Pivot Podcast

Contemplative, Charismatic, and Centuries Old, All in One Church

Rachael Wooldridge is Associate Vicar at St Paul's Church Hammersmith, a Church of England parish in London dating back to 1631, where hundreds of young adults with no prior church background have come to faith in recent years. In this conversation with host Dwight Zscheile, Rachael describes the discipleship program her church built to disciple them well: a nine-month commitment involving daily prayer and scripture, mentoring, small groups, and a fifty-day fasting program called Awaken 50, built in part on the Catholic program Exodus 90. Rather than lowering expectations to make faith more accessible to newcomers, Rachael and her team raised them, and found people hungry to meet the challenge. Rachael also reflects on the leadership shift that made this discipleship program possible: learning to lead through discernment rather than strategic planning, watching for where God seemed to already be at work, and building worship and pastoral care around what they found instead of a five-year vision statement. She shares stories of physical healing during worship, a former drug dealer now preaching in the prison where he served time, and what it's meant for her personally to loosen her grip on control as a leader. Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) Awaken 50

A Solo Reflection on Prayer, Longing, and an Australian Movie from the 90s

This week's episode breaks from the usual format. Pivot producer Joey Goodall steps in for a solo reflection on what prayer practices are actually for, and what happens when we lose sight of that. He starts in an unexpected place: a line from the 1994 Australian film Muriel's Wedding, where a character compares her life to the biggest hit by the Swedish pop group she'd once used as an escape. From there, Joey turns to prayer, scripture reading, and the practices Christians return to again and again, naming two temptations that work against their purpose: holding a practice so tightly to its exact words and structure that we forget what it's for, or adapting it so loosely that it no longer reshapes us. He closes with a version of the Examen, a nearly 500-year-old prayer practice from Ignatius of Loyola, as one way to stay open to a God who is always more than our practices.

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Leadership for a Diverse Church

Eastminster Church has been in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood since 1856, and for most of that history it worshiped and looked like a fairly typical Presbyterian congregation. Aaron Teter, the church's current pastor, spent time recently reading through the session's meeting minutes going back to the 1960s. In the 1970s, as the neighborhood changed and members left, the session wrote down a plain conviction: this was a church for the neighborhood. By the early 2000s, a strategic plan named becoming cross-cultural as an explicit goal, and the pastors and staff hired in the years since, including Rev. Nicole Porter, carried that work into the life of the congregation. Today Eastminster is diverse racially, economically, and in the traditions its members bring with them, with that diversity reflected at every level of leadership, from elders and deacons to the pulpit. In this episode, Aaron and Ayana Teter talk with hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm about how that history shaped the congregation, and about the practices that carry it now: reading a church's own story back to it, passing the peace before communion, and a kind of leadership built on dependence rather than control. Ayana, Dean of Community Life and Formation at Pittsburgh Seminary and a leader within Eastminster, talks about watching people who aren't fully reconciled in their private lives cross the room to greet one another before receiving the elements. Pittsburgh Theological Seminary - A Seminary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Eastminster Presbyterian Church

What Sunday Morning Teaches People About Monday

Katie Roelofs has spent years thinking about the space between Sunday morning and the rest of the week. A pastor in the Reformed Church in America and managing director of the Worship for Workers Project, Katie is co-author of the new book Leading Worship for Workers. She argues that churches, often without realizing it, have widened the gap between faith and work, training people to leave their real lives at the door instead of bringing them into worship. In this episode, Katie talks with Dwight and Alicia about what it looks like to close that gap. She describes a congregation that reimagined its offering plate around the ancient idea of first fruits, inviting people to bring forward the actual work of their hands. She talks about developing pastoral curiosity, the practice of genuinely learning what congregants carry into the pews each week, and about why the opening and closing words of a worship service shape people more than most leaders realize. Katie also addresses a question many pastors hear in one form or another: does God actually care about my job? Her answer draws on Genesis, on the theology of vocation, and on a vision of worship as the gathering and scattering of a people formed to carry faith into their daily work.

