Music.
I'm Pastor Luke, I'm Pastor Cameron, and this is the Uncut Podcast, where we have
uncut, honest conversations about faith, life, and ministry.
Today, we're just kind of sitting in here, don't have like too much of a plan of what
we're going to talk about, but we're going to have a little bit of a plan.
We have like a topic that we just kind of tossed, but I don't know what I'm going to say about it yet.
So I don't really know either. We were talking with someone in the congregation yesterday who shared that they had some questions
about something that was going on.
They had some questions about baptism and the process of baptism and stuff like that.
And then they, I don't want to say stumbled upon, but a lot of their questions ended up
being answered in the podcast episode that we did.
I think it's called Water and the Spirit. I'm not sure what episode it was,
but that we talked about baptism.
And so her encouragement to us, which I think was valid and a good idea,
was that we would use this platform sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes to be able to have
maybe a little bit deeper excursus on the things that are going on here at Conduit
or in the church in general, maybe those of our listeners who attend Conduit.
Can have a little bit better picture, insight into what we're doing.
Or no, it wasn't baptism.
It wasn't baptism. It was communion liturgy. It was communion liturgy, that's right.
Yes, it was communion liturgy. She was like, why are we doing this?
I don't get why we're doing this. What's the point?
And then she listened to the podcast episode on communion and on liturgy.
And was like, oh, okay, I'm in. Yeah, well, and my hope, I think, also too,
is that sometimes we kind of get into things that are more oriented in our philosophy of ministry,
like why, how, why do we choose to do things in a particular way in the ministry here?
And so even if you're not at this particular church, you're not at Conduit with us,
you're somewhere else and you're listening,
I hope those provide context for you to reflect on how you're conducting your own ministry,
how you're interacting with your church, just a deeper,
gives you some deeper reflection to how you bring that into where you're practicing faith.
Right. Yeah, because not everyone, we're not all given the opportunity to see.
One of the things that she said and it's this episode it's not about what she's our meeting
That's lady because it was a very encouraging very helpful for us,
but one of the things that she one of the Conversation loops that we had was around she brought this thing to us and we're like, yeah,
We've been talking about that for weeks now and here are some like steps that are being taken and like and it was
And her response was like, oh yeah, I guess you guys,
you do think about this stuff.
I'm like, well, really, it's difficult for us to think about anything other than this stuff.
And you don't always get to see or get to hear all of the conversation or thought or prayer,
or failed attempts or new ideas or old ideas that are tried in order to do things or address things.
But, and I've said this to people before, it's like, if you see something within the church
you either like or you don't like, or as a frustration point, or like a feature.
Or like, I would almost guarantee you that it is like, that I'm aware of it too.
Yeah. Very, very, very rarely is there like a issue that I'm like, oh my gosh, I was so aware.
No idea. No, like, like it is, you know, we're, all those issues tend to be kind of front
and center in our minds, so.
It is like.
You know, modern church is so complex. Like, there's so many different things that like,
I mean, in some ways, it's not complex. And in some ways, it's complex, right? Like.
What we're doing, the main things haven't necessarily changed, but the way churches
function has like, ballooned. And, you know, I was talking, I think I was talking with you a
couple weeks ago, and it had been a week where I had to do a lot of writing and a number of
teaching. I think I taught Monday night and wrote Monday night, taught and wrote Wednesday night,
taught and wrote Sunday. And I was just like, how did preachers used to do the rhythm of
preach Sunday morning, preach Sunday night, preach Wednesday night? And your response was just like, well, that was...
That's all they did. That's all they did. I was like, oh, well, maybe that's doable. Still a lot.
Yeah. But there's just so many other things that end up crossing our desks.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It feels to me, in fact, I just posted something on Instagram about it.
But it feels to me like there is a pressure, a cultural shift, sometimes even a shift within
the church for pastors to be organizational professionals primarily and shepherds if they
have time.
Lead the organization, cast the vision, organize the mission, allocate resources, hire the
right staff, do all of the like CEO responsibilities, and then if you have time when you're done
doing all that important stuff, it wouldn't be a bad idea if you met and prayed with people
or you visited the sick, or you met one-on-one.
With someone who's wanting to go deeper in their relationship with Jesus and you read the Bible together
and studied the Bible together, or you offered counseling or spiritual soul care for people.
