Pastor As Gardener (Part 2)

We continue our conversation with pastor and author Matt Erickson of Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee. The job of many pastors feels like that of a CEO, with a focus on leadership strategy and the "three Bs": buildings, budgets, and butts in seats. This conversation offers a slower, deeper, and more hopeful way to think about church health, discipleship, and long-term spiritual formation.

We dig into the sequoia metaphor: doing work you may never see mature, trusting God with fruit you can’t control, and learning to “know the soil” of a local congregation. That leads into the daily practices that make this possible, from deep roots in a pastor’s own life with God to the courage to let certain ministries die and become compost for what comes next. Then we take a hard turn into prayer, including Simone Weil’s claim that “unmixed attention is prayer,” and why contemplative attention can be a distinctly Christian practice rather than mere mindfulness.

From there, Matt helps us frame pastoral work inside Charles Taylor’s “secular age,” where belief is an option and we all live under cross-pressure from competing ideas and value sets within a larger secular frame. We talk about the constant temptation to become a religious salesperson in a spiritual marketplace and why “bearing witness” could be a better model. We also wrestle with orthodoxy, the role of the creeds as family story, and the difference between right belief and lived faithfulness. Finally, we go straight at the question many pastors dread: how to pastor through Trumpism, political idolatry, and public Christian compromises, with the Black church and voices like Howard Thurman and Bonhoeffer shaping the horizon.

Catch Part 1 of this conversation here.

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Transcript

Welcome Back And Why Part Two

Randy 0:06

I'm Randy, the pastor half of the podcast, and my friend Kyle's a philosopher. This podcast hosts conversations at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and spirituality.

Kyle 0:15

We also invite experts to join us, making public a space that we've often enjoyed off-air around the proverbial table with a good drink at the back corner of a dark pub.

Randy 0:24

Thanks for joining us, and welcome to a pastor and a philosopher walking to a bar. Well, friends, we are back with my friend, Matt Erickson. Matt is a pastor of Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he wrote the book Pastor as Gardener. And it's a lovely book. We uh released part one of this conversation. I don't know what, two weeks ago, something like that, whenever we release episodes. So if you haven't listened to the first episode, you should probably go do that to contextualize this. But I'm excited about more conversations with Matt.

Kyle 1:01

Yeah, this is one of those conversations that was we expected it to be fun, but it was more fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or it went places maybe we didn't expect. It helped that we were in person. So uh, you know, those bodily cues and things uh could make the conversation go in a way that it might not have on Zoom. Uh, and it ended up being longer and richer than we thought. So we decided to give you part two. Yeah, well, Matt Erickson, welcome back to Pastor and Philosopher. Welcome to a bar.

Matt 1:43

It is so great to be here, Kyle.

Kyle 1:44

Yeah, excited to finish the conversation with you. Absolutely.

Sequoias Versus Church Scoreboards

Randy 1:48

So, speaking of a bit of humility, another theme throughout the book, which reminds me of Wendell Berry, my favorite Wendell Berry poem, The Mad Farmer or the Manifesto. You talk about pastoring being this slow process, and again, using leading into the the gardener's metaphor of um kind of what Paul's talking about there in like we're we're tilling ground and working ground that we have no idea what the fruit is going to look like, and it might not be born by the time we're done pastoring here in this field. And um, I like that. It reminds me of that. Yeah, there's a phrase in that Wendell Berry poem that says plant sequoias that is like two words that come back to me over and over and over again in my life and in my pastoral ministry, because this idea, I mean, I just saw a photo the other day of a person standing in front of a 3,000-foot sequoia. It made me emotional just looking at the photo, right?

Kyle 2:44

Probably meant 300 feet, right? No, I'm sorry, 3,000-year-old. 3,000-year-old sequoia. Did I say 3,000 foot? That makes sense. My bad.

Randy 2:52

3,000-year-old sequoia, which just that idea will give you an existential crisis or warm you from the inside out, right? Um maybe both. Yeah. And I love that idea of reminding myself you're planting sequoias, you know. However, my cynical side reads that and thinks, man, I don't know a lot of pastors who think that way, to be honest with you. Um, I in even more than that, and I hate to like this is a classic pastoral move to blame the board, right? But um even more than that, I don't know many elder boards or leadership boards, teams that lead pastors and lead churches who think that way. You know, we want to see, we're very addicted to numbers. We're addicted to the attendance numbers weekly and what that translates to yearly, and what that translates to our budget. We're addicted to budget numbers, we're addicted to baptism numbers. We've talked to philosophers of gaming who were fascinated when I talk about how like baptisms are like a feature for success.

Kyle 3:59

That actually made it into his book. Did I tell you that?

Randy 4:01

That made it into his book. It's in his book. That's ridiculous. We got to talk to T again. But when I told him that that like some churches will seed a baptism service by having people who've already been baptized, who already are in the fold, go down and say, I'm gonna get baptized, or raise their hands in order for other people to do it, right? All of that, I mean, we could tell stories about how addicted to numbers pastoral teams and church boards are. So, how do we get from that reality to planting sequoias and to tilling and working ground that you're you may or may not see the fruit of? Those are two very different sets of priorities, and you're gonna be looking for two very different kinds of people, even. Yeah. And you're gonna be firing one person based on the fruit. You know what we could talk about that for a long time.