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Ministry That Doesn't Rush Toward Results

For twenty years, Johnny Sertin has practiced a kind of place-based ministry built on staying put. He and four other families started the Earlsfield Friary in southwest London, committing to live within one square mile of each other while each working ordinary jobs. Along the way, a Franciscan friar became a close friend and encouraged them to find the places in their own lives where they felt most alive. Meg Fry joined the community a bit later, drawn in by her own dissatisfaction with church as usual. That same posture eventually led the group to a stretch of land next to a prison, where they raised pigs, and to a cafe Meg opened inside the sanctuary of St. Andrew's Church, one that's welcomed everyone from young professionals to asylum seekers to parents with young kids for the better part of a decade. In this episode, Johnny and Meg talk with hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm about what it takes to build trust in a neighborhood before ever bringing up faith. Meg describes waiting years, sometimes five or six, before someone asks her why she does what she does. Johnny reflects on a woman who told him that after a week of feeding the pigs at dawn and dusk, she'd come home to herself again. Together, they offer a picture of urban ministry, rooted in one specific place, that doesn't rush toward results and trusts that presence, patience, and genuine relationship do the deeper work.

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Augustine Was a Pastor First

For most of his afterlife in the Christian imagination, Augustine has been a theologian first, a philosopher second, and everything else a distant third. What tends to get lost is that he spent nearly forty years as a working pastor. In this episode, Joey Sherrard, pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church and author of the new book The Augustinian Pastor, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk about Augustine as a pastor for pastors, discovering not a distant theologian but a fellow pastor who had shepherded his own congregation through a world coming apart at the seams. The conversation moves through some of Augustine's most enduring insights for those in ministry today: why restlessness isn't a problem to fix but a signpost pointing us home, how pride can dress itself up in the language of Christian virtue, and what it means to order our loves rather than simply renounce them. Joey also talks about pastoral loneliness, and about the Ambrose Collective, a weekly practice of friendship he built with fellow pastors, and what it looks like to build a rule of life without a monastery, a vow, or a bell tower.

A Different Kind of Strength

Second Corinthians is one of the strangest letters in the New Testament: a leader defending himself, a community in open doubt, and in the middle of it, some of Paul's clearest writing on power in weakness. Dr. Lois Malcolm, professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary and author of a forthcoming commentary on the letter, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to explore what that friction opens up for church leaders navigating a culture that no longer grants pastors automatic authority. Lois traces why Paul turned down money from the Corinthians and accepted it from the far poorer Macedonians, unpacks the image of treasure carried in clay jars, and tells the story of her mother's imprisonment in a concentration camp and what it taught her about freedom. The conversation moves through baptismal identity, the ministry of reconciliation, and why Christian community has always asked hard things of the people inside it, without that difficulty ever being the point.

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The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You

"The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists." That's how Dr. Scott Cormode opens his book, and it's the starting point for this conversation about Christian leadership with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm. The Hugh De Pree Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of The Innovative Church, Scott argues that Christian leaders don't have followers — the people in their care belong first to Jesus — and that the real work of leadership is planting and watering while God gives the increase. Scott shares five questions for discerning what keeps people awake at night, tells the story of a congregation transformed by teaching lament to middle schoolers, and offers a raw, personal account of reinventing prayer during his wife's cancer treatment. The conversation moves through reinventing ancient practices for a changing culture, the danger of an individualistic model of ministry, and how to build sustainable rhythms of labor and rest. Scott, one of Pivot's original co-hosts when it launched six years ago, brings both decades of scholarship and hard-won personal wisdom to this conversation about what it means to lead Christian communities faithfully today.

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The Church With No Budget, No Staff, and No Sunday Service

Ten years ago, JR and Amy Rozko planted a two-hundred-year-old congregation in Canton, Ohio, only to discover that what their city needed wasn't another program but a rule of life: a shared rhythm of prayer, rest, study, and work old enough to predate the church they'd inherited. Out of that conviction came Canton Abbey, a neutral space with no budget and no staff where churches and nonprofits collaborate freely, and later Common Life Church, a small congregation of about fifty people who've chosen to live under vows drawn from monastic tradition rather than membership on a roster. JR and Amy join Dwight and Alicia to talk about what it costs, and what it gives back, to ask people to embrace a rule of life in a culture that treats the self as sovereign. They walk through the four rhythms and four commitments that shape their community, tell the story of a congregation that grew almost by accident out of people hungry for something thicker than what they'd found elsewhere, and offer honest counsel for pastors in inherited structures who sense that recovering old practices might matter more than adding new programs.

