We're All Prosperity Preachers Now with Andrew Root | Episode 299

Hello, and welcome to Church and Main, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. So, it was about 20 years or so that I sat in a hotel room in Omaha, Nebraska. I was there for a conference for communicators, and it was there that I learned about the wonders of Facebook. It had only become public. It had been created in 2004 just for college students, and then in, I believe, 2006, it went public. And it was growing exponentially. The people at the conference were talking about it in this very excited way. They saw Facebook and other social media at the time as bringing the church into this wonderful new era. And then maybe about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, actually, you started to see several denominations within mainline Protestantism that approved gays and lesbians to be married in their churches and also to become ministers. And people celebrated this advancement. They believed that this was going to bring the church into a whole new age. But did they? Social media isn't all bad, but it hasn't been the salvation that the churches thought it would be. It definitely has not been the salvation that society thought it would be. And while greater acceptance of LGBTQ people in the life of the church is a good thing, and I have to say that it has been personally good for me as a gay man who got married in a church and is also a minister, that hasn't necessarily, quote-unquote, saved the church either. Both of these examples aren't necessarily bad, but they were promised as a way to bring stability to churches that were experiencing decline. It's a hope that if we do these things, then the good old days will come back. The churches will be full. It reminds me actually a lot of what happened in my hometown of Flint, Michigan. When General Motors started to shut down plants and let people go, there was always this hope that something, anything was going to bring back the good old days and bring it back to the days that there were the city was bustling and there were jobs aplenty. Now, I want to talk about all of this with Andrew Root. He comes back to the podcast, and he's going to talk about his latest book, which is called Baal and the Gods of More. And in the book, he talks about how churches tend to be fixated on growth. And they're trying to find ways for congregations and denominations to be stable. And what they're doing, basically, is what amounts to a modern-day version of a fertility. God. And of course, when you choose a God over the God, there are costs. Because instead of choosing the God that is there that calls us children and holds us, we're choosing one that wants us to produce and make more and make more. Andrew is the Kerry Olson-Balson Professor of Youth and Family at Luther Seminary, which is, at least for now, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of probably more books than I can shake a stick at, and also the co-host of the Ministry in a Secular Age podcast. So, with all that out of the way, here's my conversation with Andrew Root about how fertility gods are corrupting American Christianity. All right. Well, Andrew, thank you for coming back on the podcast. I wanted to, I'm obviously having you on to talk about your latest book, Bell and the Gods of More. And I think the first question I have is just to kind of, what were the things kind of going on, maybe in culture and the church that led you to write this book? Yeah, well, I think, you know, the first thing is just the pressure everywhere you go, really across Protestantism, I think mainly in mainline Protestantism. But even within conservative Protestantism, you'll find everyone's worried about some kind of sense of decline, whether it's kind of cultural relevance or it's number of people. And there's just this odd way that people don't want to really fall into church growth, but nevertheless, there'll be a church growth conversation at every. Presbytery meeting or church-wide conference or something. It kind of crops up. And I think I've been accused of being the anti-church growth guy, which I don't think is fair. So I was partly trying to just get straight on what I think is important about growth and what are we actually talking about when we talk about growth. So, and then I was on a podcast, Dennis, you know, like all my best ideas come talking to podcasters like you. And I said something about like the church has become obsessed with fertility gods or something. And I just kind of, I don't know, the bell went off in my head to think about, well, what would it be like to think about modern fertility gods? And are we obsessed with those? And then, you know, what would it be like to read, you know, 1st and 2nd Kings next to this? And so the project just kind of evolved from there. And then I do crazy things like sit in this basement office here and just type away and then make everyone mad at me, you know. So that's my spiritual gift is losing friends, which I probably, through this book, everyone is mad at me in one way or the other. Well, I think one of the interesting things about this book, and I mean, I've read the stories in the Kings before and you hear about Baal and all of this stuff, but I never really thought about the fact that. Baal was a fertility god. And I never really thought about the fact of what that meant for the Israelites, and what it means for us today, even though, you know, we aren't worshiping Baal, but we are worshiping. As you say in the book, some type of a fertility god. Yeah. I mean, if I quote Luther way more than I quote Calvin, but, you know, it's Calvin who has the great quote that the human heart is a factory, you know, is an idol factory. And I think that's really true for us too. You know, we don't, we don't have cultic systems like you would have in the ancient world where, you know, we have a ball priests or, you know, the, the, the priests of Artemis, you know, chanting around looking for fertility and better crop yields and things like that. In some ways we