Jason Byassee on Whether There is a Formula for Mainline Success

Welcome to the Future Christian podcast. I am your guest host today, Martha Tatarnik. And today I have with me Jason Biasy, who lives and serves just up the highway from me in Toronto, Ontario. Thanks for being on the podcast, Jason. Thanks. What else would you like to share about yourself and kind of your story and a few, and a few... broad brush strokes. Sure. Well, I had a kind of evangelical conversion experience to Christ at a Baptist camp.

It's something that I advise people both have and grow out of. They were willing to actually say the J word with me and tell me what they thought about Jesus. And then I realized I couldn't handle the politics and they were nuts. So I've tried ever since to kind of keep the Jesus bit and the strengths of evangelicalism. while trying to kind of back out of the parts that I see is not just wrong, but dehumanizing. And it's the same with my life in Mainland Christianity.

I think they're treasures and glories that we have. And then there are also things that are not just wrong, but dehumanizing. So there we are. Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. I think that's a really, you're in good company in the listenership of future Christian and someone who has been thoroughly raised in the mainline tradition. I take a lot from that evangelical witness to keep Jesus at the center. So yeah, it's a good balance to keep in mind.

He's kind of the only thing we got going for us, right? So like all the other stuff is negotiable. He's at the center and he's luckily he's all we need. Yeah, yeah, totally. So I think that you're maybe kind of getting at these next two questions a little bit in that introductory word, but what do you think it has meant to be a Christian in the past and how is that maybe different from what it means to be a Christian today?

Yeah. So where I studied Duke Divinity School, one of our rival schools says, Duke is the place where Evan... So there's uncomfortable, awkward accuracy in that. The Dean of Duke Divinity School in the 60s went to Vatican II and came back and was like, oh, dang, y 'all Catholics are Christians. This changes everything. And there was a similar process here in Canada too, of course.

So former Dean of Emanuel College at the University of Toronto told me, look, I was basically trained to be a Catholic priest, to trust in the power of the sacraments, to trust the tradition. Now we wanted to open the priesthood. advanced rights for gay people, but basically the form of the ministry was a priesthood, right? And that'll be even more agreeable to your fellow Anglicans, Martha. But there is something we've lost there.

I think we both have to keep our evangelical identity while we embrace Catholicity, that there's something in the tentative quality of the both and that's particularly compelling. Because, I mean, like the rival school to Duke implies, like if you could just go be Catholic. Like they're taking people, right?

So like what piece of the Christian tradition do we have that's our charism that we're bringing that would be lost if we just join the rest of the Roman Catholic Church, which is a fine thing to do. There's nothing wrong with it. But if you're not called to that, okay, what are you fronting? Yeah, I mean, if you're not called to that or you're not included in that, there are lots of us.

Yeah. list of invitees as a male wannabe priest, although being married would be a bit of challenge, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. Well, here's to the both and rather than the either or. I think that if it's an either or proposition, we're probably all in trouble. So. know that the best part of Anglicanism is the conjunctive quality, the both and right. I mean, if I may, the worst part of Anglicanism is if you're trying to be in the middle, often you kind of end up being neither thing.

So I find a special amounts of hope in the kind of extreme forms of Anglicanism, the kinds that are There's not a lot of that because like people who started the Church of England were worried that like if you're on the wrong side of history, you lose a significant body part. So y 'all kind of chilled out. Yeah, you want that one. I mean, really, if you're choosing, you want to keep that one. So, but I think. Yeah, yeah, and probably the places where we need to pay attention. It's good.

Is there a spiritual practice that is particularly helpful, meaningful to you right now at this juncture in life? and helpful to me. I've made a practice of going to Trappist monasteries and then bringing lay people with me. And I find that magical. I love that the Book of Common Prayer is basically trying to make monastic practice something that the rest of the church all engages in. The problem is it just doesn't seem to work.

So trying to find a way of prayer that's communal, that's disciplined, that's It's also. That still seems to be the prize to me and the Book of Common Prayer seems to be the best effort to make it happen. I just haven't really seen it work. Yeah, what do you mean by you haven't seen it work? I mean, so there are Anglican communities that gather for morning and evening prayer, right? Just like there are throughout Catholic Christianity writ large.

When I've tried to gather people regularly for things like morning and evening prayer in the Methodist and now United Church settings, I meant it hasn't really taken. Right, yeah, okay, I see what you mean. It does seem to be sort of a charism of particular churches that they're able to get that gathering momentum. I mean, I think a lot of communities practice that piece around the daily office, but in a more solitary way, you know, part of it.

undo it to me, you know, I mean, Phyllis tickles amazing talking about sneaking off to the washroom, you know, for each of the seven hours to the point where her friends realized either you have the most regular bladder in history, or you're going to pray with the monks.

But the whole point is that it's communal, right, that you're in the same physical space. So you can do it at a distance, but something is lost. Yeah, something is lost. Also, you know, as we say in the Anglican Church, like you are never praying in the office alone, even if you're by yourself. and saints. That's right. And, uh, and other prayers around. Yeah, good.