If you have time, do all that stuff, but make sure you get to the organizational nuts and bolts.
Yeah, pastor as CEO, pastor as a startup guru,
guru, pastor is like, you know, like there's, you can put pastor as and fill in the blank.
And like, there's a, yeah, pastor is entrepreneur, right?
Like those are molds that pastors have been kind of thrust into.
There's a little bit of it that I think.
Has overflowed into idolatry like an idolatry of leadership. Yeah.
Now that's not to say that, you know, we should settle for being poor Leaders. No, no, like because there's that like like I know you and I both,
read listen to interactive leadership content and are consistently trying to grow in our
our leadership skills.
Right. The danger being though, is that like, we would overemphasize that in our own self
and neglect the primary thing.
Yeah, like how much time are we spending listening to leadership podcasts versus like spending time in the word
just personally or ourselves?
Like I could fall under some serious conviction about that if someone leveled that question to me.
No one's going to though, right? You know, I think that's real, so...
One of the things that we were talking about this morning is the difficulty or...
Yeah, I'll call it the difficulty of balancing a pastoral heart and approach.
With also the feeling of necessity, really,
to get things done.
Yeah.
So an example for us would be, and this is a real life example for us,
is, okay, so we have, here at Conduit, we have a pretty substantially attended kids ministry,
on Sunday mornings. Up to a third of our worshiping attendance on a Sunday is kids 12 and under.
And that demonstrates a large allocation of human resources on a Sunday morning, meaning
we need a lot of volunteers. Unless we wanna stick all 50, 60 kids in one big room and just say,
run amok. Wow. And still we need like a certain ratio of volunteers. We've committed to a safety
and protocol and all of that. Right. And we have people who do a snacks and we have floaters in
between rooms and we have room leaders and assistant room leaders. And then we have people
who run the check-in and you know, it's like it, it's, it's a complex web of volunteers that are,
that are needed. And, and of course in that, you know, we're talking about, we're not talking about.
You know junior Holy Spirit here that we want No, we want yeah people who love Jesus and who are who are following Jesus closely and who are eager to.
Teach the word to kids and to help get them closer to Jesus so that Jesus can transform their lives as well and so,
It's not just warm bodies. Yeah, God's God is interested in their lives What's going on in their soul?
Absolutely.
Like interested in their spiritual development. It's not like God suddenly cares once they turn 18. Right.
Right? It's... They're no less a part of the church. They're no less a part of the body.
Right. If we just look at the... Like, if you've ever been to our church and you look at the physical space, you walk in
immediately through the front doors into the worship sanctuary, but that is like the space
that is like, it's the smallest space, if we were to just kind of like divvy up the types of spaces.
My area, yeah. It's like worship sanctuary.
And then probably the offices would be the smallest amount of space.
Next would be worship, adult worship sanctuary. And then the biggest amount of space that the entire building is made up out of is children's
ministry. Kids ministry.
Yeah, 100%. Right? Because we have a duplicate space below the worship sanctuary that is like where the kids,
have a big group. entire ground floor is kids ministry. Yes, it's all.
And then three rooms upstairs. Yes. Kids ministry.
So it takes a lot to make that happen, right? and like.
I don't know if this is, I really don't know. I'd be interested to know if this is a pattern in other churches or if it's just, if it's unique here. I'm not sure.
But we have a real difficult time getting volunteers committed into those spaces,
and maintaining volunteers. And it's probably one of the biggest organizational headaches that we
that we encounter is ensuring that we have people in rooms to teach kids on Sunday mornings.
So like. I mean, somebody on staff spends several hours a week doing that. Doing that, right.
So what's the solution there? Well, there is a part of me who thinks that I could.
That I probably have enough relational equity here to stand up on a Sunday morning and to,
for lack of a better term, cajole people. Cajole. Yeah.
Coerce. Coerce. Not quite coerce, but cajole. cajole people into signing up to be in volunteering in the kids ministry.
And could probably get that done. Leveraging a bunch of guilt.
Leveraging a bunch of, you know, like threatening to have to shut down kids' ministry rooms
because we don't have enough volunteers and all that.
Anyone who's in ministry, I think, has a secret closet somewhere in their brain
where they put all of the really snarky things they wish they could say or do.