think we're modern and we've outgrown that kind of stuff. You know, that's the ancient world stuff, but our relationship with money and our relationship with capital in general And the way capital becomes more than just money, but, you know, we think of social capital and we think of all those kind of different kind of forms of cultural capital. We think of all those different kind of forms of capital. There's a certain way that we've kind of pivoted out of the ritualization of fertility. But we still have this sense that what stabilizes us or makes us long for the world, our institutions, what will give us a history will be growth in some ways. And, you know, for our ancient folks, it was growth in the cult of Baal. Worshiping the fertility god would bring a good future. It would keep your society going. And I think for us, we don't quite hold on to it that way. But we do think that if your church isn't growing, it's dying. You know, if your company isn't growing at a, you know, 10, 15% rate, it's going to get – it's going to disappear. I mean, we even think our nation states, you know, our countries, if the economy doesn't grow there –. Well, revolution or, you know, something's going to occur that will upend it. You know, that what keeps modern societies growing is this sense of continuing to grow the economy or to grow reach in some way. And so that's really what I was trying to explore is, you know, how do we how do we see? I think what's our God is what we think will keep us existing. And for us within the church, we like to say, oh, it's a gospel. Yeah. OK, we believe all that. Yeah. It's a living God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're about that. But where are the people going to come from? Where's the money going to come from? And, you know, that, I think, does unveil what we really put our hope in, what we really put our trust in. And you just even said it in those final words. Does this kind of all boil down to with this whole wanting to be obsessed with growth? And I think you talk a little bit about the golden age and wanting that to trust and to trust in God. Because I think that's, as I was kind of preparing for this, I kept thinking, this is really all about trust, isn't it? And do we really trust in God? Yeah, and I think that's absolutely true. I think that's always the demand probably on every community of faith or every believing community is do you really trust, you know, for us, we'd say as Protestants, kind of the word of God or the promises of God, but is do you trust your gods to be able to save you? I mean, do you actually trust that? And I think we actually trust capital gains more than we trust God to kind of save us. But we're in a particularly difficult position, I think, Dennis, because, and this is where I kind of drew a parallel to 1 and 2 Kings, is that at least in our kind of larger cultural consciousness within our institutions, within our institutional memory, we can remember a golden era, you know. So for mainline Protestantism, you know, early 1960s. I don't think we should glorify it as a cultural, you know, there are some struggles culturally, but the church in the main line, the coffers were full. The congregations were full. The choirs were, you know, huge. And we still, within our institutions, have memory of that. And that memory, I think, can make us long for, well, I guess this is Elijah's point. It can make us long for oddly for the flesh spots of Egypt. Like we long for those days. And that opens up to a particularly unique temptation. So I think there's always a question for every community of belief of, do you trust your gods? You know, do you trust your God? But I think for us, we're at a kind of unique place. I mean, there's been many other points in history where this has happened, but, you know, similar to first and second Kings where the Israelites can remember the golden era of Solomon. Like they have it in their kind of memory. And so every king is trying to get back there. And for us, I think we can remember when our mainline seminaries were, you know, bulging with people and our pastors didn't even have to think about growth because it just happened. You know, it just, the civic religion was just bringing people into Presbyterian churches, you know, and if you were upwardly mobile and you moved to the suburbs, you started looking around for a Presbyterian church to go to. You got educated. You thought you needed to find a Presbyterian church. And all that has kind of gone away, but it's still in the DNA of our institutions. And so it makes us long for those golden eras. And that opens us up, I think, particularly the temptation of fertility gods. That's kind of the parallel I'm trying to draw. Yeah. And the thing that made me think about what this made me think about is where I grew up which my hometown is Flint, Michigan so you know that was, A town that literally, I mean, GM was founded there. It is a factory town. Both my parents worked for GM. And there are many people around that can still remember when Flint was a town of nearly 200,000 people, with 80,000 people who worked in all of the plants and just kind of how things were at that time. And, of course, it is not that now. And I think you have people who look to that past and wish that they could be back to that and want to find. And I remember, especially over the years, finding some way of trying to get back to that past. And it's like, and not really coming to terms that it's not coming back. And, you know, you can even find echoes of that in our larger political conversation. And that there is this sense of wanting this golden era but it's. It's hard to get that back for certain reasons. There were certain things of that time period that made that happen, but can't really be repeated. But we want it. And that leads us to go off towards easy answers or fertility gods. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, in this kind of fertility god mode, which, you know, to make the point of, you know, what you're saying about kind of political discourse, too, is inside a kind of heavy fertility god worship. There's always someone to blame. There's some enemy. There's someone who is we could be at this golden era. But these these people are keeping us from from getting there. You know, you can you can hear all that discourse starts to arise. And. You know, it's an easy analogy to say, like, you know, look at in between the wars in Germany, all of a sudden the rhetoric is these people are keeping us from this economic game that would stabilize our society, that would keep us from this great wound that's occurred. And so this becomes quite vicious in its own way. And so if we don't become clear what we really are putting our trust in and what we think about growth, what we think will make us long for the world, what will keep us stable, then we do fall into these experiences. And it becomes quite vicious. And when you feel really like you're sliding way down and you feel like you're just racing to get back up, it becomes very easy to, enter into resentment and grievance and calling other people the ones who are, you know, they're the ones pulling us down this other side. And yeah, I mean, I worry about that in a significant way. Yeah, having just a few months ago read a book about Karl Barth and his, emergency homiletic and kind of learning about the the interwar period it's like yeah that that doesn't that's going down a really dark road it is yeah yeah so um. One of the things that you talk about in the book is that there are two, ways of kind of dealing with this kind of sense of what you call stabilization, and those are the techno-optimists and the identitarians and this is kind of where it comes in, where you say you may not have any friends. That's right. Yeah. So how do you explain those two? And the other interesting thing I want to talk about is that you also talk about how one of those groups may not like to think that. What they're doing is kind of caught in a kind of capitalist way of thinking, but it really is. And so I'd love to hear about that as well. Yeah, well, I mean, it really picks up. You know, the backstory to this is something like Flint and is, you know, the larger Detroit area in some ways in that part of Michigan is an example of this. Because I draw from this economist named Robert Gordon, who's written this big, thick book called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. And he really looks at what he calls the special century. is what he calls it. And it is from 1870 to 1970. He thinks this was just unprecedented growth in the American economy. And it really was the outworkings of industrialization. So you have the first industrialization and it's distributions that start to happen in the 1870s after the Civil War. And then one kind of goes down, but another one comes up in the second industrial revolution. And this becomes like the home where Detroit Flint become the center of the second industrial revolution. You know, the car, the gasoline and electricity become this huge thing and the factory becomes a huge piece of this. But then there's supposed to be a third industrial revolution. And the idea is that it would pick up and it would push us into the 21st century with this continued kind of amazing standard of living growth. And it shifts to California and it shifts to Silicon and it shifts to the Silicon Valley. But it doesn't really bring the same amounts of growth. I mean, founders of these companies become filthy rich, but the rest of us is its distributions come into our standard of living and into just even our broader GDP, which I have to be honest, don't really understand. I'm a theologian. I don't really understand GDP, but I'm just following Gordon here. Doesn't really happen. And one of the things that will occur out of that, Gordon says, is there's always a group of people, he says, that look at his economic theory and be Like we haven't, you know, we've been in, in decline really, and not been able to get to the percentage we were at in the 1970s and particularly in the 1960s, we haven't been there, you know? We've had some people become filthy rich in the 1980s and beyond, and others who have really struggled to keep standard of living even similar to where their parents were. And you can kind of you can sense that you can see how that gets transposed into church life, too. Like since the 1980s, we had things called megachurches where you could grow your church huge, but the rest were just struggling to not decline too quickly. So you get this very rich, very kind of poor dynamic or this disparity. But he says that inside of this, there's always a group of people that are like, we're just one invention away from having this growth come. And he calls these the techno optimists. Like these are the people who are just like, hey, AI is going to do it. It's going to happen. Or robotics or something. Or before this, they said like social media is going to do it. Streaming is going to do it. Well, it doesn't seem to actually. I mean, we're all entertained, but our standard of living has not, you know, changed much. And, you know, the factories in Flint are not reignited by streaming Netflix or anything like that. So I can see that within the church, too. There's this group of techno optimists that they, you know, maybe don't think it's an invention, but they kind of do. Like, it's just one new framework. It's just one new way of doing Sunday school. It's just one new way of reaching young families. It's just a different kind of youth ministry. And we'll be back. We'll be back to growth. We'll be back to the golden era. So those people, I think, are in almost every denomination, the techno-optimists. It seems that their enemies are what I would call the identitarians. There's always a group of people who point out that those techno-optimists may be too capitalistic. They may be too into these kind of maturations of growth. And really, this becomes about affirmation of identities. Now, that's interesting. And I have some sympathy, actually, for both sides of it. But one of the