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Why the Ancient Church Might Have the Answer We're Missing

Every generation inherits the same task: figuring out how to receive an ancient faith and pass it on in a language people can actually hear. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm open a new season of the Pivot Podcast by asking what spiritual formation looks like when it draws on centuries of Christian practice, the Book of Common Prayer, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rhythms of liturgy, without losing people along the way. Drawing on Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered and the idea of incarnation as an ongoing act of translation, they trace the line between tradition, which stays alive because it keeps finding new expression, and traditionalism, which freezes a particular cultural moment and calls it sacred. Along the way, Dwight and Alicia talk honestly about what keeps churches from doing this work: the fear of getting it wrong, the pull of comfort and familiarity, and a habit of experimenting freely with children's and youth ministry while staying far more cautious with neighbors outside the church. They ask what it means to trust the Holy Spirit with something as fragile as change, and what's lost when a church becomes a museum rather than a living community. It's a thoughtful start to a season built around one question: how do we make the ancient new? The Parable of the Talents American Congregations by Mark Chaves The Book — Practicing the Way The Book of Common Prayer Christianity Rediscovered - Orbis Books

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Why Is Cultivating Community in Church So Hard Right Now?

Why is cultivating community in church so hard right now? In this Season 6 finale, hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm reflect on a full season of conversations with historians, theologians, pastors, and researchers who helped them understand the many layers underneath that question. From the formative power of late modern culture to the provisional nature of relationships today, they name what the church is genuinely up against — and why the tools the surrounding culture offers can't get us to the deep belonging the church is meant to provide. But this isn't a conversation that ends in resignation. Dwight and Alicia also talk about what leaders can actually do: casting a bigger vision, getting off the hamster wheel of programs that aren't forming disciples, and starting small where community is already gathering. And they point to real signs of hope — a cultural shift away from cynicism and toward longing, and a growing number of people finding their way into Christian community precisely because the culture is offering so little. The soil, as Dwight puts it, is being prepared.

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Amen Means I Trust You

The guilt most Christians carry about their prayer life, that it isn't deep enough, consistent enough, disciplined enough, may say less about them than about the world they're living in. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile talks with the Rev. Dr. Wesley Ellis, pastor of First Congregational Church in Ramona, California and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, about what a culture of optimization has done to the Christian prayer life and what might be recovered when we stop treating prayer as one more project to manage. Wes argues that prayer is primarily something God does, and that we are less its practitioners than its recipients. Drawing on philosopher Charles Taylor's account of the secular age and sociologist Hartmut Rosa's work on social acceleration, he makes a case that the exhaustion so many church leaders feel is bound up with a way of thinking about prayer that puts all the weight on us. The conversation moves from personal guilt to pastoral practice to the deep grammar of grace: that the most important things have already been done, and that amen means something closer to "I trust you" than "we're finished." Following Jesus to Purpose and Meaning with Angela Williams Gorrell Taste and See: Connecting with God Through Spiritual Practices Overflow: An Introduction to Growing in Faith with Steve Thomason

Half of Christians Say Faith Is Private. Here's What We're Losing

Church community building has never been more urgent or perhaps more difficult. In this episode of Pivot Podcast, Jeff Galley and Phil Smith, co-authors of The Way Back to One Another, join Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk honestly about the loneliness epidemic reshaping American life and what it means for the church. Drawing on years of experience in large church ministry and global relief work, Jeff and Phil bring both data and personal longing to this conversation. Since 2014, time Americans spend with other people has dropped by roughly 50%, and the church is not exempt. Jeff and Phil ground their vision in three biblical terms, ezair, allelon, and koinonia, and lay out five practical "one another" commitments that Scripture calls us to. But the heart of the conversation is about culture, not programs. Real church community building, they argue, starts with leaders who are willing to model vulnerability, go first, and trust that one relationship at a time can turn the ship. The Way Back to One Another - InterVarsity Press Missio Dei: The Church Sent with Edwin Ortiz-Rivera and Chris Steubing Listening and Serving: Community-Based Ministry with F. Willis Johnson Family Systems: Tool for Ministry with Jules Erickson

