Mandy McDow: Paving Paradise at Los Angeles First UMC

At LEAD last year, and a really, really thoughtful pastor from West Virginia was also presenting.

And he came to me and said, you know, in a rural setting, like these strategies would have to be adapted completely. Like they don't, there's not a one-to-one correlation. And that is entirely true. That's entirely true. But what remains are things like, well, what is this community's value? you. Welcome to Mindful Leader. This is Dennis Shaw. I'm the host of Mindful Leader. I am a retired elder in the Mountain Sky Conference United Methodist Church.

The purpose of Mindful Leader is to share leadership ideas, leadership tidbits with both lay and clergy. I'm not limited to the Mountain Sky Conference United Methodist Church. If you have some thoughts that you want to share with me, please send me a note. I'd love to receive that. My email address is in the show notes, the information associated with this podcast. If you can't figure out how to read those, send me a note at Dennis, D-E-N-N-I-S, at Dennis.

That's the at symbol, Mantuan, M-A-N-T-U-A-N.org. My guest today is Amanda McDowell. Mandy is what she goes by. And she is the pastor at Los Angeles First, Los Angeles First United Methodist Church in the California Pacific Conference, United Methodist Church. But she's not from California. She's sort of from all around. She was a resident from Tennessee, went to college in Atlanta at Oglethorpe, which is up on the north side of Atlanta. Then she went to Princeton for her Master's in Divinity.

She had a congregation or two there in New Jersey. Came back to Atlanta, where she had several congregations where she was part of the staff. She's got her doctorate in ministry from Emory University, Candler School of Theology, as part of Emory University. And then she transferred out to the California Pacific Conference. This is a delightful conversation, both about her doctor ministry paper and her life experiences and how it has contributed to her leadership in the local church.

If we say things here that are meaningful to you or valuable to you, don't hesitate to forward them on to somebody else and say, there's something here that might speak to us in our context. Again, thank you for listening. This is Mindful Leader Dennis Shaw.

Thank you for being with us. We'll be back after a short break. Let me welcome you back to Mindful Leader. This is still Dennis Shaw. I didn't go anywhere, but my guest, Mandy McDowell, is here with me now. And as I indicated in the introduction of her, she's got a very diverse set of experiences that she's done in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, and California. Welcome to Mindful Leader. I've heard your name many times, and now we actually

get to meet each other. Thank you for having said yes to being on my podcast. It's an honor, Dennis. Thank you so much for having me. Mandy's appointment is to Los Angeles First. And I've been hearing about Los Angeles First for a while. And Los Angeles First is a church without a building. And her paper at Candler, when she got her doctor of ministry, was called, We Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot.

That's a Joni Mitchell riff. And then she adds, how church assets can be repurposed for the sake of the congregation and the community. You didn't design it where you sold the building. You sort of inherited that situation. Am I right with that? I voluntarily inherited it, yes. I feel like I have to clarify because I had been serving. I've served some wonderful

churches. I've been very fortunate in my career. And I was serving at Laguna Beach, United Methodist, which has a view overlooking the Pacific Ocean. So I have to clarify with Google. Tough kick, but somebody had to do it.

Someone had to do it. I always want to tell people, like, I wasn't being punished by the bishop. I asked for this appointment. It was very intriguing to me. After years of really struggling with churches and their buildings and their properties, it was getting tired of having conversations about light bulbs and the overhead in buildings that mostly sat empty. It was really tough to square. And that's not a knock on anybody.

That's just the business model that we have created and in my generation inherited. And when I heard about Los Angeles first, I'd known about their ministry for a while. They had actually been set to close because they don't have a building. They have had lots. The church has this rich, marvelous, wonderful history. That's its own podcast, really. But they've been around since 1853 in downtown Los Angeles, like – arriving through really, really challenging time in the city's history.

In the 1920s, they had a massive building. They had 10 consecration services in a week. Multiple bishops had been pastors of that congregation. That church helped to find the seed money to build and create USC, the Methodist Hospital. I mean, just an amazing legacy. And eventually, they couldn't afford that building. When the streetcars all shut down, when, you know, everybody got their own vehicle and people moved outside of the urban core, white flight, all of those things were factors.

