the new president who’s not even Presbyterian. I am told that there is less than I believe the number is one, but I can’t say that confidently. So I’m going to say less than ten Presbyterian students are a majority Midwest Presbyterian Seminary.

00:29:03:19 – 00:29:25:21
Michael Gewecke
They’re the CPM. I was just in a meeting our committee that handles sort of people under care. They’ve not had people under care to be ordained at our presbytery for so long. They just at their last meeting talked about making a marketing video to convince people to go to seminary, which you can guess. None of us are prophets, but you can guess how effective that will be.

00:29:25:21 – 00:29:49:06
Michael Gewecke
Leadership is a real struggle for the church because if you don’t have people who are enlivened and engaged and capable and willing to do the work of the church, it’s not that the church can’t flourish, it is that the church will struggle to do that without competent leadership. And we’re in a moment where attracting that leadership and training that leadership is not going well.

00:29:49:44 – 00:30:18:32
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and and not to make it even sound like more of a struggle. But the other reality of that is and this is no disrespect to the people who are doing it, the people involved in training, the professors and educators, they learned what works in churches in a very different time, and that is often not working now. So not only can we not get the kind of people we may need, we don’t know exactly what to tell them if we could get them.

00:30:19:24 – 00:30:38:54
Clint Loveall
And, you know, we’re we’re trying to sort that out. But the reality, I think and if we could be predictive here, I think Michael and I would be on the same page and correct me if wrong, Michael, but I think the future of leadership in the church is going to look less like you go to seminary than it is.

00:30:39:10 – 00:31:09:14
Clint Loveall
You sign on with a church that is doing well and you kind of have an apprenticeship. I think that kind of leadership is going to increase in its value and its its necessity. And one of my guesses about the future is we’re going to see something like that begin to happen because our traditional way of recruiting, training and sending pastors is kind of crumbling on us.

00:31:09:14 – 00:31:14:00
Clint Loveall
I mean, it’s just we’re not it’s not it’s not working. It’s not we’re not doing well with it.

00:31:14:29 – 00:31:15:10
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, I don’t think.

00:31:15:19 – 00:31:39:05
Clint Loveall
I’m sorry, Michael. It, it, it has always taken a year or two. That’s one of those slow moving things. When a pastor leaves, you’re doing great. If you have your next pastor in a year, which find another functioning organization that can do that, it’s not many. It’s now worse than that. I would say you’re I would say you’re ahead of the game if it takes you two years.

00:31:40:06 – 00:31:55:01
Clint Loveall
And and many are saying they can’t find presbytery. Is there an increasing number of Presbyterian churches that are going outside our denomination altogether? Because they’re saying we just we couldn’t find anybody. So it’s going to be an interesting time for leadership.

00:31:55:31 – 00:32:35:00
Michael Gewecke
I have a colleague from January who is looking to hire an associate. It took them three years to hire an associate in Chicago, big city, and they oops, hit the button, sorry. And they were not able to find a Presbyterian. They had to call someone from the Reformed Church in America. So yeah, very interesting. That said, I will move on here, but I will say I think that’s one thing that when we move to the constructive conversation which is happening in this series, one of the things that I think a congregation like first Class should think about is what does it look like to be an incubator for leadership?

00:32:35:16 – 00:32:57:43
Michael Gewecke
What ways can a congregation pass off? Not there’s not some secret sauce. It’s not a magic incantation, but apprenticing and learning in a place that’s healthy is such a rare experience in our group of the faith that to have places where that’s possible, that that should be a thing that that lives on the on the menu of conversations.

00:32:57:43 – 00:33:28:03
Clint Loveall
Michael and I could both tell you that a majority, or at least a significant number of both of our seminary classmates have not had great experiences in churches. The person who comes out of seminary finds a call, thrives in that call, enjoys that call, does well in that call. That’s unfortunately the smaller end of the spectrum. And some of that some of that we can lay at the feet of the training, some of that we could lay at the feet of the individuals.

00:33:28:03 – 00:33:48:41
Clint Loveall
A lot of that we could lay at the feet of the churches. I mean, there’s we could spread that blame around. But that is some of the reality. The next thing, the next challenge and I want to beat this to death, but we’re an old, older denomination. Average age is somewhere north of 64 Presbyterians, I think is well north of 60.

00:33:49:31 – 00:34:18:43
Clint Loveall
And that continues to go up. And, you know, that that is just what it is. And that’s not a bad thing because there are lots of and you all are many of you are among them. There are lots of vibrant, active, thriving, passionate retirement type age people. And those people have really in many ways always been the backbone of our church spiritually and in regard to volunteerism.

