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The SkyePod - Picking Pastors & Popes with Kaitlyn Schiess
00:26:51
Kaitlyn Schiess joins to discuss church structures. What are the major ways church hierarchies are organized and what are the pros and cons to these symptoms? And, why does she think church elders should wear pink aprons? Get the full episode...
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- [00:00]
Sky Jutani
What incentive does he have to tell these people anything other than what they want to hear?
- [00:06]
Caitlin Chess
Oh.
- [00:21]
Sky Jutani
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sky Pod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm Sky Jutani, and joining me today is my Holy Post colleague, Caitlin Chess. Hi. Hi, Caitlin.
- [00:30]
Caitlin Chess
Hi, Sky.
- [00:32]
Sky Jutani
It's good to have you back on the show. We see each other all the time. We do podcasts all the time. But you're not always on the Skypod, which is the place to be.
- [00:40]
Caitlin Chess
I speak only one other time. So exciting.
- [00:43]
Sky Jutani
Before we jump into the topic for today, I want you to notice I have a little baby can of diet Dr. Pepper.
- [00:49]
Caitlin Chess
Do we have a new sponsorship?
- [00:51]
Sky Jutani
No. We should. We should. But we talked about this a while ago. Phil and I Both love Diet Dr. Pepper, and a listener heard that and sent me a Diet Dr. Pepper hat.
- [01:04]
Caitlin Chess
Oh, my gosh.
- [01:05]
Sky Jutani
Yeah, it's still got the cardboard in it. Actually, he sent a couple of hats, so I suppose there's something. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because he also sent you a pink diet Dr. Pepper t shirt, which I'm holding up for. It says, I need a diet Dr. Pepper with a pitcher of a can, and it's pink.
- [01:28]
Caitlin Chess
I love that. That's adorable. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. Whoever said that, that's amazing.
- [01:33]
Sky Jutani
So there's a note with it and everything. You can collect this the next time you're in town, but I thought everyone would get a kick out of that.
- [01:40]
Caitlin Chess
Incredible.
- [01:41]
Sky Jutani
I'm not gonna wear this hat the whole time, but, yeah. Thank you. And if Dr. Pepper ever wants to be a sponsor of the Sky Pot or Holy Post or anything else we're doing.
- [01:50]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah, we're down.
- [01:51]
Sky Jutani
Yeah, give us a call. Okay.
- [01:53]
Caitlin Chess
Interested?
- [01:54]
Sky Jutani
Here's the deal. A new pope is going to be selected pretty soon because Pope Francis died. We've talked about that numerous times on the flagship show, the Papal Conclave is coming up. You've seen the movie, right?
- [02:07]
Caitlin Chess
I just recently saw it.
- [02:08]
Sky Jutani
Oh, good.
- [02:09]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah. And it did really solidify for me that I should be a Protestant, because I was like, I am too into this for the wrong reasons. Like, I watched it, and I often think, like, I would love to be a nun. I'm very attracted to the idea of being a nun, but watching that, I'm like, I'm very into the Catholic Church for bad reasons. Like, I was like, I like the drama. I like the outfits. I like the hierarchy. I like the. And I think that's why I should be a Protestant.
- [02:37]
Sky Jutani
Okay.
- [02:38]
Caitlin Chess
Those are bad reasons to Like Catholic Church.
- [02:40]
Sky Jutani
I mean, we'll get into that more perhaps in this episode, but if you haven't, like, apparently there's like a 1300% increase in the number of people streaming Conclave.
- [02:50]
Caitlin Chess
I Googled it the day after the Pope died. And all the articles that popped up were, like, interested in learning about Catholic hierarchy from this movie. Go. Here's all the places you can stream it. It was very explicitly about the Pope.