Matt 4:49

I think we certainly could. And um, when you think about the preoccupation with numbers, again, for me, that's a subset of control. We are trying to control a narrative about our church or about the reality of what's happening in the Western world or North America. And the reality most studies are showing right now is church is in decline in North America, and that's not just a mainline problem. Even in evangelical churches, um, all the growth is happening in multi-site churches and it's still in decline. So if that's the reality, we could celebrate, you know, 800 baptisms in a year or something like that, and yet in the big picture, there's a different story that that's being played out. And in light of that story, I don't want to be utilitarian, but that story for me uh hyper-emphasizes the need to be thinking way further into the future. Um I think about you know some of the monastic movements that you know that book How the Irish Saved Civilization or things like that, you know, it's like this idea that there was a preservation of culture sometime that happened even as things were declining. That's we can question that narrative, but the concept of saying I'm planting for the future, I'm planting sequoias, I think is something we have to cultivate in our imagination. I think the imagination about, you know, people talk about the three B's, buildings, budgets, and butts in the seats, right? Like if that's what our imagination is for church, that's a very small imagination. Let's get sequoia-like imagination there. And I think those are the sorts of things you see in scripture. Uh Paul is not saying, you know, hey, how many more Corinthians came to Corinth? Yeah. He's he's knowing the people, he's stepping inside of that. You know, there are places in Acts that talk about the thing. Yep. Uh, but I think even the reason Luke is telling that story is not just to do what we're doing today with baptisms and these things. I think he's trying to help people get a sense of what God is doing. It's like the church is caught up in the current of the Holy Spirit that they have no control over. They don't even understand it most of the time. And and so us being aware of that bigger picture and looking for the future generations, I think is super, super important in this time. I don't know if I answered your question, Randy, but no, you did.

Randy 7:10

I mean, it's the more we talk about it, the more depressed I get at the same time, you know, because uh I don't see an easy way out of that mindset. Yeah, I see uh like an absolute addiction to that mindset in the modern American church. I mean, I'm I'd be happy to be talked out of that.

Matt 7:27

I mean, I don't disagree with you, but I think one of the things you can do is cultivate your own imagination and cultivate the imagination of your local congregation and tell a different story and help people see what is happening now as part of a grand narrative that God is working out and that we're a part of. And uh all through this book I have little sections out of a book called The Man Who Planted Trees. It starts every chapter. It's a little kind of parabolic book, it's not a Christian book or anything like that, but it's all about a guy who nobody knows his name who basically changed the landscape of part of Europe after World War I by planting trees. It's a beautiful little story. If I would encourage people to take a read on it, it's it's worth reading. Inspiring.

Randy 8:11

Yeah, and also uh buy your church leadership team, pastor is gardener.

Kyle 8:18

And see see if the paradigm changes a little bit, right?

What Long-Term Pastoring Looks Like

Kyle 8:21

Yeah, yeah. While we're on trees, what does it look like practically to the Sequoia thing, right? It's a nice metaphor, but as probably the only three one of the three of us that has actually tried to plant a sequoia. And tried to plant a sequoia. We did, yeah, and it died. Um and it symbolized our marriage, so it was very sad when it died. Um but like to extend the metaphor, like that was never gonna survive here. Past a certain point, right? Best case, we were gonna put it in whatever house we bought, and maybe it would get a certain height or something. I don't know if it could even survive in this climate, probably not. So that metaphor breaks down at a certain point. But like as a pastor, what does it actually mean? Like, practically, how is your day-to-day different if you're doing a thing that you know is gonna outlive you? And that best case scenario, the next generation can pick up and run with it. Like today, what is your work? How does it look different than it would otherwise?

Matt 9:09

Yeah, I'm gonna say one part of that is is cultivating our own life with God. And so I talk about some aspects of that. Uh, we've touched on some of that already, that the roots have to be deep and rich in our own life with God. I don't want to put more pressure on the pastor, but there's a little part of it that I do want to put the emphasis on the vitality of our life with God. And then I do think there's a lot about, I mean, I use this metaphor of the gardening, being familiar with the soil of the local congregation. Uh, it's not a plug-and-play one size fits all thing. And so we have to be very attentive to what's the history of our congregation, what's the history of our city, what's the history of our denominational tradition sometimes that helps inform the way we do the work day by day. What do we what's the season of life of the church as well, I think, is worth paying attention to? Um, are there things that need to that God is bringing to life in a church? And so we want to put more energy behind that with people and time. Are there other things within our congregation that need to die? I think a lot of churches are utterly afraid to let aspects of the ministry die. And if you think about compost, nothing that dies is devoid of life for what comes next. So some of these everyday things of just paying attention to what we're giving time to, and I think being with people is a huge part of that as well. Um, being willing to spend yourself with people like Jesus did. Um, he had a movement of 12, and here we are today talking about him.

