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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari (00:02):
Is innovation just a buzzword, or is there something going on with innovation that Christians should be paying attention to? In today's interview, Kenda Creasy Dean takes us on her own journey, one that began by trying to figure out where young people were finding meaning and purpose. Dean is an ordained United Methodist pastor and serves as Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Within the field of practical theology, education and formation, Dean has focused on youth and young adult ministry, Christian social innovation, and theories of teaching. She works closely with Princeton's Institute for Youth Ministry, the Farminary, and the Polaris Young Adult Leadership Network. Dean is the author of numerous books on youth, church, and culture. Today we explore her latest book titled, Innovating for Love: Joining God's Expedition through Christian Social Innovation. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Kenda, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Kenda (01:05):
I'm so glad to be here.
Shari (01:07):
All right, so help us understand how you found yourself in this conversation about innovation.
Kenda (01:15):
It's a great question. Well, as you know, I do most of my work around studying youth and young adults in their relationship with churches. And as they became less frequently spotted in churches, they became more frequently spotted in some of these social innovation spaces just trying to find the meaning and belonging and purpose that churches promised. But they struggled to find those things there and they increasingly were finding them outside of the church. And often those were in things like social enterprise or agricultural work or other forms of work aimed at bettering the neighborhood, at bettering the culture and the community, in ways that churches would have once called mission. But these young adults were doing these without a church connection. And so I was curious about that, and I set out to try to learn enough about it to have an intelligent conversation with them, and that was a long journey.
Shari (02:27):
So you just followed the trail of young people.
Kenda (02:30):
I do feel like I sort of chased young people into this. Yeah.
Shari (02:34):
Yeah. Well, in the end you claim that fundamentally what's going on is really about love. So connect those dots for us.
Kenda (02:48):
Well, I think the bottom line is that both what young people seek in churches and what churches seek to offer boils down to just flat out love and acceptance and trying to be Jesus for the person next to you. And it's a very squishy word, so I tend to avoid it, but I couldn't avoid it when I started to write about it because it just felt true. So I think the bottom line is that churches are trying to embody the love of Christ in ways that follow people into the world. And young people were instinctively searching for that. They just weren't finding it in congregations a lot of the time. They were finding it in these other kind of spontaneous communities that were trying to accomplish many of the things churches say they would like to accomplish. Churches weren't completely absent from those, but it was more and more common that young people who I think in my generation would've come to seminary, said, yeah, I think actually I can either serve God better in these other places in these other capacities, or they simply weren't making the connection at all between the faith that they had been raised with and this instinct that they had to try to serve their communities and become agents of good in their communities so that social enterprise and social innovation allowed them to be.
Shari (04:32):
Yeah. So is there a story you could share that would really help us understand, much like you said love is a squishy word, innovation can also be understood in so many different ways.
Kenda (04:42):
Oh yeah. That's also a squishy word. For sure.
Shari (04:44):
Yeah. So can you maybe share a story that would help us understand when you talk about this concept, what encapsulates that for you?
Kenda (04:52):
Well, the story that actually launched me on a search that led me down a thousand rabbit holes was, I stumbled across on the Internet a story of a woman in Burundi who was a victim of the genocide there, but she survived and she became a refuge and created a huge ministry for orphan children in the genocide of Burundi. This was in the mid-nineties. Her name's Maggie Barankitse, and she was the founder of Maison Shalom, which was essentially a community of orphans who learned to be family for one another. And she created all sorts of things in this community to help support the community, to give people jobs who needed jobs, to give children families who needed families. And she just did one thing after another that both resonated with her Christian faith deeply. She put in a swimming pool, for example, on a killing field because she wanted not only for kids to have a place to swim, but she wanted something that, as she put it, would wash away the sin that had occurred there.
Kenda (06:10):
But she also was quite an entrepreneur in the sense that she knew that she had to support this community in a way that was going to allow them to have income and allow them to have the needs that they, their needs met. And so she put in everything from a beauty parlor to an automotive shop, to libraries, to food purveyors, to all these things that allowed these kids as they grew up to gain skills and also to support the community. I thought it was brilliant, and it was such an obvious outgrowth of her faith that allowed her to do it. And what she said was that she, love made her an inventor, and that just rang true to me. And I think anybody who's a parent knows that you, because you love this child in front of you, you'll try all sorts of ridiculous things to make the tears stop and you don't stop trying new things until the pain goes away. That's love making us inventors. We do it instinctively, but we don't connect what we're doing out of love with our need to try new things. But churches are in a really good position to do that. It's curious to me that churches have become so stodgy in their reputations when in fact, originally churches were engines of innovation and creativity and imagination, all because they were trying to love their communities better.