In order to get their point across, but they know that like they shouldn't.
That's just not pastoral. Well, no, right? Like...
It's not the representation of good leadership, it's not the representation of compassionate
leadership or godly leadership, but nevertheless, it is there.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and it's not... I was talking with a friend in an entirely different denominational
space than we are. And they have the same exact problem. For as different as their worship is
from ours, they have the exact same problem. They can't get anybody to help out with the youth.
And the guy who I was talking with is in charge of their children's program and stuff, and he was
talking with the priest, and the priest was like, maybe we're just not the body of Christ because
we don't care about the children." It was just like going at it. It was like, oh, okay.
So it's not just a... It's not just to us, I definitely think it's a broader problem, but,
there's definitely a lot of... Yeah, there's things that we're like, I'm just like,
oh, I could say that. That wouldn't be pastoral or Christ-like or...
Yeah, right. Or it wouldn't, even practically speaking, it wouldn't actually move the needle over the long
term. You might convince someone to serve a couple weeks out of a year, but it doesn't actually
it doesn't actually engender or plant within them
a heart that desires to lead kids closer to Jesus.
Which is what we...
That's really what we wanna plant in people. We wanna plant in people that there's a calling.
To serve the Lord, serve the kingdom, and serve these kids by teaching them,
being a place of safety for them, giving them a place of community
is contextual to who they are and their age groups and all of that, so that they can meet Jesus,
and that Jesus can transform their lives.
Yeah.
Right? Because if you're passionate about that, you'll do it.
You'll do it. Right. I didn't understand this for the longest time because I just don't know if it just didn't
click or I didn't hear people explain it well enough, but there was this like, don't get up
there and say, we need volunteers, like using the word need was like the dirty word you're never
supposed to use in like a church announcement. And I was just like, I don't understand because
don't we need people? Like, you know, and the, the, it's less about the, the need, right? It's
less about using that word need. And it's more about like the thing actually behind it of like.
Like, cause you can get people who will just like, oh yeah, I will show up and fill a need.
I will do the thing because it seems urgent.
It seems important, but that kind of volunteer will only last for very short,
very short period of time before they're like, well, like it doesn't seem like the urgency,
showed up, the urgency disappeared.
And so now am I really still needed slash there's something else that's maybe more
interesting or more urgent or more needed that I would rather go do versus someone who shows up
because they're dedicated and committed to seeing kids know Christ. Yeah, those are two different
volunteers and one's gonna last longer. Right.
Not just last longer, serve in a different capacity. Right. Well, yeah, like I'd say two things. One is I think we talked a couple weeks ago,
about how when things get difficult in ministry, if you are not firmly planted in your calling,
then it's really easy to quit. Yeah.
If you're there for some other reason other than you truly believe that God has called you to this
very thing. Yeah. And that the work is important, eternally important. That's what roots us here.
Yeah. That's what roots me in ministry. Right. Like it's not, I mean, I love, I love my job and
I love the church and I love the people and I love to preach and I love the word of God and I,
you know, like all of those things. Yep. But the thing that keeps me planted is that God has,
has a calling on my life.
This is the reason that I was created.
Right. And, and I like, There.
What else could I do I can do no other I can do no other right But if I was here out of a sense of well
I was kind of looking for a job didn't it paid fairly decent had flexible hours and you know, whatever sure
I'll do it. No problem as soon as it got hard. Oh,
Yeah, you're out the benefits of being a pastor or not that great. No No.
The compensation packages are not, don't include like time shares or, you know.
Right.
You know. So it is, it functions in a similar way with, for instance, conduit kids leaders, or kids
ministry leaders. Yeah.
And I'm not, I'm honestly not faulting people for that, like, I'm really not.
But I think that it's sometimes overlooked the role that a pastor has to essentially,
what we do is we lead, organize, motivate, inspire, empower, encourage a large staff,
of people that is not necessarily extraordinarily called to that specific ministry, right?
Whom we don't pay. Yes.
And they are very busy and usually have kids of their own. So it's like,
they're trying to show up early on Sunday. If you're in the business world,
you have some teeth with your employees. Sure. There are things that they must do
in order to maintain or keep that job. Right. And that gives you the opportunity to,
to, you know, it takes a lot of the leadership equation out of it.
