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Innovative Seminary Education Models - Insights from the NALC with Rev. Jeff Morlock
What if the future of theological education wasn't bound by the walls of traditional campuses? Reverend Jeff from the North American Lutheran Seminary joins us to unravel this intriguing possibility by explaining the seminary's innovative hub-and-spoke model. As the Director of Vocational Discernment, he shares how partnerships with institutions like Trinity Anglican Seminary and Concordia Texas are shaping new pathways for students in the Lutheran tradition. With his journey from parish ministry to seminary leadership, Reverend Jeff emphasizes the power of connection and the necessity of nurturing future leaders in a post-Christian world.
Explore the intricate process of discerning one’s calling within the church, guided by God's word and enriched by community feedback. We discuss how the roles of deacons within the LCMS and NALC denominations are evolving to address pastoral shortages and support church communities. Reverend Jeff sheds light on the new pathways available for aspiring deacons, like the Master of Arts in Religion program, that prepare them for diverse roles in ministry. We also reflect on the biblical journey of Abram and Sarai, drawing parallels to the faith and obedience required in modern spiritual challenges.
Discover how life-to-life discipleship and authentic leadership formation can transform church leadership. Drawing inspiration from the early church and the teachings of Jesus, we highlight the significance of relational and contextual learning over traditional programs. By aligning seminary education with the real needs of congregations, Reverend Jeff advocates for a grassroots approach that reignites missional zeal. This episode is packed with insights into empowering pastors to lead with humility and character while nurturing future leaders who are ready to embrace diverse congregational contexts.
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Welcome to Lead Time, tim Allman here. Jack Calberg is in the house, jack, how are you doing man?
Speaker 2:I'm doing fantastic. How are you doing, brother?
Speaker 1:It's a great day to be alive. Today we get to hang out with Pastor. Reverend Doctor, that's right, isn't that right, jeff? Reverend Doctor, no doctor. No, doctor, I should have asked that before. Well, you're going to hear why. I would have assumed that because he is the Director of Vocational Discernment.
Speaker 3:Though, assume that because he is the director of vocational discernment, though we can learn from a lot of people. You have a Master of Divinity though. Right, jeff, I do, I do Master of the Divine, so that's a pretty big deal. I was a little bit presumptuous, it seems like to me.
Speaker 1:It kind of is right. Let me tell you about Jeff just a bit. He's the director of vocational discernment for the North American Lutheran Seminary. He's going to tell us a little bit about that, a hub-and-spoke kind of ministry. They're pushing residential seminary. They have some distance opportunities, numerous partnerships. It's very, very innovative. We're grateful for what the Lord is doing in the NALC. I know in the LCMS we're not Word and Sacrament partners, but there are so many things, so many things that we agree on, especially regarding confessional, mission-oriented Lutheranism, word and Sacrament and getting out in a post-Christian world. So, jeff, what a joy to hang with you today. Brother, how are you doing?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. In fact I just solidified some meetings down at Concordia, texas. I'm headed down there to build some strategic partnership there. We have lots of churches and potential students down there, so we're going to start to build some friendship and see if we might cut some time off seminary in partnership with the theology department there.
Speaker 1:That'll be fun. Tell my friend, Pastor Jake Besling, who's the campus pastor there, hi, if you would.
Speaker 3:Yes, that'd be awesome.
Speaker 1:Former co-host on Lead Time. So yeah, we have strong ties there. At Concordia, Texas. Tell us your ministry story, though. What was the focus of your studies and just a little bit of your background that led you into your role there as Director of Vocational Discernment? I love that title.
Speaker 3:Yeah, really Well. You know my call has always been two years ago to parish ministry and that was always the goal, I guess early on my discernment. I came from a large church in a small town. We had a strong, strong youth group. Three of us missed seminary at the same time by one year from my little youth group. So that's always been strong.
Speaker 3:This kind of came out of nowhere, this call to the seminary, but it's probably been the best fit of any call and the reason was because I'm a people person and a connector and part of my role is to build really a pipeline for the future. We've never had high schools like the Missouri Synod. I'm jealous for that but we don't have it. We left most of our camps and almost all of our camps and colleges in another previous denomination. So we have to build these strategic partnerships and look for connections. Where we can and that's really exciting for me we're doing that at some kind of evangelical schools where we're finding that people are being drawn into the liturgical kind of word and sacrament tradition, finding meaning in that and coming to us from other places. So it's really exciting to make those connections.
Speaker 3:Now I have to say, director of Vocational Discernment is kind of a mouthful. Student Recruitment I usually say and Student Recruitment, that's really a long title I like to say the Holy Spirit does the recruiting and I come alongside and I'm not a spiritual director, but very much it leans in the direction of asking really good questions and praying a whole lot for folks, with folks that the Lord of the Harvest will raise up, you know, workers for the field. So that's what I come up to every day.
