Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Thriving.
Thriving is created by the discipleship and advocacy team of the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania Uniting Church in Australia.
This podcast is produced on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri people.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Thriving. It's exciting to be here today and we have Andy and Cara root with us. This is a special treat because Andy and Cara are going to be with us live in Melbourne on the 26th and 27th of October. So this is a really great opportunity to talk about what we're going to be sharing at the two days, which we've called Beyond Waiting, Witness and Formation. So welcome Andy and Cara. Let's start by just introducing each other and getting to know who you are.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Don't have Andy.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: Well, yeah, well, you know my name. I'm Andrew Roach and go by Andy. And we are coming to you from the twin cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul. We're on the St. Paul side and I teach at Luther seminary here in St. Paul, Minnesota, and have been on the faculty of Luther seminary for about 20 years. I know it looks like I, I started when I was 14. That's what I want everyone to, to think. But it's. Yeah, been. Been doing it for a while. So right about kind of thinking about the church in a secular age and think about younger generations of folks oversee a youth ministry program here at the seminary.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Fantastic. Hi, Kara.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Hi. So I actually pastor a small congregation on the Minneapolis side. I've been there for 18 years now, and we intentionally shape our life around worship, hospitality and Sabbath. So Sabbath has been a big piece of our, of our ministry and of my own learning and, and how we've parented our kids.
Yeah. It's great to be with you. We look forward to being there in person.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Fantastic. So there are a lot of connections between your work and what we're wanting to talk about when you come over. I'm teaching a missiology subject at the moment, and last week was actually the week we talked about the secular age and how one engages with that in terms of mission. So I wonder if you can explain just a little bit about what you mean when you talk about the secular age and how it might be that we as Christians can engage with that. And that actually fits, I think, into the context of the first lecture that you'll give as part of this Beyond Relevance conference. Andy?
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, the secular as a word is a quite slippery one. I mean, I think we all feel like we know what we mean when we say secular, and we have a kind of sensibility And a feeling maybe even in our stomachs about what it is. But you get underneath that a little bit and you realize it's just a really complicated phenomenon. So I think we usually think of the secular aspect. Fewer and fewer people are coming, so the church has fewer and fewer members. The budgets are smaller, our training institutions are weaker. There's just fewer, there's less of everything. And I see that as a reality, obviously across our Western societies. That's, that's definitely true. But I do also think that's a bit of maybe the, what maybe we call the red or the MacGuffin in like, literature that it seems like that is the. The culprit here, but there might be another culprit, a deeper culprit. And so the way I define the secular is the way the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor does in his big thick book A Secular Age, that it becomes this experience of contested belief. And I think from a kind of Protestant perspective, the challenge of a secular age is that belief becomes very much until further notice. And even the idea of a transcendent living God that's moving history becomes more and more unbelievable to people. Not even as a kind of statement of belief. They just have a hard time holding on to those kind of frameworks of imagination.
So to be secular really means to have a certain kind of imagination. And it's an imagination where God is a complete option within it. And that makes a very different challenge for the, the practicing pastor, the minister, to think about how we do ministry inside a reality where people's imagination, it really goes against the grain of their imagination to have a sense that there's a God who reveals God self that's moving history in a certain direction. So that's what I mean when I say secular. And I think it's opens up a huge challenge to the practice of ministry.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: It absolutely does. In Australia, we are a disestablished country, so no particular church has power. And that, that was set up the way Australia was set up in the. In 1900 when we became a federation of states, becoming one country.
Which means that there is this real sense in which people don't want there to be a voice of religion in the body politic. And so they often say we're a secular country, so we don't want religion speaking into politics as though, you know, you're kind of fairy monster, kind of God in the sky that's controlling what you think shouldn't be. Shouldn't be affecting how you, how you speak into politics. So it has a real resonance in that, in the way that we might speak about social justice or we might speak about the poor or those sorts of things in the political sphere for us in Australia, too. So in terms of churches, what does this mean about how we might engage with people in the world, in the existential kind of why we exist, who we are, but also, also maybe in terms of how we might speak about issues in the, in the world, in politics?
