Slowing down and “waiting” to impact pastor health
Join my discussion with guest Dr. Andrew Root, author of “When Church Stops Working.” Together, we dissect how the relentless drive for growth impacts pastoral health which then leads to burnout and and the threat of early departure from ministry. Discover how pursuing resonance over acceleration can breathe new life into our spiritual communities.
Our discussion takes a reflective turn as we explore the powerful act of waiting, a rare but transformative practice in today’s fast-paced world. Delve into the primal sin of outpacing God (isn’t that a nice way to say “avoid burnout”) and learn how living within our human constraints can lead to profound spiritual renewal.
Finally, Dr. Root shares experiences of those who’ve faced burnout, often unaware until it’s too late. We offer tangible resources like a free burnout questionnaire to help leaders assess their well-being. This episode is an essential listen for anyone navigating church life, seeking to maintain authenticity and spiritual integrity in a world that demands constant acceleration.
This is a GUILT-FREE zone! So here’s your friendly nudge about self-care and its importance for your family, friends, and those you serve in ministry.
Contact info:
Email me at crabbypastor@gmail.com with your input and ideas for burnout and leadership topics of interest or if you know someone who might be interesting to interview.
Visit my website:
YOUR LEADERSHIP COACH FOCUSED ON BURNOUT PREVENTION
Get your FREE Burnout Symptoms test to help you assess whether you are dealing with just general tiredness or something MORE.
CLICK HERE FOR THE BURNOUT SYMPTOMS TEST.
I love scouring around to find great content to share, and am always interested in feedback, if you are or know of someone willing to share their Back from Burnout story so we can all learn together, then CLICK HERE to email me.
And, if this is a reminder you wish to opt out of, that’s fine too.
Blessings on your journey!
Margie
🦀 🦀 🦀
Find regular support on my Facebook group: Building Sustainability in Ministry Leaders: Beating Burnout.
Connect with me about
LEADERSHIP COACHING and Workshops…
Transcript
Margie: 0:01
Hey there, it’s Margie Bryce, your host of CrPastor Pastor podcast, where we talk about all things sustainability, whether it’s sustainability in ministry, in your personal life and we acknowledge that the church is in a transitional time, so we hit topics there too that are going to stretch your mind and the way you lead, especially how you lead yourself, so that you don’t become the crabby pastor. Hey there, this is Margie Bryce with the Crabby Pastor Podcast, and I have a guest here today that I heard speak recently at the streaming conference at Rochester Christian University recently, and before then I had gotten his book and trolled through it. It’s called when Church Stops Working. Now, this really doesn’t have a lot to do with the functionality of your church. Exactly, Sort of the subtitle is A Future for your Congregation Beyond More Money, Programs and Innovation.Margie: 1:24
So I have Andrew Root here, Dr Andrew Root here with me, and we are going to talk about his book. The contents and some of the things that I think are definitely tie in with your self-care and your sustainability in ministry as you seek to live into God’s call for you and as you serve the people God has given to you to serve.Andy: 1:54
Sure, well, first, thanks for having me. It’s great to be on here.Andy: 1:56
Well, as you’re talking to me, I’m in St Paul, Minnesota, so I live in the Twin Cities and I teach at Luther Seminary here. I’ve been on the faculty of Luther for almost 20 years. This is my 20th academic year, so I don’t know where time has gone, but it has gone somewhere over these last nearly two decades. But yeah, I have written for the last 20 years or so on really the practice of ministry and thinking about it theologically but trying to kind of lace together the philosophical elements, the theological elements, and then the practical elements of the practice of ministry really. So I’ve written for youth pastors and thought about youth ministry law, but then also thought about pastoral practice and congregational life.Andy: 2:37
And my project the last gosh, maybe seven years or so has been really writing on ministry in a secular age, and so I have multiple books kind of addressing that. And in this book that you kindly referenced is a kind of well, I mean a synthesis of a lot of those thicker books, a book that’s trying to distill some of the major ideas, and I had a lot of pastors who read those books, were kind enough to read those books, and then wanted to take some of those ideas into church councils and broader conversations across the congregation and just needed a little bit thinner synthesis of those ideas. And so that’s where when Church Stopped Working comes from, and so, yeah, really happy to talk about it today.Margie: 3:22
Sure, so is this like the cliff notes of all your big volumes?Andy: 3:29
Well, kind of sort of. I mean, in some ways it is sort of the cliff notes of it. I’ll say this it’s stripped of a lot of the footnotes.Andy: 3:39
I happen to be addicted to footnotes and anyone who’s read my other work knows that there’s always a ton of footnotes at the bottom of each page and so it’s getting rid of that. And yeah, cliff notes maybe. Yeah, I guess sort of I I don’t want to, I don’t know. I don’t know how people feel about cliff notes, like, if it’s no, no, I mean, that’s how I use cliff notes in high school is it was a way to keep me from actually. Yeah, was it cheating? I don’t know if it was cheating, but it was the lazy person’s way out.Margie: 4:13
So I don’t think the book is bad for folks. All right, all right, all right. I stand corrected?Andy: 4:19
Well, no, I think that’s fair in the sense that is a distilling a more kind of direct kind of articulation of the big points.Margie: 4:26