Speaker 1:What a cool, cool calling. So tell us about the origin. For those who aren't familiar with the North American Lutheran Synod and the seminary, tell us that, that origin story, if you would.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're a 14-year-old denomination. We were formed in 2010. Right now I think we have around 515 or 20, kind of probably approaching 20 congregations. We're a 10-year-old, we have a 10-year-old seminary. So I tell people, if you've ever had a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old, you kind of know that things are a little bit evolving. We like to say we're building the plane while we're flying it. That's how that's sort of unfolding.
Speaker 3:Early on we went looking for some partnership. Again, partnership is a big word for us. We didn't have the money or inclination to build a bricks and mortar seminary, so we needed to find someone who would partner with us and we found it used to be called Trinity School for Ministry, but it's Trinity Anglican Seminary. They kind of want to be the go-to for the Anglican Church in North America, like we are for the North American Lutheran Church, and so we have partnership with them. Our professors and staff are mostly hubbed there.
Speaker 3:I live in Ohio but the center or it's kind of a hub and spokes model, like you mentioned. So the hub is in Ambridge, pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. Our Lutheran professors are hubbed there. Our students kind of residential students, come in two different doors. They or online students, they take their classes, other classes together, like church history, old Testament, new Testament, languages, and then our students take their courses specific Lutheran courses through our professors there, and it works similar.
Speaker 3:Trinity used to have a residential requirement for all their students, and so we had to build some other partnerships, which we call this, our spoke seminaries. There are several that work with us in the same sort of way. Trinity just allowed us now to have five intensive weeks instead of doing two semesters, so that helps a great deal, especially if we have students in this part of the country who can get to the seminary fairly quickly and cheaply. So that's kind of the model that we're working at. I mean, it is a little bit different than a lot of models that are out there, but, as you know, there's lots of new models, so you're working with one of those as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, there definitely are. You said before we hit play that you're really pushing residential education and if people have listened to me and Jack for a while, they may get the impression that we're maybe against residential. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Speaker 1:I mean truly, jeff, there is. There is a necessity for deep, deep relationships formed with. For us, you know, younger men with their professors and with their students over a longer period of time, and if you're in, you know the pathway, like I was. Hey, I'm a 16-year-old. I was talking to a kid just yesterday, jeff. His name is Liam. He comes to our Sunday morning 6 am. He already has kind of discerned this internal call. He loves deep theology. He raided my theological bookshelf, my library, yesterday. It was so cool, so he's going to go. I'm like already telling him okay, man.
Speaker 2:Concordia Irvine for us Concordia Steward off to St Louis, isn't that right, jack?
Speaker 1:So good so there is definitely a role for that, but there's also the role for maybe the second career or bivocational, co-vocational leader, who needs a little bit more flexibility. How are you kind of navigating that that kind of flexible, multi-path kind of option toward training Jeff?
Speaker 3:So we're North American Lutheran Church. We have 30 some congregations in Canada. We'd set our first big youth gathering down in Texas and we had prayed mightily that the Lord would raise up 25 future pastors for the church and we I spoke with there's 24 that I've spoken with and who are leaning in that direction, discerning, and I told our bishop, there's that 25. There's 25. We just don't know who the other one is yet. But I think when I work with a student, whether they're just in college and discerning or whether it's second career, the first discernment is do you have a call to ministry? And there's some ways we get at that. But really the second discernment is okay, what's the best path for you given your circumstance?
Speaker 3:I'm working with a number of college students this year because we've, over the course of the last two years, we've developed some feeders and some strategies. So I have more college students this year than I have and for them, if they're not married and they're just coming straight out of college, I'm going to really push that. They do residential and we also have tiered financial assistance in the North American Lutheran Church, so the financial benefit will be greater if you do residential than if you do online. It's not a vast difference, but there is some difference. So yeah, we want to, but, having said that, I think everybody's path is going to be different and we just need to figure out what's the best one for each person. That's my goal is to help them come to their own sense of which path would be the best one.
Speaker 2:So one vision that I've tried to explore with people in our own church body is I'm a retired military guy, right? So I retired as a staff sergeant out of the Army and we have officers, and we have officers and we have NCOs, and I was reflecting a lot on the model that we have in our church body versus what the military does. So the military has the army. The US army in particular has what I consider to be the best residential officer training college in the entire world. Residential officer training college in the entire world West Point. Right, it is unbelievable. And if you can qualify to get in there and you know that this is going to be your career, that's where you should go. And what's interesting is the majority of officers are not raised up through West Point. The majority of them are raised up through local ROTC programs of them are raised up through local ROTC programs.
Speaker 2:They partner with 1,700 local colleges and I want to say roughly 80% of the officers that are raised up in the Army are raised up through local ROTC programs.
Speaker 2:So they have this amazing, very prestigious, best-in-the-world residential program that they try and get the best of the best in there, and it is relational. You are deeply embedded in there. You're there with the professors, you're getting all of that. You know that experience was phenomenal. And then you have this other program that says hey, you know, I was a medic, I was a PFC and a medic. Now I think I think I got a calling to be an officer.