00:34:19:11 – 00:35:01:06
Clint Loveall
And that continue to be true, but without filling in those generations behind it again, it gets very hard to have the infrastructure to continue to do that. Now, we live in a culture that glorifies youth, and we live in a church that doesn’t know what to do with that. And so one of the things we offer and one of the struggles that we have is how do we talk to people about essentially finishing well, living out the last parts of their journey faithfully, joyfully and passionately?

00:35:01:44 – 00:35:22:33
Clint Loveall
How do we embrace that as a church? But how do we do more than that? How how do we reach out to those who aren’t there yet and create a space for them that allows or at least minimizes the barriers for them to come in?

00:35:22:33 – 00:35:45:05
Michael Gewecke
Next thing that our culture is highly sensitive to and attuned to right now is this idea of hypocrisy. Whether we like reality or not, I think we have to come to grips with it. There is a cultural impression that the church is hypocritical and that we’re a shill for some version of power. And actually culture looks at that from different vantages.

00:35:45:05 – 00:36:18:14
Michael Gewecke
Some say we’re on this side or some say we’re on the other side. It depends on where you are in that. That’s not altogether unsound. But here’s the thing about Presbyterians. Presbyterians are defined by our mild mannered non viral, boring, plodding pass. And so you won’t be surprised to find out that we don’t trend on Twitter. We don’t get pulled up are Presbyterian pastors don’t get called up by the major 24 hour news networks if you were going to keep track.

00:36:18:26 – 00:36:41:16
Michael Gewecke
Our people aren’t those people. Why? Because our people aren’t big media people. Our people aren’t out there on tour. And it’s just that’s that’s not an insult to that, is to say that’s not our tradition. Now, here’s the the the part of that that’s a struggle is whether we like it or not, everyone assumes that’s exactly what we are.

00:36:41:16 – 00:37:01:44
Michael Gewecke
Right, because all Christians are seen as being hypocritical, whether we like it or not. That is a label applied. And so if we are going to live forward as a congregation, we’re going to have to be able to speak to that in honest ways. And we’re going to have to recognize, and this is true here at first press you know, there is no such thing as a purple church.

00:37:01:44 – 00:37:32:24
Michael Gewecke
Have you heard that the idea that, like you got red and blue together and that they all mix as purple, but it’s not real? Not like people don’t blend into each other, right? You have red people and you have blue people and they’re called in Jesus Christ to somehow move beyond that towards the cross. Right? And at the end of the day, that is not what we strive to be, but the narrative that is given to us is that we are one thing and that we are that one thing sharply.

00:37:32:38 – 00:37:40:44
Michael Gewecke
And we have to grapple with that impression that it may not be accurate, but we have to live our life in such a way that takes it into account.

00:37:41:06 – 00:38:03:01
Clint Loveall
One of our great strengths is in that regard, one of our greatest struggles. Don’t know if you all heard this purple church thing, but during COVID emails every week, you know, as political divide was sort of blowing up. And that was we were all sitting in front of computers and TVs all day. That was that was big. And this thing purple church, purple church, purple church.

00:38:03:19 – 00:38:28:10
Clint Loveall
And it’s nonsense. It’s it’s not as if you’re conservative. People said, hey, I’ll just be less conservative. And your liberal people said, I’m going to be less liberal. And they all met in the middle and agreed on everything. It didn’t change. It’s just diversity, trying to maintain unity. And that’s true of our theology as well. We historically are a relatively big tent.

00:38:28:37 – 00:38:50:47
Clint Loveall
One of the wonderful things about Presbyterian is when you join, we don’t give you a checklist and say, you got to mark all these things or else you’re not one of us. We leave freedom for thinking. We leave freedom for discernment, for praying, for coming to different conclusions. Your life might lead you to a different opinion on some issue than mine.

00:38:51:05 – 00:39:17:27
Clint Loveall
And we say, that’s okay. We will figure that out as we follow Jesus together. And if there is a less popular message right now, I don’t know what it is. This idea that we are seeking uniform, that that we want everybody to be the same, that’s that’s not who we are. It’s not who we’ve ever been. It’s not who we need to be.

00:39:17:49 – 00:39:46:42
Clint Loveall
But we do need to figure out in the midst of that divergence, to work together, to honor one another, to share with one another. We did this thing during COVID that I continue this phrase that I think continues to be really important. Unity is not uniformity, so our oneness is not sense. And that is one of the great strengths of the Presbyterian Church, I think.