And downtown Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was very different than what it had been 40 years prior. So they bought this building that was, I think it had been an office building. They sold their big, beautiful building that, you know, generations had saved and worked to create. It was heartbreaking. They sold it to the gas company. That's now the gas company lofts. They bought this used office building and repurposed it. They created some beautiful stained glass, really, really lovely.

So they turned it into a worshiping space. They also saved a lot of money. They helped to start the United Methodist Urban Foundation. They endowed a chair at Claremont in urban ministry. They did their very, very best. But because a lot of their assets were tied up in other places, as the building was declining, it got to a point where it didn't make sense to keep repairing it. And they made the decision to tear it down. That was in the late 1990s, I think 99.

The hope was that they would just raise about $5 million and build a church, a real church. And in the meantime, they had sold off the perimeter of the property to the city, used that money to start an affordable housing development called 1010 Development. The 1010 had developed affordable housing for families and for children.

Those were HUD housing units, though. And the people who moved in, because church doesn't have any ownership of that land, they have no authority over who lives there, the government does. And the people who were given those vouchers were either historically and culturally Catholic or Korean or non-English speaking people.

So the concept that if you build it, they will come, like, oh, we'll just build a church and these people will come, was a little flawed in the sense that, you know, they weren't likely to go to a predominantly white English speaking Methodist church. It's not to say that we don't draw from that building, but certainly not in the scope or scale that one might have imagined. The other thing that happened was they didn't raise any money.

They were relatively small. They didn't have the money coming in. They had dreams and hopes and plans and ideas, but none of them came to fruition. And at some point, they decided to pave the lot instead of waiting to build and stick shovels in the ground. And about that time was when LA Live and what was then the Staples Center opened. And there was this increased need for parking. This had been an area of downtown that wasn't really utilized.

There was nothing going on on that side of town. But when those things opened, it changed the entire landscape of the neighborhood. It changed who was coming in and out. It changed why people came to downtown. It changed the fact that people now did come to downtown, not just for work, but they would come and stay for the evening.

So the church was able to capitalize on that. Sandy Richards was the pastor at the time, and she coordinated a really, really healthy deal with someone to manage the parking lot. And if you want to get real technical about it, we take rent from them. So it's not other business income for us. It's something different. So that affects how we pay taxes. We do pay property tax because we don't have a structure on site. And property tax in downtown Los Angeles is exceedingly expensive.

So, a good almost quarter or a budget, a little less than a quarter, goes out the door immediately just to property tax. For pastors, you know, people do wonder, like, oh, you're just taking in all this money. Like, yes, but it does cost us. It costs us to stay unhoused. Now, it costs us enough that we can keep doing it. We earn enough that we can keep doing it, and we have enough to do positive, good ministry.

But when I came to this church, I was really intrigued by the idea that a progressive church could grow. I was sort of tired of only hearing about really conservative, typically conservative evangelical churches growing and growing in droves. I thought that can't be, right? Like, they don't have the lock on growing healthy churches. And I admire that they are able to do that. It's no way critical. There's a lot to learn from that.

So I thought it would be possible for us to grow a church that was more progressive, that sort of espoused the theological ideals that I heard people craving and saying they couldn't find in the churches that they visited. The other challenge was, well, we don't have a building, so what do we do? And it seemed pretty obvious that Los Angeles has weather that permits being outdoors almost all the time.

And it seemed like a no-brainer. And I had to practice for a year what it would be like to be a street preacher, because this work is really comfortable when you're in a pulpit and it's designated, right? Like, I'm real brave. In the context of a church building, but I had to see if I was going to be that brave outside. And our church isn't like a church, right? Like, I'm literally just under a tent in a parking lot. We've had to make that space sacred, but there's nothing designating us.

You know, if you're walking by, it does look a little nuts. And I was like, all right, we're going to have to John the Baptist this and just practice what it's like to go outside and what's going to fit me, what's going to fit our context, what feels good and natural, what are pieces that we could probably let go of. Like, we don't do a lot of unison prayer. Other than the Lord's Prayer, we don't do a lot of liturgy.