Speaker 2:Well, I can go to a local ROTC program and do that, right, and it has created a massive scale. And what we see is that these two programs complement each other tremendously right. This residential program becomes the storehouse of best practices for teaching and it gets to disseminate that through the ROTC programs. The ROTC programs create scale and accessibility to people, and I think you know that's the type of the vision that I'm trying to encourage. Think you know that's the type of the vision that I'm trying to encourage, for you know, and to be sure, you have to be a big church body to pull that kind of thing off, but I think we can give ourselves permission to think that way. What are your thoughts? Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3:In fact, I would say many of our students, even our students that are at Trinity at the hub, they at the hub. A lot of them are studying online. When we say that we value residential formation, some of that happens at. Currently, we require five intensives If they're going to do mostly online. They come in for a week five times. Mm-hmm. What happens during that week is just fantastic.
Speaker 3:In fact, people were there this June for a week from Canada, from North Carolina, from California just all over the map and coming together around one of our courses that's taught in the summer is taught around one of our four core values in NALC. So there's a lot to be commended for what we're trying to work through, which is, in many cases, hybrid, and we're trying to build the residential while understanding that we need the hybrid, in fact. So one of our professors, our faculty, runs the Lutheran Studies program at Gordon-Conwell University, which they have a few students who are in the classroom, but most of our courses are actually in a classroom where there might be four or five students and then a bunch on the screen. So it's a bit of a hybrid sort of model, so good.
Speaker 1:So, jeff, how do you help? You said you had two roles right. It's helping them find their path, but before that, helping them discern their call into ministry. What does that look like more formally for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think. Well, the call comes from the Holy Spirit and always comes through the Word of God and through the community of God. And so how do we, you know, I ask them, how's the word of God landing on you in terms of discerning a call? And and sometimes it's between a call to ordain, ministry, and or even the, the deaconate, which is also an ordained, an ordained role in our denomination, or sometimes people are just discerning between lay and ordained. So but I asked that question is like how is the word of God informing that, as you hear your pastor preach, as you're reading the word, as you're involved in Bible study, how's the word landing on you and what kind of things are happening there? But also, what are people saying? And if they're married, I want to know what their spouse is saying about this call. I want to know what their pastor is saying about this call. I want to know what their pastor's saying.
Speaker 3:And then you know, a lot of times I'll just say okay, on a scale from one to a hundred percent, where are you in terms of being certain? And if they're at, you know, if they're on the higher end of that, I'll say okay, what are the roadblocks? Because the other thing I try to explain to people sometimes is that once the call becomes clear, now we're doing spiritual warfare. Yeah, Because the devil can leave you alone until you get close. And now all the objections come up about, well, what about money and what about time, and what about this and that Location and all that. It's the pathway.
Speaker 3:But you know, a lot of times I'll use the biblical story of Abram and Sarai, when the Lord, you know, because when the Lord wants to raise up a nation for himself, he calls a moon worshiper from Ur. So but he says you know, basically pack up your tents and go to a place, I'll show you. And so it almost puts our students a little bit at ease when I say I know, you want to know what's around the bend. That's not usually the way God works. If he's calling you to this, he'll show you the next step, He'll provide for that, and then he'll show you the next one after that. And that's kind of how this is going to probably work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's exactly right, and so if I can help them see how God's providing for the next step, then a lot of times they're ready to get on board at that point.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the diaconate. Tell about your training and ordination in the diaconate. This is something in the LCMS I don't know if you know some of our story we unfortunately back in 2016, I believe ruled against having deacons in the LCMS kind of servants within the church, most of whom are non-paid, most of whom were older men in ministry just wanting to serve. They help with spiritual care, worship, maybe other organizational, operational things within the church, teach Bible studies, things like that.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we have deacons actually in our church right they eliminated a national recognition for that Is that right.
Speaker 1:Tim, yeah, we eliminated a national recognition. Churches can do whatever they want to do, but they got rid of kind of a national.
Speaker 2:There's no national training.
Speaker 3:In my experience, deacon is an interesting word and we've had to really do a lot of explaining because sometimes pastors have raised up deacons in their congregation to serve in those roles that you just mentioned. Some of our congregations have a polity where they have deacons, trustees, and what am I missing here? Anyway, elders yeah, elders are organized that way, right, so that's another kind of term. What we're talking about is one of our deacons, james. James talks about the permanent deaconate, the NALC. Permanent deaconate meaning if your pastor raises you up a deacon as a deacon in your church and then that person moves across the country, they're not a deacon anymore in that church until that pastor says, okay, you're deacon. Well, so this is a deacon in our denomination. That is basically like a pastor on theed certified, the whole thing, and they go through a similar process, but their call is to a ministry of word and service, not to word and sacrament. So they can preach. They're trained to preach. In some cases they will help in mission districts where we don't have enough pastors, in mission districts where we don't have enough pastors, and so some of them might. We'll have one. So far has come through because we just put this in place not long ago, but they can do those kinds of things.