elements, and I'm drawing from the sociologist Emmanuel Castiles, who wrote this incredible book. Three volumes in the late 1990s, like looking at what would happen in the third industrial revolution in the Silicon Digital Industrial Revolution. One of the things he says will happen here is that identity questions will become huge. And how we work out identity questions will become really significant. But what he wants to point out and warn us that we did not follow. His prophetic warnings is that they will also become interlocked with capital structures. And on the internet, the movements of growth towards recognition and identity affirmation will just become exponential. And what I see within our denominations is you have the identitarians who point out to the techno-optimists, oh, you're just all about this or that. But really, there's a certain kind of sense of similar escalatory growth for them is if our denominations can just affirm and affirm and affirm and affirm and affirm and affirm, recognize the right identities, recognize, recognize, broadcast that, you know, with that, with certain markers that we affirm the right identities, then that will stabilize the church. So one says some kind of invention. The other says some kind of, well, you know, again, this is going to make me no friends, Dennis, but kind of political identification will stabilize the church. And what I'm trying to point out is for good or for ill, both are fairly capitalistic. I mean, they both kind of, are functioning inside of that reality. And there have been people who have accused me from that identitarian side of like, you know, not caring about identities or something. Or I got critiqued for being on an Angel Studios conversation about the Bonhoeffer movie, but they were critiquing me on Facebook. You know, like you're on a platform that it's just making money after money, off of this, like, you know, they love it when there's arguments around identitarian questions about affirmation of identities, because it just leads to either the outrage or the affirmation is perfect for the likes of escalation. And so, you know, with the social media, we can just mark, we can look at how much your assertions for affirmation to certain people or to your own identity. What's the algorithm? I mean, what's the stats of it? You're seeing directly how much uptake it's getting. So again, I have sensitivity towards both those perspectives. I understand some of the drives towards the techno-optimists and the move towards creativity and innovation. I don't think that's all bad. And I think the larger questions of what it means to be a human being and the deep levels of what it means to embrace one another and hear our experience is essential. But those easily, when you don't cast out the idol of escalation, those can become idolatrous in their own rights and they become linked up to fertility gods. So your side is right on either of those. Because why? Because you have more of something. You have more recognition or you have more people coming or you have more relevance in some kind of measure. And that just seems starkly different than the picture of the cross that we have. You know, like there's something radically shocking when Paul is like, this is growth or this is the new world and it's a crucified Christ. Or we get these pictures of other icons and, you know, looks at the virgin and the child and like, this is growth. Very different than our kind of escalatory logic. And I think there is something, I can't remember if you said this in the book or maybe it was on a podcast, it probably is also inflammatory to some people is that you basically say, and you say it out flat out. In some ways, we're all prosperity preachers now because we have this belief that wherever it's either, this technique or technology is going to be the answer and bring prosperity or it's going to be affirming these identities are going to bring prosperity. It's the same thing. It's the belief that if we do the right things, success will happen. Yeah, absolutely. And I hear this everywhere I go. I mean, if you're kind of a historically a conservative Protestant institution, you're told if you don't go kind of further towards some kind of capitalist logic of escalation, that you will never be able to raise another dollar. If you can't show that you are really after this growth in this way, you'll never be able to raise another dollar for your school. But you're told if you're a mainline institution, that if you don't get into more and more escalation of affirmation of identities, you'll never be able to recruit another student. So the idea is, of course, again, your only stabilization is if you can grow one of those two dynamics. If you can raise money, if you can get more students. Now, I'm the realist. I understand. Those are real things. Like those, and the gospel is not the proclamation. I mean, this is why, you know, the heart of some most Christian expressions is a sense that poverty is part of the gospel. Because this is not to say, well, no, this is a reverse logic. And, you know, like if you deny these things, you'll actually get richer in a different way. I mean, this is your point. Like, you know, we're all prosperity gospel people in some ways. We're really willing to take on poverty as long as it means we get rich in the back end. You know what I mean? Like, I'll be poor here on this end so I can save my capital and get the escalation with the compound interest on the back end. But just the call to have to bear the liminality and even the suffering and pain of poverty is very difficult for us. It's very difficult for me. I mean, I'll be completely honest. I hate the idea of it. But there is something when you look upon the cross and you look upon the picture of the crucified Christ, when you look at the life of Jesus, that the call to poverty is... Is there. And at the very least, we have to contemplate that the way God chooses to grow God's church or what even the gospel means by growth is very different than the way we've all been formed inside