It. Yeah. Oh, all of our, all of our employees in kids ministry are volunteers. Yes. And
so if they say, if they call us on a Sunday morning at 7 a.m. be like, uh, Hey, yeah,
by the way, I'm not going to be there this week or this morning for my, we're not, what
are we going to say? We can't say, well, uh, we're going to have to talk about this on
Monday in my office, or I could, sure.
I could, I could be like, I could like leverage some of the equity, relational pastoral leadership equity or whatever.
Yeah.
Um, but to what end, to the end of guilting them into doing the thing that they committed to doing, or is it like a, you know, remember the
calling, remember the, remember the task, remember the stakes, remember, remember,
remember. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm still not gonna be here. Okay. Love you.
Well, I always feel immensely conflicted when someone comes to me, maybe they've been serving
for a while, and they say, Pastor Luke, I'm just burned out. I've got too many things going on.
Like, I need a break. And like, I'm Mr. Pastoral. I'm Mr. Like, you know, I'm like,
I get it. Like, I hear you. Like, you need a break. Like, I...
Yeah, I'm just like I don't want you to serve in a place that's like harming you or like,
detrimental to your spiritual health to your emotional health like,
um, I of course want you to be able to participate in other aspects of the body like, you know, i'm,
My heart is to immediately go into care mode for someone who comes to me and says like i'm burnt out. Yep,
but at the same time Right? Like there's a question of like,
are we the first thing that you cut?
Like when things, when, when stress happens, when things happen,
do you ever consider that there are other things that you could potentially cut back on, trim that,
or is this the thing that's maybe the easiest because it has the least amount of consequences?
Or it's the thing, I don't know. I don't know.
You can't, there's, I have zero ability to judge anyone's heart on that matter.
But it's always, it always puts me in a place of just like, that's I'm, you know, of course you absolutely
we're not gonna force anyone to serve.
But then as soon as they leave, I am immediately calling other people. Right.
Sometimes people who I had that same conversation with several months ago and said,
oh, I'll be back at some point.
And now I'm like, okay, well, we need you back because somebody else is doing what, you know,
that same conversation I had with you several months ago.
I don't know.
That feels like such a tricky space to be in consistently. Yeah, it is.
Yeah, because like we can't, right, can't force anyone.
No, nor do we want to. Nor do I want to, right? So that's the rub, there's the rub.
Like I can't force anyone, I don't want to, But therein lies the problem, it's like, okay, well.
We still have kids show up. We still have kids show up.
We can't responsibly or safely staff a kids ministry.
With a number of people that we have or don't have. And so what is then the response?
Well, the response is, okay, well, we have to cancel these rooms this week.
And then the response is like, well, what gives, guys? All right.
Like, why don't we have conduit kids this week? And what do we say? Well, because y'all canceled.
Or do we take a more pastoral approach and be like, well, we're just struggling with,
maintaining staffing in those rooms and da-da-da-da-da. I don't know.
Right. Well, we tried for a season to do, because most months have four Sundays. Every once in a
a while, there's a month, there's like, what, four a year that have five Sundays in them.
And so we tried to do those fifth Sundays do like a joint family service and stuff. And that was...
Part just to alleviate some of the stress that we were feeling of like, oh we got an extra Sunday this month like,
People were less able of willing available to serve on those Sundays And so we were consistently running up like how are we gonna have?
Children's ministry. So well, let's just have a joint family service and try and,
Try and love the community that way and there's some good things in it But then what we'd largely noticed is that people
with children just stopped attending those weeks.
They would say, oh, it's a fifth Sunday, just not coming to church this week.
Yeah, because it's hard to have your kids in church with you to not feel like you're a distraction.
It's like one, and it's one thing if you've got one small kid that can sit on your lap,
it's another if you've got five.
Five in the front row. Five in the front row.
I don't know who falls into that category, but like.
You know. You. And yeah, that's hard.
So I don't like, I wish I knew what the answer was. I mean, I think the classical answer is,
well, you need to cast better vision.
You need to cast better vision, you need to cast better vision,
you need to cast better vision. Yeah, but again, that's like a thing that I've heard, But again...
What does that exactly mean or yeah, I mean I could cast vision till I'm blue in the face Yeah, right at and,
It's been I don't know. Maybe it may be maybe it just is I have not cast a clear enough vision
I have not cast it often enough. I have not been more clear about the,
The goal or the mission or the vision or whatever?