Speaker 3:But our call to the diaconate is discerned in conjunction. Once that's discerned that they want, that's the direction God's calling them. They work with our bishop actually, um, on a sense of where, what's it's, what's this going to look like? Is it going to? Are you going to serve your, your own congregation? Um, our, our deacon, who, um, has just come through, is going to be a chaplain, a hospital chaplain, and work with, also a congregation. So it can look lots of different ways. One of them that we have going through is the executive director of her church. She's not a pastor, she's the executive director that gives of administration, she wants to help her church in any way she can and leads worship and does other things. So it can look very different. But, yeah, we're, we have, in fact, we have so many people that are considering it right now that we're going to do a Zoom in a couple of weeks with a couple deacons who are deacons already and a couple that are studying, so that we can get people good information and have them ask all their questions.
Speaker 2:Are you offering like a master's? Yeah? Is it a degree program for that.
Speaker 3:It's a master of arts and religion, track 16 courses. It's a Master of Arts in Religion, track 16 courses. So it's about half I would say it's about half of a Master of Divinity in our scenario.
Speaker 1:Well, gosh, it seems to make too much sense for us not to have deacons, jack, I mean, you know this and I'm not trying to unduly kind of puff you up but I don't do the things that you do. Right, you come from a different background but you also love theology and you get to be a part of the spiritual formation of this community. You do word and service work. I don't know why in the LCMS we wouldn't have a theological formation that identifies, because there's an army of people who have been in the marketplace, that are maybe 40, 50, maybe they've hit early retirement, something like that who say I want deeper theology and then I'm going to put a lot of these leadership, finance, business principles into effect in the church. It just makes too much sense for us not to do, jack. I don't get it.
Speaker 2:Let's pause on that. They do that for women, they don't do that for men. Isn't that interesting? Because they have a deaconess program still. Yeah, but it's still. They get a master's degree.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a word in service for us.
Speaker 3:But it's not, maybe on the systems or structure side right. I mean they're doing a lot of spiritual care or the leadership side, right, right.
Speaker 1:But I'm more curious, like with your role. Like you have a deeply theological mind that's growing in our partnership with Luther House of Studies, but then also you're bringing your finance and business background, like why wouldn't women and men get trained in an MA part time program like that. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Speaker 1:If anybody in the LCMS and organizational leadership wants to have a conversation with us about this, this is long overdue. This will help pastors tremendously, because what frustrates a lot of pastors? I have two. There are too many things on my job description, jack. There's no possible way I could do everything that is expected of me, so I need partners like you and then a business team of sorts, and people think, ah, business isn't, didn't now. Now I'm going to go down a trail with Jesus. Jesus had a business team. Judas kind of struggled. There. Don't be a Judas, jack. That was not good. So anyway, yeah, anything more to say there?
Speaker 2:Quick on that because you know, when I consult with churches that are exploring what does it look like to raise up operational or executive director roles, I start off with a study on Acts, chapter 6, right? So what's going on in that situation? It is a resource management issue. It's a benevolence issue, for sure, absolutely right. But what are they trying to do?
Speaker 2:They're trying to administer resources, the treasury of the church, and these guys who are preaching, they're not experts at spreadsheets. They didn't even have spreadsheets. They had abacus and you know tablets and stuff like that where they're trying to keep track of stuff and if they're not impartial and fair and all that with the and having some sort of a tracking mechanism to show that right, it creates anxiety and opens up cracks where people can say well, there's, you know people aren't being treated fair, so they needed people that had wisdom. You know spirit and wisdom and you know these Greek people that they a lot of some, a lot of Greek names that they're bringing in there. They knew how to, they knew how to run business and they cared for people, right.
Speaker 1:So I mean Matthew, for goodness sake, right, Matthew is a tax collector. He obviously deals with financial matters. He's one of the first disciples call. So anyway, Jeff, talk to me about this. You can see we get a little passionate about this because we see, it's just some structural opportunities, strategic opportunities that the LCMS could change to bring more health to our congregations and we're a little reticent right now. Your thoughts?
Speaker 3:Well, one of the things that we're trying to do to bring health to our congregations is that we have, as you do, too many vacancies in our churches in terms of pastoral leadership, and so one of the things that we have done is put in place something called ordination under special circumstances. So when you were talking about people who have a background in business or some other teaching or just background in life, they've, you know, they're older. We have a lot of congregations where they're small, they haven't had any traction in the call process, but somebody's been raised up as the preacher, leader for lack of a better term pastor without the title, and what we've decided is that in some of those cases, we need to train them to do what they're already doing, and because otherwise these congregations just aren't served, we don't have enough people to serve them, and so we do have that track. Now it's a shorter track to ordination. It's a little bit controversial in our in our body, as you can imagine, but so we're trying to do the best we can.