Randy 10:36

Yeah, I love that thought, Matt. Uh, I I think a huge part of that, Kyle, is as pastors asking ourselves what we're motivated by over and over again, right? Because I can't tell you how many pastors I've talked to who um who will say things like, Oh, you did that? I could never do that because I'd lose my church. Or I could never do that because I'd get fired, right? Or I could never do that because we would start losing people and I don't know, you know, I could I could keep going. But um there's just some things that I think as pastors I want to take our jobs seriously enough to say there's some things that are just really, really important about who we are and what we do. And one of those is just being faithful to the to the leadership of the Holy Spirit. Um, and sometimes I think there are times when we pastors know the Spirit is leading us in a direction, inviting us into a different space or our church into a different space or convict like pushing us to say something, do something different, and we don't do it because we know that it's gonna have ramifications maybe for our bottom line, for our job, for our um for the butts in the seats, for the three B's that you were talking about just a moment ago. So I think I would love to see more pastors who are who are motivated um by the by the better things than the bottom lines or the three B's or whatever. I think a lot of things would change if we were motivated by different things.

Kyle 12:07

Yeah.

Matt 12:08

I think another thing uh that that maybe ties in with that a little bit, and it might sound like a pat answer, Andrew Root in his book The Pastor in a Secular Age, and I mentioned some parts about this, he basically says that the key aspect of pastoral ministry in this time is prayer. Yeah. And and so it feels so trite to say, to answer your question, Kyle, but I think it's relevant that that pastors must be people of prayer. And not, I don't mean that in some, again, guilt-inducing, shame-inducing way, but learning to pray, learning to be attentive to God, learning to pray with people, learning to teach people how to pray. I think a lot of people are eager for spirituality. And I don't mean that again in a utilitarian way, but I think it's actually part of how we're made.

Kyle 12:59

Yeah.

Matt 13:00

And pastors need to be more than logistical mechanics of religious activity. They need to be people who are stepping into that deep territory with God.

Kyle 13:13

Yeah.

Attention As Prayer And Presence

Randy 13:14

So speaking of that, that's a perfect segue, Matt, because you talked about prayer in your book a fair amount. And you quoted Simone Vey, and it's a beautiful quote, but it also brings up some things that we've talked about recently because we had an episode where we talked about prayer in kind of unconventional ways, right? But let me just quote your or say what you quoted. Simone Vey said this attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposed faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. I love that quote. Um What do you think Simone meant by that? And I think Kyle's gonna kind of push back on it a little bit, and I think a lot of people would push back on it, even though that resonates, that reflects what I would call my prayer life more than anything right now, to be honest with you. Because I am in one of those spaces where sometimes I have words, but a lot of times I don't. But it feels like I'm still in prayerful moments, I would say. So tell me your thoughts. Why'd you include that in the book?

Matt 14:17

I find that quote so provocative, and I don't know if I can answer what I think Simone Vay meant by it. What does it mean to you then? I think she I think she was uh very hard to understand some of what she was getting at in some of her writing, but for me that comes back to what I would describe as contemplative prayer, which is where I've been moving more and more over the last years of attention being a form of focus upon God that is there in set times, but is also there in in times where I'm in a conversation with someone where I might be walking down the street, and part of that is awareness, but also for me is a bit of the awareness that God is present everywhere, and that the problem isn't that God isn't someplace, it's that I'm just not attentive to who God is, how God is present, what God might be uh doing or inclining me toward in some way. And so that is part of why that quote is so powerful for me. Um and it was interesting. Um, I'm reading this book by Christian Weyman and Miroslav Wolff, uh, and they actually talk about the same quote and kind of wrestle back and forth with it, and I found that pretty pretty fascinating in this book that just came out. Um, it was just on my mind because of of that quote as well. Yeah seeing them wrestle with that and not agree with each other about what Simone Vay meant there. Yeah. So go ahead, Kyle and shit all over this.

Kyle 16:02

Well, now I'm curious what both had to say about that. I think maybe we come back to that later. I can pull it up.

Matt 16:07

I have the book here.

Kyle 16:08

Yeah, so I read that I I liked this chapter, and I read now I have another question about it in a second. Um, but I read that quote and thought, isn't that just reductionism? Which is a thing I get accused of fairly. Um, like, isn't isn't she saying who knows what she actually meant, but it seemed to me on the surface that's very similar to I think something in our conversation about prayer that you had quoted from Richard Rohr, and and my response was you don't need God for that. Like, isn't that reducing this phenomenon that we think of as a conversation with God? If you're asking a kid what prayer is, that's what it is, right? Insofar as a kid has any idea what God is, you're talking to God, and you're it seems to me pulling God out of the picture entirely by saying that it's really about attention. Um and maybe it's the Kierkegaard in me, I don't know if God isn't required. Uh it doesn't seem like prayer to me. Like it doesn't seem like Christianity to me, right? If if God doesn't have to be there for it to happen. Um, but as I thought about it, I thought, well, maybe we could re-reframe it. Maybe we could put it as a conditional, right? We could say if God exists, then attention is prayer. Yes. Attention reduces to prayer, even, right? Because if God is the fundamental reality, everything takes place, as you like to say, in Christ, then as the closer I pay attention to something, the closer I am in communion with God. It's Brother Lawrence. I'm sweeping the floor and God is there, right? But on the converse of that would be if God does not exist, then prayer reduces to attention, which is what I thought that was saying, but maybe not because she's assuming that God exists, presumably, right? Yeah. Um so I'm gonna come back to this in a moment. First, I want your take to that, uh, but then I'm gonna ask you about Charles Taylor, and I'm gonna connect this up with it. But up first I want to hear what you think about that.

