Podcast
Pivot Podcast
Hosted by Faith+Lead · EN
Over the past few years, church leaders have been forced to respond to several global crises in the blink of an eye. In a moment with little information and lots of uncertainty, churches reinvented nearly every aspect of church.
Season 5 of the Pivot podcast explores the changing landscape of the church. Our co-hosts will dig into difficult questions that faith leaders are asking now, and provide an understanding of the deeper cultural shifts that account for the unraveling of inherited models of church. What are the four key pivots that today's church must make? New episodes post weekly on Thursdays.
31episodes
Episodes
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Augustine Was a Pastor First
6d ago00:33:55Tap to summarizeFor 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.
Transcribe →A Different Kind of Strength
2w ago00:43:04Tap to summarizeSecond 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.
Transcribe →The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You
3w ago00:37:01Tap to summarize"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.
Transcribe →The Church With No Budget, No Staff, and No Sunday Service
4w ago00:36:16Tap to summarizeTen 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.
Transcribe →Why the Ancient Church Might Have the Answer We're Missing
Jul 900:34:50Tap to summarizeEvery 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 TalentsAmerican Congregations by Mark ChavesThe Book — Practicing the WayThe Book of Common PrayerChristianity Rediscovered - Orbis Books
Transcribe →Why Is Cultivating Community in Church So Hard Right Now?
Jun 1100:44:31Tap to summarizeWhy 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.
Transcribe →Amen Means I Trust You
Jun 400:28:16Tap to summarizeThe 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
Transcribe →Half of Christians Say Faith Is Private. Here's What We're Losing
May 2800:31:58Tap to summarizeChurch 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 PressMissio Dei: The Church Sent with Edwin Ortiz-Rivera and Chris SteubingListening and Serving: Community-Based Ministry with F. Willis JohnsonFamily Systems: Tool for Ministry with Jules Erickson
Transcribe →You Don't Own the Spirit: The Meaning of Pentecost
May 2100:07:58Tap to summarizeWhat 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.
Transcribe →The False Choice That's Been Costing the Church for a Hundred Years
May 1400:38:25Tap to summarizeThe 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 TizonWhole and Reconciled – Baker Publishing GroupChristian 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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