So I guess at that level it’s cliff notes, yeah.Margie: 4:33
Okay, so all right, what I wanted to say I’d just start out. Having listened to your presentation at the conference recently, I mean you really articulated well our current situation in the church, that we are really swimming. This is my distillation of what you said. We’re swimming in thick soup for sure, Because I listened to what you said and I thought surely this is a very transitional time for the church, big C, and trying to figure out what next steps and I know we’re in a secular age, I know where some people freak out when you say post-Christianity in this culture. But what you presented about acceleration was I came away thinking, oh my gosh, we’re in worse shape than what I thought, and maybe some of that’s from hanging in the Christian bubble, I don’t know. But talk to us some about the acceleration.Andy: 5:40
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that it would be crazy and your listeners would probably think I was crazy if I were to say we’re not in a crisis like that, everything’s fine. It’s true, we are in a crisis, but I think my larger point is well, I mean, maybe this is just common when you’re in a crisis, it’s hard to really know what’s going on. You know, like the crisis of a car accident, you’re like what happened? What hit me? You know, you feel a kind of a deep sense of disequilibrium in the midst of the crisis, and so it’s not uncommon for us to feel very dizzy that we’re in this crisis, and I think that leads us to misinterpret what the crisis is, and we tend to think the crisis is that we’ve lost people, that there are fewer people, therefore there are fewer dollars, there are fewer resources, that everything is declining, and I do think that you would have to be pretty naive or have your head in the sand and not recognize that that’s a fact. You know, like our institutions are weaker, but I don’t know that that’s the heart of the issue.Andy: 6:43
I think what the crisis is is that it becomes much more difficult to talk about a living God in this cultural context. And what makes that much more difficult is not even that people deny it or there’s this incredible wave of kind of a militant atheism going on. I just think that a lot of people, the way their lives are organized, they don’t even and this gets the acceleration point don’t even have time to really stop and think about whether there’s a deep metaphysical reality at the center of the universe or whether you know there’s the living God of Israel could still speak and move. I mean, if they get themselves into a religious space, they may do that, or if they’re thrust into deep levels of grief, they may at times feel God calling for them, but in the kind of day to day before the deep interruption, god as a living reality becomes harder for people to hold on to. So one of the dynamics that plays out within this, or one of the realities that makes it possible and I think I said this to the group at the event you were at that this is a weird kind of time, because you can hear people say things at coffee shops like you know, I’m taking a break from God for a while, you know like or you can hear pastors people have gone through seminary and ministry training and they’ll say you know, I just left this position and I just think I really need just to take a break from God for a while and, you know, just figure out what’s going on.Andy: 8:06
And I think that makes sense to us. Oddly, I think that that makes a lot of sense to us, that, oh yeah, that that seems coherent, that seems culturally coherent. And yet my point is, historically, if a medieval person would hear us say that, they would think we’re saying up is down and down is up.Andy: 8:21
or you know that you could take a break from breathing, that you just couldn’t do that. So what allows that possibility that across our cultural reality, people could perceive that they could forget about God or they could decide to take a break from God and then their lives could go on?Andy: 8:38
And one of the dynamics that allows for that, I think in that eclipsing of the sense that there is a divine actor in the world, is the way that the modern project continues to speed us up and ask us to go faster and faster, for multiple different reasons that asks us to do this, but this just imposes this kind of sense where we don’t even have time to reflect on what’s the meaning of life or what’s the point of my existence.Andy: 9:04
You just got to get on from one thing to the next. And we tend to feel like we really have to do that because the winning strategy and the sense that we have to win has the sense of trying to do more with less, trying to try to extract more value out of our actions, and it does lead to this kind of what I’ve called a time sickness, where we feel like the kind of transcendent qualities of life aren’t there. Or the great social theorist Max Weber, who talks about the disenchantment of the Western modern world. Well, part of the way that this world becomes disenchanted is we become so fast within it and the acceleration becomes so all out that we don’t even have time to reflect on the deeper, more, more kind of even mystical realities that exist within our world. And who’s got time for mystery?Margie: 9:53
You know, you just yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you know. And then one point you were talking about feeling like we’re in crisis, and I would say too that you know, as the sense of crisis and your anxiety goes up along with that, you know the thinking department definitely shuts down, which is really less than helpful, and you’re describing us operating on a scarcity mindset and feeling under the gun. Meanwhile, I’ve also read a lot in magazines like the Atlantic and places. People are not having children today because there’s no meaning to life, and I thought, oh my goodness of all things, the birth rate is declining because people don’t have a sense of meaning in their lives, but yet they have cut themselves off from the very place where meaning is given out.Andy: 10:55