Matt 17:51

Yeah, I I think Vay presumes or assumes that God does exist. And so I think that your first rendering, if God does exist, then attention sort of becomes prayer by uh a journey. And and for me, it also connects with um uh in Eastern Orthodoxy, Theophan the Recluses uh kind of summarizes the Eastern tradition of contemplative prayer by talking about how we descend with the mind into the heart and there are attentive to God or or leaning into the God who is there. And so I connect what Vay is saying with that. Again, that's my take on it, and I assume God exists. That's a big assumption. Uh that's a different podcast. Probably necessary for the job. As a pastor, I do actually it isn't. Yeah. Yeah, that's that is true.

Pastoring Inside A Secular Age

Kyle 18:43

Okay, so that raises the question for me anyway. What does it mean to to pastor in a secular age? Because that's really the focus of that chapter. So, first, if you could tell us what a secular age is in the way that you're talking about it, because it's kind of a precise thing. It's not just necessarily what a listener might think of when they think of what it means to be secular. We're using some precise language here and some some precise concepts. So if you don't mind just framing it there, what you're doing in that chapter, and then I'll have a follow-up.

Matt 19:10

Yeah, I mean, uh, I'm leaning so hard into the work of Charles Taylor, which is, I think, hard to understand. I'm not a philosopher by training. I was an English major, which helps a little bit, but not to the same degree that you have, Kyle. But Taylor's basically saying there's three different senses of the secular age, and where he's trying to get at is we've come to an age where whether you are a believer or not, we exist in a social imaginary where the assumption is everything is disenchanted. And so we we're all operating, whether we're whether we're Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, whoever else, it within especially the Western world, this assumed reality of uh the world is disenchanted. And and so there is this uh what he calls cross-pressure, both sort of religion and anti-religion, um, sort of enchantment, disenchantment that's pressuring people all the time, that then leads to this uh Nova effect, all these different sort of increasing pluralism happening at the same time. So pluralistic views of religion, spirituality just proliferate um because of the pressures that we're under in this social imaginary that Taylor describes in the secular age.

Kyle 20:30

Yeah, sort of like a marketplace of ideas kind of situation. But it's important to note, I think, that it's it's not this because some listeners might hear that and think, well, you pick the true one, right, and you batten down the hatches and you defend it, right? You don't get tempted away. But but that would be to miss, I think, the force of the point. This is not something one can opt out of. Correct. You're born in this century, ergo things appear to you in a certain way. Right. The marketplace exists and you're in it. Right. Um, and and so so to see something uh to be cross-pressured is not a choice, and it's not something that one can train themselves out of. It's to, as I try to put it to my students, it's to see belief in God or faith as an option. Right. It's to have the question at all, right? Yeah, yeah.

Matt 21:12

And you can't go back to an earlier era, you can't choose to do that. Where even to do that is an example of the Nova effect, like I'm trying to do something else.

Kyle 21:20

It's actually I remember reading in grad school, we were there was a class on Plato, and we we did some background reading about like mythopoeicism of the ancient world. And it's like to see the gods and what's going on in your city and what's going on in your farm and in your family life as one thing in a way that it's literally not possible for us to transition fully into that mindset. We can think of it, but we're thinking of it as something that someone else used to think that is no longer truly accessible to us. Right. And something similar is true, I think, for the authors of the New Testament. So that puts evangelicals in a bind for sure. But like uh, I literally can't. Go back to prior to this, what he calls the imminent frame. Right. It's not it's not open to me to do that. Right. And this because the enlightenment happened.

Matt 22:07

It's happened and you can't go back. You can't put it back in the box. And that's, I think, also where Taylor's social imaginary as kind of the atmosphere is more helpful of a concept than when people talk about worldview, which almost feels like something I choose and line it all up. Taylor's saying, hey, we're the water we're swimming in, this is the secular age. You can't be in different water.

Kyle 22:30

Yeah. And so then the question is, and this is very helpful. I'm glad you went that route rather than the worldview route, which is tried and beaten to death, and the apologists have kind of ruined it. Um but here's the connection that I wanted to make to prayer about that. Because the question then becomes, okay, well, how do you pastor in that? Yeah. Where everything is an option, everything's on the table, including for the pastor, right? Um, so in order to make sense of that claim about attention, I had to make a distinction. A distinction between assumptions about God. That's cross-pressure.

Matt 23:00

Yeah.

Kyle 23:00

If you assume this, then this, if you assume the opposite of that, then this follows, right? That's the imminent frame, as far as I can understand it. Yeah. And so if that's right, and if we really do live in this marketplace of spiritualities or whatever you want to call it, what does it mean to be a Christian pastor? And or what is the function, what is the purpose of pastoral work in that? Is it just to try to be the best salesman in that marketplace? Right? Yeah. We have the truth in some sense, we think. Yeah. And so I'm going to represent it the best. And to be, you know, completely transparent. I got a little bit of that towards the end of that chapter in yours, where you're trying to make sense of this. If it's to be the best salesman, how do we then avoid that thing we've been talking about, that church's business model? Because there are ways to be the best salesman in this frame. And whether they have anything to do with Jesus or not, or have very much to do with agrarianism or not, you know?