the system. And again, I'm the sinner among sinners on here. So I'll have no friends, but I am as pulled into all of these things as anyone else. I mean, here we are on a podcast that we're hoping people are going to listen to, you know, and we'll be able to see the numbers on how well it did, you know. So, in some ways, there's no way to escape this, which is all the more reason that we have to kind of, think deeply about what's going on here, because we are, in some sense, like, you know, in a land where there are no fertility gods, but where we're trying to proclaim a gospel that goes really, against the grain of the larger culture milieu. And maybe that's why, you know, they talk about the whole scandal of the cross and that it's really hard to, we have a culture that believes so much in success and in, prosperity and we're being called to look upon a Christ that's on a cross, that's being executed probably in, at least in Roman times, the most embarrassing, most horrible way possible. That's not very appealing to people. No, it isn't. It is. And it is definitely, it's a rupture. And, you know, it is apocalyptic when it says this is growth. This is glory. The crucified Christ is very different. And the element I'm really trying to hit is, you know, it's always the theology of the cross is central in my work. And I'm trying to hit that note. But the other one really is that couples with it, I think, or else we can just get into the glorification of kind of suffering. Is that the other side of this is this dynamic of the relational and the relational reality. And that's why I kind of point at the end of the book towards Mary and the iconography of the Madonna and the child is to say that there is a growth here. I mean, there is a beckoning to grow, but it is not a growth that is escalatory. That's about escalation. It's a growth into. And so there is something in the Christian life that demands growth, that you grow into Christ. And growing into Christ looks very different than the escalation of glory. Hence, the Heidelberg Disputation, the theologian of the cross calls the thing what it is, and the theologian of glory calls good evil and evil good. You know, I mean, you could think, you could put that in the context that the theologian of glory calls escalatory growth the only good, and the theologian of the cross looks different. And this depth of these very small, seemingly weak ways as the most powerful ones, like the love of a mother to a child, the love of friendship. The willingness to console one another as they bear their burdens, to sing lamentations and songs of sorrow. Like these are what really changes and transforms. And so I am trying to push us away from, I think, what escalatory growth always does, which is it instrumentalizes us. And I think that's the kind of irony, even on the identitarian side or the techno-optimist side, is we're kind of saying, oh, no, we're doing this so people can be together. But we need to grow the church in a techno-optimist way, because if we don't have a church, then people can't be together. And the other side is, we just want to affirm people. We just want people to be accepted. And we want that. But inside the escalatory growth, it's very easy at some point for those objectives to become instruments for growth itself. That growth becomes this kind of monster that eats all of that. And at the end of the day, you end up needing to have enemies that you point out that don't affirm so that you can show what it really means to affirm. Or you have people who don't get it and are backwards leaning and they don't really want to be creative and they don't really want to be innovative. And it does lead us to a kind of over and againstness as opposed to a with and forness. And I'm trying to point out in this very kind of Martin Luther way that God is always pro me. He's always for you. He's always bearing your burdens with you in this way. And the only God you can know is the God who was revealed to you in the cross of Christ, the only revealed to you in the arms in the fragile arms of this teenage girl. These are not signs of world domination coming and yet, And yet, what is long for this world, this community of people? What's not, I mean, our denominations, I have to be quite honest here. Like, this is not reverse logic to say, well, this will keep our denominations going. You know, the PCUSA that we're both connected to, Dennis, there's no guarantee it's here to long for the world. But a community of people proclaiming Jesus Christ crucified and living, bearing each other's burdens, that is long for the world. And God will be faithful in that way. And if our denominational structures go away, believe me, I'll be the first one to grieve it heavily. I really like teaching at an ELCA institution and having a job that's a full-time professorship. That's great. It's utter privilege to have it, but there's no promise I get to keep it. But there is a promise that there will be a community of human bodies gathered, proclaiming the resurrected body of Jesus Christ as true God and true Lord. One of the things that is fascinating in this book is that you do, and you just kind of talked about it, focus on Mary. And that is something Protestants have not done a lot, but I was fascinated by it. One, because I spent, half of my, you know, pre-college, you know, education in Catholic schools. And my mother happened to be named Maria, which of course is Mary. So there's a fascination with that. And so I'm kind of curious, what is it that Protestants have missed by not focusing on Mary? Yeah i mean i think there's a there's a lot i mean i i, there's there for me it is that relationality that's the most central piece like you just cannot escape, the relational dynamic that can't be escalated with an infant at at mary's side but you know i really am you know i i keep my protestant cards here uh. Dennis because i read end up reading mary ultimately through luther and Luther's reading of the Magnificat, you know, so I am trying throughout this book to have my cake and