Because I imagine if I was walking by a parking lot in downtown Los Angeles and I saw a group of people speaking in unison, I'd get really creeped out by it. I don't know that that would be warm and inviting. I think it would be strange. And the last thing I want to do is put up more barriers in a place that we've, like, done everything we can to tear them down.

And we won't be for everybody. We're not. Like, my church will never have a thriving children's ministry. And that's okay. Because people should take their children to places with buildings and, like, they can wash their hands. Playing in a parking lot is not the ideal. And that's okay. It just means that that's not something we have to fret over.

We can make good referrals to places that have thriving children's ministries, but we can do something a lot of places can't, which is this congregation is really equipped to welcome people regardless of their socioeconomic status, regardless of their housing status, regardless of how they're doing mental health-wise that day. This church is incredibly well-equipped to navigating some particular challenges that would make other churches, they just aren't as equipped.

Again, not critical, just not as equipped for that. And my congregation happens to be. That's been a real blessing. Part of my purpose with this podcast is to help people see what's possible in their own context.

And you made, for example, the comment that your congregation is well-equipped to handle people that perhaps have different issues and psychiatric-related issues, is what I think you were driving at. How do you equip laypeople? How do you equip people to be able to handle that kind of situation so that they know what to do when someone is talking to them and there's something going on with them that they don't quite know what it is?

Well, the first thing is to talk about it. A lot of times I think what we do, and every church will have an experience where people expect them to function as social workers or mental health care providers, right? There's a pretty significant overlap in expectation. People come to the church looking for help, and they come to the church expecting to be welcomed. And some churches can be really adept at that. Some churches are good at referring.

My church doesn't have a choice because we say we're going to remain unhoused until we can provide housing. And our long-term goals are to develop permanent supportive housing on our site. So in the meantime, I realized that for myself, in order to get comfortable and deal with a population that can frequently be unpredictable, the first thing to do is to lay out expectations. And a lot of people come in and you don't have to do that explicitly. They sort of understand what the expectation is.

There was a Sunday where there was a gentleman who came over and he was, you know, he was taking some food and we have food out and available. We want people to eat regardless of whether they stay for worship. So he was coming over and he was grabbing a yogurt and some things, but he was getting really loud and belligerent. And it was getting close to when our service was starting. And I walked over to him and I said, Sir, I'm so glad you're here today.

I want you to know that I'm the pastor and this is my church and we don't have a building. We meet outside and we're getting ready to start our worship service. And I'm so grateful you're here. And I hear that you're really excited and your voice is so beautiful and so loud. But I'm wondering if it would be possible for you to stay quiet while we're worshiping, because I want everyone to be able to hear and participate. And his demeanor completely shifted. And he said, Oh, my word,

I'm so sorry. I had no idea. He became about as lucid, more lucid than I would have expected, and was completely, completely kind after that. Not everyone is capable. We definitely have moments where we need more help or have to redirect people. If they can't be respectful of what we're doing on site and keep their voices down, then we have to redirect them to go somewhere else. We don't have to do that often.

And it's harder in the early, early morning than it is around the time that we start at 10 a.m.. Folks have tended to either come in and settle down, or they've wandered off to other places. But we definitely have to just make our expectations clear. Here's who we are. Here's what we expect. Here's the expectation we have of everyone's behavior. We'll be kind to each other. We'll be respectful of the space. We're all here to worship.

And because the congregation sees that, they're able to model that and reiterate it, too. I'll be candid with you. When I first heard of what LA First was doing, maybe 15, 20 years ago, I really thought that they had sold the property and they had bought a parking lot somewhere else and they had made a sort of a profit off of that.

That that's that's clearly not what happened with what you were describing you sound like you almost were at operating a bit of a loss because bringing a building down destroying a building and paving the parking lot actually cost them money in order to be able to get to a place to be able to you're nodding your head those are everybody you can't see her because you're not on zoom with me but mandy's nodding her head up and down i realize you weren't necessarily here at that time,

but I imagine there's some folklore and some stories about how that all transpired. How did they make the jump to move from a building that could not be sustained to this fairly radical decision? And I don't mean radical in a bad way, but it's a fundamentally difficult choice. That is something I'm really grateful for, was that that wasn't an emotional road I had to walk with the congregation.