Matt 23:54

Yep. I think I think a big part of it, and this is where I do I find Andrew Root's uh work helpful in in writing on this. Um a big part of it, I think, is because it is just the reality

Bearing Witness Not Selling Religion

Matt 24:08

in which we live, we can't choose that. Um, we could just be a salesman in another way, but I like how Root talks about bearing witness. We're we're entering into places and bearing witness to the God who is. And for me, that connects with biblical imagination. I mean, Acts 1.8, Jesus says you're going to be my witnesses, Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. And that both is, I think, relieving of pressure. So in that cross-pressured state, uh, there's there's the intensity of having to figure this out. And instead, Root talks about, you know, when we're showing up in a hospital room, we're not trying to manufacture the presence of God. We simply bear witness to what we have known or what we sometimes even experience as absence and enter into the absence with people and just try to, again, I think it's a fine line to say, I'm not cult, I'm not creating the presence of God, but I'm maybe through prayer, through the reading of scripture, just trying to testify that there is a God who is, and we can't avoid the fact that it might just feel like to people one more option. And yet I believe there is a transcendent reality. I believe there is an enchantment in a sense of the divine touching earth. And so I'm gonna I'm gonna bear witness to that. I'm gonna speak of it, I'm gonna testify to it. Not in a way to be a salesperson, I don't think, Kyle, but you can check me on this, but simply to to say this is who I think God is. Uh, this is what I think it means to be with God. I think even going back to Gilead a little bit is uh sometimes I do that with my mind, sometimes I do that with my heart, sometimes it's just by being bodily present, embodying something in a certain space as a pastor, it's sort of a weird role. You actually are standing there in some people's imagination, and I think in the best biblical sense, you're standing there in some ways as an as an ambassador, as a representative, as a witness.

Randy 26:16

What does it look like to what is pastoring as a Christian? How does that work? Are you just trying to be the best salesman, right? I think it's one of the more beautiful things about what we do, and really what you're trying to get at this book, Matt, is at its best, our profession, our vocation, really is an ancient kind of practice. And we're trying to root ourselves at its best in some just like questions that humanity has been asking for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And um I think reminding ourselves of that, not trying to be a slave of the moment and not trying to get up on the um the best new you gotta have the newest, most innovative vision and concepts and strategies and goals and and and ways to get your teams working in those ways. Um, I think that's where you can kind of lose yourself. I I hope I'm getting at what you were what you were getting at, Kyle, because you guys were talking about Nova effects and shit that I don't know really. But um I think rooting ourselves in these ancient practices and going back to what it could mean to be a spiritual person and reminding ourselves of that as pastors, and then reminding our congregations of that is kind of getting at what it really means to be a pastor, I think.

Kyle 27:37

Yeah. You were gonna ask a follow-up. Yeah, you go ahead. Well, now I wanted to go two ways because your your vocation is ancient, but so is mine. Speaking as the philosopher, not as what I actually do on a daily basis, and and ours have always been intention, right? Um explain that. Socrates had some some awkward conversations with the priests, sure. And there have always there's always been an uneasy relationship between someone who is um speaking on behalf of God and someone who is at least claiming to follow the argument where it leads, um, which may or may not lead to anywhere in the vicinity of what the people speaking on behalf of God think that it think that it says, right? Um in if this is a marketplace, we will often find ourselves as competitors in that marketplace. Um and may the best argument win, I guess. I don't know. Um but but I don't think pastoring is that. I don't it doesn't seem to me that it is that, and yet it's it's difficult for me to see what it is in the context of the frame that Taylor describes. Yeah and so I guess I was gonna ask you, uh Matt, what if it turned out? Does I don't know how to even phrase this, does the idea that your efforts as a pastor might not win out in this marketplace that we're in, right? Does that do anything? Do you view that first of all as a real possibility, I guess? And if so, what does it do anything to your faith? Does it do anything to your sense of your own vocation that you might lose the argument, so to speak, or that the sequoia might die. Sorry, to my wife. Yeah. So just sad image.

Matt 29:26

Uh but I love that I love that you tried to plant a sequoia. I'm actually now it makes me want to do that. Yeah. I mean, I I think from the the angle of uh the story in our culture right now, if you just said what's happening with the church and it's in decline, you would say, well, that actually could be exactly what you're saying. Maybe the maybe the story is dying out. And uh so I think that's a a reality in the sense of what we're seeing happening in North America about the church in decline, but I view that as different from the story. Um and I know you framed it in terms of what if the argument isn't winning? And I would always bring it back to a story. And I just believe there is such depth and beauty to the story of Christ that even if everything was fading away, I would still love that story and live that story. Uh does it shake my faith? Oh man, I have all sorts of moments of deep doubts or despair about all sorts of different things. Um but the the thing that that has become so core for me is just the the belief in Jesus incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and ascended. And creation kind of speaks of that to me. I still wrestle with all sorts of questions and those sorts of things, but I'm not even sure if I'm getting at really where you're where your question is. I don't think I have a a naive faith. Maybe I have a a post-cynical second naivety, if I can borrow somebody else's phrase, um that it's just very core to me. Yeah. And even if it was all fading away, which we've seen many times in history where that the store, you know, like the story of history in relation to Christianity, and even in parts of the world today, it's just really dire. And yet beautiful things rise from ashes, resurrection happens, and for me that's just so beautiful and compelling. I can't get over the the wonder of it, I guess.