- [03:01]
Sky Jutani
Okay. So I was sitting down with Mike, our producer, talking through future episodes of Skypod and what we wanted to cover. And we talked. Oh, it'd be kind of cool to maybe get a historian on to talk about papal conclaves. Now the Pope is selected. And then I realized everyone and their brother is talking about that. It's going to be all over cable news and the coverage of the conclave coming up and the history and there's YouTube videos on that. I'm like, I don't know if we can really contribute anything helpful or different on this show. But it did bring up the broader question, which is why I invited you to come on to talk about just how do we select church leaders to be in general? The Catholics have their way and we'll get into some of that and. And different Protestant denominations have their own way. But I thought given there's a lot of people who are in the Holy Post media orbit, Holy Post plus subscribers and others who are like, really struggling with church stuff. And a lot of them are coming out of churches that were toxic or had really unhealthy leadership or lack of accountability or all manner of brokenness and messed up stuff. And so I thought it would be interesting to just do a survey of kind of how do different Christian traditions think about leadership? How do they select their leaders? What qualifications do they want for leaders? And what's that all look like? And why do they have these different ways of doing it? So rather than just focus on the papal conclave, as interesting and colorful and well decorated.
- [04:28]
Caitlin Chess
Dramatic.
- [04:28]
Sky Jutani
Dramatic as that is and as good as the movie was, I thought the movie was really.
- [04:32]
Caitlin Chess
Well, it was really good.
- [04:33]
Sky Jutani
Yeah, I wanted to branch out beyond that. Okay, so I want to do this in kind of two parts. Part number one, I want to talk about qualifications. What do different churches or maybe different eras of the church expect from their leaders? And therefore, what qualifications do they examine when selecting a leader? And then I think part two will deal with process stuff. So. Okay, Quality qualifications. I am fascinated by this topic and just what different churches and different cultures and different eras of the church have said a leader needs to have what? Gifts, qualities, proclivities, skills. I've seen it change dramatically even in my brief 49 years on this earth. So let's start just with the Catholic Church, though, because that's what's kind of launching this whole thing off. There's been a lot of popes, a lot of popes. There's been good popes, there's been bad popes. There's been weird popes. There's been multiple popes simultaneously.
- [05:40]
Caitlin Chess
Even weirder. Yeah.
- [05:42]
Sky Jutani
So how has the selection of a pope changed as far as qualifications in different eras? Because what we're looking for, like, there's even a debate right now about what should the Catholic Church emphasize in whoever the new pope is? What's changing?
- [06:00]
Caitlin Chess
Well, one thing I think is important to say that's both a change in the progression of the Catholic Church. And again, we've talked about this in various formats before. Like some we say Catholic Church because of the current Roman Catholic Church. But a lot of what we end up talking about with the history of the Catholic Church is just the history of the Church, especially for Protestants, like, we're part of the Western Church, broadly, a lot of this is our history. One thing I think is really important to say is just the increasing global nature of the papacy, so really early in the church. First of all, there's a lot more. We could say that we don't have time for that. A historian would be even better at, in terms of, like, how we went from local church leadership to, like, bishops over larger churches to the Bishop of Rome to, like, all of that is a. Is a developing history. But even once some of that's developed, it still is a little more centrally located, what the Pope has authority over. And as the Catholic Church engages in lots of global missions, in good ways and bad ways, that the Catholic Church becomes increasingly global. And then you especially add, in much more modern times, the possibility of communication across great distances very quickly. So I just saw something on Twitter the other day that was like, part of the drama about the conclave is like, if a global leader, if, like, the president or the prime minister of a nation dies and the Pope has some involvement in that nation, that's, like, immediate. And there's coverage of it immediate. It used to be if the King of England was sick, the Pope could worry about that for six months before anyone really knew what was going on. The Pope has both greater global concern today and thus is often treated as a kind of statesman that needs to have some diplomatic role. But that has to also deal with all of the various forms of the Catholic Church that exist in very different nations. I was just listening to a podcast this morning about Pope Francis's legacy, and one of the things that they were talking about was how big it was for Pope Francis to be against the prosecution of gay people civilly. And it was like, well, in America, we're like, well, yeah, we don't think you should, you know, imprison gay people. But for Catholic leadership in some African nations, that was like, a controversial thing for the Pope to say. So part of the shift in qualifications is not just a change in what kind of control the Pope has. This has happened over time. Right. The Pope used to be have more civil control over nations, but then increasingly also has to adjudicate between very different cultures, very different contexts, and has to find a way to not only give kind of doctrinal teaching that's universal and spiritual, but, like, has to navigate the political realities in the different cultural contexts. We talk a lot on the show about the need for pastors to say, like, very specifically, this place and time, what is needed to be said? The Pope doesn't really get to do that. The Pope has to be the kind of theologian and church leader that can be like, what's happening now across the whole world is of my concern.