Shari (07:52):
Yeah. Talk about that. What are some, it's interesting you bring up a number of instances in church history where the church was kind of at the front lines of innovation. There have been other seasons in the church where the church has been the opposite and kind of formally prohibited folks from innovating. But what are a couple hooks you could point us to that are like, oh, we have a history with this?
Kenda (08:12):
Well, they're numerous, and you can start from the early church, which re-imagined social safety nets for people. The early church was known for taking care of people who the state was not taking care of. It infuriated the Roman emperors that Christians took better care of pagans than pagans did. And so there was a reimagining even from the very beginning of the way communities should care for each other. By the time the monastic period rolled around, fifth, sixth century on through the Middle Ages, you've got monasteries who are actually really engines of reform. They are places that not only preserved literature, everybody knows about that, but they also just had a whole string of things that they contributed to the betterment of society. So after the Bubonic Plague, for example, monasteries were credited with inventing agricultural practices, things like a heavy plow and terraced landscaping for crops.
Kenda (09:23):
All that stuff is credited with preventing famine in certain areas around monasteries. And they didn't set out to prevent famine, they just set out to feed hungry people that were in their parish. It was very organic, but it had the effect of moving the needle along in terms of the way we began to think about how we treated each other. So of course, it also developed crops that they could sell and that kind of stuff, but again, they didn't set out to produce more wheat. They set out to feed the people. And that's the impulse for love that I see that is just built into churches’ DNA if we'll just listen to it.
Shari (10:10):
That's a really helpful reframing because I think when you bring up social entrepreneurship or innovation, particularly for people of Christian faith, there's a little nervousness about it.
Kenda (10:22)
Yeah, that’s true.
Shari (10:22)
Are you just asking me to do new stuff? Or, I'm not creative, I couldn't do something new.
Kenda (10:27):
Or that we just want to make money of the story. Right.
Shari (10:34):
Which churches are not great at doing for the most part. And then other people are skeptical because they think, are we throwing out the things that we love about our tradition like worship or baptism or things like that. But I think reframing it in terms of who do you care about and what does that compel you to do is a helpful reframe. You take an interesting tack in the book to talk about shipwrecks. So can you tell us about that? Talk about flotsam and jetsam and Malta and talk us into that?
Kenda (11:17):
Yeah, this was a pandemic project for sure, right? So yeah, during the pandemic, I became very fond of the story of Paul's shipwreck, and it became kind of a source of good news for me because first of all, everybody made it to shore even though all hope was lost, and the way they made it to shore was the ship that they were on broke up. But a number of things happened that I think really speak to our situation today. So the first is that the same boat that broke to pieces was what got 'em to shore safely. The captain tells everybody they can swim to jump overboard and swim to shore and the rest of them to hang on to pieces of the ship. So I take from that just because the church as we know it feels like it might be going to pieces doesn't mean God's not still using it to save us.
Kenda (12:13):
And that is a huge source of comfort for me. The other thing is, I think that because the text talks about Paul being, they find themselves on an unknown shore is what it says. And they have to ask the natives where they are. And it turns out they were on the island of Malta. They didn't know anything about Malta. They didn't know what grew here, who those people were, what do they do, how do they conduct their lives? And the people of Malta, they weren't hostile. They were really curious. They were even kind. They took care of the shipwrecked people when they came to shore. And the bottom line is I'm like, well, we're on an unknown shore too. We don't know where we are either in this new normal that we find ourselves in. Normal is probably the wrong word, but I talk a lot about the fact that we're doing ministry on Malta now, and I think that's where we all are.
Kenda (13:16):
And the third thing about that was Paul was not only unfamiliar with the place, but he was unfamiliar with the people. And I think the church finds ourselves in that position as well. We're unfamiliar with the people who are curious about us. They are people who have not always been in our pews. They're people who are not always going to be the people that we are accustomed to serving. And so some of them are our own children. All of the data on the nones and the dones and the disaffiliation of young people about, what is it, 43% or something, say that they are not part of a religious faith at this point. We're just trying to figure, it turns out that's a very complex label that you can be a none and you can believe things, but you don't behave in ways that we associate with religion. You don't belong to the things we say religious people ought to belong to. Most young people no longer believe it's important to be part of a faith community if you're going to have faith. We absolutely don't know how to be church with these people. We have to learn that, but this is what ministry on Malta is going to look like. And so we're using new resources, we're partnering with new partners, we're learning how to be in relationship with new people. And so yeah, the shipwreck story on Malta says a lot to me these days.