Randy 31:51

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, for me, when I feel like this thing called church is failing, or when I see things like a couple days ago, uh a pastor blessing a golden statue that was built for Trump, or that Trump had built and put up to worship him, and that pastor said blessed it and then said that was the biggest, greatest honor of my pastoral career. And when I see that, I just want to say, what is the church anymore? You know, like what is Christianity even, if this is what it looks like. And so for me, our success doesn't look like winning or losing an argument as much as it does um inhabiting a way of living um and living in the way of Jesus, and that's really hard to lose because I just want to say, like, if I if we can if a few of us um are dedicated to the way of Jesus and living and showing up in this embodied fashion in uh embodying Christ, um you we can lose all the arguments you want, and I'll still feel like we're winning, you know? So um I just think it's a different category.

Kyle 33:03

Yeah.

Orthodoxy Creeds And How We Live

Kyle 33:04

I don't want to get either of you in trouble with this question, but uh answer it, you know, to the extent that you're comfortable. What does this do to orthodoxy as an idea, as a concept? Um, because you might think that um once you even recognize that we're in an imminent frame and that things are options, things are sort of on the table in a way that they didn't used to be, and you're motivated to sort of stake out your claim in that space, you have to kind of be sensitive. I'm not a salesperson, but like you kind of have to be sensitive to, and I don't even like using the business metaphor, but you have to know who your audience is. You have to know what's going to be live to them, what's gonna be meaningful to them, and you have to sort of mold your message in a way to that will make sense to people who are also in that frame, including yourself, right? Post-Enlightenment, whatever. Um the church has a long history of resisting doing that, and I mean the church, like the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church. I I knew some Eastern Orthodox folks who like to quip that the Romans were the first Protestants, because the you know, the filioque thing, they were out already, right? You take one step and and you've already capitulated to culture, to say nothing of enlightenment thinking. So if we're in that space, is there any sense in which orthodoxy is a thing we want to aim for? Is it a useful concept? Should we abandon it? I think we should. Um I want to put that to the pastors, yeah.

Matt 34:33

Oh man. How to answer this question. I mean, I still I still hold on to orthodoxy in in a broad sense. Um and I view uh I view it again partially as a story. What's the story of of the church in terms of tradition that has significance? I view it as a conversation at the same time as an unfinished conversation, so that might be different than than others. Um I do think culture and times are always changing, so we have to be adapting to that and aware of that. Uh one of the chapters, the Taylor chapter, is all about being aware of the environment, right, in which we're doing the gardening work. We can't just pull something as like abstract truth and and just think if we just say it the same way, the same way forever, it's always going to make sense. And so there's always interpretive moves that have to happen in there. But I still I still think it's valuable, but it depends maybe what you mean. Um, is am I just holding up this standard and saying you're in, you're out. Um again, I view it as a conversation. How do we enter into this? I mean, our church still will recite the Apostles' Creed once every month when we do communion. Um, because I view it as I say when when we get up to say it, this is part of the family story. Imagine you're at a table and somebody's telling one of the great stories. That's how I view what's happening there. So I think it's vitally important, but I think it's part of that conversational story of the church that's still ongoing.

Randy 36:09

I love the description of why we say the creeds, and I I love, I love the creeds. I mean, I I want to say, and I I don't want to fully commit myself to this, but I'll just say um I think orthodoxy matters in as much as it influences and shapes the way we live. Um I think so. Um and I think we've certainly grown to we we've identified Christianity as orthodoxy, and I think that's a really bad mistake. I mean, I'm just I'm getting together with someone very soon who's really angry that I believe that all pu people will have life in the end. Um and I want to know why this why you're so committed to this piece of orthodoxy that says you can't be a Christian if unless you believe that a majority of humans are gonna burn an eternal conscious torment forever and every free time.

Kyle 37:04

I mean, that's very narrowly orthodoxy. You have to be in a niche for that to be orthodoxy.

Randy 37:08

But I would say the reason that he's angry with me about that is because of orthodoxy, because you can't be a Christian and and and believe that stuff. And so I think um I have a really uh complicated relationship and view of orthodoxy. But again, yeah, I just read the gospels and re read the stuff that Jesus said about what I believed versus what I did, and I it tells me that I there's something amiss when we get too fixated on orthodoxy, and there's um there's we're we're idolizing um categories and types and beliefs and in orthodoxy um at the cost of what Jesus is really after. And I just want to say we gotta be willing to leave that down, not be dogmatic, hold to the creeds, I think is beautiful to the extent that they serve us in the way that they're pointing us to Jesus.

Kyle 38:00

Thank thanks for going there. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully we both have a job, but you know, yeah.