- [08:54]
Sky Jutani
Yeah. It's worth remembering that for most of human history, information could travel no faster than a horse. And it's only recently, in the late 1800s, with the invention of the locomotive and then eventually the telegraph, that information could move more quickly. And now it's instantaneous. But that changes what you expect of a leader and how quickly they respond. And then you're right. The global nature of the Catholic Church, huge change. And you mentioned that the Pope used to be much more of a civil leader. Up until 1870, there were still papal states, meaning territories over which the Pope was the sovereign, not just the spiritual leader, but the ruling magistrate over land and over armies and things like that. And so in the modern era, we primarily see the Pope as a spiritual leader, as some kind of pastor to the millions or billions, billion.
- [09:47]
Caitlin Chess
Especially given the last papacy.
- [09:48]
Sky Jutani
Yes. But even like Pope John Paul ii, who was Pope for most of my life and my childhood, he was a spiritual leader, but he was Polish, and he came out from under communist rule and was seen as a Catholic Pope who stood up strongly against the abuses of communist regimes. And even though he had the political influence over that, it was an influence that came from his pastoral leadership, not because he was inciting Insurrection and Eastern European countries or something. So that's been a big shift in the way we think about that public and religious figure. What about in Protestant communities? And I don't know how far back you want to go in the history, but like I said, even just in my lifetime, I think I've seen a dramatic change in what people expect of a local church leader or pastor. But what do you see there? What are the things that people are emphasizing or maybe what did we used to emphasize that we no longer prioritize?
- [10:48]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah, I think one important shift to say for Protestants to think about ourselves is that. And this can be overemphasized, and there's some evangelicals that overemphasize this. But it is true that in the Reformation, there was a portion of the Reformation that had a little bit of an anti hierarchical impulse that just said, and part of this was a return to Scripture. Right. Like we don't have the. This infallible interpreter of scripture that is either the tradition we've inherited or this one leader of the church. But it also was a sense that there was too much emphasis given to the person of the priest or the leader. And some of this works it out in how some of the reformers talked about the sacraments in particular. You and I were just talking about this in the context of a different conversation recently that like for Catholics, the real distinguishing feature of a priest, as opposed to a deacon, as opposed to a lay leader that might preach a sermon in a church, the distinguishing feature is their ability to administer the sacraments of which they have more than Protestants do. But that's crucial. So in a church service, what's most relevant is the Eucharist or communion or the Lord's Supper, the ability for someone to, for Catholics, really, they don't change themselves this bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus, but they are the person who mediates that. And other people cannot do that. It's not a legitimate Eucharist if someone who is not an ordained priest presides over it. That is still very often, often true with a different way of thinking about what's happening to the bread and wine in Protestant denominations. But there is a shift in the Reformation and especially later on, that centers more, and you've talked about this a ton, centers preaching more. So in what a pastor is, what a priest is. But it's not just that preaching becomes more central, which we could talk more about. There is a real shift, especially given the Internet and podcasts and whatever, there is an increasing role for the pastor to be like really good TED talk giver. But even prior to that, there's a shift from the central thing being like this person in their body. And that's really important for Catholic priests when it comes to gender. Part of why there's a male only priesthood within the Roman Catholic Church is like, you are representing Christ and Christ is and was a man, and so you should be a man. And you