Speaker 3:What we do is train them. After a year, uh, they're ordained with a mentor and they keep going. In order to be in good standing, they need to complete their their track as far as the coursework goes. Um, but that's, that's the way we're working. That so it's. I think a lot of our, a lot of us, are just trying to figure out how to best serve our congregations and raise up leadership that can multiply leaders. You know that's the.
Speaker 2:Is that a restricted call just for that local congregation in that particular case?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that tends to be the way we think about it. Yeah, it's early yet, but yeah, like if a person is ordained in that situation, they can't just jump into another church, they're ordained to that ministry, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Do you know how delightful it is for me to hear a synod leader like yourself say my ultimate responsibility is the health and vitality of our local congregations, having the difficult conversations whatever it takes to serve them well. I'm praying for more humility like that in the LCMS to be sure that we would be listening deeply to the needs of the church.
Speaker 3:One of the things we always have to explain because it's a little bit people want to know what it means is that we say that one of our four core values is that we are congregationally focused, and what that means is that we're not congregational. We have a structure where we are Somebody's at my door, we have a. We have a structure, but we okay, where was I? So so our, our resources and our thought processes are always going to how can we serve our congregations better? Yeah, and so, while we're not congregational, we are congregationally focused because we're disciples made.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in congregations.
Speaker 3:Disciples aren't made at the judicatory level. No.
Speaker 1:So let's go a little deeper into your polity if you don't mind. So you say you have bishops, right, and pastors kind of report up to. There's one bishop, one bishop, your president, if you will, right.
Speaker 3:Yep, we have one bishop Early on. So this is kind of interesting because early on we decided so we're going to have one Bishop, but we also needed some oversight at a lower level. I'm on a podcast.
Speaker 1:We don't edit these things at all, it's all good.
Speaker 2:Is that your wife? Is that your wife, jeff? For those watching on YouTube. Hello, mrs Morlock, is that your wife? Is that your wife, jeff?
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice to meet you For those watching on YouTube, hello.
Speaker 3:Mrs Morlock, thanks for your husband's time.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 3:Okay, back on track, polity. Early on we decided we need a little bit. Our congregations needed to be served and our bishop wasn't able to do that to meet with congregations, to meet local needs. And so we have mission districts and they're very fluid. In fact they're kind of we're dividing, it's like cells. We're kind of as we grow we're dividing mission districts and multiplying. So in my mission district here in southeastern Ohio we have five mission districts. In Ohio they're typically around 12 or 13 congregations and then we have a dean of the mission district. So I resigned as dean of our mission district to do this work with the denomination. I served our 13 congregations and worked with them during vacancies and with any kind of needs that they might have, and so our deans are really the people who serve, represent the bishop on the ground with congregations.
Speaker 2:How many deans in total would the church body have then?
Speaker 3:Probably now, maybe. I would guess that in the high 30s or maybe 40.
Speaker 1:Okay, and that group is connecting to the bishop, kind of on a rhythm that group connects to the bishop on a rhythm.
Speaker 3:He connects with them individually, and then there's a couple times a year where they gather to meet. One is in conjunction with our annual convocation, and then they have a dean's meeting coming up in the fall where they come in for a couple days. We're actually hubbed in Texas in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, so they'll come in there and meet with the bishop for about three days.
Speaker 1:So people listen when we're talking to leaders like you, Jeff, and we're proud to be in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod third generation LCMS pastor. No, we're not leaving the church body, we're just here learning about how lean if it's a smaller church body like yourself, a younger church body. There are blessings and there are struggles, right, and one of the blessings is that, just like in maybe a smaller church or a new start, you can make strategic changes structurally pretty quick. Why? Because it's based on relationship. There's trust, you know, between the bishop and as a bishop you could get to know, or a synod president, whatever, you can get to know 30, some, you know you call them deans of mission, which is awesome, but when you have, there's no way.
Speaker 1:So for us, your deans would be equivalent to our 35 district presidents. Right, we have 35 district presidents, 6,000 congregations. There's no way. Our bishop, if you will, we call him our synod president. There's no way that President Harrison could know the circuit visitors who oversee congregations of between eight and 12 or so in a respective geographic area. So it's just, our struggles are relational. I'm making that point just to say there's like we're not battling over theology today. We're battling over over trust, relationship trust, and that just takes time and the larger you get man even as a congregation.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of empathy for President Harris and the larger you get, the easier it is for you to kind of not be able to listen to all of the stakeholders in that respective congregation. Right, there are folks I like to say Grandma Schmittke. Grandma Schmittke at one time had your ear, but because of size and all the different types of people you got to meet with as you continue to grow, you don't meet with her anymore. And I would to bring that metaphor home I just don't know that we're able right now the mechanisms are existing for us to listen to all parts of our church body.