eat it too, you know, which will, again, I'll have no friends on this. But Luther really thinks Mary is the true prophet, you know, in some ways I'm trying to connect Mary and Elijah and saying really Mary is the fulfillment of Elijah. She's the true prophet who hears the word and responds. And, you know, this is the kind of Protestant kind of sensibility is what does it mean to follow Jesus Christ? What does it mean to grow into? What we're trying to grow into is hearing the word and responding to the word. And Mary becomes the true teacher of that. She teaches us what it means to hear the word and respond to it. But as Luther points out, as only kind of Luther kin, it's an apocalyptic word. I mean, the Magnificat is incredibly apocalyptic. Mary's poem is, you know, if you are high, God is tearing you down. And if you are low, God is bringing you up. So you think just a radical different disposition of growth. And in some way, she's saying the Magnificat, if you have taken... If you put any of your hope in escalatory growth, it's coming down. And the only way in all that will be left are those that who are lowly. The poor are going to have a place in this kingdom. They're going to be at the center of it. Children like Matthew 18 are going to be at the center of this. So there's something incredibly prophetic about her word too. And it is a call back to Elijah in the sense where Elijah is saying, you can't synchronize these things. Like you can't bring together Yahweh, the one who frees you from Egypt and frees you from slavery for what? For the sake of what? Not to be his slaves. It's to be his children. He makes you his children. And you can't then go and mix this up in a cocktail with Baalism. Baal does not have children. Baal has cogs in a machine of growth. And so you can't do this. And I think it's really interesting because Elijah is basically saying to Ahab, like, you can't, these things don't mix. This is poison if you mix these things together. These are logics that don't hold. But all, you know, to give Ahab the benefit of the doubt, all he's really trying to do is get back to some growth. And so, you know, we often say the Jezebel spirit as if, you know, Jezebel, his wife, is the sexual temptress. That's not true at all. Jezebel's the great economist. I mean, she's from she's from Baal's hometown and she's bringing in this Harvard, you know, economic theory into Israel to try to jumpstart the economy. But Elijah's point is they don't work. They don't work because Yahweh does not function on escalation. He functions. He's a God of the desert. So when you are at your most depleted, when you are at your most barren, when you're at your most lost, this God hears your cry and comes near to you. And what does this God do? Holds you like a child. That we see in Mary. So Mary becomes the kind of fulfillment of the one who embraces. And, you know, in the iconography, you can always Mary's eyes. You often see the infant's eyes are on Mary and Mary's eyes are on you. And what she's saying to you is come, grow into this. It's not about this glory. It's about what it means to be found inside this relationship, what it means to be found, held by this child who I hold now. And I don't know, I just want the church to be mesmerized by that story and. That dynamic more than wringing our hands, thinking, you know, how can we get more growth out of our creativity? Or how can we become more politically conscious for the sake? I mean, we need to be politically conscious in some ways, but often it becomes in the sake that then young adults will come. I mean, it's amazing how often that both Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches, people will come up to me and be like, our church is right next to the university. We share every political view, every identity view that supposedly every young adult at that university holds. And we have the most progressive pastor in our denomination. And none of these young adults are coming. Like, why? And the idea is if we have recognized and we've given the affirmation of the right identities, it should open up and lead more people to come. And you can see how that is embedded in escalatory logic in and of itself. Like maybe there's reason to affirm these identities, but it should be something deeper about shared life and what it means to bear each other's burdens than just if we're on the right side of these identity issues, then people will recognize us and they'll show up and they'll. You know, give us the gold star for, you know, being on the right side of history or something. We just, we get pulled into those realities so easily, I think. I think this is the first time I've ever heard of Ball or Jezebel as akin to McKinsey, the Harvard kind of growth firm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I never saw it that way, but I think there is some truth to that. See, I can have no friends anywhere, Dennis. That's why I live in this small little room in my basement. because I, yeah. And, you know, I think that there's something to be said about the whole Magnificat because I think the way that we, at least sometimes that I've heard it, is that when we talk about the mighty being pulled down from their thrones, we think that that's someone else. Yeah, yeah. And I think the way that you're explaining it is a lot more confessional. It's like, ooh, maybe I've been the one that's been, you know, not relying on God and being placed high up. And that that's, you know, where I'm at fault. Yeah. I think that's how we have to read it. You know, unfortunately, I always want to say it's those people or it's, it's, it's this person who's in the, in the Oval Office right now, that's going to be pulled down. And there's something true about that, that we, we can proclaim, but we have to proclaim it. And what gives that word a kind of profundity is to say, I know that's going to happen because it's going to happen to me. Because I have been the one that's turned my back on the poor. I have been the one that's been too concerned about my escalatory growth