are like through your body you are performing these acts. In the Reformation, there's less emphasis on the person and there's more emphasis on the variety of roles being more intertwined. Like the one person who is the pastor of this church should be administering the sacraments, communion, baptism, but should also be pastoring, should be preaching. And that's where you get into some like, tricky things about how to weigh certain things. Because in the past it was sort of like, well, the church hierarchy ordains you, you are qualified to do these things. Like it's, it, there is, it's not quite magic, but there is a sense in which it's just a very strict, like you are legitimately able to perform this task. And so someone who is coming to you for communion knows that it is really the body and blood of Christ. In Protestant circles, especially as the Reformation, we forget the Reformation was not like we're not Catholic, now we're Protestant. It was like 10 different forms of not being Catholic, all fighting with each other all the time about very specific things and jostling for leadership in different nations, and different nations fighting over whether they would be Catholic or Protestant. So there's like civil questions involved. And in all of that, it suddenly feels more important to be like, well, who's teaching rightly? And then that becomes really important to the role of a pastor. And we're not even getting into right now all the complicated exegetical questions of part of what's happening in the Reformation is going back to Scripture and going like, what do the qualifications in the New Testament epistles for elders and deacons, which is the language that's used, those are the only offices listed in the New Testament. Elders and deacons. How are we taking that and then changing that into the various different forms that we use today to describe what's a priest, what's a deacon, what's a bishop, what's a. Like all the different forms of church polity that we now have today? There were all these fights in the Reformation over who is being faithful to how Scripture describes, how these roles should function. And in the midst of that, the big question Was like, who's a legitimate teacher of Scripture?
- [14:56]
Sky Jutani
All right, that was a lot. But let's unpack this. Let's simplify and try to unpack this a bit. So prior to the Reformation, the idea of an ordained priest, that role was primarily to be a mediator through whom the bread and the wine became the body and blood of Christ in the Mass, in the eucharistic ceremony.
- [15:17]
Caitlin Chess
Other sacraments as well. But other sacraments, that's the most centrally every week or every day.
- [15:22]
Sky Jutani
And if that's your conception of a church leader, that they are ordained with the authority to transubstantiate, or through them, transubstantiate the bread and the wine, then other things don't really matter as much. Like, I don't really care if this priest knows a lot of theology. I don't really care if they can preach a compelling sermon. I don't really care if they're a good teacher. I may not even really care if they have a godly character, which was.
- [15:49]
Caitlin Chess
A fight we had.
- [15:50]
Sky Jutani
Right.
- [15:51]
Caitlin Chess
Like, how much does that matter?
- [15:52]
Sky Jutani
Right.
- [15:52]
Caitlin Chess
But we determined it's not necessary.
- [15:54]
Sky Jutani
It's the means of grace to me by God comes through this priest via the sacrament. And as long as all of those pieces are in the right place, that's what matters. Okay. Then we jump to the Protestant Reformation. And again, this is an oversimplification, because as you put it, there's all these different battles about things going on. But the oversimplification is now the qualification for being a pastor, leader, whatever title you want to put on that person is, can they teach the Scriptures well and faithfully so their theology suddenly really matters? Their teaching skills and communication skills begin to really matter. And in some communities, they are seen as being in some way an embodiment of a mature follower of Jesus. So a representative of Jesus and therefore should have a character that meets godly qualifications that you see in First Timothy and Titus and other places.
- [16:50]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah.
- [16:51]
Sky Jutani
What were you going to add there?