00:39:47:09 – 00:40:17:16
Clint Loveall
But we’re not getting that message out very well. You know, I’m I want to be careful. I’m amazed when I have the pulpit view and I see you all out there. I see everybody out there and I don’t know everything by any stretch, but I know something of what that person thinks. And I know it’s very different than that person thinks.

00:40:17:16 – 00:40:47:24
Clint Loveall
And I think, where else do you go where people have such wide disagreements and sit and drink coffee together and try not to, you know, bring don’t bring up the things. But we sort of agree on that, right? I mean, we we’ve said intentionally, we can love each other. We can serve Christ together without agreeing on everything. And there just aren’t many places that are trying to take that approach.

00:40:47:24 – 00:41:13:51
Clint Loveall
And that’s the thing I want to be again on it. You don’t need a sermon, but that’s the thing the church can’t lose. That’s the most dangerous thing I think we could sacrifice in this moment that we’re in. And I tell you, if if the Presbyterians could figure out a way to share that, because we’re we’re actually relatively good at it at our best.

00:41:14:18 – 00:41:16:31
Clint Loveall
But we’ve got a long we’ve got a long way to go.

00:41:17:15 – 00:41:39:57
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. And that that is important and will come up again in future conversations. So that will come up. We move on to our facilities, which is one of these classic either or type situations or that with the either our family just had the opportunity we, we took the girls this winter to the Mall of America for like an overnight thing.

00:41:39:57 – 00:42:12:45
Michael Gewecke
And it was great with a great time. And while our girls were going around and our daughter, our 12 year old, is just getting to the age where shopping is like the thing, right? Her eyes are big and she brought all the money and she spent every penny. And I’m serious. Every penny was spent in that place. As we go into the stores and she’s looking at the stuff, I’m looking at these spaces and just was blown away by the hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars across that place invested every year in making those spaces cutting edge.

00:42:12:45 – 00:42:40:06
Michael Gewecke
There was one clothing store that we went into. It was on inspiring that the combination of technology seamlessly blended into the walls and lighting and presentation and books that symbolically represented things and sayings on the wall. Like when you walked into that space, you know, someone with a lot of leathers behind their name and tons of money went into thinking about how to make this space compelling.

00:42:40:57 – 00:43:14:47
Michael Gewecke
And once again, this is a difficult conversation for Presbyterians. But across our country there are buildings that have not been touched or updated for 150 years. And that’s not an exaggeration I mean, yeah, we changed the heater, but like the functional space and you’ve got to factor that that all of these folks who and by the way, this is funny, I was just in a meeting with a bunch of Presbyterians and I mentioned a lot of the coffee shops in small rural towns are nicer than their churches.

00:43:14:47 – 00:43:44:00
Michael Gewecke
And why the little old Presbyterian ladies who was at that meeting, A friend of mine said to me, she said, Yeah, the one that I go to is way better than my church. And the reality is the reality is that we have been tempted as people in the church, to lock our buildings into a space and forget that the building was always designed to serve people.

00:43:44:42 – 00:44:08:54
Michael Gewecke
And that’s not always the case. I think in many ways this church pushed back against that with this building. Right. And there’s a lot of different conversations there. But there’s also a sense in which even that can become a temptation to think this is the space and this is exactly how it should be. An adult is just the conversation of what does it look like to make your home so that people feel welcome in it?

00:44:09:28 – 00:44:36:27
Clint Loveall
Yeah, again, it’s very interesting. Those of us who are a little bit older and maybe inclined to physical spaces, we think we want the church to be nice. We want this to look good, look good, be good. We want the symbolism we want to cross. We want stained glass. Young people. There’s your wi fi work. What’s your wi fi password?

00:44:36:27 – 00:44:40:06
Michael Gewecke
Yes, it works reliably down. It will work reliably.

00:44:40:26 – 00:45:06:52
Clint Loveall
But again, just groups of people and the different things they care about. I do think that’s something, you know, again, we might going to and I promise you we we give thanks for this regularly some of these things many of these things don’t apply specifically to first press or at least don’t apply as much as they do in other places.

00:45:07:13 – 00:45:34:08
Clint Loveall
I think in regard to building, not only do we have a nice building, obviously I think we endeavor to use it pretty well. You generally, when you come in, you can find things. The doors are unlocked on Sunday. You know, I’ve told this story before, but when I got to Texas, that was a building that was kind of one of those typical Presbyterian church or some of it was built and then some of the rest of it was built and then it was added on to.