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, I think at one level it, it really frames what, what the existential crisis is. And, and, you know, part of the drum that I've been beating is that we are kind of confused on what the existential crisis is. And if we define the secular as fewer and fewer, then the existential crisis is, well, lacking market share. We need to find more market share in one way or another, even though we may not use that kind of crass consumer language that essentially becomes kind of what we think. But if, if the secular is a kind of whole imagination for living God, then the existential crisis is how do you move people, open people up, who kind of have a framework, an imagination that's imminent, as Charles Taylor would say, kind of living in the imminent frame. How do you open that imminent frame up? How does the, you know, picking up the scriptures and saying, this is the word of the Lord, maybe for a medieval person, that sends a shiver down their back, like they, they don't have to be convinced that this is a reality, that there's, that the divine is, you know, is. Is coming in the midst of this, of this words in this book. But for us, we have to do a lot. I mean, and I say us, I mean, ministers, pastors, have to do a lot of kind of mental work. Like this is important. God moves and speaks in this. So part of the reality of being seculars, we're kind of.
We're kind of sheltered from the divine fear in some ways, or the holiness of God in a certain sense. So this becomes the crisis. The crisis is how do we, in a very different kind of imaginary, speak of very profound things, of a. Of a living God, of a speaking God, of a God who moves throughout history, when even those of us who are leading congregations or teaching future pastors, that goes against the grain of just what we kind of take in day in and day out. So to me, that's the bigger existential crisis is that your own pastoral identity, our own senses of why the church even exists, can easily be kind of forged and pushed forward without any need to be able to confess that there's a living, active, moving God within the world. And to me, that's the real crisis we face.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: I was just gonna say one thing he highlights in his work is that to have belief fragilized, we have doubt fragilized as well. You know, not believing is also.
You have moments where something breaks through some experience that's transcendent and there's no explanation for it in the imminent frame. And so to your question, that's one of the places that churches and pastors can exist, is that we hold together these experiences for which we don't have these explanations, these moments where we're touched by something outside of ourselves. We share those stories, we watch for the activity of God and we give language and speech story to this other reality that's. That's at play. So we're not just trying to sort of compete with ideological beliefs or something. We're saying, yeah, we're all living in a time where it's hard to believe there's a God. And we, we even who are pastors sometimes doubt that. But also we could be firmly entrenched that there is no God, and we're going to doubt that too. So as a corporate collection of doubters, how do we then live in our lives, present to what's really. And then give each other a language and the vision for what God might be up to?
[00:08:27] Speaker A: I wonder in our context where we're, you know, we have a fear of the church dying. And I find myself often saying things like, forget about the bums, like the bums on seats. We want to have lots more bums on seats. We want more people to come to church.
And it doesn't kind of matter how we do that. We need programs to make that happen. We need to be able to step into a space where we can have a conversation about what it is we might believe, what that imminent thing is that we might have to offer an opportunity for people to grapple with that. And I, I still think in a secular world, people are looking to find that thing that's beyond them, that thing that we might all grapple to actually explain.
What is this transcendent God that enters into our imminent lives?
Is that kind of. Is that. It feels to me like a paradigm shift where we actually have to be able to talk about that rather than.
And really grapple with that, rather than wonder about, oh, how do we get one more person to come to church so that we can tick our numbers and improve our size and all the rest of it?
[00:09:35] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can feel that pressure. I mean, I think we all feel that, that pressure. We better get some more people, we better get some more money. I mean, this is just a, this isn't even just a church reality. It's just a kind of common reality of, you know, late form capitalism. You better get more or you're in trouble. Like the way we will stabilize ourselves is through growth in, in some kind of material way. So those, those realities are there. And we should never be naive to say that we don't have to deal with those realities.