Yeah, I mean it’s very dystopian in some sense that people feel like the future is so bleak broadly, like the future is so bleak broadly that and then I think they I think it’s a dual thing, that they feel like the future is so bleak that there’s not much meaning, but also their lives don’t feel like there’s there’s much meaning within it. So why would you want to share that meaning with someone else, or that meaninglessness with with someone else? Hence the reason not to have have children. I mean, it is a. It is a very interesting dynamic that you lose the sense of trying to give life to something else when you feel too exhausted. I don’t know. It’s an odd kind of moment that we’re in that you need to somehow breathe in the goodness of life, to want to pass it on.Andy: 11:42
And yeah, what does that mean? I mean, we’ve thought about this. My wife and I have thought a great deal about this. We have two budding young adults, a 20-year-old and a 17-year-old, and there used to be the presumption that your kids would have you would have grandkids. That was a pretty good bet, and now it’s not. You know it’s. Who knows if that will will have that opportunity or not have that opportunity and, yeah, it’s fascinating that that this younger generation is making, making that choice out of senses of great despair, but also out of competitive advantage, and I think we miss that either, like you know, you may have competitive advantage to succeed, or to harvest all the resources that will make your life meaningful.Andy: 12:28
or the experiences. Can you really experience the fullness of life, like all the trips and all the parties and all those experiences, if you’re tied to a child child you know, like how can you really, in this odd way, how can you really suck the marrow out of life if you have to give all your money and all your attention to, to someone else, though there have been deep traditions that that that’s exactly where you find the good life, you know yeah, that’s where.Margie: 12:57
Yeah, you certainly come away with a different focus and appreciation, like a focus like oh, it’s not all about me, you know when, if it is all about you, you know, like.Andy: 13:10
If that’s the only way to find meaning, no wonder we have a generation. That’s just like. I don’t think that I want to have kids. First of all, maybe the earth is going to implode ecologically and secondly, it’s got to be all about me, you know like, and that doesn’t work.Margie: 13:28
So well, I was looking through your book and talking about the acceleration and how that even impacts the church, the sense of you know you got to keep running on the hamster wheel to keep all the programs and everything going all the time.Margie: 13:47
And that’s an area of compassion for me where I just look at ministry leaders, having been one for a number of years myself and thinking about the acceleration and the sense of it’s never broadly stated as competition, although I did sit in a meeting once among pastors and they said, oh, we always gripe this is a well-known phenomenon among clergy we always gripe about stuff, but let’s start the meeting out this time and let’s share something good that’s going on.Margie: 14:24
So we go around the room, we get this one guy and he says you know, well, I’m just thanking God for the million dollar expansion that we just did. And I just was like, okay, you would have been good, but you didn’t have to say the number. And so there is, you know, some competitiveness and some churches deal with, you know, the mega church down the corner or down the street or whatever, and and just trying, feeling like you’re doing everything you can to keep your head above water. And that’s where in your book you started talking about a different way of doing church. You want to start us off with some of that.Andy: 15:07
Yeah Well, I think that you’re really right that there is a deep, whether we want it or not, there’s a deep level of competition that plays in and maybe sometimes that always is in fronted. But we kind of feel like I think pastors feel a lot like if things go wrong with their church it’s their fault and so when someone else just says we did, like you’re saying, a million dollar capital campaign, the reflex response is we could never do that or I couldn’t pull that off, and therefore that person’s in a better spot. And I think part of it is that that competition is just there. But one of the things I don’t think we’ve taken enough consideration in is that, you know, part of this has been with us for a long time, but there was a lot of well, there was a lot of growth available. You know like, especially in the middle of the 20th century, people could there was still probably competition, but you could succeed, you could have your church grow. But now I think we’re at a time for different economic reasons, that’s probably a much longer story where there’s not a ton of growth out there. And when there’s not a lot of growth out there, then you enter into a much more competitive situation and growth becomes, oddly, the main measure of value. Like, how are you growing your congregation, whether that’s financially, I mean there’s some sense. You have to grow the capital and it leads to competition. But really what I think makes that competition I mean there’s a sense of who’s best that makes it intense that competition. I mean there’s a sense of who’s best that makes it intense. But the other level is that if you fail, it’s not even about you not making your church into a mega church or something. It’s about you fall right off the hamster wheel, right off the treadmill. So part of it is you have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place.Andy: 16:53