Or organizational mumbo-jumbo you get yourself mixed up with these days.
Tell us how you really feel about that, Cameron. I could rant and rave about the, you know,
kind of postmodern, like, obsession with mission, vision, core values,
and how it just completely consumes a leader's, like, time.
To align all those things and to make them Um, provocative and intriguing and sticky and, um, all of the things in an effort to,
you know, create an organizational soup that tastes good to all the people who.
Are coming there.
Right. Right. I think the funniest example of this in that I cannot remember the specifics, but I
know it was the CEO of Uber and he, like when they redesigned their logos, I think he
spent like a year, two years, some exorbitant amount of time and money.
I'm talking like millions and millions of dollars to design a new logo.
And it was like this massive, like mission vision, like he had to, it had to embody
like the ride sharing service.
It was like, it was like, what do we, what do we stand for? Like, there was like all this like woo woo corporate speak mumbo jumbo, like
wrapped up in something that the CEO had done like one-on-one personally with like a graphic
designer for like years and spent millions of dollars on and it was a
Fine logo not changing the world not even as good as coca-cola Right, right
So like you can get all wrapped up into that Yeah, and the fun, you know.
You want to know what's really funny is if you were to get on to any of like the AI free AI go to chat GPT whatever sign up for it and
and ask it to generate a church mission, vision, and like value statement or whatever,
and then go compare it to just look up churches,
and look at their mission and vision statements and see how eerily close it is.
Like it is- There's nothing novel.
No. In the realm of that. I would say in 90%, 95% of churches,
99% of churches, their mission and vision stuff Yeah, so boilerplate. Yeah, believe belong,
You know, right go out serve right, you know believe belong gather grow and go yeah.
Well Cameron, okay, yes live laugh love I mean live love serve Oh my gosh, live, laugh, love, die, cry, and hate, how about that?
How about instead of live, laugh, love, it's die, cry, and hate?
I mean, okay, yes, do we gather? Yes. Do we grow? Yes.
Do we go? Yes. Right.
Oh, exalting that as like a, we just need a better mission statement
and we just need to communicate it with more clarity
and that's really gonna be the silver bullet to our organizational success here.
I think is so pridefully idolatrous idolatrous, that it is almost that,
but it has become so normal that for me to say a mission and vision statement is pridefully idolatrous.
Becomes provocative or scandalous or like,
what are you talking about?
Like all of the big churches have mission, vision, core value statement, like, yeah, I, I'm not saying
that they don't. And I'm not saying that, like, sometimes those things can be helpful, right? I'm not saying that
they're not help, they can't be helpful. What I'm saying is like, they're not the thing, right? They're not the thing,
you can have, you can have the best branding, you can have the best like mission and vision and be an absolute shell.
A whitewashed tomb. Yes, a whitewashed tomb. Yeah, so I just, I weary of it and I think,
you know, we've here begun to transition or pivot into, I guess what you would call a more simple,
simpler model of understanding why, you know, why we exist and who we are, you know, and
And it feels to me to actually be more clarifying for us.
Than to try and fit every program, every ministry, every decision into a like a,
well, does this meet our five values and our three points of mission and our six points of vision?
I feel like, well, does this move people closer to Jesus? Because that's where their transformation is gonna happen
is not closer to our programs.
Closer to Jesus, and if we can get them closer to Jesus, the odds are that if they allow him to be lord
of their life, that Jesus is gonna transform them, period.
And so our responsibility is not to necessarily create compelling vision so that people wanna serve.
Our responsibility is to get people closer to Jesus so he can transform their lives, and they'll transform,
And then he'll go on to transform homes and communities and churches and all of those things.
So yeah, the temptation in the flesh is to stand up and be like, we need people and we need people
because we need to do this and we need to do that.
We need to do that. That's true at its base level, it's true.
We do need people to continue the, I guess, standard of ministry that we've set in the past.
But it um...
You know, I, I, I, I'm not willing to, I'm not willing to cash in pastoral equity that I have,
on the cajoling of people to, to volunteer when they, when the, when the heart is not there.
Right.
But then that leaves us in a space of being like, well, what do we do? What do we do?