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You Don't Own the Spirit: The Meaning of Pentecost

What is the meaning of Pentecost? In this reflection episode of the Pivot Podcast, Luther Seminary theologian Dr. Lois Malcolm moves past the familiar imagery of wind and fire to ask what the Spirit was actually doing that day in Jerusalem. Her answer is both clarifying and unsettling: the Spirit arrived not so the disciples could possess it, but so it could send them out. Lois draws three claims from the Pentecost story that speak directly to the life of the church today. The Spirit belongs to no one. Speaking in other people's languages is a divine mandate for empathy, not a one-time miracle. And the power given at Pentecost was never for the church's self-advancement; it was given for the common good, for the dead places in our communities, and for the people most unlike us. A short, searching reflection for Pentecost Sunday and beyond.

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The False Choice That's Been Costing the Church for a Hundred Years

The debate over whether the church's primary calling is evangelism or justice has been running for over a century, and Dr. Al Tizon believes it has cost us more than we know. In this episode, the lead pastor of Grace Fellowship Community Church in San Francisco and affiliate professor of missional and global leadership at North Park Theological Seminary and Fuller Theological Seminary joins hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to make the case for a missional church grounded in the whole gospel. Drawing on decades of ministry in the Philippines and the United States, Al offers reconciliation as the organizing framework for mission today, one that holds evangelism, peacemaking, compassion, and creation care together rather than forcing a choice between them. The conversation also gets at the heart of Season 6's central question: why is Christian community so hard to cultivate? Al's answer is direct. The church has largely failed at discipleship, forming individuals in private piety rather than communities that embody the values of the kingdom in every arena of life. He shares stories of congregations where holistic mission has genuinely taken root, names the false gospels most tempting to American churches right now, and closes with a candid account of where he is finding hope in a moment that makes despair feel like the easier option. Christ Among the Classes: The Rich, the Poor, and the Mission of the Church by Al Tizon Whole and Reconciled – Baker Publishing Group Christian Witness in Smaller Membership Congregations with Jon Anderson Missio Dei: The Church Sent with Edwin Ortiz-Rivera and Chris Steubing Recruiting, Equipping, and Empowering Church Leaders with Clara King and Dwight Zscheile

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The Early Church Was Figuring It Out Too

What does first century Christianity have to teach the church about belonging today? In this episode of the Pivot Podcast, Dr. Kristofer Phan Coffman, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, joins hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to explore the early church as a community of genuinely unlike people navigating real social upheaval. From the chaos of the Roman Empire to Paul's fledgling congregations scattered across the Mediterranean, Kristofer helps us see that the early church was not a settled institution with established patterns. It was a community figuring out, often under pressure, what it meant to belong to one another across real difference. That history has direct implications for church leaders today. Kristofer challenges the assimilation patterns that quietly shape much of North American Christianity and invites leaders to ask hard questions about who feels at home in their communities and why. Drawing on Paul's letters and the witness of Acts, he points toward self-awareness and deep listening as the foundational practices for forming Christian community in a fragmented cultural moment. Genesis to Revelation: A Bible Overview with Kristofer Phan Coffman Walking the Narrow Road: Milestones in Church History with Jennifer Hornyak Wojciechowski Crash Course: Church with Stephanie Luedke

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God Doesn't Say Follow Your Bliss

What does it mean to find your identity in Christ, and what does the Old Testament have to say about it? In this episode of the Pivot Podcast, Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, walks hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm through the Bible's vision for human community, from the boundaries woven into creation in Genesis, to the covenant at Sinai, to the prophets calling Israel back to account. Along the way, she challenges the modern assumption that identity is something we construct from within, offering instead a picture of people called into being by God and sent into the world to be a blessing. From the call of Abraham to the Sabbath commandment to the words of Amos, Kathryn shows how scripture consistently orients us away from self-fulfillment and toward the flourishing of others, especially the most vulnerable. This is the first of a two-part series on biblical community at Pivot Podcast, and it offers church leaders a grounding and hopeful framework for navigating a culture that has largely forgotten what community is for.