Okay, so our main topic today is definitely one that sparks a lot of interest in my circle of friends and colleagues, and that is about how you grow a mainline or a traditionalist church. And I've been thinking about that word grow because I don't think that that's actually the most accurate word for what we're going to be talking about today. I think I might want to us sub in either the word like thriving or healthy or flourishing.

I think the piece around numerical growth can be a part of it and certainly one that most of us really desire. But I think what you're going to help us explore today is more around health and flourishing. Is that fair? Yeah, I mean, the nomenclature is contentious for a reason, right? I am committed to the claim. unhealthy things grow too, right? I mean tumors grow, schisms grow, dysfunctions grow. So not everything growing is healthy.

But, you know, I think if you're someone who believes in Jesus and thinks he's good news for your neighbor, then you want to see more people get to know him. And that's going to mean new relationships in the body of Christ. So that's a kind of growth. And yeah. So many qualifications abound, I agree. Yeah, yeah. Well, and we're also going to have a part of our conversation around death and decline too. And I've heard you kind of gather that into the picture of health and life in Jesus.

So yeah, we're going to unpack all of these different parts of this topic. OK, so let's start off, Jason, with... how you understand and describe the church because I think that's an important starting point. And certainly when I've heard you talk, I would say that you have a pretty high ecclesiology about the church and what it reflects about God. So over to you. So I think of the church as Jesus and all his weird friends.

I wouldn't have any interest in the church if it wasn't for the church's heart, which is Jesus of Nazareth. And I really do have a high ecclesiology in the sense of, I mean, if you take the metaphor of the body of Christ, it's kind of a shocking metaphor. And Paul seems to take it so seriously, it's almost... non -metaphorical for him. That were kind of the liver, spleen, eyelashes, toenails, ribs, fleshy beating heart of the Jew from Nazareth, Mary's child.

Someone noticed about me when I guest preach, which I do in a lot of different traditions, I almost always start with, here's why your church is so great. Mennonites, you're into peace. Anglicans, you're into sacraments. Catholics, you got Big Frank. evangelicals, you're zealous, like these are all gifts that God has given. And then God hasn't given all the gifts to any one of us, right? They seem to be scattered so that we kind of end up needing one another.

I just see Jesus risen and reigning in all of these places where we don't necessarily call one another sister and brother yet. So there is something to the early 20th century ecumenical vision of the church that I still think is radical and interesting, and that my United Church of Canada was born. It just doesn't seem to have a very sharp edge anymore in our day, right? And it almost feels like yesteryear's project that's kind of failed. So I'll stop with this.

GK Chesterton has this thing where he says, we would all agree that St. Francis is like Jesus. That seems easy enough. Is the reverse also true? Is Jesus like St. Francis? In other words, can you learn things about Jesus you wouldn't have known without the witness of St. Francis? And Chesterton wants to say, yeah. There's more to be learned about Jesus from this medieval Italian.

I think that's correct that learning about God's weird friends, the saints, especially maybe those saints we don't recognize as such, is a way of learning about the God fleshed in Jesus and Nazareth. Yeah, I mean, that sounds really accurate to me, and I would certainly say that that is borne out in scripture as well.

Like, it would be pretty hard to understand the story of Jesus without the characters that surround him, the weird f - We learn a lot about Jesus through Mary Magdalene and Mary of Nazareth and Peter and Thomas and, you know, sort of all of the people that don't get named. And there are crazy stories, too. wouldn't have these scriptures without them. Thank you. Yeah, a friend of mine visited the church I serve, Timothy Eaton Memorial, which is,

beautiful building in Midtown Toronto. And she said, I was surprised. It seemed like there were needy people there. What do you mean? And she said, well, people who seem to sleep outside and people who seemed not to have all their act together financially. I thought this was a great compliment. She paid them. So I'm not sure where else in our culture is someone who doesn't know where they're gonna sleep and someone who has plenty of money sit beside each other and become friends.

And I think our culture wants that. We just don't really know how to do it. And I don't know that the church knows how to do it. It's just that the Holy Spirit is always drawing all these surprising relationships where you wouldn't expect. I'm struck too that... Maybe the greatest miracle in the church in the last half millennium is the African -American church in the United States, that a religion that was used to impose and maintain slavery, segregation, and violence.

African -American people said, okay, we don't like this white Christianity, but this Jesus, this one who was bruised for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities, he's on our side. The heart of this story is someone who suffers and the heart of this story is a God who frees slaves in the Exodus. So y 'all are doing it wrong, but we're going to do it right. And I'm struck.

I can't bring up an example from the African -American church where my people in Toronto don't lean in and say, yeah, there's something true about that. I want that. Age, I can't think of where people who are a hundred and people who are one sit down together and make their life together when they don't have the same last name. So I really am committed to, I mean, I think that church is a miracle.