Pastoring Through Trumpism And Power

Randy 38:06

Um last question for me. Yeah. Um, and this is the one I I I had to call you ahead of time because we're bros and I didn't want to, you know, didn't want to get me in trouble. Well, didn't want to get you in trouble, but also don't want to be the dick that asks his friend uh, you know, the got this is not a gotcha question. It's just as I was reading through your book, Matt, I have a I have a there's a question in my mind that has not led up for the last 10 years. And it's been even more pressing in the last couple. And that question is how do I pastor in the time uh in the era of Trump and Trumpism in our country? Um, we are seeing a cultural phenomenon happen, and we've seen things come out of the church that I think we've we've all been disgusted by and shocked by in many ways. And I mean, there's rarely a sermon that goes by that I write, or I mean, how many times have we had to figure out do I have to say something about what just happened in our world on Sunday morning, right? I mean, all the time. And constantly the question is how am I supposed to pastor when we have a person like Trump as president? Right. Um, and I was bummed to not read that your thoughts in the book, you know, because I didn't I didn't see it. You you talked a lot about COVID and George Floyd and civil rights crisis, and you'll fill in more, but um I I wish I had heard that. So yeah, tell me about why you didn't put that in. Was that just like I don't want to get in trouble? Because that's fair. Or was it like it just tell me, tell me your thoughts.

Matt 39:49

Yeah, it was interesting when when uh I started thinking about this as you asked me that ahead of time. And um when the book was written originally was a while back. And so part of that was reflective of the first uh Trump presidency. I mean it was in that time, but in our congregation during that season, and and the book was finished before the second Trump presidency. Um, for our church in that season, it really was first of all, the pandemic um just changed so many many things. Churches within the city limits of Milwaukee, you know this, we had to like really adapt so quickly with COVID. And then the racial justice around George Floyd became a crisis moment in our church. And that really loomed larger uh in that moment for me. So it wasn't an intentional choice to not put something in about that. Okay, yeah um, and then there's also I I think there is like sometimes for me, and it's not really related to the book, but how much airtime do I want to give this individual who's pretty much happy to have airtime, good, bad, or ugly? Um, do I want to feed that? Yeah, or do I not?

Kyle 41:01

Yeah.

Matt 41:01

Um, for for our church and the way that I'm trying to navigate that as a church that has people across the whole political spectrum, Eastbrook's been like that for its whole history. And so, how do we keep people together? Uh very much trying to keep in the kingdom. Like, hey, we are we are kingdom people, and that can be a way to avoid talking about things, or it can be a way of pressing into talking about certain things. So trying to do that, you know, talking our church does a lot with immigrants and refugees. Um, and so talking about those things, yeah, um, addressing why we are uh we we use a phrase becoming seven, a revelation seven, nine and ten church, people from every tribe, tongue, and nation will say, like, no matter what happens in the world around us, there's nobody who's a second-class citizen in our church. And if we see that happening, which can happen, then we address it within our church community, and we also move out into the community around some of those things. Um, I think it's a challenging time because I think Trump, and I don't think he's the only person who's done this, um, has um utilized the church to realize their own ends. And so I think that's something to for us to be very attentive that we do not become a pawn in the hands of somebody else's purposes. Yeah. And which has been happening in the history of the church, right? Yeah, sure, sure. And I think there's some pronounced ways that we feel that right now and experience that for sure.

Bonhoeffer And Learning From The Black Church

Randy 42:30

Yeah, thank you. Um, and you you answered this a little bit in that answer that you just gave, but you talk about Bonhoeffer a fair amount in your book, which I love and appreciate. Yeah. Um, Bonhoeffer challenges the shit out of me as a pastor. I feel the same. Um, because I constantly am wondering what would Bonhoeffer do. Yeah. As we're living in this time where we see, let's just take you know, the last four months as an example, you know, at the end of January, I think end of January, beginning of February, we had a couple of people gunned down in the streets of Minneapolis, and ICE agents looking a lot like a fascist army, basically, um, running roughshod over a city just five hours away from us. Um, and then we have golden statues being built and pastors blessing them, or all this, and many people in our congregation supporting to some some extent all of that and really supporting that person. When you ask yourself the question, Matt, what would Bonhoeffer do in a moment like this? Um, is this not worth comparing to 1930s Germany? Or is it worth saying, worth asking the question, how would Bonhoeffer respond to this? How would Bonhoeffer, how would people like Bonhoeffer pastor in this moment that we find ourselves in? So I'm just kind of like, how do you process this math?

Matt 43:54

Man, I wrestle with that same question because he's been one of my heroes since I first became a Christian in high school. I read Cost of discipleship and it yeah, it challenged me so deeply. And he continues to be one of these figures that I don't really know always what to do with. Uh he is one of my heroes. Uh, and is it the same kind of moment? I think there are some similarities. There are the other things that are utterly different.

Kyle 44:17

Yep.

Matt 44:18

Um, one of the things I know that he did, and I talk a little bit about it in the book, is that he he chose to cultivate a seminary community that was very different. It was a little bit off the grid. It got shut down pretty fast, but it was almost a semi-monastic training center for pastors so that he could nurture and cultivate uh people for ministry, knowing, I think Bonhoeffer knew and the confessing church knew that it was not going to last very long. And yet to support those pastors as they went out after that time and to create sort of relational networks in a time of deep crisis, obviously, in the church in Germany. So I think I see that as one of the actions that's worth investing in. And it connects with me with the idea of the gardener because a seminary, that word literally means a seedbed. And so he's doing something that's very small, not very noticeable, but has huge impact. And we talk about it, the book Life Together came out of that community. Um, that's an amazing book on Christian community, and it really came out of a time of crisis. So leaning into those crises and doing things that may not be on the radar, I think, is okay. Uh, one thing. And obviously, he did other things that were on the radar. The other thing that I've been maybe a little bit um realizing I need to hear, Jamar Tisbe, who's written a lot about uh racial justice, he uh made some statements not too long ago where he was saying, hey, people in this moment need to stop talking about World War II Germany. They need to start paying attention to the black church of America. And so I think where I've been trying to bring my attention to in this moment a little bit more is to pay attention to the black church in some different ways, to read a lot more Howard Thurman, uh, to pay attention to Martin Luther King and figure out what I can learn as a white pastor in 21st century Milwaukee, uh, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. How do I pay attention to what these brothers and sisters um experienced and how can I learn from that? How do they stand in the kingdom? And it's extraordinarily challenging. Yeah. Extraordinarily challenging.