But there, there is this sense of, you know, how do we help people really believe again? Or how do we help people have deep encounters and make sense of their lives in a way where God is at the center of it or, or they can, they can wrestle with those, those big, big questions. So this is a really weird kind of secular age that we have to kind of point out. And it's weird in the sense that it's just littered with all sorts of spiritualities. And that's one of the things I'll mainly talk about when I'm with you all in Melbourne is, is this kind of weird secular age where everybody wants to be spiritual. And we see all sorts of, kind of narratives and stories of people's transformation and, and this kind of deep awakening to purpose and meaning. But again, what's really fascinating and quite unique in the sense that like the Western societies are trying something that has never been tried before then the last 400 years, we're trying to create meaning and purpose without any divine reality at the center and without any kind of sense of even religious ritual really at the center of it. And, you know, who knows how we're doing? We'll have to look back in another 200 years and wonder how we've done with that. But that is a real challenge for the church because I think in our mutual societies people will say things often like, you know, like people will say, be at a coffee shop and say that they're a pastor and people be like, oh, that's really cool. You know, I'm a spiritual person too, but I don't need church. I mean, I just take my dog on a walk in the woods and, you know, that's, that's all I really need. Or oh yeah, I'm super spiritual. I'm really into, you know, CrossFit or I run marathons or something, and there becomes all this kind of proliferation of other spiritualities. And for the most part everything's equal, whether you're, you know, taking a mass at a Catholic church or you're a YouTube channel about aliens who have infiltrated the earth and are directing history. All those things for the most part are equal and are the same and hold weight as long as they work for you, as long as they help you find purpose and meaning. So there is a kind of sense where we have to walk with people and really confess the depth of the Christian story as it can provide purpose and meaning. As it opens us up to beauty and horizons of meaning like that, that becomes very significant.
And you know, that's, that's the work that God does, that God moves, the God of the, of the scriptures moves out of, out of death towards life, that this God gives, gives meaning in life by coming into our experiences of brokenness and death. And that is, that is an assertion. That's a, that's a claim that this God does that. So. And again, it's not the kind of perpetuation of institutionalized forms of life, though we are all human and we need institutions. But it is saying that there's a de.
There's a deep way of being in the world and inviting people to journey into that. And in some sense there's a kind of pilgrimage dynamic here of how can we walk with people and help them wrestle with meaning and purpose and seek for God in the midst of all that.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Kara, I wonder whether the kind of spiritual practices that are deeply rooted in the Christian tradition have something to do with helping people on that pilgrimage. Are there things that we can find in the Christian tradition that might help us with that grappling with meaning that might help us with finding that deeper purpose that Andy's talking about?
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that in a lot of ways we lose our humanity in this sort of fast paced, as Andy talks about, you know, growth, focus, maximize and optimize and be your best self sort of way of being. We make our lives about doing instead of being. And it is so much in those places where we're sort of thrown back into silence or solitude or spaces where we can't produce something that we find ourselves met by God. Andy did some research once where he asked a number of people to share if they've ever had an experience of God that, you know, even maybe they've never talked about before. Every single person he spoke with had one. And almost to a person, they had never told anyone and for sure not in church, they hadn't talked about it in church. And so that's part of it too is giving ourselves, giving each other the vocabulary and the language to talk about a living and active God. What does it look like to tell stories of things that happen that you can't explain. Those places in sorrow and tragedy where you're met by something, where someone ministers to you deeply and something happens in that moment or, you know, those. Those places of sort of transcendent joy and. Or where you find yourself contributing to life for someone else. It's a whole other reality that we're living in, in the midst of this one. And we're so bombarded by everything else that I think the practices of our faith that we've been given over the thousands of years are ways to sort of step out and to be in this other reality along with the God who's here with us.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: How do you create a space where people feel welcome and safe to actually be able to start to answer some of those questions or even be safe enough to say, you know, I've had this experience where I experience God coming into my life. How do you create a community where that's possible?
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Cara I think that for my own congregation, where I've been for 18 years, when I first arrived, we had a lot of conversations about what are the things that are keeping us from experiencing God's leading and presence now? And. And beginning to ask ourselves the question, what is God doing here and now? And how do we listen and join in whatever that is? It may not look like what was or what's happening other places, but how do we watch for the presence of God in our lives? And one of the things we did early on that ended up being really formative, I had read an article about a guy who was saying, how do they count success in the abbey? You know, they're not counting bums in the seats. They're, you know, number bucks in the plate. We would say, too, money wise. He said, are they counting the number of prayers they're praying? The jars of honey they make, they have. What are they doing?