and my own personality capital. That judgment comes on me. And I do think this is, you know, the church, maybe one of the reasons we get so obsessed with growth is because we also are so deeply afraid or have cut out the reality of judgment, you know, uh, and, uh, There's something incredibly life-giving about judgment. And, of course, it's dependent on the judge being worthy of making a judgment, of the judge being filled with mercy and grace, of the judge being a good judge. Being judged by someone who is not good is awful. That's not good. It's the awful thing. But when the judge is good, like it's someone who really loves us, to actually be judged by someone that's your good friend is actually incredibly life-affirming. It doesn't feel great, but it is actually because they are for you. They are pro-me again. They are for you. They are on your side. And so the judgment of the Magnificat is really because it is us first because God is so for us. And that means that God sometimes judges us. And yeah, I joke about having no friends in this book, but this book is confessional in the sense that I'm judging myself, you know, first and foremost. There's been a lot of times, you know, sitting in this room in prayer, feeling the temptations of, you know, escalatory growth. Like, why aren't people reading my books more? Why does that, you know, a-hole from I don't like and think that's a terrible thinker? Why is everyone reading their books? You know, this gets in all of us. It's got really sharp, sharp claws that grab hold of all of us. So there is a personal confession here as well. It's kind of like the Taylor Swift song, it's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me. Yeah, yeah. Taylor Swift's a great way to quote it. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that I found fascinating towards the end of the book, and you always kind of do this with that you kind of weave in stories. Some of them are true. Some are apocryphal. But an interesting one that takes place in Europe and with a person who has lost their wife and that relationship with the congregation. And you kind of lift that up as an example of really maybe a living example of what you're seeing with Mary and the child. Can you kind of explain a little bit more about that without totally giving it all away? Yeah. I mean, it's just this kind of sense of, of encountering this, this, this person. And, um, you know, this is a person who's never been part of a church before, but in the midst of losing, um, his wife, who was part of a church, um, you know, happens to be in Europe on a Viking cruise, which, you know, if you are, at airports this time of year, there's this all sorts of retirement age people with their Viking, uh, their Viking cruise, uh, bag tags around. And it just makes this confession to us about how important it was for him that his pastor was there. You know, it comes up that my wife Cara is a pastor and there's a kind of sense of him just being grateful for the pastor. And he's not grateful because, well, our church had 16 people left in it. This pastor came and now he had 65 and, you know, in three years, we're going to have 600. And, you know, this pastor saved our church from, uh. Bleeding out all of its resources, that the real confession is, the thankfulness that there's someone who could bear my burdens with me, that there's someone who could be there with me in the midst of this deep, deep sorrow and create a community where as I face the great goodbyes of life, I'm not alone in the midst of it. And someone that can kind of carry my burdens there. So I'm picking up this theme that I did in the evangelism book too, about the importance of consolation, you know, and, and, and the confession that makes to the world that it actually invites in, you know, I, I, I don't want to, sometimes people push back and be like, well, you gotta be, we gotta have some growth because we have to invite people in. Don't we care about people coming to the church? We do. But what does it mean to minister to people and really minister to their burdens here? So that, that kind of is a very, I mean, I think it's, it's, I tried to write it in a way that this is something that's happening in, all sorts of congregations, all sorts of places. And in a lot of churches that we think, oh, this church is a bad church or this church isn't, there's nothing exemplar about this church. And yet my point is there is. There is a church where people will bear each other's burdens and people feel pulled into a place to be is incredibly significant. And that is a growth into something. That's a growth into the very crucified Christ who proclaims life. Yeah, I mean, I think you were just kind of talking about the Episcopal Church being next to the university and having all the right positions. But I think in that example, it's kind of like, okay, but are you forgetting, maybe there is a student that feels lonely, is dealing with loneliness or things? But that seems to be the important thing. It's not that the identity isn't, but what matters, what really shows Christ is how you enter into that person's life and into their, wherever their pain is, wherever their desert is, to help them and to meet, help them to meet God there. Yeah. And it actually could be someone that you have a deep impulse to hate. You know, it could be the very call to find Christ and the one who's wearing that red hat that you would not ever want to be in your church who now cries out to you to be with them and be for them, as a witness, as a very sacrament of a God who is with and for us all. So as we kind of wrap things up here, one of the things that I wanted to kind of talk about, and I see this in my own situation, being a pastor of a small congregation, is. What message you have to churches, especially as we're dealing in a time when it feels like religion as a whole, especially in American society, feels very brittle. Yeah. And I think that we are all looking desperately for something. What kind of word would you give to, especially to pastors, but