00:45:34:08 – 00:45:53:40
Clint Loveall
So it ended up being kind of a big U-shape. And in the middle of the you there was kind of a small courtyard and it was there was a gate there. And the gate had been probably by a middle schooler thrown into the side of the building. So the handle on the outside was mashed. Well, the gate was never locked.

00:45:53:40 – 00:46:11:43
Clint Loveall
You just had to reach through and open it from the back side, which was easy. I mean, there was plenty of room, but I had been there, I don’t know long enough that I felt like, okay, I can say something in a meeting. And I was at a building and gone to meeting and said, You know, I wonder if we could fix that gate.

00:46:12:21 – 00:46:37:57
Clint Loveall
Somebody said, There’s nothing wrong with the gate. And I said, Well, but, you know, it doesn’t open from the outside. And they said, All you got to do is reach through and open it. Everybody knows that. And that’s what I mean. It’s it is, for me, a funny story. But yes, everybody knows it who’s already here. There’s something that is very clearly a barrier to a visitor.

00:46:38:34 – 00:47:05:36
Clint Loveall
They had never even thought of. And that’s not a criticism of them. It’s just a difference of thinking inside versus outside and being able to try to work through those things. You know, On the other hand, one of our realities of having buildings is that in an inordinate amount of time and resources go into our physical spaces. We put a ton of money into our buildings.

00:47:06:09 – 00:47:35:25
Clint Loveall
Our buildings are the subject of a lot of our arguments, a lot of our disagreements. We, we, our buildings are at least very important to us and in some cases too important to us. We are not our buildings. And we’ll have to we’ll have to remember that. And there’s a quote from Martin Luther that would just share with you the idea that the service to God should only have to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice and the like is without a the worst trick of the devil.

00:47:36:00 – 00:48:01:42
Clint Loveall
How could the devil have led us more effectively astray than by the narrow conception that service to God takes place only in a church? So pretty good for Martin Luther. He would have. I didn’t mean that because I know it sounded. I wonder what Martin Luther would say about some of our our buildings.

00:48:01:42 – 00:48:31:04
Michael Gewecke
Yeah. Remember the context that we originally prepared this for, relabeled this technology? I think probably a better label here would be just smartphones and social media in general that I know that you all know this, but it’s worth saying most Presbyterian congregations don’t have a studio down the hallway. I think you know that most congregations don’t invest the time and energy that we have into trying to find ways to make our walls transparent so that people can come in.

00:48:31:04 – 00:49:02:27
Michael Gewecke
The reality is, as a family, as a larger denomination, we still pretty much rely upon mailing newsletters, which there’s nothing wrong with, except for half of the entire population of the country that doesn’t know how to open a mailbox. And I’m really not joking. I mean, realistically, finding ways to connect with people who are used to this on tik-tok all day long mail newsletters are not going to be the way that those disciples get trained and equipped.

00:49:02:27 – 00:49:19:42
Michael Gewecke
And I don’t know the answer. We don’t know the answer. And unfortunately, the denominational higher ups also don’t know the answer because if we would, we would just go to those classes. What what we hope for is the opportunity to learn and be taught that as we go together.

00:49:19:42 – 00:49:24:12
Clint Loveall
We have we have a short list in the office and.

00:49:26:06 – 00:49:27:18
Michael Gewecke
I don’t like where this is going.

00:49:27:18 – 00:49:59:04
Clint Loveall
It’s a fun list. We have canceled things pretty rarely once that I can remember some snow. And then during the COVID thing, there was that blip where we kind of started getting back together and then we didn’t get back together. Well, we let everyone know that. But there are just a small segment of folks who show up on those Sundays and got a little upset that we didn’t they didn’t know that we weren’t meeting.

00:49:59:51 – 00:50:24:59
Clint Loveall
And we said, well, website, email. And they said, we don’t use a computer. And I remember thinking, well, is Megan supposed to call? And I, I mean, we need to get one of the auto dealers, like the political ads you get. Hello. First Presbyterian Church is not having churches and it’s not it’s just so we call them, there’s three or four.

00:50:25:06 – 00:50:53:54
Clint Loveall
We if something is happening, we call them and tell them, make sure they know which just kind of makes me smile. But imagine navigating this world and saying, I’m not I’m not doing that. I’m not doing digital. I it’s it’s it’s tough. I mean, we try to make we try to make allowances for it. But that’s you know, again, that’s the world we live in.

00:50:53:54 – 00:51:17:52
Clint Loveall
We are as a denomination, we’re kind of digitally. We’re not natives, we’re digital immigrants and we’re print heavy. And that’s okay. You know, the biggest you know, the biggest question, the biggest comment when we came back from COVID bulletin. Yeah, when when do I get a piece of paper? Right? I had nobody we hadn’t nobody seen a bulletin in two years.