Like the inertia of the whole kind of cultural reality is that if you don’t work harder or the assumption is there if you don’t work harder, then you won’t be able to keep what you have. You know you won’t have as many youth and youth group, you won’t have as many members as you have, your budget will be smaller. If you don’t work 10 percent, 20 percent harder next year, you won’t stay in the same place, you’ll be sucked back and that is incredibly despairing and creates huge amounts of burnout. I mean, just burnout becomes the real existential crisis, I think, for many. So the response to this is like how do you get this accelerated mode, this competitive mode, this well, this scarcity of just trying to even keep what we have? How do we get that out of our consciousness, how do we get that really out of our moral imagination of what is good? And the issue is that it won’t just be the absence of that that will do it. We’re going to need something actually productive or something that reframes us, more than just saying let’s all not work so hard or let’s all take a break. We’re going to need a different way of relating to the world, and both the accelerated kind of interpretation and the response of it I take from a German social theorist named Hartmut Rosa, who’s, I think, really quite a genius interpreter of our cultural context.Andy: 18:22
And Rosa’s point is slowing down is necessary and we should take everything we can do to slow down, but in the midst of slowing down, you can’t just create a vacuum. If you just create a vacuum, it won’t do it. These structures are too insidious. The way that this speeding up works, the way this competition works. They’re just too insidious that you could just say I’m going to take a break from them. They’ll reach for you, they’ll grab for you. So you’re going to need a different way of relating to the world.Andy: 18:50
And he says we have this, though I mean, we do have experiences in the world that don’t feel accelerated, that we still do have these experiences where we don’t feel like time is using us but we’re being pulled into the fullness of time, where time isn’t racing through us but we feel almost he doesn’t he uses this kind of analogy as a social theorist that we have these kind of sacramental experiences of time too, where it feels full, it doesn’t feel like it’s accelerating, but it feels like it’s drawing us into something deeper. And he says you know, these kinds of experiences we have are like looking at a beautiful painting or having a long conversation with our grandchild or our child, where we feel like there’s this deep sense of being alive, of resonating, and he calls this kind of action of resonance where we feel this deep, deep form ofating. And he calls this this kind of action of resonance where we feel this deep, deep form of connection. And this is the ultimate problem that takes us back to the beginning of this conversation is that acceleration alienates us.Andy: 19:48
It ends up alienating us from ourself, it alienates us from our congregation. It ultimately and tragically, dangerously alienates us from the world where we feel like we’re not in the world. We feel like nothing in the world speaks to us. We’re too exhausted to have an experience where we feel spoken to, whether directly by other people, or spoken to by the beauty, by the fullness of life. We’re just too exhausted for that. We’re moving too fast to have those experiences.Andy: 20:20
So his point that I really quite agree with and have tried to build on is is how do we create space for these resonant experiences? How do we look at really church life as congregational life, as a school that teaches people how to relate to one another in the world and then ultimately as God, in this cadence of resonance over acceleration, and that may start to infuse us not with a bunch of resources that allow us to win the market, but it may infuse us with life. And I think ultimately what the church is after is living inside the life of Jesus Christ and therefore the life of the Spirit, which means that life is really a connotation, the real marker of what it means to be faithful, not growth or expansion, which too often we assume.Margie: 21:14
Right, right for sure. And the acceleration just pushes us, like you said, to the place where you can’t even make those kind of connections. I was just talking to a friend earlier today and said something about a tragic incidence that happened in her town and she was out of town at the moment and she goes oh no, that happened right in my neighborhood. And I said, oh really. And she said, oh yeah, right around the corner. And I said, oh, so you know these people? And she goes well, no, I don’t know these people. And so I thought you know, and I thought that many times you can live in a neighborhood setting and be close to people and still not ever connect, and sometimes it’s because you don’t have time. The North American work ethic and the press, press, press has pressed its way into the church and we forget that we need to be making connections with people. It is more about relationship today than ever before. That is the gold, the gold key, if you will. But we’re running too fast sometimes to even to even do that.Margie: 22:27
That’s horrible implications for anything you know outreach or yeah, yeah. Connect yeah.Andy: 22:34
It’s even really the news cycle. I mean, you know, you think of the stuff that’s happened in the last my gosh, in the last few months that if you would have saw it in a like 1990s, early 2000 movie you would have been like this is not realistic. And now it’s like in our news. You know you would have thought this plot of this movie, this would never happen.Andy: 22:55