That's really hard, and they'd already been through a lot. You know, there is some lore about this, and if I say these words out loud, someone will probably want to correct me. But it's my understanding that the pastor at the time, who was a visionary person, he had done a lot of really courageous, creative things. But he tended to be more of a ask forgiveness, not permission kind of person, which is part of why he got things done.

But he also, you know, took a few tumbles here and there. And it was my understanding that he really pushed to tear the building down and didn't really have a lot of support. But because he was the kind of pastor he was, he just sort of plowed ahead, no pun intended. They weren't entirely ready for the building to come down. The congregation was not, even though it was clear that it needed to.

So I'm very thankful that that was not work I had to do. And when the building came down, they started meeting in the multi-purpose room of the senior housing community that they had helped to build. And they were in that multi-purpose room for about 17 years. It was up to me when I got there after the church was set to close. I went to Bishop Pagia and said, you know, I would really love a chance to try. Nobody wanted to close the church. It has this rich history, so nobody wanted it to close.

But there wasn't a particular vision for what to do there. And literally as soon as Bishop Hagia was appointed to come back to CalPAC, I went to him and said, I don't know what your intentions are. And this is like a parent asking the principal for their child to have a specific teacher. That just never works. You don't ask for an appointment. But I said, if it would be something you would prayerfully consider, I would love the opportunity to serve that church and just see what we might do.

And that was almost eight years ago. So it was my sort of push of the Holy Spirit to move them from the multipurpose room, which was really hard to find. You can't grow a church in an unmarked building, to move us outdoors. So that was my impetus. And the congregation went with it because they'd been through so much and were so glad to have a new pastor and a new lease on life and a new opportunity to thrive that they've said yes to so many things.

That normally most churches might be reluctant or reticent to say this too. And you were on staff at St. Mark's in Atlanta, which is downtown, which is right smack in the middle of downtown. It's on one of the peach trees. It is the peach tree. For those of you who haven't been to Atlanta, almost everything in Atlanta has a peach tree, peach tree circle, peach tree place, peach tree street, northwest peach tree street, southwest peach tree, you get the idea.

But St. Mark's is down there. Did any of that time in Atlanta help you with the vision, with some of the stuff you were seeing and how some things were possible? Or were you sort of building this from this idea on the fly, sort of painting the caboose on the train while the train's moving at 40 miles an hour? No, that was during the pandemic when we were all doing that. No, I learned everything from my time at St. Mark. That's, again, another whole podcast.

That congregation's story is remarkable, and I just feel fortunate that I got to spend time there. I was there for seven years.

It was just back in August to preach their homecoming service. St. Mark is another church that has a really clear sense of its identity and DNA. And as the city kept shifting, it was always on the right side of history. They were welcoming Black people when Black people were forbidden to go into white churches. when everybody moved out of Atlanta, white flight, et cetera, et cetera. There was a group of people who was moving into these gorgeous houses in Midtown.

And the congregation said, you know, everybody else left, we're down to a hundred people, but there's a whole group of people moving into Midtown. Why don't we minister to them? And it was all the gay men who had found community, found solidarity and found a place where they could be safe. And this is at the start and dawn of the AIDS epidemic. So, St. Mark's pastors were among two in the city that would actually do funerals for people who had died of AIDS.

Wow. And they reached out. They're on the Peachtree. The Pride Parade, when it was a protest, walked right in front of the church. And the congregation went through a lot because there were some, theologically, people hadn't really wrestled with this. So, a lot of people were uncomfortable and they believed the clobber passages. And some people, it was very clear what their task was. It's our job to love all of God's people. Why on earth would we not reach out to the people who are here?

And some people just couldn't wrap their heads around it, and they found themselves to other churches. But the people that remained on Pride Sunday, they walked outside and handed out cold cups of water and a little slip of paper that said, You are welcome here. And for a population of people who've been told that God hated them and that they were going straight to hell and they were abominations, for a church to say, you are welcome here, was countercultural.

And about 30 people showed up the next Sunday, which is amazing. Imagine 30 new people showing up out of nowhere when you're a church of about 100. Those 30 people found that they were, in fact, welcomed and loved, and they invited their friends, and those friends invited more friends. And by the end of the year, they were up to 250 people. And by the end of the decade, they were up to over 2,000.