And he began to say, what would it look like if we looked at how we were being church rather than how many people were coming to church? So our community did that experiment and we essentially, as a whole congregation said, okay, how are we. Let's write down how we being church? And of course, it started with butts in the pews and then, you know, went on to like, well, there's meals on Wheels, or we, we do this service or another. And then once we got through sort of the obvious things, there was this long pause. And then one person said, well, you know, Dee has keys to all her neighbors houses because she lets their dogs out in the Middle of the day and lets, you know, the meter person in. And so then Dee's name went up on the board, and then we circled the number of her neighbors. And then. And then, oh, well, Carolyn is volunteering for a suicide hotline. Okay. So then Carolyn's work. And once that door opened, we began to see being church in a completely different way. How are we participating in the ministry of God that's happening right now in the world already in our lives? And that's what the ministry of this church looks like. And so that kind of started us on this pathway of trust. And then we've incorporated a number of other practices, such as we always share our prayers out loud and sing God in your loving mercy. Hear our prayer after each for some praise, so that the vulnerability of those things we're grateful for and those things we're longing for are shared by the whole community. And it's been a gradual process of building up that trust, but it has started with sort of the constant reminding of ourselves and each other that, hey, this is God's church. God is real. This is not about us. How can we practice listening and watching for what God's doing and getting better and better at pointing it out?
Is this maybe something God is doing?
Yeah.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: In the community that I led before I came into this role, we used to have a gratitude prayer practice, which was basically the prayers of thanksgiving at the start of the service. So I would start each week by saying something about, I wonder where God has met you this week? And it fitted with the. Whatever the story was. It might be something like, have you experienced living water this week? Or how have you experienced. Experienced living water this week? Or where has God walked with you this week? Or whatever?
Has God met you as you've stepped out of that boat onto a rough sea this week? Or whatever? And so everybody would. And it took a while. Everybody would call something out or in. In the congregation. I mean, now it's a much bigger congregation. So I get them into little groups of two or three, and then. And then get them to share a couple. And then. And then my prayer of thanks at the end of that. I just kind of catch it together. But it's about, I think, training that posture of noticing or listening for where God is a way into that for me.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, you're giving language then, too. I mean, you're giving them a grammar of faith with biblical metaphors when you ask that. And then how. How do you not carry that out with you then into your week and start thinking, start paying attention so that you have something to share the next week. So yeah, it's, it's the same way we train children in households to understand what is our life together, what defines us, how do, how do we live and move in the world.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: So that's a nice segue to the second day that you're here where although it's going to be, it could be for the same audience, we're thinking a bit more about what it means to be an intergenerational church and how we work with youth. And of course Andy, that's your kind of background, isn't it, talking about youth and youth ministry.
So I'm a parent of a 15 year old and right at the moment my 15 year old goes to church. She's very happy to be involved in Bible study, really happy to kind of talk about faith stuff. But Friday night when News group is on, she has dance and dance really matters, like it's very important. And so we're, we're talking about, you know, how do we engage our kids when in this world we live in there's so many other things kids are interested in.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And that's it. We'll definitely pick up that, that exact theme because I think this is something we kind of share across our societies is that in this really strange way, at least for you know, middle class people, we're more invested in our kids than ever. I mean some of us are of the generation where we often joke in the States like there used to be public service announcement that tried to remind parents that they had children, you know, because we were just out just doing stuff so there would be like 10 o' clock and I had to go beep beep beep. Parents, do you know where your children are? Because they had no idea where we were, like they had no clue where we were. And now we have a, you know, almost 22 year old and a 19 year old moving towards 20 and we know where they are all at all times and we have known where they have been almost every second of their life partly because we're tracking them. Don't they know they were tracking them? But yeah, I know and I actually kind of feel bad saying that because it's pathetic, but we do. And so there's a strange thing like when I started in youth ministry when I was a young youth worker, we wanted to plead with parents to get invested in their kids lives. And now this very ironic thing has happened that parents are over invested, middle class parents are so invested in their kids lives but it hasn't led to more engagement and faith formation. It's actually led to. To less, and it's less even involvement in the church because, like you're saying, we have all sorts of other activities to give our kids the goods. They need to be, quote, unquote, successful. They need to be at. So now there's competition with a. Just with a very.