And now it’s there, like, for instance, you know, I mean just to raise one. Like you know that Israel gets bombs and beepers that blow up in in the you know, blow up their enemies. Years ago you would talk about this all the time. How did this happen? How did this occur? It was in the news cycle for like two or three days and now it’s just kind of gone and you kind of think to yourself did that happen or did I make that up? And it is so surreal. You think that, like, things are moving so fast we can’t even reflect on. What does this mean? How did this happen? What kind of world are we living in? We’re just on to the next thing, and maybe it has a lot to do, or it’s encapsulated in how we tend to entertain ourselves, which I hate to admit this, but my wife, kar, and I do this. We just, you know, either Twitter or Instagram.Andy: 23:47
You just watch two minute videos over and over and over and over. You know, like you just keep scrolling through them and at the end of an hour of doing that, you haven’t really watched anything. You’ve distracted yourself, but you haven’t. It’s not like you’re more informed or you saw something beautiful, you laughed, maybe. Or that was another you know cute dog video, but it’s all episodic and it all ends up feeling really foggy and like you didn’t really have any well, you didn’t have any coherent experience. There was no narrative arc to all of those two minute videos for the most part, no, there isn’t, there isn’t.Margie: 24:22
And I know in my small group there’s a guy that is an ER nurse and he said he said I don’t think our physicality is meant for all that we are taking in. He said I just I don’t think we can handle it. I don’t know, maybe in you know, 50, 100 years, our DNA will shift and change and something I don’t know. I have no idea. But he said you know when some of these things happen, like you brought up the pagers and exploding pagers and that, and you know, back in the 50s you wouldn’t have learned about that, for you know a couple weeks, maybe you know, or when the Pony Express came by or something. But today there’s such an immediacy, and I think that does contribute to this acceleration, which is its speed that keeps on increasing and increasing and increasing.Margie: 25:15
You and your book, though, talk about a different church model. You connect it into Acts with Acts, and I really I appreciate that a lot. I love Acts. Acts is just it’s a fun ride, it really is, and I thought you rightly ascribed it. It’s mistitled. It should be the Acts of God. And you talk about quote this moment with these people. Can you unpack this moment with these people as a way that we can help. I don’t know if it’s mitigate, maybe that’s even too strong, but work against the acceleration.Andy: 25:54
Yeah, reform ourselves in some way. I mean, I do think we are these strange creatures us, you know, middle class, late modern Americans that we tend to always be projecting ourselves into the future. I mean that becomes a huge issue of you know, we rarely are where our bodies are. What’s next? What do I have to get prepared for? How am I going to get this person here and that person there? I mean, you know, we’re always three days ahead of ourselves and I think that’s really what happens when most people come to church that they’re sitting there and now it’s supposed to be a moment of reflection and receiving and hearing and engaging, and usually I think a lot of people like when it’s time to hear the word preached. They have to do a lot of work to just be there, to just receive.Margie: 26:41
To be in the moment.Andy: 26:42
To be in the moment is really, really hard. And yet I think one of the great gifts of all religious communities, and particularly Christian communities, is this invitation to be in this moment. But to be in this moment, you have to be with these people. So the gift of actually being with these other bodies here in this time, in this moment, is an incredible gift. I mean, it is really regenerative and forming. To just try, even if it’s for 45 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes or however long your service is, to just be in this moment and accept the gift of being with these people. And the gift may be that you can’t stand the person across the sanctuary for whatever attention you might have, but here you are with these people. And what does it mean to be in this moment with these people? And really what that ultimately is about is how do we become?Andy: 27:34
Instead of churches, I think, instead of Protestant churches are always thinking how can we do more with less? How can we get more out of this? That really the gift of even the Protestant imagination is to stop and receive something is that you actually can’t do anything really here. You really have to receive something and all you’re doing will come out of what you receive, and to receive the gifts of God, to receive the word of God, to receive the life of this community in this moment, with these people, you have to learn to wait and, as I think, late modern people we hate waiting, like we’ve been formed to think that waiting is wasting and if we are particularly in a crisis, the worst thing you should do is nothing and just wait around. I mean, what a waste that would be and how horrible.Andy: 28:23
And yet there may be a kind of paradoxical renewal that will happen here, that what the church needs to do is, instead of trying to optimize and accelerate its way out of this, trying to even innovate its way out of this, is that we should wait.Andy: 28:37
And my guess is real significant, theologically inspired, adaptive innovations will come out of learning to wait. But we have to wait. That happens at the end of Luke in Acts 1. That Acts 2 and Pentecost only comes when the community gathers with the command from Jesus to the men on the road to Aramaeus, where they’re told to go back to Jerusalem and to wait. Really, what gathers the church, what starts the church, is the command to wait, to wait on the spirit, to wait on God to move, and I think that disposition may be a healthier one for our leaders, that our job as a pastor is to help their communities. Wait for God by remembering that we’re these people in this place, that it’s this moment, these people, that that might be more renewing than trying to think what do we do, how do we get more out of this, how do we work harder, that we actually, I think, should learn to wait on God.Margie: 29:46