It's got all these horrible flaws that we see very quickly, those of us who are on the payroll, right? But then I just think we have to constantly say, yeah, and look at all this river of grace born to us through this flawed institution. That's lovely. like a bit unsettling. You know, you say that we kind of want this diversity and don't know how to get it. But I think in lots of ways, we're also sort of trained not to want it.

Like we are we are trained to sort of edit out people and voices and opinions that don't. with our own and there is something grace -filled and totally unsettling about like we don't get to pick who's part of this thing like we're just stuck with each other. No. I mean, Nadia Bolz Weber says, like, I get why we want to be done with church because other people are disappointing. But then you realize, oh, wait, I'm the disappointing one and these others are sticking by me.

So there's something about our constant failing one another that seems intrinsic to church life, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, the flaws are kind of the point in some ways. So the way that we connected for our listeners, I'll just share that Jason was recently a speaker at Con Ed clergy day that I attended. And, you know, tough crowd, you get a group of clerics together of the same denomination for a mandatory con ed day and there can be quite a lot of grumpiness and cynicism that runs rampant. Yeah, totally. Yeah, we're in trouble.

But you know, you really manage to capture the crowd and He sort of opened by talking about there not being a book, a manual on how to grow a traditionalist church. I would say that that would be a book that many of us would love if there were just kind of a ABCD manual of how you do this thing, like most of us, I think, would sign up for that. There isn't one.

And you also kind of named a lot of the inadequacy that I think that those are the best serving in the traditionalist mainline church often feel, especially when we compare ourselves to like the mega church down the road that is equipped with all of the bells and whistles of modern ministry. So, you know, I think that you were reading the room well in terms of knowing who you were speaking to. People, people. related to that.

Then you also shared a story about speaking to a pastor or mentor of yours who is in a thriving, traditionalist church, and you wondered with him whether there might be some takeaways that could be put into a book and shared. He pretty quickly dismissed that suggestion, saying, Right.

But I understand you have a background in journalism and and your journalistic radar was on and you have been doing some research into whether there aren't in fact some takeaways that can be offered from your friend or from others who are leading flourishing churches. So... Yeah. Wow, Martha, you're a terrifyingly good listener. You just summarized all the good points I had in three hours in about 30 minutes. So bless you.

Yeah, I mean, there's no formula because every place is unique and nothing can be kind of dropped one size fits all into a neighborhood where it doesn't fit. So I think this is why horticultural metaphors still have a kind of purchase, right? Like what people talk about planting, people talk about gardening. I don't, I, I, you can look at my hands, I am no good at this. I have no ability to actually dig in the dirt and make things live. I think it's a miracle.

But people who do will talk about specific soil and what can grow there and what can't specific shade, specific weather. And, you know, if you don't know how to read those things, you're not doing it right. And actually, we all depend on someone doing it right to eat. We don't notice it because we're far enough down the food chain, right? So, So I guess you remind me for some reason as you tell the story of a story that I didn't tell that day to y 'all.

A friend of mine took over a historic African -American church and the neighborhood had changed. So we hear this story a lot with white historic churches that a downtown core has changed. I don't hear it as often with African -American churches. So it had changed into a largely Latino neighborhood and suddenly had African -American church that was saying like, how do we learn how to talk to our Spanish speaking migrant neighbors?

and not just become a drop -in church the way white people often do, right? That's an interesting question, I think. And it's almost enough to make you think, all right, maybe this is something that the church always experiences. One group of people starts a church, and then the people change, and then the church has to say, okay, the people who started us aren't here anymore, somebody else is here, what do we do now?

So St. Cecilia's, the Irish Catholic Church, parish in my neighborhood here in the west side of Toronto is now a largely Vietnamese parish. That took some skill to say, okay, the soil has changed. What will grow here now? And it's not going to be Irish nuns who are going to make it happen. So I guess I'm increasingly convinced it's not that this is a unique circumstance that the people who planted this church have moved on and now there are other people.

It may just be that that's what church leadership is, that that's always taking place. And you and I just need to be better gardeners. Yeah, I mean that definitely speaks to just the translation of the faith across generations as well, let alone across cultures or racial contexts or whatever. I think that's really good. if you're the Irish Catholics and you're like, yeah, we don't like Vietnamese people, we don't want them here. All right, cool. Then your building should be condos.

Let's let's let's just like have that happen. And yet. So I tell this story a lot that Andrew Walls tells the great Scottish Missyologist who just died a few years ago in his hometown in Glasgow. He said there were four. historic cathedral churches in the main square. Three of them are now nightclubs. And he says, I got to tell you, a medieval cathedral makes a beautiful nightclub.

He said, the fourth is an African immigrant church that's booming and that's asking itself questions like, how do we reach these lonely old white people? I just think that's how the Holy Spirit works. Yeah, that's beautiful. So we've got to be better gardeners. We've got to be attentive to the soil, the changing of the soil.

I think that... that you did grab my colleague's attention by kind of naming the topic, again, a topic that we all would love a formula for, but also gaining some credibility by making it clear that you weren't going to just try to sell us sort of one more magic bullet that would like, if you do this, then everything will be fine. What has been the scope of your work? Yeah, so I really am a storyteller.