Shari (14:43):
You also mentioned that God's not afraid of downsizing and God can do a lot with mud. It sounds like this work has been really hope-filled for you, whereas a lot of people sound very afraid of what might be next for the church because of this sense of decline, or where are the young people right now?
Kenda (15:05):
Yeah, and I do think it's a hopeful season for the church. I actually think that Paul, when if you ask the people in Malta, they'll say, Paul saved Malta. I'll get off of Malta in just a second. But Paul saved Malta because he brought Christianity to Malta, and 95% of the island is Catholic, I think. And they have festivals every year that celebrate Paul's shipwreck because Paul saved Malta. When I read that story though, it sure looks to me like Malta saved Paul. If that little island hadn't been there, who knows what would've happened. And I just think it's possible that maybe God is using this bizarre place that we find ourselves now as religious communities, not to threaten us, but to save us. Maybe we were going off the rails in ways that being in this new disorienting place allows us to strip ourselves of a lot of the trappings that we got so attached to, but actually distracted us from what we were about. I think that that was a blessing a lot of people in youth ministry experienced during the pandemic. They couldn't do their programs, they could only be in relationship with young people. And it turned out that was exactly what young people needed, and the programs were completely uninteresting to most people on Zoom, but the relationships mattered critically.
Shari (16:39):
Yeah. I'm interested in an idea that you share about the power of being indirect or telling the truth and telling it slant. What does that have to do with innovation and with this new kind of radical love that you think emerges from innovation?
Kenda (17:03):
Yeah. Well, the phrase “tell the truth, but tell it slant” comes from an Emily Dickinson poem, and there's a lot of debate on that poem about whether she's talking about God's action in the Incarnation or not, where God comes, but it's not really recognizable at first what God's up to here. This is a human being, this Jesus, so it takes a while for people to put together that Jesus and God are one and the same. So telling the truth, but tell it slant seems to me to suggest that we've done a lot with our direct words. I'm a fan of words, I think it’s fine to use words, but the truth is, a lot, we've been so talky about Christianity for so long that people tune out, right? And they're way more apt to recognize God's activity through our actions, through the ways that we are interacting in the world, through what people observe Christians doing, than in what Christians say.
Kenda (18:18):
So I think the social innovation part of the church allows for that a lot. It's basically making yourself known through mission first and then explaining it later, which actually is the way the early church did everything. You didn't preach a sermon before you assisted someone who was poor. You just assisted them. And then the story about who you were as you got to know them eventually unfolded. So I think it helps us reclaim some of that to think about, let's do the things Christians do and be the people that Christians are called to be, and let's worry more about that than what we are telling people all the time. It's not that I don't think we should use words. The Trappists talk about, preach the gospel, when necessary, use words. It's necessary to use words in our culture, but for the most part, but not for absolutely everything, there's a lot that we can do as Christians that confesses who we are without having to stand up and give a testimony on a street corner. And I think those have special power right now.
Shari (19:35):
So speaking of actions, you've developed resources to help people who are interested in trying new things, whether it's just new for them or whether it's genuinely new, and you've tried to create some ways to help people imagine in new ways and enact their love of God and neighbor in new ways. And I'm interested if you could share a couple stories of what has emerged through your journeying with others and trying to live in a new way.
Kenda (20:06):
Well, it's really funny because mostly what I do is I feel like I'm just a talent scout. I just look around for who else is out there doing great stuff, and then I just try to be their friend. I'm sure that's annoying, but here's one, right? So I had a student last semester who, he and another woman were on a team in a social innovation class, and the deal was they had to come up with a project for the semester where they could choose their projects. And people did everything from start community gardens to start new faith communities, to start podcasts, blah, blah, blah. What they wound up doing is they wanted to use gaming. They wanted to have a board game that would help kids and parents talk about hard things. So they created this fascinating game. I mean, it was captivating. They're actually, they have some actual interest in producing it from some people who might invest in it.