Do you think, then, that that infers that we have just been running on ahead of God?Andy: 29:57
Yeah, I mean it’s an interesting statement because at one level, you know, theologically, we would want to say how could you ever run ahead of God? I mean, when we say God, we’re talking about something that’s nothing greater can be thought. But at another level, in the sense of the way God acts and the way that God’s revealed God’s self in Jesus Christ and through the incarnation, there’s a great book written by a Japanese theologian that was titled the Three-Mile-an-Hour God, because the three miles an hour is basically how fast you can walk so that God moves at this pace of three miles an hour, moves at this pace of Jesus of Nazareth, moves at the pace of a human who walks. And so there is something about that that we can kind of race beyond the pace that God desires to move in. And you know, the God of Israel is a God who really calls Israel over and over again to wait on this God, with no sense of like, wait 10 minutes or wait 10 days, or you just have to wait for this God to appear, because this is a God who arrives. This is a God who enters into circumstances, and particularly enters into circumstances of death and loss and a brokenness, and brings healing and brings newness, and you have to wait within those experiences to experience that.Andy: 31:19
So, yeah, I do think there’s something theologically legitimate in the full breadth of the Christian confession to say there’s a kind of primal sin here that we try to get out ahead of God.Andy: 31:30
I mean, in some ways that’s what the serpent tempts Adam and Eve with, which is you know. Did God really say how about you get out ahead of God here and you have the same knowledge of God? In other words, it’s a lot of theologians would say that it becomes this temptation to not be creatures, to not have to live in limit, to not have to wait and live inside the relational well, we could call it the relational residence of word and response with God, but to kind of take control of your own destiny. And I think that’s a really interesting correlation to this moment. I think most denominations and often a lot of pastors feel like we have to control our own destiny. We have to take control here. Instead, remember, who we’re trying to take control from is God. Maybe God calls us to wait and find a renewal in this waiting and in this suffering and in this celebration of joy with each other and being together more than trying to have more resources to survive.Margie: 32:32
Sure, sure, but meanwhile, meanwhile, many people are functioning, you know, in anxiety and they can’t seem to very well control it. It’s tricky. It’s tricky to control it in a real accelerated kind of culture that we live in. So we’re fight or flight, you know, and the anxiety goes high. We don’t do our best, thinking then, but that’s some of that survival mode. We’re concerned about our survival, and I think in your book what you’re saying is that we are not the center of our story, that God is to be the center of our story and that God, ultimately, is the author of that story. Can you unpack that a little bit? Yeah?Andy: 33:22
Well, I mean, it’s an interesting moral assertion. I agree with you completely that most of us feel this utter anxiety that we have to survive or that we’re on the precipice of destruction or something, and we feel a lot of weight of that and maybe even feel deep levels of shame. If that, if that’s happening, you know that we feel my watch on my watch, you know exactly, you know, on watch. This is all coming undone. Maybe we don’t say this directly, but or maybe even it’s more tacit or in the back of our minds, but we have this sense that it’s our fault that this has happened, you know. So, first of all, to say if we’re in a crisis, it makes a lot of sense that we don’t have the anxiety, that we don’t have the attention to wait, that we don’t have the pull to wait, and so again, going back, I don’t want to say we’re not in a crisis, but I do want to reframe what the crisis is, and I do think that we become so confused in the midst of a crisis that what’s actually occurred here, if we think about this theologically, is we’ve taken God’s responsibility and somehow we think the church is dependent on us and not dependent on God. And so part of I think the only way forward is not to let ourselves off the hook by saying, well, we never have to worry about this, there’s no sense of responsibility, I can be irresponsible. But it’s also really to remind ourselves that the church is God’s responsibility. And, yes, it is very true that our denominations may disappear, that I teach at a seminary. God forbid. Some of our seminaries disappear. There’s no guarantee that these institutional structures will survive and that will be painful and we should grieve that. We shouldn’t act like that’s no big deal. That’s a big deal. But when we catastrophize that into saying if we don’t do something, christianity in America will disappear or the church will no longer exist, that is fundamentally catastrophizing because it’s a big theological problem, because it says that the church is more dependent on our action than God’s action.Andy: 35:38
And I think one of the things we can remember is that God is God, and when we talk about God, we’re not talking about an idea that we have to somehow get the word out about. We’re not talking about an idea that we need to market for. We’re talking about a being that acts and moves in the world. We’re talking about a God who is God, a God who is in, that this is all, that God has control of all of this, that God is, like we just said, that of which nothing is greater.Andy: 36:10