There are really good sociology and data -driven studies about what grows in different places. It's just not how I'm trained. I'm trained to go around, find interesting stories, and tell them. And so I like to refer people on to someone who does proper numbers, because such people exist. They're just not me. So one of the things I do talk about though is fronting your weird, not being afraid of your weird.

So this often works well in Anglican settings, because often Anglicans will have a contingent in your midst who are Anglo -Catholic. And there's nothing weirder than chanting stuff, incense, sacraments, parading around neighborhoods, carrying these things. Like what? Like in a kind of not religious age, seeing these things is befuddling. And... There was a day when Monty Python and the Holy Grail could make fun of such things and people knew what they were talking about.

That was the early seventies. People don't know what they're talking about now because they don't see monks and nuns. They don't see priests. They don't see people parading around neighborhoods doing religious things. It's, if anything, so foreign, they don't know how to make fun of it anymore. Right? So, and I think Anglican Catholics are right to say God in this bread, God saving through this water. That's magic. And our world is starving for magic, right?

This is what you see in the Harry Potter phenomenon, right? Like we want the world to be alive. And I mean, as the poet says, the world is charged with the grandeur of God. So I think it would be a mistake to take an Anglo Catholic setting and say, okay, what we need is guitars and praise courses. No, no, no, let them be their weird, cool selves.

They're holding onto one of the treasures that Jesus entrusts the whole church with, and they need to front that and not pretend there's something else.

So in the whole ecosystem of churches, it would be a catastrophe if we all tried to be the same. We don't have to do that. There are plenty of other churches doing guitars and praise choruses. We can do this weird thing and see what happens with that. Yeah, so embracing your weird, embracing your uniqueness, embracing your, your context, your history, I guess, the the pieces of the tradition that have been passed along to you being good stewards of that.

Is there an element of the weird that is about being countercultural? Is there an element that is about resisting something about the current cultural context? there is. I mean, someone said about community that people you can't this is an audio podcast, you can't see my hands that but I got one hand that's holding up like a stop sign and another hand that's holding up like a come hither sign. Like we're all like that with community, we both want it.

And we don't like we would like community with people who we like, who don't ask anything of us. I do think there's a deep desire for God. And there's also a kind of deep suspicion of God and especially God's weird friends. that I share, you share, right? Like we are all a product of our age and that it's just you and I have happened to got to have gotten a glimpse of church where we say, that's the thing, that's life -giving. I want that. I want to share it with others.

So I think the right thing to do is to share that version of faith with others. In other words, whatever it was that brought us to the place that says this is worth spending your life for, don't hold that back. So I mentioned before taking lay people to monasteries. There was a moment where I didn't want to do this. It was like I was afraid they were going to ruin it for me. Like that's my place. That's where I meet with Jesus. Plus they'll think it's weird and probably fire me.

And then I finally thought, well, that's dumb. Like I finding life there, let's bring them along and maybe they'll find life there too. And then we can discuss the problem together of how do we share this life more broadly? And that's what happened. So taking... lay people from North Carolina Methodist churches to this Trappist monastery, they'd come back and be like, wow, that's the coolest thing I've ever done. Why can't every Tuesday be like that? That's an appropriate question.

I don't know why we can't, but let's work on it together. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are so many elements of what you have named kind of around prayer and the gathering of community across fault lines and the sacramentality and the embodiment of community that like literally where else can you get that in our world today? So like lean into that, like. mean... try to make it all just so accessible that you...

Yeah, let it be in this sort of big, mysterious, unexplainable, odd, difficult. I mean, they're all at least quasi church institutions out there now, right? Like I see people jogging when I'm driving to church and they're wearing hundreds of dollars worth of jogging gear and clearly running shops have figured out. If you get people in a community, they'll do something hard together. Like that's just church. without the God bit, right?

Like we have the advantage of being church with the God bit, which is actually the only interesting thing. So in some ways in the mainline church, we've made this mistake. We've kind of said, don't talk about God too much. Don't talk about Jesus. Don't talk about the Holy, don't talk about sin. Like we want to lower the bar of what people actually have to believe and then like forklift them over it and say, Hey, you're already Christian. You just didn't know it. Like that's a failed strategy.

We've tried it for a few generations. It doesn't work. Instead, we should raise the bar, right? Like, do I have to believe in the bodily assumption of Mary? Yeah, you should. Here's why it's amazing, right? I mean, it's the kind of antithesis of the Boltman strategy of trying to drain all the supernatural out. I actually think people want something bigger than they can understand or trust. Yeah, yeah.

thing about this is I take this from Ken Hood, and he takes it from a preaching professor at Princeton Seminary who says, interested people are interesting. Interested people are interesting. So I sat under a preacher for a while who loved talking about flying this plane that he'd learned how to fly. And he'd go on to talk about flying for about 15 minutes. And then he'd be like, all right, I guess it's time to say something about this Bible passage because we're almost out of time.

