Pivot Podcast

What Paul Meant by “In Christ”

What did Paul think God was doing about what’s wrong with us and the world? For Pauline scholar Michael Gorman, the answer centers on life in Christ. Paul uses the language of being in Christ well over a hundred times, and when he writes “you,” he usually means a whole community. Michael joins Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile to talk about the Christ hymn in Philippians 2, the cross as both the source and the shape of the Christian life, and justification as God creating a people who practice God’s justice. Michael, who holds the Raymond E. Brown Chair in Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University and is the author of Life Transfigured, also talks about why the language of church membership falls short, and about the Friday night Bible study and prayer group he and his wife have hosted in their home for 36 years. For church leaders wondering how disciples are formed today, he points to ongoing community, preaching shaped by scripture, and a deep openness to the work of the Holy Spirit.

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A 500-Year Old Resource for Forming Faith

When Luther and his colleagues visited rural parishes in Saxony, they were horrified by what they found. One congregation refused to memorize the Lord’s Prayer because it was too long, and nobody knew the Ten Commandments. Luther’s Small Catechism grew out of those visits, written for the home and printed on broadsheets so parents, children, and servants could learn the basics of the faith together. Mark Tranvik, who teaches Reformation history and theology at Luther Seminary and spent ten years as a parish pastor, joins Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile to talk about what Luther was trying to accomplish and why that gap between calling yourself a Christian and living the faith feels familiar today. Mark reflects on how Luther’s Small Catechism faded from many homes and congregations, and why he believes it can come alive again through worship, prayer, and the sacraments. He also explores Luther’s understanding of vocation, where God works through ordinary callings like parenting, teaching, and picking up the garbage, and shares how he watched the mutual consolation of the saints take place at funeral lunches. It’s a conversation about recovering a 500-year-old gift for discipleship in a changing world. Lutheranism: Bound and Free Positions: Thinking Theologically About Politics Theology and Church History Foundations Gordon Jensen, The Call to Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship Martin Luther, Large Catechism Martin Luther, Small Catechism

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How Do You Disciple Others While You’re Still Growing?

What does discipleship look like when the pastor is still growing too? Pastor Edrin Williams leads Sanctuary Covenant Church in North Minneapolis, a congregation that is black-led and black-centered by design and multi-ethnic by conviction. He joins Terri Elton and Alicia Granholm to talk about the Sanctuary Five, the church’s discipleship rhythms of connect, grow, serve, give, and invite, and why he believes formation happens as people share life together more than in any classroom. Edrin also talks about his own formation: the pastor friends he meets with each month, the therapist who helps him stay whole, and the sabbatical he spent with friends who knew him before he was a pastor. Along the way, he reflects on following two well-loved pastors, leading through 2020, forming faith across generations, and why pastors of small and rural churches can trust that their faithful work matters.

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What Kept a Bilingual Church Together Through a Hard Winter

How does discipleship take root when a church walks through crisis together? In Pivot’s first bilingual episode, Dwight Zscheile is joined by Pastor Henry Burbano, executive pastor of Juntos Ministries at Emmanuel Covenant Church in Shoreview, Minnesota, and Anna Schaberg, one of the core leaders of the ministry. Henry speaks in Spanish and Anna interprets as they describe a community where people from about twelve countries share meals, meet in homes, and worship in two languages, with new Christians learning to follow Jesus alongside people who have walked with him their whole lives. Last winter, during the immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota, nine members of the Juntos community were detained on their way to work, and three were deported. Henry and Anna tell how the church drove people to their jobs, went with families to immigration appointments, and sent a team to visit those who had been sent back, and how that season deepened faith across the whole congregation. They also talk about why helpers burn out, the wave of baptisms that followed, and what it takes for a church to begin a bilingual ministry.

Why Is It So Hard to Make Disciples Today?

What is discipleship? Everyone is a disciple of something, and whatever we follow shapes what we believe about ourselves, other people, and the meaning of life. In the Season 8 opener, Dwight Zscheile, Alicia Granholm, and Terri Elton begin a season-long conversation on discipleship, convinced that the primary challenge facing the church in North America is a crisis of discipleship. They reflect on their own formation, draw on Lesslie Newbigin's observation that every culture is religious, even when it presents itself as secular, and discuss why so many churches invest their energy in being church and lose sight of what it means to follow Jesus. They also discuss why discipleship can't be a one-size-fits-all program and preview a season that will explore discipleship through history, hardship, preaching, tradition, and even AI.

What We Learned Looking Back on Season 7

Season 7 of Pivot has come to a close, and in this finale, hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm look back over eleven weeks of conversations about spiritual practices, church tradition, and what it means to make old forms of faith legible again for people living in a very different world than the one those forms were built for. They talk through difficult moments in church history, questions of leadership and listening, and why exhaustion might be one of the truest words for how people are experiencing church and culture right now. Dwight and Alicia talk through concrete ideas for helping leadership teams encounter unfamiliar traditions, and challenge leaders to root themselves more deeply in their own church's history rather than chasing the next quick fix. Season 8 begins October 8, turning to discipleship.

The Church Has Survived Worse Than This

Warren Smith, professor of historical theology at Duke Divinity School, joins Dwight Zscheile and Terri Elton to talk about his new book, Early Christian Theology: A History, and what the first several centuries of Christian thought have to say to church leaders navigating a very different, but strangely familiar, moment. Warren walks through Justin Martyr's arguments to a suspicious Roman government, Augustine's account of pride and the desire for dominion, Irenaeus's vision of a unified gospel, and Gregory of Nyssa's reflections on the endless discovery of God. The conversation turns practical near the end, as Warren offers church leaders a word of encouragement: the church's survival has never rested on our shoulders, and the best thing a pastor or teacher can offer their people is genuine delight in scripture. That kind of enthusiasm, he says, tends to spread. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Q3gtQcwV86M Early Christian Theology: A History, Warren’s new book.

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

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

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

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

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Leadership for a Diverse Church

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

What Sunday Morning Teaches People About Monday

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

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Ministry That Doesn't Rush Toward Results

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

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Augustine Was a Pastor First

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

A Different Kind of Strength

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

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The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Is Cultivating Community in Church So Hard Right Now?

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

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Amen Means I Trust You

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

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

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

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