And I think sometimes we feel like, well, because we feel like the church has become so old and can’t can’t really take care of itself. So we therefore think we have to parent the church instead of the church being our parent. You know, then we inject that into our, our views of God, and we tend to think like God needs us, not that we need God. So I think a big piece of this is for us to remember who it is that has called us, who it is that we serve. And we are talking about the God of creation, we’re talking about the God of salvation, we’re talking about the one who frees Israel from Egypt and raises Jesus from the dead. I mean that’s very different.Margie: 36:55
And I like the fact that you said you know who is the star of the story? Is the church the star of its own story? And even the way sometimes we articulate faith, we’ll say I accepted Jesus as my Savior, and I’m not saying that you can never say that. But what I am saying is it’s a misrepresentation. Like you said, theologically, technically, what happened is God knocked on your heart and you responded. And that is what the transaction really is. And it’s the same thing if we became a waiting church, waiting on God’s direction and waiting for us to discern what our next steps are instead of charging off, and then we respond to that. That’s, as Blackaby would say, is joining the work in the world that God is doing, but we’re joining what God is doing instead of setting the tone. So it’s kind of an interesting way that we talk and speak well, same thing about our faith in terms of what is technically and theologically correct, and it really does make a big difference. It absolutely makes a big difference. I like that.Margie: 38:12
You then go on to describe the waiting church and you say there’s tension in church life and you’re alive if there’s tension there. But we tend to mirror all the anxiety of the culture. We like to think that we’re separate and apart, sanctified and separate and apart, but we actually carry many of the ills of the culture and then, like you said, we sit in a worship situation and we don’t receive very well. So I think you’re right that there needs to be some new thinking reframing done. So I think that I think you’re right that there needs to be some new thinking reframing done, and I always like to quote Oswald Chambers here at this kind of thing. Am I more attached to my ideas about God?Margie: 39:01
Yeah then I am attached to God, so that’s kind of where some of that, some of that lie. And I did like to the section where you talked about God being a pet.Andy: 39:18
Yeah.Margie: 39:19
Yeah, that’s some of that, can you? Can you bring that to our audience here?Andy: 39:23
Yeah, well, especially when we mix up, who’s the star of the story? That when we mix up, who’s the star of the story? We usually think I mean, and the point of that is in a competitive environment. Back to our competitive environment. Most often churches are told that they’re in a competitive market. They’re in competitive religious marketplace, so they better find what distinguishes their church over others.Andy: 39:46
So therefore find your story, you know, find what sets you apart in the market, and that does I mean. I get that from just a brute fact of thinking about how you relate to your community and things like that. But it does open up a big theological problem, which it says that your church’s story is more important, or is the primary story, to God’s own story. And theologically, what we call in the midst of our ecclesiology is that the church has no story of its own. The only story the church has is the story of God’s act within the world, of God’s bringing salvation to the world. And so the issue becomes then if we put our story, the church’s story, above God’s story, then what ends up happening is it becomes a bit like you watch these biopics about companies like Apple or whatever.Andy: 40:36
Yeah, there’s been these movies about these things and what of course you get is these end up being stories about personalities.Andy: 40:44
They end up being stories about the company and they’re framed to us as stories about a product. But they end up becoming stories about a company and that becomes framed to us as stories about a product. But they end up becoming stories about a company. And that becomes very similar to when we think of our churches, that it becomes the story of the church, and then the only thing that God can become within that is the product we sell. So God becomes our kind of pet or product that we end up selling, because God becomes an idea. And that starts by getting the story wrong and thinking. The survival of the church will be dependent on us finding our own unique, creative, church-based story not that the church could be renewed by remembering again, rehearsing and living out God’s own story of how God comes into the world in the person of Jesus Christ and brings salvation and continues to move the world towards its culmination. That will be the fulfillment of God’s act.Margie: 41:39
Sure. So if you could say a couple of words directly to ministry leaders, what would you encourage them with leaders? What would you encourage them with?Andy: 41:51
Yeah, I think I mean I would ultimately encourage them. I think my big word would be to them well, it’d be maybe a couple things. I mean, the first thing would be something that I’ve already kind of been dancing around or tried to say directly, which is that the church is bigger than you and it will survive, that the church does not need you to make sure it can survive, you can go off duty, that your job isn’t to keep this thing alive. That’s God’s responsibility. And you will be pulled into this in a big way and, I think, in a life-giving way. But don’t over, don’t, don’t over, don’t catastrophize, don’t over assume.Andy: 42:34
What’s needed here and to remember the church is one word I would really say is the church has had, there’s been, more difficult times than this and and it’s gotten through by god’s mercy and god’s grace like these are not golden period. This is not a golden period. No one’s going to look back historically at the first three decades of the 21st century and say, oh, this was a golden era of Protestantism or just congregational life. But there have been worse times. There have been far worse times and God has been faithful to see the church through.Andy: 43:05