Speaker 1:Now President Harrison would probably say well, I have all my district presidents right To which I would say the most recent this is why this is a little controversial the most recent 13 district presidents putting together, putting their name to a paper, a pastor for every LCMS congregation. I've heard from multiple of those 13 district presidents putting together, putting their name to a paper, a pastor for every LCMS congregation. I've heard from multiple of those 13 district presidents their paper was not engaged with the kind of fervor that we were hoping it would be engaged with.
Speaker 1:So there's just time and trust that we need to rebuild it. And this is a call for everyone, at every different level in the LCMS, to take responsibility for building trusting relationships with people that you're like. Well, I don't know if I agree with that guy. No, go and have coffee with them, go and break bread with them. We need one another desperately. Why? Because the world's going to know the love of Jesus based on our unity and care for one another, specifically in different contexts. So maybe this is where the question can come in for you. I mean, how are you building kind of contextual hospitality? This is one of our calls right now in the LCMS. Like, doing ministry in rural Ohio is radically different than urban LA. Like, how do you build?
Speaker 2:that sort of contextual hospitality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let me go back one step to the structure thing, because what I didn't mention, that we also have just put in place in the last year or two, area assistance for the bishop. So they're mostly they're not all retired, but I think several of them are and they they basically, if what we want our bishop's job is unsustainable unless we help him meet, have to meet with fewer people to get things happening right. So these area assistants work with the deans and the bishop works with the assistants, so that things can be communicated in that kind of way. Now, as far as your talk, boy, contextual hospitality, you are speaking my language. We are at the seminary One of our concerns— is that, and we have an intern right now in my church.
Speaker 3:So this is really critical. What we want for our intern, dale in this case, is he should be able to come out of seminary and our context and be able to serve any church in the NALC High church, smells and bells, low church, contemporary worship, whatever it is. He should be able to go in to a congregation and serve them well, and so we want that. We want our pastors to be able to serve in all the contexts. In fact, one of the things I've been doing with Dale because I'm a kind of a rover now on Sunday mornings I fill in different places. But in our mission district we have the largest congregation in the NALC, which is multi-site that's the one I was serving before I came on board and we have church plants, we have an Oromo Ethiopian congregation, we have urban, rural. So I've been taking Dale once a month to go with me and experience these different contexts. He sat with a small town, a rural pastor. He sat down with one of our. He actually worked for part of a week and then preached in one of our kind of more higher church settings here in Columbus.
Speaker 3:So we want our students to be sensitive to when they get out and they go into a congregation. I always say that we had students or I had students for like 15 years from our seminary here in town back in the ELCA days and I always said to them their first job is to be a detective. When they go into a congregation and ask good questions about you know what, what, the what the history is and what, why, you know if they have a question about, well, why does this congregation do this? Cause it's not what I learned in seminary. Ask them, they'll tell you if they know. But don't go in and blow it up until you figure out why.
Speaker 1:And that blow up can be on either end of the spectrum, right, I mean, you may have a congregation that has really really grooved to more modern worship and so the pastor has a bent toward more traditional. Or could be the exact opposite. You're going into a place and this is probably more likely where there is a high, high value for traditional liturgical worship. But they could be a young leader who's coming in and they want to, they want to get the band going right away. Like that is not wise, that's not wise at all.
Speaker 1:Um, need to respect the traditions and every this is the unique thing. I mean, there there's this, uh, hope, this, I think, utopian desire that I would walk into every church I've heard this before and I can open up the hymnal and I can, you know, have the exact same worship experience. And while some of those experiences may be kind of commensured from the invocation through the benediction page 5 and 15 from TLH back in the day, for us in the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod, right, it really is a, it's a fictitious hope. It's not going to happen. Why? Because there's, they're found in context, that congregation has been rooted liturgically in context, so a number of their traditions, even within the liturgy are going to look and feel different. So do you, pastor, have sensitivity toward those traditions? And they're, they're deeply embedded. But traditions, and they're deeply embedded. One point, like we at the end of the service or sermon, like Christ Greenfield has said, god is good all the time, for like years and years and years, right and it would have been very.
Speaker 1:We don't say God is good here, that's just we don't. We don't like. That would have been very bad for me. You know what I'm saying. That's a small little example, but I think pastors can just kind of rip through those kind of tradition, kind of the underbelly. It's more sociological than it is theological. This is what norms us, right, jeff? Anything more to say there?
Speaker 3:Absolutely Just that my undergraduate degree is in sociology, so A to the men. No, I think you're absolutely right. And yeah, I guess I've served congregations where you know. I went into one congregation and the pastors were chausable, so I wore a chausable when I was at my last call. And even at my church now, where I am now, we've had contemporary worship and traditional worship and I'm as happy as a clam jumping from one to the other and that the traditions are different. Are there things that I would change? Probably, but not if I was the pastor. That wouldn't change them immediately, maybe, or maybe ever, it's just not. It's.