What to Say (and Not to Say) to People Who Are Suffering

Why does God allow suffering? It's one of the oldest and most urgent questions in human experience, and Dr. Rolf Jacobson has lived inside it. Diagnosed with bone cancer at 15 and losing both legs, then decades later walking alongside his brother Karl and close friend Mike through simultaneous cancer diagnoses, Rolf has wrestled with that question personally, pastorally, and theologically. In this conversation with host Dwight Zscheile, he draws on the theology of the cross, the Psalms, and the hard-won wisdom of his own experience to offer some of the most grounded and practical guidance you'll hear on faith, suffering, and Christian community. Rolf talks about what to say and what not to say to someone in crisis, why the impulse to explain suffering usually backfires, and what it looks like for a congregation to truly show up for someone going through the worst. He also shares the story behind his book God Meets Us in Our Suffering, co-authored with Karl and Michael Pancoast, and why he believes the theology of the cross is not abstract doctrine but the most practical pastoral theology there is. Dr. Rolf Jacobson is Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary. The Grace of Just Showing Up (With Cheetos) - Mockingbird God Meets Us in Our Suffering – Baker Publishing Group God and Grief and Loss: Turning on the Light with Michelle Bryant Powell

A Crowd Is Not a Community

What does real church community cultivation require? The Rev. Dr. Eun Strawser, physician, author, and pastor of Ma Ke Alo'o, a network of multiplying missional communities in Honolulu, Hawaii, has spent years working out a practical answer to that question. After planting her first church and growing it to 450 people, she realized a crowd had gathered but a community hadn't really formed. Her second church plant took a radically different approach, starting with 15 people, a discipleship core, and weekly community dinners before ever launching a Sunday service. In this conversation with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm, Eun makes the case that discipleship is the missing link in most churches' understanding of community. She shares what it looks like to form people for neighborhood presence rather than church volunteerism, how to make locally rooted invitations that actually move people, and why the vision of the early church in Acts 2 is less about miraculous growth and more about a countercultural way of life together. If your church is serious about church community building that goes beyond filling seats, this episode is a place to start. Recruiting, Equipping, and Empowering Church Leaders with Clara King and Dwight Zscheile Starting a Fresh Expression of Church with Michael Beck, Dwight Zscheile, and Dee Stoke Starting a Fresh Expression of Church with Michael Beck, Dwight Zscheile, and Dee Stoke Ma Ke Alo o - Home Centering Discipleship: Connecting the Church to Community Development-Rev. Dr. Eun K. Strawser, Melissa Cabagbag, Kelci Schedler » Christian Community Development Association

The Two Things That Have Always Renewed the Church

Why is Christian community so hard to cultivate in contemporary culture? In this episode of Pivot Podcast, host Dwight Zscheile continues his conversation with Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski, a professor of church history at Luther Seminary, tracing the deep cultural roots of our present challenge. From the Enlightenment's reimagining of the human person as an autonomous individual to the seismic cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, Jennie and Dwight examine how Western culture arrived at a place where shared frameworks for truth and the common good have largely dissolved, and how both mainline and evangelical churches have accommodated themselves to that story in ways that have undermined their witness. But the conversation doesn't stop at diagnosis. Jennie draws on two thousand years of church history to identify what has actually produced renewal: communities defined by credible Christian living and the clear proclamation of the gospel. From the mendicant movements of the High Middle Ages to the witness of St. Francis, the pattern holds. In a culture that measures human value by productivity and self-optimization, the message of grace turns out to be genuinely strange and genuinely needed. This episode offers church leaders both an honest reckoning with the forces shaping their congregations and a historically grounded reason for hope.

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