When I got there in 2007, that was around the time of one, the economic crash, but two other denominations were starting to become more welcoming. And a lot of people had found their way back to their home denomination, their Presbyterian churches, their Episcopal churches, even their Lutheran churches. So the membership wasn't quite as high, But it was a congregation that was characterized by its radical welcome for all people and advocacy for and with LGBTQ people.

And as a Methodist church for whom we've been wrestling with ordination. Yeah, for all that, that was just a part of their advocacy. They stayed Methodist because they could stay and fight from the inside. What I think I'm hearing you say is that you saw some things possible that could be done at LA First and, Perhaps others, well, I think your website says, are you out of your damn mind? Yeah, exactly.

Well, and serving at St. Mark, a big population of people were HIV positive, and many of whom were living on disability, but they were healthy.

So what they did with their time was volunteer. They had started a breakfast ministry, a supper ministry. They had a clothing closet that was always staffed with volunteers, was filled with beautiful clothing. People would come in and organize. And these were some of the smartest theologically minded people I'd ever met because they'd had to fight for their faith in a way that I never had. So they put their intellect to the test to truly reconcile their faith with

their sexuality. And once they had done that work, they saw how important it was to help other people in that journey. So, this was a congregation that never struggled for volunteerism and never struggled for generosity. They saw people through the early stages of same-gendered parents adopting children and becoming families, and those families grew because they had other friends who would never have children necessarily, but wanted to participate. So the children's ministry was full.

Vacation Bible school was off the charts. And because they did things like start a breakfast ministry where the model for that was a restaurant, people could come in and sit and be served. And they had to stay on a list if they missed a day, they missed a Tuesday, two weeks in a row, they rolled off the list. And that was to maintain continuity so that they could develop relationships and figure out how to truly help people who were struggling with homelessness, poverty, and food insecurity.

So those relationships were really critical for people to get better, more targeted help and find their way into pathways to recovery, pathways to finding housing. It was a holistic approach. And so, those types of things have been really instructive for me. At LA First, we started a breakfast ministry two years ago that was entirely based on that model. And it's been really, really successful because we centered this idea of serving those who were almost never given the option to be served.

I think you've probably heard the joke of the last words of the church is, we've never done it that way before. So when you went into this situation where you were meeting at LA first in a community resource room of some kind, did you run into any, we've never done it that way before? Or was it, you're shaking your head? No. There were two things that I never had to fight. Other people did, and other listeners to this may have these roads ahead of them.

I didn't have to be the one to guide them through tearing down the building. Because of that, I didn't have to be the one to convince them to do something new. They had already been told that their church was going to be closed. And when you've been given news like that, it's amazing how open-minded it makes you to everything. My first six months, I worked this out ahead of time. The first six months I was there, we only met for worship once a month because we were trying to figure

out how to do that. There were a lot of logistics. Our Sunday mornings are a technological wonder. because we have to like steal. We're not stealing, but we have to borrow power. Oral, yeah. Yeah, we have it worked out. We pay them. But we have to set up literally like everything from nothing. So we needed some time to figure out the logistics of that. And I also wanted to see what other churches were doing.

I wanted to go to churches that were thriving, churches I would theologically totally disagree with, but were doing really good work. I wanted to see different worship services. I wanted to see just what else was happening in an urban core. And we went to, you know, probably 20 different churches. We took notes. We observed what we saw that was working. And, you know, excellent worship, excellent music, true connection in the community, all the things that draw people in.

We noticed what wasn't happening. And the big sort of evangelical churches that really valued things like small group ministry and core connection with one another, they weren't doing a whole lot of outreach or missional work and we could see that like that's not an option for us like our whole work is mission so we could see that and you had a history of that yeah yeah you're you're i mean not over the i'm not.

You had the metaphorical descendants of people that had done ministry to marginalized people in the 1920s and 1930s, and so the congregation's DNA was already in that. Absolutely. And the congregation, any congregation's DNA, really is important. It's not restrictive, necessarily, but it is instructive as to what people are inclined to do, what they are inclined to value.