00:51:19:01 – 00:51:54:48
Clint Loveall
Got to have one. If I’m in church, which is not. It’s just funny. We’re funny people. That’s all right. So that’s I don’t yeah, they don’t call us. Yeah. They’re also not calling us. We don’t get those calls if they call us. Megan answers. We, we them, they leave a message and we know we have an answering machine.

00:51:56:22 – 00:52:34:12
Clint Loveall
If they tell us, Are you having church, we call them back on Tuesday, they’ll find out we didn’t have church on Sunday. Yeah. Yeah, It’s insensitive. I hear you, House. I’m not following you, Jane. Yeah, Yeah, right. And we call them, and if we know who those people are, we call them. And it happens whenever we change the service times.

00:52:34:12 – 00:53:05:15
Clint Loveall
I mean, we put it on the radio, we put it on our website. I but I don’t know if those people want to go to a movie. They check what time the movie is. But I’m just saying it’s a small group of people and we try to be as sensitive as possible. But it is interesting and the number of those people that are Presbyterian is probably by percentage relatively high.

00:53:05:27 – 00:53:16:21
Clint Loveall
So that’s some of what we think we see. That’s some of what we think we have noticed about where we are in our particular landscape.

00:53:17:09 – 00:53:41:42
Michael Gewecke
I think what needs to be said at the end of a conversation like this is the temptation for any congregation is to latch on to one thing that works and think do it over and over and over and over again. And we had some benefit from the technological stuff. Are snowbirds getting to be part of our community, the education for people driving to work?

00:53:41:42 – 00:54:09:05
Michael Gewecke
I know lots of people who commute and they get to be part of Sunday school because they listen on the way, right? All that’s great. But technology is not the future of the church that like if we let’s just do more of it, they’ll make it better. No, that’s not the case. Right. Like a church has to be fundamentally focused on the central thing, which is Jesus Christ being the center and being church around that transformed reality.

00:54:09:32 – 00:54:30:48
Michael Gewecke
That’s the center. And then the goal is to call everyone on the ship to use their gifts to make that the central thing. Some are going to do the technology stuff, some are going to do the visitation stuff, some are going to do the the card writing stuff. Some of them are going to do. They’re going to kids, hockey games, stuff.

00:54:30:57 – 00:54:54:55
Michael Gewecke
It. It literally takes everyone in this room and everyone in that sanctuary. And that’s that’s where I think congregations get it wrong, is they’re looking for the three bullet points, saying that we can activate this year instead of a continual process of evaluating who are the people, our community, what gifts do we have to be? The hands of feet of Jesus Christ?

00:54:55:06 – 00:55:28:19
Michael Gewecke
And how can we do that more and better all the time? And that’s tiring. And I think it does connect us with and we’ll engage with this, that common thing that churches say, people in churches say to us, particular outside of this place, we’re tired, we’re tired. It’s hard work and we’re done. If the church loses the will to serve, if the church loses the will to expend effort for the sake of the other, then I think we need to have some really challenging conversations about that.

00:55:28:42 – 00:55:36:25
Michael Gewecke
But as long as we can keep expanding effort for the sake of the other, I think that’s a good marker that the church is living in Jesus way.

00:55:37:10 – 00:56:12:59
Clint Loveall
We will we’ll circle back to this. And what I just want to plant a seed for what will come later. I want to make sure that it doesn’t seem like we’re saying the church has to do a bunch of new things the church may have to do some things in new ways, but the things the church seeks to do will be the things the church has always been called to do, to take care of each other, to try and grow in our faith, in service, to have compassion, to seek mission and invite people and be evangelistic.

00:56:13:39 – 00:56:40:55
Clint Loveall
The things that make church work have always made church work, and I believe always will make church work. Now, we may have to figure out how to package them and live them out in some new ways, but they won’t be new things. They might be new versions, but they’ll be old things because those things have always been what it means to be church and Will.

00:56:41:07 – 00:57:03:57
Clint Loveall
We’ll get there. We’re going to spend a good bit of time on that I just want to be clear that as we have a conversation about change, it’s not change for change sake. It’s how do we do what. We’ve done in a way that might be more effective when we are and where we are right now. And I think ultimately that’s the conversation the church’s struggle to have.

00:57:03:57 – 00:57:11:38
Clint Loveall
And I think it’s it’s really the core of anything else. Questions, Comments. Thank you. You guys have been generous with your time.