He'd be like, yo, dude. Time for a new job. Like you and I as preachers have to stay interested in Jesus, in the new creation he's bringing, in the sharp counter -cultural difficult witness to that, that scripture is, is it great against our sensibilities. That's the only thing worth being interested in. They will notice what interests us. They will not necessarily be interested in what interests us, but we have to, when they notice what interests us, we have to make sure it's...

Jesus and the world of resurrection he's birthing, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The stories of the people in front of us and their witness, I mean, that's, you want to keep lifting that up. Yeah. It is amazing what God is doing in the lives of the people listening to us and lifting up that story from each of them is crucial or handing them the microphone so they can tell it. Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

So we said at the beginning of this part of our conversation that we were qualifying that word growth and that there's a lot of nuance to that word. You talked about healthy things growing. But you've also talked about what is good and healthy about living in a time of institutional

religious decline. You've talked about the importance of death in the church. So let's get real here. Let's talk about death decline. so one of the ways I like to put this is I worry about churches that feel like we got the future figured out. We got a plan. We know how we're going to grow from strength to strength. We really don't even need Jesus because we got everything figured out. We got plenty of money and people. Though those are clearly already atheist institutions, right?

Whereas institutions that are like, yeah, we got no future, none that we can see. The only future we got is the other side of a stone that's been rolled in front of a tomb. Um, cause I think good, that's exactly where the God of Jesus wants you is where you have no hope other than the resurrection from the dead. Um, now I think that's true. What does that mean? And sort of point of fact in lots of denominations in places like where you and I live, where real estate is like the gold mine.

the Holy Grail, the Golden Calf, whatever. What it means is, okay, good, churches close and so then you can pulp them for dollars to keep the denominational machine rolling, right? I think what it has to mean instead is something like what the Bishop of London did, which is, yeah, I'm not selling any more empty churches. I'm gonna give them to somebody who knows how to fill them. Now in his case, that meant lots of people from Holy Trinity Brompton who knew how to replant churches.

I think it can also mean giving them to somebody who knows how to fill them from another denomination, right? From a church whose work you respect, but whose ethos is different from yours. Now, that's hard because you're talking about giving away one of your prime assets, right? But Jesus has plenty of hard things to say about wealth and poverty and what all of them mean. So a teacher that my wife and I both had, he told this story to her.

She was complaining about... the church he was serving, which I'm sure you would never do Martha, but you know, some of us mere mortals do this. I do plenty of it. And, and he stopped her and said, look, there's only one thing that will help some churches. That's one blessed trip to glory land at a time. Yeah. I mean, death can mean new life. And weirdly, I've done a fair number of funerals where people have gotten involved with our church afterwards.

Like, In a moment where people think what they want for their funeral is funny stories and drinks and golf or whatever, like just another consumer opportunity. Actually, the church has the heavy lifting to be able to say, here's what this life means. Here's what we learned from God through this life that we wouldn't have known about God without this life. Because that's kind of the only thing that matters, right?

And when people hear something from us that's like, oh, that's actually worth saying. They'll give us a listen. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the bottom line about sort of all of those points that you've just made is that, like, surely as Christians, we don't have to fear death, right? Like, surely as Christians, we don't have to fear living in a time of something dying. We... this. Yeah, like a lot, a lot of a lot of stuff to say about this.

And a time of death might mean you and I don't have the pension plan we once thought, but Jesus never promised us that, did he? Yeah, well, and I think we're both of an age where like, we got into this with eyes wide open about like what was and wasn't on the table. Certainly nobody ever promised me a lifelong full time career with a gold plated pension at the end of this. Well, and in truth, right, like you and I are in the same position most jobs are in now, right?

Like, I mean, there was a day sort of a post -war, middle -class dream of that being guaranteed for all kinds of positions where it's not anymore. So we're in the same boat with lots of our colleagues that way. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I was at a bridge tournament at the beginning of the new year and got into a conversation with an editor for the Toronto Star. And I mean, bridge tournaments and editors of paper newspapers are like both of a of a different sort of era. Right.

And, you know, the way that he was describing the challenges of his job were just all too familiar in terms of. similarity with print newspaper in our work because as someone wise said, can you even have a city without a newspaper? Like what actually holds a city together? And like, can you have one without a newspaper that has that city name in the title? Like it's not clear to me. Right, but this is the horizon that is unfolding.

Yeah. So you know that famous thing that is usually attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, that the job of preaching is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. That didn't come from Reinhold Niebuhr, that came from a newspaper editor named Peter Finley Dunn in the kind of age of muck -racking journalism in the late 19th century. He said, that's what newspapers are for. So I actually think you could pretty carefully chart the rise and fall of mainline churches and print newspapers.

Someone needs to write that book anyway. Yeah, no kidding. And I had no idea that was where that quotation came from. Amazing. Now the problem with it is of course, ain't no Jesus in it. So that's just the bit I want to add is like comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable with the risen Jew from Nazareth. But you know, Niebuhr is doing fine on his own. He requires no supplementation from me. Okay, noted.