So remember God’s faithfulness and then make the payoff of this, or remember that the great privilege of this calling is really the gospel itself, that it is utterly beautiful and, instead of making it what you can build, that your value will be on.Andy: 43:28
Did you bring the numbers or did you make some kind of difference? You will make a difference, but you will make a difference as you become more and more infatuated and in love with the gospel itself. And so to remember the utter privilege that you spend your life reflecting on this incredible story and trying to help people prepare to truly live in it and die with it, I mean that is an incredible task. To be a pastor and by pastor I mean really broadly to be in ministry is an incredible privilege. To walk with people as they try to make sense of their greatest joys and their deepest, deepest, heart-wrenching pains and suffering and grief, and to point to something bigger, to point to the redemptive work of the triune. God is an incredibly beautiful thing and it will not leave you without bruises and without heartache, but it will renew and it will make your life well-lived.Margie: 44:38
Yeah, what was coming to mind for me when you were speaking there is we need to return to our first love and recapture that and wait on God for our next steps. Yeah, amen. Well, I will for sure put a link to your book in the show notes and I really appreciate you coming on. I’m going to ask you one last question, and I always apologize to people every time I do this because I say, oh, and I should have warned you that I’m going to ask you this question. I guess I’m consistent. So anyway, the title of the podcast being the Crabby Pastor, I need to ask you what makes you crabby.Andy: 45:32
I need to ask you what makes you crabby. You know, what makes me really crabby is meetings. Meetings yeah institutional meetings at my school make me kind of crabby, especially when they feel like we’re spinning around stuff. So, yeah, that makes that makes me crabby Having deep conversations about things I like, but sometimes I get a little crabby when I yeah, when I when I’m in too long of meetings. So, thinking of institutional meetings I have coming up this week, oh boy.Margie: 46:09
Well, high marks for honesty there for you. Thanks again for joining me on the Krabby Pastor podcast.Andy: 46:17
Thanks for having me.Margie: 46:22
So how do the pieces of your life fit together? Do they fit together well and things are humming along just fine, or are there some pieces that are tight or absent or just not fitting the bill? This is your invitation to join me in my glass workshop for a video series, where I am going to do a stained glass project while I talk to you about sustainability and building sustainability into your heart and into your life. So I am going to be doing my art, which is a form of self-care, and I’m going to invite you into that space with me and I’m going to chat. I’m going to chat about self-care and I’m going to show you how I create, and there’s a nifty, nifty analogy Stained glass seems to be a very good metaphor for what I want to talk about. So I’d love for you to join me. To do that, to opt in, I’ll need you to email me at crabbypastor at gmailcom. That’s crabbypastor at gmailcom. So you won’t want to miss this. You definitely won’t want to miss this. So make a plan to join me in the glass workshop.Margie: 47:47
In the Glass Workshop, are you wondering whether your fatigue, your lack of motivation, your lack of interest is burnout maybe? I just wanted to let you know that I have a resource on the website, margiebryce dot com that’s B-R-Y-C-E MargieBryce dot com, and it is a burnout questionnaire free for you to download and kind of self-assess and get a sense of where you’re at. There are questions that not only ask about what you’re going through but maybe how often you’re experiencing it, and that’s kind of a key to where you might be, because you have to know where you are in order to chart a course forward. Pastors and ministry leaders who experience burnout rarely know that that’s where they’re at until they’re well into it. And if you’re unsure about that little statistic, so far, everybody that I’ve interviewed on this podcast who has experienced burnout, when I asked that kind of question, they’re like, yeah, I didn’t know that’s where I was at. So again, go to margiebryce dot com. It’s on the homepage of the website and you can get your burnout questionnaire and kind of see where you’re at.Margie: 49:27
Hey friends, the Crabby Pastor podcast is sponsored by Bryce Art Glass and you can find that on Facebook I make stained glass as part of my self-care and also by Bryce Coaching, where I coach ministry leaders and business leaders, and so the funds that I generate from coaching and from making stained glass is what is supporting this podcast and I will have opportunities for you to be a part of sponsoring me and, as always, you can do the buy me a cup of coffee thing in the show notes. But I will have some other ways that you can be a part of getting the word out about the importance of healthy self-care for ministry leaders. Hey, thanks for listening. It is my deep desire and passion to champion issues of sustainability in ministry and for your life, so I’m here to help.Margie: 50:38
I stepped back from pastoral ministry and I feel called to help ministry leaders create and cultivate sustainability in their lives so that they can go the distance with God and whatever plans that God has for you. I would love to help, I would consider it an honor and, in all things, make sure you connect to these sustainability practices you know, so that you don’t become the crabby Pastor.