Randy 46:28

Um because that'll get you in trouble doing that too.

Matt 46:31

It already has. Um, you know, that's part of why the racial justice thing was so big for us at Eastbrook was it was a challenging time because of some places that I aligned myself and things I was saying, and I'm still trying to learn and figure that out. Um, we went last uh Christmas break, my wife Kelly and and our youngest son David, we drove down, we needed to get out of town. We drove down to New Orleans. You gave me tons of food recommendations, which were amazing. Um, but along the way, we we stopped in Memphis and and stopped at the Lorraine Motel where uh Dr. King was shot, and we went through what's now the National Civil Rights Museum that's there, and so much of that museum is about faith because the story of the black church is interwoven with justice and righteousness. And I honestly, you know, if I use my old school language, I came out of that museum so convicted of ways that I am not stepping forward in the public sphere, and also maybe I haven't learned from some of these voices the way I should be. Yeah, yeah, that's really good.

Randy 47:42

Thank you.

Kyle 47:43

Probably also worth noting that Bonhoeffer himself had uh I don't know if I'd call it a conversion, but a significant influence on his later decision making, moving back to Germany, for example, and taking the stand that he did was because of his time at the Black Church in New York City.

Matt 47:57

So yeah, Reggie Williams' book, Bonhoeffer's Black Christ, is an amazing book on that, exploring his connections with Abyssinian Baptist Church and Harlem and all that. It's huge.

Randy 48:08

I would love for pastors just to have more conversations like this, right? Like where we can be honest and we can actually stand together a little bit and say, what if we together could say this does not look like Jesus? You know, like we have to say something. Yeah. I wonder if it's easy to feel isolated, alone, intimidated, scared of what the ramifications are going to be when I'm by myself. Yep. But when we're actually together, bonded together because of the gospel and the the way of Jesus, I think there's power in that as well. Yes, definitely. Um okay, so thank you. Thanks for humoring me and going there. And man, we could have a whole episode on how to pastor, how to do everything in the Trump era. Yeah, it'd be interesting for sure.

Shifting From CEO To Gardener

Randy 48:53

Um, going back to the beginning of the conversation, we talked about metaphors and we were talking about CEOs, and we were talking about leadership teams and churches and the paradigms and imaginations that they do or don't have for the stuff that we're talking about for pastor as gardener. How do we make our way from where we are now with kind of thin uh yeah, thin understandings and imaginations for what pastoral ministry can look like and what the church should be and can be? How do we get from where we are now, CEO mindsets, uh, you know, ish, to pastor as gardener, agrarian mindset and models, shepherding in the most beautiful ways. How do we do that? Because we've got church staffs and leadership boards full of people who see the thing in this way, in that CEO model. I I I'm very hope- what I'm trying to tell you is I love your book, but I'm I'm I'm a little bit skeptical that we're gonna see some of these changes.

Matt 49:56

I mean, I feel like if I was advertising my book, I'd say everybody should read my book and then uh dig into it and help figure out the way. I think part of what I'm trying to do is start a conversation. Again, I I don't know if I've got that figured out, Randy. Yeah I do believe it's a it's a shift in the imagination. And so the book really for me is about pastoral imagination, the way we see ourselves, the way we see our church. I think um Peterson again, Eugene Peterson was a big influence on me and the way we cultivate biblical imagination, not in a compressed, uh stifling way, but an expansive way, living into the story and helping our churches in our own lives enter into that sort of story, I think helps helps us a lot. And um, another thing too, I think, is for pastors to remember we are part of the congregation. We stand as part of the laos in the Greek word, the laity actually includes the pastor. And so we are not some removed citadel dwelling person over here. We are right in the midst of the community. So the more that we get into the soil of our churches, the more we get our hands dirty in people's lives, it will help with some of that as well.

Book Plug And Listener Calls To Action

Kyle 51:10

The book again is The Pastor as Gardener, a renewed vision for ministry. Matt Erickson, thanks so much for joining us.

Matt 51:16

Thank you so much, Kyle. Thanks, Randy.

Randy 51:17

Great to be with you guys.com/slash a pastor and a philosopher, where you can get bonus content, extra perks, and a general feeling of being a good person.

Kyle 51:48

Also, please rate and review the show in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. These help new people discover the show, and we may even read your review in a future episode. If anything we said pissed you off, or if you just have a question you'd like us to answer, send us an email at pastor and philosopher at gmail.com. Find us on social media at PPWB Podcast, and find transcripts and links to all of our episodes at pastor and philosopher.buzzsprout.com. See you next time. Cheers