Alright, so another piece that you talked about alongside of embracing the weird, embracing your weird, is you talked about like, leaning into this idea that your church has what people around you are desperate for. And,

And part of that, I felt was like, you kind of use some examples that were almost like manifesting, like, like, let's preach as if this these kinds of people were here and see what happens. Let's let's build a nursery and equip it and see what happens. Like there was some of that manifestation piece. But I also felt like there was a broader piece just around.

like knowing that that gathered community across all of those fault lines is what people are desperate for, that Jesus is what people are desperate for. Like, how would you sort of unpack that piece? language from my mentor, James Howell, who got sent to what he called the ugliest church building in Charlotte, North Carolina, the fastest declining church in Charlotte, North Carolina. And he started preaching that line everywhere. We have what people are desperate for.

And you're right, some of that's aspirational. Some of it is we get these zombie narratives in our head. we are closing and there's nothing we can do about it. What we offer people don't want anymore. I can't even get my own kids and grandkids to come here. Why would anyone else come here, right? Like we're all familiar with those narratives and they're not wrong.

They just have to be, I think, contained within a bigger narrative that says, yeah, the thing we're longing for, namely Jesus and the new creation that he's bringing, that's actually not only what we want, that's what everybody wants. Even if... They don't know it yet. So it is a little bit of a kind of the hope we talk about is too small. And. Yeah. So people who talk about advocacy for disabled people, for example, will say, we think about that backwards.

We tend to think as a church, well, we don't have any people in wheelchairs, so we don't need a ramp. But it's actually the reverse of that. Yeah, you don't have any people in wheelchairs, because you ain't got no ramp. So build a ramp, and then you can ask yourself, do we have any disabled people? Why, lo and behold, things seem to have changed, right? So. Tim Keller used to talk about that with preaching for non -Christians. If you preach as though non -Christians are present, they will be.

If you preach as though there are no non -Christians, you won't have any. It feels backward. So the way I try and talk about this is you want to preach for kind of one layer beyond who you can presently see. Like if the church is a series of circles nestled within each other, who's the circle just beyond where you're at? Who could conceivably come to be part of your... community but aren't now. Preach for them. The ones who are already close, they're fine. Let them take care of themselves.

If you need to at a key moment, you can tell them, hey, you guys are gonna pay my salary so I can ignore you. My job is to work the edges just beyond you. Not the people who are five circles away, right? But the people who know they want something, know that we might have it and might be convencible to visit us once in a while. Like, how can we posture ourselves so that we make... clear, you're the center of our life. We have no church without you.

And actually we think what we could come to share together makes your life more beautiful that you want it. Not all of them are going to come, but you want to aim for them. Yeah, no, I appreciate that for a couple of reasons. I think that it helps us to set our vision in the right place. I think it also puts our confidence in the right place. I think that I think we do want to be confident about what we have to offer as long as we're clear that it's not ourselves, that it's Jesus.

Yeah. And in fact, if we point to ourselves, it's pretty pitiful, right? But that's kind of awesome. Like all we got is a kind of screwed up community. So, oh, you're a screwed up person? That's great. Yeah, we also have a building that's old and needs a lot of care. And yeah, a lot of us have those buildings too. Yeah, no, that's. I think being clear, clearly modest about our own community and also immodest about God who's always raising the dead are the two things to do in tandem.

Yeah, totally. So there's no formula. You've been really clear about that. Every, I think every leader that you have talked to of thriving, traditionalist churches have co -signed that. There's no formula. Yeah, they all want to be clear. But there... There's some patterns in common ground. So what would be some of those places of common ground? take this from a guy named George Lings in the church army in the UK, who I think I'm sure he's getting it from somewhere else. But it's a great phrase.

Churches that intend to grow tend to grow. Churches that intend to grow tend to grow. That is, if you make it an intention, and you try something to make it happen, it will probably fail. Because most things fail. But what you gotta do like any good gardener is pulp that failure into something that bears fruit, right? And it's something that becomes mulch. So I knew a sociologist who studied in Southern California at Fuller and he said, all right, you mainliners start stuff wrong.

You'll start one thing and you'll overfund it and it'll fail because most things fail. And then for the next 50 years, you'll say, well, we tried that and it doesn't work. He says, meanwhile, we evangelicals try a hundred things. We fund none of them. 90 of them fail because most things fail. The 10 that don't fail, we then proceed to underfund. Most of them will fail too. Three or four will succeed and become amazing. Then we dump money on those. Right. So I think that's correct.

We need a much higher tolerance for failure. And usually the way things succeed is not what we expect. So the Alpha course was designed to be a new members course for folks coming to Holy Trinity Brompton who were part of another congregation. And it succeeded as an outreach to non -Christians. They say, we would never have designed it that way if we thought it was an outreach to new Christians. We wouldn't have started with who is Jesus, right?