Kenda (21:10):
But the bottom line is they just, again, they made it for the kids that they knew, the parents they knew, and they created a story about Jericho that you play this game. And the way it works is you beat, either Jericho wins or you do, it's not against a person, but it's, along the way, you're asking hard questions like, why does God allow war? These are things that actually are about the real day and age that kids live in, but it's in the form of this game. So they're telling the truth slant through this game, right? And it's opening up a dialogue space for questions that are difficult to just talk about without this third thing in the middle. So again, they didn't set out to do anything particularly innovative. This is a thing that I think I would like people to think that our goal is not to be innovative. That's not what we set out to do. Our goal is to love people, and you can't really love people well without trying a bunch of stuff. So that's my very scientific definition of innovation. Try a bunch of stuff.
Shari (22:29):
Try a bunch of stuff. That's good.
Kenda (22:31):
And so this is what they did, and they came up with this delightful kind of mediating tool that allowed these conversations to happen in churches and in families. So we'll see where it goes, but it's one of those tools, and I just think they're fascinating humans who can think like that. So I become their cheerleaders as much as I can.
Shari (22:59):
Yeah. Is there another story that comes to mind that's been really either surprising or inspiring for you?
Kenda (23:07):
Well, you know, our friend Mandy Drury, who teaches at Indiana Wesleyan, again, she did not set out to become this innovative genius that we know her to be today. And Mandy has been recognized in many ways for the singular creativity that she has with helping churches find playful ways to address needs in their communities and solve problems and that kind of stuff. So she's created a bunch of learning tools and games and that sort of thing. But the way this all started was she showed up at a ConEd event, a Continuing Education event that we did here, and we did this circle game that we do, and it requires an even number of people. We were short one. She just wanted to come observe how we were, what we were doing. So we threw her…
Shari (24:00):
The best laid plans.
Kenda (24:02):
Right? So we threw her in the circle and she went ahead, and the deal was in this circle, you were supposed to answer a bunch of questions that helped you come up with an idea. It takes about 20 minutes. At the end of that 20 minutes, she had this idea for a trauma-informed, after-school program for children in her hometown of Marion, Indiana, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the Midwest. And so it took her about 24 hours after that before she had a place for it. She had people to run it. She had the local library offering her a building to house it in, and she called it The Brain Kitchen because they also taught these kids to cook. And after, they came after school and they did homework and activities and so on, but they also learned to cook something that they took home at the end of the week to their families. So those families had a crockpot of food to see them through the weekend. This came out of a very accidental exercise, but Mandy was able to put things together in a way that said, she can certainly be a faithful Christian without doing any of this, but when she tries to figure out how to love her community, she starts getting itchy and has to figure out a way to do it.
Shari (25:32):
Yeah, try some things.
Kenda (25:33):
Yeah, it's try stuff. And so The Brain Kitchen has been around now for many years. She's no longer the chair of the board. She's passed that on. But she, through that, has able to foster an entire culture of innovation through her students and through the local community, which has had astonishing impact, not just through The Brain Kitchen, but through a million other things that they've done. So there's something about, I don't think it's the ministries themselves necessarily, it's just the openness to trying a different approach to ministry that unlocks a lot of potential that people don't know that they have. And I find that super inspiring.
Shari (26:17):
Yeah. There's something interesting you said earlier about how younger generations are not as connected to the church anymore, but it sounds like that's also connected to an openness to try to be faithful elsewhere. How do you live your calling? How do you…
Kenda (26:36):
How do you do that, and I'm not even sure. A lot of them think of it as a calling. In fact, I think the church has a role to play in this to say maybe what this thing that you're doing, when you do that, because we're Christians, we see God in you when you do that. Now, I know you might not see God in you, but I do. And because I'm a Christian, I think I'm supposed to help you. So to me, it's about how do churches come alongside people who are on a journey already with God that they may or may not recognize or may not use those words for it. And our job is not to do ministry to them, it’s to participate in the ministry that they, in fact, are already doing. So yeah, I am a great proponent of getting people out of church buildings, out of classrooms, into the streets and the sidewalks of the world and trying it out in real time.
Shari (27:43):
So my hunch is that you've sparked some interest among our listeners, and some folks might think, I couldn't try something new for fill in the blank reason.
Kenda (27:58):
Right?
Shari (28:00):
What's an easy place to start, or a simple place to start to imagine, what could God be up to that I've not seen or thought about yet?
Kenda (28:11):
Well, I love that question because first of all, a lot of pastors think that, they're like, oh my gosh, now I've got to be innovative too. I'm already busy.