- [16:52]
Caitlin Chess
Well, I was just going to say, I want to make sure that something I said earlier that you're kind of touching on now doesn't get misinterpreted by anyone. This is not to say that in the Catholic Church, those qualifications in Titus and First Timothy don't matter. They have what many Protestants would say is actually a much more rigorous process for discerning the priesthood and being confirmed by the Church. But when so central to what people want from you every day or every week is just, can you turn this bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. I mentioned this earlier, and we don't have time to get into the details, but we determined early in the Church, are the sacraments that are done by a priest who is in some way morally or theologically wrong, are they still valid? Is your baptism still valid? If the priest who baptized you was a bad dude, the answer is yes. So if that's answered, and a lot of Catholics especially, I think it's worth saying, in the period of the Reformation, part of what the reformers are worried about is this doesn't mean much to people. They're going through the motions. They're just showing up to get the thing they're supposed to get, to make sure that they get their get out of hell free card. And the priest doesn't have to be a good person or preach good sermons to give you the thing that you need, which is a valid baptism. Valid. I mean, all the various sacraments as well, that Protestants don't, for the most part, have.
- [18:06]
Sky Jutani
Okay, so when I was young, or even when I was in seminary, I think a lot of the church, the Protestant, maybe even the evangelical church in America, still primarily viewed its leaders as shepherds and teachers, two functions that are delineated in Ephesians chapter four, where it talks about apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, or teachers and shepherds. So it was, can you pastorally care for people and lead them in the faith, counsel them in the faith, and can you instruct them in what Scripture says? And so preaching and pastoral care, all those things are really, really important. And I think a lot of communities and churches looked for those qualities in the people that they would call to lead the church. Now, since then, since the 90s, maybe going back even a little bit earlier, I think there's been a change. And I'm noticing a lot more churches that, yeah, they still want a shepherd to a degree, they definitely want a teacher. But increasingly, they want a CEO. They want a leader who can lead an organization, who can manage a staff who knows how to do budgets, who can figure out insurance and vacation policies and buildings and all the. And so even when I was the editor, managing editor, executive, I forget all my titles were at Leadership Journal. A lot of that content was all around training pastors in how to lead organizations, which is why you would go to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit and you would hear from a bunch of people who were not ministers, they were business leaders.
- [19:42]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah. Oh, I went to a bunch of those.
- [19:43]
Sky Jutani
Yeah. I mean, that became like a really dominant. It was a. It represented a Significant shift in what the American church expected a pastor to be. And I think it's even evolved since then. And I think we've become much more fixated on our pastor not just being a teacher anymore or somebody who can expound the scriptures faithfully, but they need to flat out be an entertainer.
- [20:07]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:08]
Sky Jutani
Like the ability to captivate an audience from a stage or a screen is really important to a lot of churches. It's no longer, are you just teaching faithfully and expounding scripture? Well, in fact, in some cases, we don't even care if your theology is orthodox and going. We just want to be entertained. And then I wonder if we're seeing another shift where we're going from CEO and entertainer to now. Those things are all kind of melding together in pastor as influencer in sort of the social media age, where, yeah, you need to be compelling on a platform, but we want you to be compelling not just on Sunday morning. We want you to be compelling all week long on TikTok and Instagram and social media and engaging all the. And managing that whole Persona and the Persona of our church. So now it's the CEO, entertainer, influencer, pastor. And what are the. We could talk all day about this.
- [21:11]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah.
- [21:12]
Sky Jutani
What are the downsides of that now being put upon the expectations of a church leader?
- [21:19]
Caitlin Chess
I keep thinking about this in the context of something I heard Andy Crouch once say where he was talking about some people being essentially so gifted that they can do certain things without having to compromise to achieve those things. And one of the examples he gave was the classic thing about, oh, who had to sleep with the director to get a role in the movie? And he's like, if you're amazing, you don't have to sleep with the director to get the role. There are some people who can use that route, and that might be their only route, and it would be wrong for them to take that route. And he similarly said it might be true that to be a heart surgeon at the highest level at the most prestigious hospital, you have to neglect your family and not sleep and obsess over, or you might be brilliant and you can do it without doing those things. And I bring that all up just to say what I see when we present that model of the influencer, the TED Talk giver, the business person. What I see happening is there are some really gifted people who can give a 45 minute TED talk every Sunday, and it takes them a few hours a week to prepare for that. They're just charismatic, they're good speakers, they have studied scripture, they know how to turn a phrase. But when that is disseminated so that every seminary student thinks that's the Expectation is a 45 minute TED talk that would go viral on YouTube for them, they do have to compromise things that shouldn't be compromised to produce that result. They're not just like uniquely gifted in the way this mega church pastor influencer person is. So for them to create the same standard of thing, it's going to take them a whole 40 hour work week. And then they're not visiting people in the hospital, they're not leading meetings of committees. They're not just one on one with people. They're not stopping to just have a random conversation with someone who's hurting in the church that has to get outsourced.