Speaker 3:I think that when one of the things that that seminarians need to learn is that it's not always about your preference and it's really about centering Jesus, and we can get lost in the weeds so quickly. You know, in one of my congregations I taught a Bible study, morning Bible study, so it was mostly older people and of course we had contemporary and traditional worship and they were mostly traditional worshipers. And they said Pastor, jeff, and we have multiple services, which service do you like the best? I said I like the one where the gospel is preached in its purity and Jesus gets lifted up and we have the sacrament. Which one do you like? And they said you know what we mean. I said yeah, I know what you mean.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry to go off on this, but we have divides about, you know, worship wars and stuff like that. We need to write good music if people have. The attack on contemporary worship, even up to this day, by some folks is so antiquated because they're making attacks on. Songs are written many, many years ago which the vast, vast majority of any of our modern worshiping congregations have long since discarded. There's new songs being written that are so so Jesus-centered, so word-centered, so master narrative-centered, so that debate.
Speaker 1:we can kind of put it to the side. But I get to be in one of those congregations I don't have a. That's like saying you got a favorite kid, you don't have a favorite kid, I just want Jesus. Just like you say, there's beauty in all of these respective traditions.
Speaker 2:you know, and people have various heart languages, jack, anything more to say to that? You get a worship in those spaces. If you applied some of the some of the very, very strict criticisms to some of the contemporary songs that are out there, then you'd have to actually look at the hymnal and say some well, you know, if we go to the history of these songs and you know they may not meet the standard too or we're going to strip those out, but there's a history behind them, a culture behind them, and so we use them. We use these things evangelically because they make sense in the culture and they serve well to teach something, even if maybe the author didn't agree 100% with every single confessional statement that you're going to have to say. So use it. Well, right, you know, adapt to the culture and take these things and use them evangelically to do word and sacrament. You got permission to do that.
Speaker 3:One of the things that I want our seminarians to and we've just had this conversation in our staff and faculty meeting recently is one of the things that I want our seminarians to be able to do. Besides you know it's great and they need to learn all the rubrics and all the things in our Lutheran Book of Worship, which is what most of our congregations use. I want them to be able to say if you were to put together a contemporary worship service, what would that look like, based on what we've learned about who the Lutheran Church is and who we are, what we center and what we value? What would a contemporary service need to include and what would be Adiaphora? I think that was. That would be a great exercise in a practica or a Lutheran liturgical class to be able to say, because a lot of our students are going to go into those contexts and they're going to need to figure it out and know what, what, what is, what is the thing that we care about in terms of the great tradition?
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we're always going to have people with Lutheran backgrounds coming to visit us. You know when they move here but we get people from Catholic backgrounds that love us because of their experience in the traditional service and we get people from non-denominational backgrounds that love us because of their experience in contemporary worship. Right.
Speaker 2:And in both cases it is. You know, there are types of liturgical services that include the things that you would expect in a Lutheran service, like confession, absolution and you know the creeds and all that kind of stuff that come up right.
Speaker 1:Lord's Prayer, lord's Prayer yeah, indication benediction yeah, exactly, but the environment is very different. Right it is. It is Because music is different and people's preferences musically are very broad today, and that's mostly technologically driven, right. I mean, you just have access to so many different forms of music, all which can be used to glorify God, all right. Last question here, jeff, time has flown. What should we learn, do you think from Jesus? Very good place to start and stop. Learn from Jesus in the early church regarding church leadership formation.
Speaker 3:It seems to me that, just off the cuff, that a lot of leadership nowadays is very structured and you go through all these very structured kind of whether it's a leadership course or a manual, those things are all good, but Jesus taught, jesus developed leaders, disciple leaders, as he was going, as they were living life it. It was very highly relational and contextual and sort of on the spot learning, I would say, as they watched Jesus in different contexts deal with, uh, critical issues, conflict, um, how do you, you know, teaching all those things? Uh, they're, they're learning in all of those moments. It's not a structured kind of classroom deal, it's lived life.
Speaker 3:One of the things that we've developed in our context in the North American Lutheran Church is life-to-life discipleship that we're trying to implement in our congregations, and so one of the things that people said about this is so how long do we do this? Because what they're used to is some kind of leadership development program coming out. They bought the books, they bought the set of tapes back in the day, and so you look in the pastor's office and you can tell what they've done, because it's all on the shelf and what we've tried to explain is no, this, this isn't a program. This is life to life. This is a template for how to do life to life discipleship, starting with a leadership group in your church that will then expand as those leaders train. You know, do do this with other leaders, so you're talking our language.