We would have started with, can you believe in a God in a skeptical age, whatever. So usually the way things succeed is you're looking that way and God sneaks up behind you and gives you a kiss on the cheek, right? it succeeds in a way you didn't expect. And then you say, oh, that's what the Holy Spirit wants. Let's do that thing instead. That accident. So this is the way Jesus farms, right? He takes a handful of seed and he doesn't very carefully plow the row and fertilize.

No, he just throws it everywhere. And some of it gets in the bus and some of it gets in your hair and some of it goes in the neighbor's place and most of it gets eaten up. But lo and behold, they're in the sidewalk. Something pops up. Ooh, look. That's the most beautiful squash I've ever seen. Like, there's a reason he farms that way. yeah. Yeah, totally.

So that's a pretty big commonality that you experience is like a willingness to throw noodles at the wall and see what sticks, like try a lot of things. try a lot of things knowing most won't and don't overspend on them. So it sort of depends on a kind of willingness of people, not just clergy, but of people writ large to use their own networks to reach out, right? I think we already know this. Most of us got involved in a church because someone we trusted invited us. It's pretty simple.

So like, You and I have to make church such that when someone is brave enough to invite a friend, it like speaks to them. Anyway, yeah. It's almost unbearably intimate. Like someone I trust who doesn't now have this in their life, I'm going to pick them up and bring them there. Most of the time they'll say, thanks, that was fun. I'm not coming again. Right? You have to be willing to suffer a kind of rejection there from someone you care about. yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I think that those kind of different levels of being able to tolerate so -called failure allow a lot of bravery that's important in ministry.

Right. And, you know, I don't know about you, but like, I kind of feel like, you know, I was in a youth group in an evangelical church, which means getting humiliated over and over again, as you ask people out, like you learn to be the fool and you learn a high tolerance for being refused. So like I worked as a salesperson for YellowPage advertising when we still had YellowPages. And most of the time people say, no, you don't take it personally, you move on to the next place. Right.

Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right. What do you think would surprise people the most about the commonalities that you found across the people you talk to? really loved learning is that people who lead growing places are not usually the kind of charismatic extroverts that you expect. That's a kind of myth. Yeah, I find that very hopeful and surprising. So the sort of skinny jeaned, expensively shod ironic facial hair with the beautiful family.

Like, it seems like that gets a lot of media attention, but it's a kind of lie. I don't know too many people who want someone that annoying in their life. But I've met a lot of pretty underwhelming, under charismatic people who've seen churches that have done really, really well and So Tim DeKal in Vancouver puts it this way, it used to be that to lead a mainline church, what you had to be was competent.

And like, you know, after World War II, if you were in a Canadian church, like people would turn up, like you didn't have to do much other than be competent. That's not good enough anymore. Now you also have to be, he says, creative and committed. Creative in the sense of actually making alliances with people that will bring energy and strength to you and to the neighborhood. committed, it's gonna take a while.

So Tim likes to say when he got to this dying church in East Van, he was like, yeah, I'm gonna turn this thing around a couple years. But he had heard it would take 10 years to get a dysfunctional place healthy. He looked around at year 10 and said, yeah, that's how long it took. So you're not gonna blow through town and do it in a minute, right? Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely right.

I'm at year 10 in my church actually and yeah, it's actually quite amazing the things that start to bubble up and become possible after a longer tenure, which, you know, until this point I haven't experienced. So. used to say, we see our most fruitfulness from our clergy in year 12. I know, we're too impatient for that. I know. I met a pastor and an associate who'd been in place 23 and 25 years. And the associate, the 25 year said to me, I think they're starting to trust us. There you go.

I love that. Yeah. church is just trying to learn how to be a human being. So like the trust will be hard one. Church has failed so many people so many times. So like, presumably it's going to take more than charisma. So my buddy, Matt Meowsky, who pastors a flourishing church in St. Louis says, mainliners fixate on charisma. And we think that's the secret. It is not. People who've been burned by a charismatic church planter know that they will walk off. with the money and a different spouse.

Like that is not the thing to trust. The thing that smart church planters bear down on is character. So like among smart evangelicals, they'll like interview your friends from grade school. Like, is this a trustworthy person? They'll pretend you're interviewing to be in the CIA or in CESA, I guess it is here in Canada, right? Like they will find out everything about you because they want to know, is this a person of character? And that's actually what you want to grow a community.

Yeah, character rather than charisma. no formula. All you have to do is like be a better human, which is actually the hardest thing there is to do. Right. So what would you most want pastors to hear from your research? What would you want the takeaway to be? Yeah, there is no lack of reason to be discouraged. I don't need to tell you that. And yet we serve a God who raises the dead. I'm thinking here about Romans 417, Paul's talking about Abraham. He's like, look, Abraham was as good as dead.

And this is all God does is bring life to the dead and call worlds into existence that do not exist. If you're facing death, That's like the only word worth speaking. That's a good takeaway. It doesn't get more solid than that. Well, on that note, we're going to take a break and come back for our closing rapid fire questions. fire, bring it. Do you need a break? All right. You're ready to rapid fire? OK, so again, we'll just have like five seconds of silence and then I'll say gathering.