A very heavy Google calendar of things that they were doing. You know, like, I don't know. I think I was in my 20s before I had a calendar or felt like I had stuff to do. But now if you're 11, you're 12, you have a really busy schedule. So we'll look at that phenomenon and what that means for the church. And it partly means that even the forms of ministry change. Like having a big youth group just isn't really possible. And yet, at least in my country here in the States, people are banging their heads against the wall trying to get back to some kind of 1998, you know, 300 kids in a church basement kind of thing. And I think the culture's changed. I just actually think that's not possible at all.
So what does that mean? How do we go forward? Well, you know, you'll have to come in end of October to hear some of that, but I think this is, you know, a phenomenon we share, and we'll kind of unpack that reality and how it means we have to have a different metric, too, of what we're doing. And participation hours may not be the best way of thinking about it.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: I wonder if part of some of that, too, is helping young people who have a hunger to engage with something beyond themselves, themselves find a way to do that. So the metric isn't, oh, how many people turn up and play volleyball in the. In the church hall on a Friday night like it was for us in the 90s. But how are we finding ways to wrestle with who. With the kids about who God is? I've just written some confirmation resources that use that. That start with Jacob wrestling with God at Peniella's kind of a posture. So if Jacob wrestles and puts his hip out, then this is a God that we can wrestle with and throw our big ideas at and kind of work out where we are and what that means as a way. I think that's important.
[00:23:22] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. What I'll try to push us into at the end of October is thinking about how narrative is what transforms. And so the job of the church is not to manage young people's hours, but to give them a space to testify if you will, to tell the story of how the spirit is leading them out into their vocation in the world. And it's very possible that a.
A young person could say, what's. I feel most alive. I feel most connected to God when I'm dancing right now, or when I'm. When I'm playing footy. See my cultural relevance there? I used footy.
There you go. You know, like, when I'm doing that, I feel alive. And I think what the church's. The church's responsibility is to give space for that to be articulated and for them to narrate that. And in the moral horizon of that, not to say, well, you know, it's either dance or it's our youth group. And, you know, we're on team youth group, so you better choose that. I don't think that's the responsibility. Ability to the church. I think the church's responsibility is to say, and sometimes these can be, you know, words of judgment in some sense of, like, why is this meaningful? Why. Why is this participation in. In the kingdom of God? And, you know, sometimes a young person's never thought about that. And I think, you know, if you've done youth ministry long enough, you ask a kid why they like something, and all of a sudden, sometimes they'll tell the story. They'll be like, actually, I don't think I like it at all. And you've just blessed them with an opportunity to actually try to create meaning on why. Why it's important to them.
Just did it because my friends did. I never liked soccer. I hate soccer. But no adult particularly has ever said, you know, testify. Tell me a story on why this is meaningful to you. And when they can, I think the job of the church, the job of the minister is to say amen. Praise the Lord. How can tell it? Continue to. We want to do this with you, not we want to own your time.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: So how might we find a way to wrestle with God, with you? And maybe we need to find a time in the week that we could all jump online together and have that conversation, you know? Oh, an hour on Tuesday night might work for all of us. Great. Let's. Let's find a way to do that. Cara, how would you enter into that?
[00:25:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I love that because it's. It's gonna look different.