- [22:59]
Sky Jutani
Yeah, they're not shepherds, they're not shepherding.
- [23:01]
Caitlin Chess
They'Re not pastoring people. And, and that's where I think we forget that there is real cost because there are people who can do that without always paying that cost. I think being a megachurch pastor, you're not pastoring that whole church. There's no way you are. But you might be able to give a really amazing sermon every week and still have time to do the things that you're actually, actually supposed to be doing as a pastor. But a lot of people can't do that. But that's the standard that's been set. It used to be true, even if there was one random church where someone was that charismatic and that could, it might grow locally. But there wasn't a podcast for you to listen to every week to show you how amazing this pastor was. The other thing that I think is important because everything that you just said is about kind of conservative evangelical world. There's a version of that in like the mainline Protestant world or the Catholic world. But the other thing I keep noticing that is a like maybe departure in some ways return, but in some ways departure from how we've historically thought about pastors is how many pastors in like mainline or more progressive evangelical spaces think that a big part of their role is to be like a nonprofit leader or a social worker or an activist. And that has some pros and cons. There are actual pros to a pastor thinking they should give really engaging sermons. And there are pros to pastors thinking they should have good business, know how. But it goes really wrong when that's central to what it means to be a pastor. The same is true on this other end. Like, it's great to have a pastor who knows how to connect people with social services, who knows what resources are available, who will show up to a protest, who will care about things God cares about. But when that becomes central to your role, I mean, one of the programs at Duke right now, you can get a dual M. Div. And M.S.W. master of Social Work. And a ton of people do it because it's not just preparing them for nonprofit work. For some of them, it's like to be a pastor is to be someone who is essentially a social worker. And again, I'm not saying that there's something evil or wrong about that, but it is interesting how depending on the value of the subset of the church you have, you start to kind of meld the pastor towards that kind of person. And there are trade offs. If you become someone who has spent a lot of their time going to protests and knowing how to connect people with social services, maybe you're not spending a lot of time studying scripture, maybe you're not spending a lot of time counseling people.
- [25:06]
Sky Jutani
It sounds like what might be happening. Again, this is an overgeneralization, but on the right side of the church in America, it's increasingly the pastor needs to be an influencer. And maybe on the progressive left side, increasingly, the pastor needs to be an activist.
- [25:20]
Caitlin Chess
Yeah. Which sometimes includes being an influence.
- [25:23]
Sky Jutani
Right? Yeah. These are not mutually exclusive.
- [25:25]
Caitlin Chess
They're not mutually exclusive. Yeah.
- [25:26]
Sky Jutani
But that's just an interesting. It shows how over even a short amount of history, like the last 50 years, so much of our expectations for a church leader are rooted in the culture rather than in the scriptures. And I mean, a couple stories that come to mind from my time at Christianity Today. Like, one is, I remember I was interviewing a church leader at a mega church that I will not name. And this mega church, I don't know, probably had a few dozen staff people at the time. And I asked the senior pastor, don't.
- [25:59]
C
Worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post subscriber. So head over to holeypost.com skypod and sign up for just $5 a month. Not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never.
- [26:19]
Sky Jutani
Have to hear this dumb announcement again.
- [26:21]
C
But you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post, plus including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin Shess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe today.