Yeah. There is like, I'm curious, do you think, and this is like, I don't know, I haven't run
across the study that's really done a deep dive on this and I'm not connected to enough. I don't,
talk regularly enough with enough pastors, but like, I, I, I wonder, and this isn't like, you
know, we can't continue to blame everything on the Corona virus, um, still like there,
there was just such a massive shift in church culture that the pandemic, like, forced all,
churches through on some level. And I'm, you know, consistently wonder, like, if you remember the
pandemic, and you remember being locked down, and then you kind of remember that sweet spot between
being absolutely locked down and being locked in your house, which like may have been different for
everybody, right? Like I was in Chicago. So like the level of lockdown-ness that was in Chicago
versus here in Western New York were different. But that space where you started to, you weren't.
Doing organized sports. You weren't like, you weren't busy, but you had more time for your
family and for close friends.
And, and people like everyone I was interacting with was like,
Oh, this feels amazing. Like there were certain things you missed, right?
Like you missed going to like restaurants or whatever your particular thing,
movie theaters. Um, but having a lot of things stripped away,
brought people a lot closer to things that they prioritized more and cared more
about working from home, closer to family, all of that.
And what I've wondered is that in the shuffling of priorities as people have like gotten back to normal life, there's things that have started back up, and people are just like, maybe longing for a more pared down schedule.
And, well, I don't want to put everything back on.
Maybe we put like some things lower at the list. list. I don't know. Like, I just wonder, like, has that shuffle, like, ended up with people,
prioritizing church less or feeling, like, because I, it was really nice to not have to, like.
You know, I did when I was doing a church plan. And so, like, Sunday mornings were, like,
more complicated than normal Sunday mornings because they involved us setting up church
in doing all this extra stuff that you don't have to do in a normal church.
And I was like, oh, this is kind of nice to just turn on some cameras and then live stream. This
is simpler and it's easier in some regards. Yeah, I...
I, like you, I am hesitant to give too much credit,
to COVID and all of that madness that happened three years ago.
But I don't know a better explanation than that somehow, or in some ways,
it affected the culture of church even.
I think that there's always been a underlying current of consumerism in the church,
where church has become a product to be consumed or a message to be heard, right?
Not a place to belong, Not a place to belong, become, and believe.
Yeah, yeah,
but it's become something just to consume. And I think that.
So we're responsible to consume, we're not responsible to produce at all. And I think that,
COVID, it intensified that because church almost literally was just something that you consumed via
a digital media, in most cases.
And so I do think that there is a besetting problem in the church, not conduit, but Big C Church,
conduit included there.
I do think that there is a growing problem of the church exists to serve me and feed me.
But I have no responsibility to belong to a community that then reciprocates that into other people's lives.
Yeah.
And that is a dangerous place to be because I think it separates us from the historical nature,
biblical nature of the people of God who were set apart
so that they could be the blessing of God to the people of the world.
And we've lost that a little bit. And I think that there's probably a,
those two things are separated or connected.
But I do think that, yeah, like, the,
the this past pandemic has maybe rewired a little bit of or sped up the trend.
Yeah, yeah, sure Yeah, it or yeah magnified rewired sped it up Whatever what you know, what was happening in the world or the culture?
So Yeah, I don't know I Wish I knew what the answer was. I think good leaders would say well, okay, how do you take your current, you know?
Pain points and how do you pivot in a way that they you know, how do you become creative in ministry?
So now that you just kind of roll with the current rather than swim upstream against it, you know?
Well, the thing is, and we've talked about this here, is like, I think what a lot of people,
the answer that I'm hearing from a lot of church leaders is like, well, just pivot hard digital.
Like, be more remote, be more, you know, like, do more digital things, right?
Like embrace the fact that, you know, embrace VR church, Cameron, and all of the things.
And we've talked, we had an episode where we talked about that stuff.
And we have theological convictions and reasonings as to why we feel like that is not... That's not it.
Healthy, like, it's interesting because it's, you know, we talked about, we'd spent several
weeks talking about sacraments, like communion in particular.
And the idea of like, oh, well, like, let's not do it every week, or let's not do it very
often. Let's not do communion all the time, right? Because we didn't want to like devalue its specialness.
And then you end up doing it less and less and less until you get churches that only do it once a year.
Like, I don't know, by offering it, by offering things that are important less
or in a less personal or meaningful way, does not mean that you makes it.