Oh, yeah, this is fantastic. Yeah, this is going to really be great. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm very pleased. I. I just appreciate, well, I said to you in my email, like, by no means did people come in with, like, good attitudes to that clergy day that you were leading.

But, you know, you were, like, speaking in ways that I think allowed us to feel seen and to feel hopeful without... having to kind of check our brains at the door and just like give ourselves over to a bunch of magical thinking which is often sort of what is presented at. Yes. I mean, I realized at some point, okay, there are all these seminars at Willow Creek where you're supposed to go learn and come back and start a new Willow Creek. That never happens.

Like, or else there would be Willow Creek sized churches everywhere. Like, no, this is more like a mutant than it is like a model. Right. Um, which doesn't mean they don't have good things to say. Of course they do. Right. Like, uh, you should have a better parking lot. That'd be great. Yeah, yeah, you have space for a parking lot. Great. Yeah, no, I think the patterns rather than the formula is pretty important for sure. OK, we'll take a few seconds and come back.

Welcome back to our Future Christian podcast for today. And Jason, I am going to throw a few closing questions your way. We call these sort of rapid fire questions. We always encourage our guests to know that they can take them as seriously or not as the spirit moves you to do. So Jason, if you were Pope for a day, what would that day look like? I mean, you got all these cool vehicles, right?

Like, wouldn't you ride around in the Pope Mobile and like, doesn't he have a helicopter at his disposal and all kinds of like cool summer resonances and stuff? I mean, there'd be a lot to motor around and see, don't you figure? I guess I also like, I mean, I don't know, Benedict wore those $500 shoes. What would they cost now? $800? Like I'd go put some on my tab, you know? So shoes and vehicles, and a automobile. Yeah, I hadn't thought about the helicopter.

I think that's worth throwing into the mix, for sure. It'd be cool, like, chopping around Rome. I mean, you know, I think as a kid, there are all these like shows you watch where you think, okay, airplanes are in my future, boats are in my future, and helicopters are in my future. Like every movie has a helicopter in it. I still never been in one. Have you? I was in one once I really liked it though. It's very cool. cool.

I mean, usually you had neither like life threatening emergency illness to get in one of those things. So, yeah, trying to avoid. That's it. What theologian or historical Christian figure would you want to meet, bring back to life, have a conversation with? Yeah, I wish I could be more interesting than I'm about to be, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the answer for me. I just, well, I just feel like he left all these scraps that he didn't know what they meant and we don't know what they mean.

And I would love to hear them, hear him flesh them out. And you just wonder what kind of voice would he have been in the church in Europe as it tried to heal and rethink who are we going to be post -Showa and post -Nazism? Yeah, love to hear from him on that. that's not uninteresting for sure. pious, you know, I mean, who would be a better answer? I don't know. That's who I got. Yeah, I wanted something more clever. All right, well, if something comes to you, you can always add a PS.

What will history remember from our current time and place? Yeah, uh... I mean, we've got an election coming up in the US that everybody around the world is dreading, not least Canadians over the border. And I just wonder what the history of democracy will look like, you know, a generation from now. Were we seeing a kind of decline or were we seeing a kind of interruption? But whatever we're seeing, it's pretty ghastly. It's one thing I think church has going for us.

I think all the stories of our world and its direction are dismal. You and I actually have a story that's not dismal, that actually says your greatest hope isn't great enough yet. And it's not unaware of the things that are making most people dismal. Yeah, yeah. Well, it kind of speaks actually right to the heart of that, doesn't it? It does. What are your hopes for the future of Christianity?

I'm impressed by Rowan Williams saying, for all we know, we might still be in the days of the early church. I mean, we're a faith that's been looking for Jesus's return like tomorrow for like a long time. But what's the church look like in 10 ,000 years? If the Lord tarries, as we used to say. I mean, you know, like St. Augustine might be among us. It just might be. woman from Asia who's just now coming to faith and struggling with her pain in the neck dad. Right?

I'd love to know who that person's going to be, but God loves raising up unlikely and unexpected witnesses. Yeah, God's really good at that. Seems to be a specialty. Right. Yeah. I like that for all we know. Jason, where can people find more about you? Yeah, jasonbiasee .com will do the trick. That's got my books and various other things. TEMC .ca, the church website where I serve, that's got the ways I preach. So yeah, that should do.

I worked for Christian Century Magazine for a long time, so a lot of my writing is there. And that's a great resource also, christiansentury .org. Oh great, yeah, I interviewed Amy Frick home a couple of months ago. me some aims. Yeah, we worked together for years. Great sister. Bless her. Yeah, she is wonderful. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jason. It has been such a pleasure and there are so many takeaways in what you have offered this afternoon. We always wrap up with a word of peace.

So Jason, the peace of Christ be always with you. You too dear Martha, thank you so much.