also to church leaders, that to help them in this time when there is a lot of anxiety? Yeah. I mean, I think the first word is one that I always have to hear myself is that, the future of the church isn't dependent on you. And you know that that it is it is god's responsibility uh, to keep the church going and at that level i mean i think a lot of our fears is that we you know if our little churches closes on close on our watch it's our fault, you failed uh you should feel ashamed of that and i want to release us from that reality you know that that. That's not our burden to bear. That's not the sleepless night we should have, though we probably need to have some sleepless nights. But those sleepless nights are really, how do we proclaim the gospel? How do we bear each other's burdens? How do I help this community see its neighbor and be called to its neighbor? How do we hear the word of a living God speak again, especially in a late modern world where we're so twist and turned and have imaginations framed in so many different ways? So I think the beauty of this is saying, well, if this is really responding to the word and giving consolation and bearing each other's burdens, then it really, there's actually advantage on being small than being big. You know, like, what does it mean as a community to really be there for one another? Of course, as a big church, you can do that. But in some ways, being a small church, you're at an advantage. You have an advantage in that. You don't have to think about, okay, we got to get a small group ministry going and we got to get a spreadsheet to figure that out. That's not how everyone's going. Small church, you just do it. And so in some ways I want to say to folks in small churches, and I guess some people could argue my work is just, an apologetic for a small little Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in South Minneapolis that Cara pastors and I'm part of. But there's something utterly beautiful in that, of a small church that can pivot as soon as the confession comes that says –. I've been diagnosed with stage four cancer and now the community can be with them. There isn't a whole infrastructure of programming and everyone can kind of turn and do that. There's something to really embrace there, but it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't free you from the fact that you're still fragile and you'll always be fragile. And you may be one big roof leak away from being in big trouble and never be able to make budget again. But there's no way around that. And there's something utterly faithful and living step-by-step in the fragility of that. You know, the cross is a fragile reality. And to embrace the fragility also can give us life, you know. Unless there's a country song. I'm not a country fan, but there's a country song that's a little sappy that's like, I want to live like, you know, I only have a few more days. There's a kind of sense of I want to live in the sense that Paul's given us that you're already dead, you know. So live life because... It's all a gift. And I really think we have to look back at that. It's a gift of God's grace. I think the song is Live Like You Were Dying. That's it. By Tim McGraw. Thank you, Dennis. I murdered that. So thank you. I'm sure there's listeners like, hey, that's not what it is. But yeah. Yeah. But there's something beautiful about if you can free yourself from bailism and escalatory logic of capital, you can live like you're dying, which is, you know, one of the amazing things about the way kind of capitalism functions is you try to, especially fiscal capitalism, you try to live like you're never going to die. You know, so my financial advisor tries to help me live off the, you know, off the accrued interest of my investments. So I never have to touch the principles so that I can kind of live indefinitely for the most part. And, you know, that's a major abstraction. I'm a finite creature who is going to die as is all of our churches. So what would it mean for us to live like we were going to die? And I think that that's something that Christ does a lot is remind us of our own finitude, which we don't like to admit. No, we hate it. Yeah, yeah. So if people want to know more, and I know that you have a lot of books out there. Where should they go? a best place to go is just on my website andrewroot.org and you know none of us can escape the escalatory giant of Amazon but you can find that you can pull the book out of the, the the the jaws of that monster that monopoly monster if you want to do it too so okay, well Andrew thank you so much for taking the time to chat again and we'll talk again soon look forward to it thanks Dennis all right. So I will put a link for, Andy's podcasts and also the link for the book in the show notes. As usual, I'm always interested to know about your thoughts on the episode and what ideas that you are thinking about. What do you think about his thoughts about. Kind of how we are inadvertently following fertility gods instead of the God? Feel free to send me a note. And this time you can actually send it to a different email address. I actually have a new email address. It is dennis at churchandmain, all one word, dot org. And if you go there, I will be receiving your comments, questions, complaints, all of that. Also, if you want to learn more about this podcast, listen to past episodes or donate, check me out at churchandmaine.org. You can also go to churchandmaine.substack.com to read articles there. I do also accept donations there. I don't put anything behind a paywall. And you will also see episodes that will show up usually a few days later on the Substack. If you want to make a donation, it's $5 a month, $60 a year. Also, feel free to subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app, and please consider leaving a review, because when you do that, that actually helps others find the podcast. So that's it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. As I always like to say, thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.