Shari (28:18):
Could I do anything else? Yeah.
Kenda (28:20):
Right. And I think that's actually not the pastor's job. I'm very persuaded by Kathi McShane's approach to the role of pastors in this, which is, a pastor's job, maybe you're going to be the innovator, but more likely you're going to be the person who inspires it, equips people to do it with stories from the gospel that frame this work and make it part of your vocation, and you're going to champion it when you see it. But for most of us mere mortals in this, I think there are things that, you might have a great idea, but maybe you're not the person with the idea. Maybe you're the cheerleader for the idea. So an equally important question to ask is not just, what are the things I want to do? It's what all my students want to ask. What do I want to do? The other question is, what do you want to champion?
Kenda (29:12):
What do you want to be the cheerleader for? What do you want to be part of that somebody else is doing? You got to have those people too, and you probably need more of those people than you need the people with the ideas. So we have to have some wisdom about the kind of ideas that we want to attach ourselves to. Not everything is unmitigated good, and it's possible that we can have the right idea, but the wrong way of doing it that hurts people. So we have to have our wits about us, and we have to remember who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ going about this. We are not going to do things to be bigger, faster, stronger. We worship a God who became human, which means God got smaller and slower and more vulnerable. So sometimes the innovation the church is behind is the thing that Silicon Valley would never notice.
Kenda (30:15):
We have a different take on innovation, a different set of metrics, because the most innovative, counterintuitive, maybe even subversive thing that we could do is to become the most human we can become with one another, which is how Jesus was with us, truly human, and let the truly divine part be God's business. So I think that the kind of work that we're called to do in this is work that humanizes us and that makes our communities feel more human and more whole. And sometimes that means we got to slow down instead of speed up.
Shari (30:55):
Is there a particular story when you think about having kind of a different set of metrics that would encapsulate this idea of God getting smaller, slower, more vulnerable, more human? Is there something that you've witnessed that has been a good reminder of that?
Kenda (31:14):
Yeah, let's think about that.
Shari (31:17):
You can tell I love stories.
Kenda (31:18):
I know. Well, so does everybody listening to this. I mean, the first one that comes to mind is the compost pile. As you know, we're part of, we have the Farminary at the seminary is known for its composting, and we get all of the leftover refuge from a whole lot of people in town to throw into the compost pile there. And I think one of the things that we have to get good at is choosing what to compost. We can't do everything. There are some ideas that might be the right idea, but the wrong time, the right idea, but the wrong person. I worked with a woman once in an event where she was a therapy dog trainer. She was brilliant at this, and she had this great idea about bringing therapy dogs into the schools of her community. And she went all the way through this Continuing Education event that she was doing with us, and her project was the one we were most excited about.
Kenda (32:28):
And at the end of it, she said, I'm not going to do this. I am not called to do this. I am a trainer. I can train these dogs, but I am not the person who can organize the systems that are necessary to go into the schools and work with children. If somebody else does that, I know how to get the dogs, but somebody else has to organize the systems. And so what she learned in the process of going through that was what her gifts were. She had a much clearer sense of what brought her joy and energy by saying no to some things than by going forward with the idea. That would be a way of, that certainly slowed down that idea. And she herself had no need to be big or well-known or famous for doing this great idea. She was very clear about what her gifts and what her joy was, and she was smart enough to stick with that.
Shari (33:34):
Yeah. It sounds like an interesting opportunity to also discern your individual and collective callings and journeying together. If there's one thing, if you could gift every one of our listeners with like, a question you wish they were asking or that they would keep asking and pursuing, what would that be?
Kenda (34:05):
Who, who is it that has caught my attention? Who is it that God has put on my path? Who is it that I'm called to be with in this period of my life? If you have great ambitions to rehab a shopping mall and to do some kind of employment training center, but you have young children at home, it's possible. You can tell I'm speaking as a mom, right? It's possible that the great vision that God has given you about the shopping mall is something that, to hold out there, but right now, it might need a little composting because the people that are actually on your path are right in front of you, in the high chair, in the playpen. And so what does it mean to innovate there? What does it mean to continue to try to love them in new ways? I actually think that we overlook the people who are right in front of us a lot, on our way to trying to get a good idea. And yeah, I do think that you don't have to really look for your ministry. God's already given it to you. You just have to look at the people on your path.
Shari (35:27):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.