Speaker 1:Now I think it has to be. It has to be authentic, it has to be close to the ground, it has to be real, lived life kind of stuff, yeah, discipled. And the character of Christ is is the fruit, the fruit of the Holy Spirit has been seen. Um, it's not just about the head, it's about the heart and, uh, the characteristics of Jesus, the humility of Christ, the care and deep love for people. Hopefully that's been discerned at the local level, like deeply before a man you know, or a woman in a deaconess program or in your context, it goes off to be a leader in the church, right, like if we miss on character, we miss on absolutely everything. And I think we see this in the pastoral epistles from Paul, like he only talks about the ability to teach. Everything else is all a character concern. And so we do.
Speaker 1:You know that we didn't have seminaries. No offense to anybody who was in a seminary. The first monastic seminaries did not exist in confessional Christianity for 700 years. 700 years Everything else was just local. So we have outsourced and this is not bad. The local church is kind of outsourced to our institutions.
Speaker 1:This is a product of Western kind of higher ed kind of movement today and it's time for institutions, seminaries to say, wow, we need to get back to the grassroots, we need to get back to life. On life discipleship, we need to work with pastors. I wanted to say this earlier and it sounds like this is one of your in the NALC, one of the opportunities a fast track. We don't want to fast track anyone. Well, could we identify men earlier on who have been in the congregation and ordained them after maybe a year or so, but they just stay under discipleship with a pastor who's been there for a while longer? And pastor, if you're not actively being discipled, if you're not coming underneath other wise spiritual fathers and mothers, man, you're really missing out. Because at the end of the day, I can't take people someplace I haven't been and if I'm not actively being discipled, I'm going to go the pride path very, very fast. I'm the pastor here. I kind of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know Jesus was under the authority of his father over and over again, right, and that led to humility. Like these men wanted to come under the authority of Jesus because it was a different type of authority. It wasn't about power, it was about humility, which was shown on a Roman cross, and then the power of the Holy Spirit coming post-resurrection, post-ascension. Roman cross. And then the power of the Holy Spirit coming post-resurrection, post-ascension, and the releasing, the scattering, the sending, even through persecution, of the church, carrying the never-changing gospel of Jesus Christ through word and sacrament. This is the call of the church today. The missional zeal needs to return to the church and it happens at the grassroots level Pastors identifying other leaders and casting vision for them to hey, maybe you could go start a church, start a ministry, and in the meantime come and hang out and see how we do life here. Anything more to say there, jeff?
Speaker 3:I got construction workers outside my door too.
Speaker 1:I got construction going on A new door is being put in outside my office.
Speaker 3:You mentioned that we've outsourced education. I don't disagree with that. We've done that. One of the things I like about where we're headed is that our professors, when they teach this course in the summer that relates to our core values, go to our bishop. They go to some of our pastors and they say what should we be teaching? What do you need us to do? Love that. What should we be working on? We know how to teach courses, but what do you need us to do? What, what, what should we be working on? We know how to teach courses, but what do?
Speaker 3:you need us to teach.
Speaker 2:What do?
Speaker 3:you see so. I like that there's a hand in glove situation between our seminary and our our denomination, because that's helpful in terms of how we go about our work.
Speaker 2:You were sharing us earlier about some content that's being developed regarding mission. You know doing word and sacrament mission in a post-Christian. Am I labeling that correct?
Speaker 3:You know who taught that course. We outsourced that a little bit because we were at Trinity Anglican Seminary and there's an Anglican priest who's done the work, the work I mean he's done this over and over in congregation. So we had Dan Alger come in and teach primarily teach that course alongside our professors, you know, worked too with them and with him. But we want to partner where it makes sense to who's the person that can speak to this, you know. And so Dan came in and worked with that. And one of the things I like about our partnership with Trinity is they're very big on the Anglican church is really a church planting movement and so all their, all their pastors have to take a course on church planting and church renewal. Wow, that's not a that's not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:No, it's not, Please. It is a skill that, unfortunately, will you know, you'll have to leverage. That more than you may think, going into the One or the other, or both yeah.
Speaker 1:But one or the other, or both, yeah, and then, hey, I got to get going, jeff, this has been so much fun. If people want to connect with you, how can they do so, brother?
Speaker 3:so, brother, uh jay, it's uh, jay, my letter, first letter. My name m-o-r-l-o-c-k.
Speaker 1:At the n-a-l-corg or the nalsorg. All right, I love it. Uh, this is lead time. Uh, please like, subscribe, comment wherever it is. You're taking this in a lot of folks hanging out in the conversation. Uh, I, I love honest comments on youtube. That that's just fine. If you think I don't know why you guys are talking to, well, you know, jesus went and talked to a lot of interesting folks so we can at least within the confessional Lutheran tribe, which I would say the NALC is, we should learn from one another and we're simply better together. Lutherans can learn from Anglicans for goodness sake, you know what I'm saying which our Anglican brothers and sisters have a lot to offer to the liturgical confessional conversation today as well. It's a good day. Go make it a great day, jeff. Thank you, jack. Great work, as always.
Speaker 3:Jack, nice to see you guys All right, thanks, bye.