Maybe looked all the same everywhere in the 90s. It's gonna look different for each community. Now. Who. Who are the people involved? When I first came to my congregation, the fellowship hall had pictures of the confirmation classes stretching from one side to the other, going back decades. And in the early years of, you know, the 50s and 60s, they were three rows deep. You know, there were, there were 30, 40 confirmants. And as time passed, you see the class size shrink, shrink, shrink through the sepias of the 70s through the 80s, until the very last one was like mid-90s. And there were three people then, ironically, they were in frames that had three holes. And so there were just two empty holes after that last picture. And I arrived there in 2008, and this testimony was what they drank their coffee to after church every single week. And so being a tiny congregation and trying to figure out what it was, how do we do confirmation? How do we do youth group? It's hard to shake that imaginary of like, it has to be a big group group with a lot of programs and a lot of cool things going on. And there was a lot of pressure for a few years when we would get enough of a cohort together to say maybe we should ship them off to another church and maybe we should team up and maybe a bunch of small churches should get together in the Presbyterian, make their own youth group, because they were trying to duplicate the form of that. But what we've discovered, I never would have plotted this out, but it's sort of organically what's developed is that we realize what we want is for these kids to live life alongside the people in this church. We want the formation that happens from being in the faith together. And so it's not about information. It's not, you know, let's take a year of confirmation, have them for every week, and then they've got 50 lessons on the Bible and on faith. And now they're like ready to live their faith. Let's take those 50 lessons and spread it out over five years and let's meet once a month. And then in the in between times, people are having relationships and the kids are involved in different things going on in the church. And like our particular class, that's the older group now has, there's only four kids and two of them are in homes that are trade off custody.
So trying to find the week in the month that works for all the all four kids. It's only four kids. And it takes us just like a crazy online calendar to get everybody lined up. But there's something so beautiful about that because they start out, you know, maybe they're not jaded yet about church. Then they go through those years where nobody wants to come and they all hate it. And then they get to the other side. And you've just gone through five years of, you know, development, but also faith formation where a community has really cared for them and has asked to hear their stories. And, you know, there's an adaptiveness to it where we say, oh, it seems like maybe this would be a good thing for us to talk about this week. So we have, like, a list of things that we want them to experience by the time they're done, but it may happen in different orders for different kids. And it's. Yeah, it's about living a relationship together. So I think that can be done in any congregation, you know, with some creativity and noticing, like you were talking about, you know, what's alive here. How.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: What.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: What does this particular group of kids need? Who are the adults that seem most connected already? And how can we feel?
[00:28:49] Speaker A: Fantastic.
So just as we come to come to the conclusion of this conversation, I'm wondering, is there anything that we should be.
That you want to say to make people go, yes, I need to be there on the 26th and 27th of October to hear Andy and Cara, what's the big thing they are coming for?
[00:29:07] Speaker B: Andy's got good jokes.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: I don't. Don't oversell me on that. Don't come for the jokes. That's way too much pressure. No, I. I think we're looking forward to it. I mean, we're looking forward to, you know, meeting people and being in conversation. And so, you know, selfishly, we want you there because we would like to hang out with you. And, you know, we love Melbourne, so we're looking forward to being back in Melbourne where the coffee is amazing and Australia, the coffee is amazing. I'm always amazed that, like, everyone in Australia has been a barista at some point, is just amazing at making coffee. So we're looking forward to that.
But no, I think we'll really wrestle with some big questions and, you know, that will get our feet on the ground, but also deal with big theological questions that we're dealing with in ministry and in a church that is trying to make its way in a secular age.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's my favorite thing to travel and to meet churches and people living faith in other parts of the world. I just love it so much. And my congregation sends me and eagerly awaits the stories when I come back. And there's really this sense of getting a little glimpse and reminder that we're all in this big story together, that the church is so far beyond any of the sort of boundaries and restrictions that we have around it. So I never spend time in another place with another group of churches or pastors and don't feel just so blessed to see what God is doing in other contexts. So I look forward to that.
[00:30:37] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, Andrew and Cara, it's been a delight to spend time with you this morning and I'm really excited to catch up with you when you're in Melbourne in just over a month's time. It'll be great to spend time with you and people who are interested in finding out more about the conference. You can look on the younger generation's Facebook page for more information and you can also find it in the email we send out and it'll be in the show notes for this program. So thanks Andy. Thanks Cara and we'll look forward to catching up in a few weeks time. Bye for now.
[00:31:08] Speaker C: Thanks. Thank you.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Bye.
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