I don't know. I don't think that going more digitally is going to make people say like,
oh, I value this more because I can consume it more conveniently.
No.
Like convenience does not always equal value.
No, and convenience is actually antithetical to the gospel of like that the gospel costs
something. To believe in Jesus costs something. We do not have a faith that has its foundation
in convenience. We have a faith that it has its foundation in sacrifice and surrender,
and giving up of myself and taking up my cross and dying to myself.
Those who lose their life will find it. Right, and so I think the gospel of convenience,
is a radically Americanized version,
or Western version of what we desire Christianity to be.
And like, yes, I am, I see the benefit of digital space, but vehemently opposed to it being the totality.
Of someone's experience with the church, because I think that people are actually important, right?
And face-to-face conversation is important, and actually pastoral relationship is important,
and the sacraments are important, and the proclaiming of the word is important,
and the worship of the body is important.
And so to say all of those things can happen over the digital space, I think is wrong.
Well, church is more than just a live worship CD and a sermon podcast.
It's not a consumable product.
Which is not a consumable product.
But yeah, I think that's the way that churches have, or some churches, I should say, have said,
well, we will just pivot into being that.
And while I understand the churches who would go in that direction,
I have serious reservations and concerns about it and choose not to.
I personally choose not to go that direction.
So.
Yeah. So then that leaves us in a place of wanting to stand against where maybe culture's going.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. You know, of like, and you know, the thing is, is, I don't know, I think when we make things,
there's like that unintuitive sense of when we make things easier for people,
people have less ownership, buy-in, desire for the thing.
When it's so, I don't know, like I'm more suspect, like when I go to buy a book, right?
I go, oh, well, I've got this free book that somebody's like, oh, here's my free book, I'm giving away.
I assume the free book they're giving away is mostly a sales pitch and a pretty bad book,
versus a book I'm paying full price for that's only in hardback and it's not in soft cover yet.
Like, oh, this has gotta be a pretty good book.
Yeah. Right? Like the, my perception of it. And that translates to- And you went searching for it.
And I went searching for it. And that translates even to how we interact
with things like serving and church.
Like, oh, like it's just a, it's just a live stream like every other church.
Like I can do it in my pajamas.
Can watch at any time. It doesn't require me to talk to anyone, to do anything. Do we think that
is of greater value than the one that costs me something, that's making a demand of me to be
someone and not just be someone for the church, but be someone for Christ? I think that's the other
component, and I think why some people might be really burnt out on churches is.
It is really tempting for churches to be all about their program, their church,
what they're doing, their mission and vision, and not about...
God's mission and not about like we want you to be a member here where I think what you're saying is like well
No, we want people to be closer to Christ. Mm-hmm. That's what we're really searching
Yeah I mean think that the classic saying is like it's not like the church has a mission and so now we ask God to come
Alongside of us and bless and prosper our mission. Yeah, so I know God has a mission in the world and he has a church to fulfill it.
But it's the other way around.
So I don't think we should be asking, what is our little piece of what we can do?
No, it's like, it's not ours. It's not our mission. It's not our mission.
It's his. And are we doing it or not? Or are we distracted? I don't know.
It's maybe coming across as overly critical of churches who are like uber mission and
vision focused and I'm not meaning it to be like that.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm just weary of it and I'm not sure that I am built for
leadership in a highly administrative or organizational model of ministry.
If we were not, neither of us are meant to be business CEOs. No, no.
And that's demonstrated both in like the witness of the spirit in my life, but also like, you know, natural gifting and
ability and all of that. I think that we shouldn't ignore that either. So yeah, I agree.
So in summary, we don't know what to do. We don't know what to do.
Yeah, we don't know what to do. We wanna be inspiring towards the mission of God in the world.
We don't wanna be manipulative. But there's also significant need within the church
to serve specifically in kids ministry. Right, we wanna be pastoral.
We wanna be pastoral. We want to. Sensitive to what's going on in people's lives.
Yep, we wanna move people closer to Jesus.
Not just sign them up for a task. We don't want people to consume a product.
We want them to be a part of a body that has a mission from God.
And all of those things kind of run headfirst into each other a lot of times. Yeah, exactly.
Well, as always, we thank you for listening or watching. If you have questions or comments, anything like that,
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