Some churches are really inclined to value fellowship. And when you try to push them beyond fellowship to something that is maybe more missional or a little more risky or something new, they can be very reticent because they're not really, emotionally equipped to do something more than, I'm using air quotes, just fellowship. And in some ways, that's okay. Like, all right, well, that's what we do best. How do we do that best to the glory of God? To proclaim the gospel in the ways we're capable.

Well, I had a friend, Tara Lynn Russ, she's retired now as an elder in the Mountain Sky, but I think she's preached a sermon that I've heard about. Actually, she told me about it. I think it's about how Martha gets a bad rap of Mary and Martha, that you sort of need the Marthas. Yes, you need your students, but you also need your Marthas, and Martha at least recognized what her gift was.

Right, right. Right. I think that's the hard part is looking and assessing ourselves and our congregations without judgment. We tend to judge what we see or place value on those things. And it's certainly true. Like, if I went to a church that didn't value the same things I did, I would really struggle, right? But the hope is that we know those things about ourselves ahead of time. And it's not about me, the pastor. It's not even really about the church,

the congregation. It's about what God is doing. And when we can get out of our own way and see like, all right, well, this church is really equipped for creating marvelous fellowship ministries and really connecting people at a deep spiritual level, other churches would love to be able to do that.

So we need to find a way to refer people to other churches if they're looking for something with a high value for X, who are the churches we partner with and say, oh, you should really go and check out this church. My friend's church is excellent at that. What we do here, what we are truly excellent at, is connecting people in fellowship and doing so in the name of the Lord so that they can deepen their spiritual life for and with service to the gospel.

And doing it without support. Sometimes when people have a non-Methodist background, a non-connectional background, they're they're a little appalled when they hear us as pastors say you know i hear what you're looking for and you might want to consider blah blah blah and it's a church five miles away and you and in in salt lake that's not very far for a methodist church to be and and people go what are you doing you're referring them somewhere else i am i am because what they're looking for we

don't necessarily have. Yeah. So, yeah. And that's one of the nice things, too, is this is such a competitive world, pastoralism. We all are, you know, we're focused on numbers and budgets and attendance and all that. If we can give that to God and say, like, I tend to believe that we were taught that evangelism was our job, but really it's discipleship. And when we do our discipleship building well, the evangelism is easy. The evangelism follows. We think evangelism is numbers. It's not.

It's just proclamation. It's just telling people. And if you don't have the language or the formation to articulate your faith well, then no one can be an evangelist. And our job as preachers is to give our congregations the vocabulary, the words, the resources, the insights to name their faith and to have the courage to talk about it with others. Because we can't grow churches by ourselves. And I don't even think that growing churches is our job.

That's risky to say. I think growing disciples is my job. Yeah. You're not aware of this. I was the conference statistician for quite a while. And there's a lot of people who perceive that I'm interested in numbers as numbers. And that's actually not true. To me, part of the numbers need to tell a story. And the stories usually include a number. Numbers is sort of this. There's a reciprocity between the two things.

So one of the great quotes that and i'll think of who said it probably tomorrow when i'm off the off the air but one of the great quotes is we don't know what to do so we do what we know, we don't know what to do so we do what we know it sounds like what you've done with la first. Is embrace a little bit of what they know which is this dna element that you're talking about But doing it in a new, different, challenging way, but that the focus continues to be towards aiding

and assisting people that are in need of help. Is that a fair statement? It is. And I think one of the things that I've done and I've been a part of in every church I've ever served is this, you know, visioning process. The pastor's casting a vision. Visions are great. We need them. You need vision. But what we did instead, because we could have a lot of conversations about vision, we decided we needed to figure out what our values are.

During the pandemic, we lost all of our revenue from the parking lot. It was a really scary time. And we had some reserves, but we didn't have a lot. We couldn't go forever. But we had enough to really get us through the hardest season of that, and we decided to use that time to focus on creating excellent online worship, keeping our community connected through online classes and fellowship opportunities like we did Zoom coffee hour after church.

And the third thing was really devoting our time to a development process where we could look at building affordable, permanent, supportive housing on site with space for the church. And to do that, we had to figure out what our values were. And we had help. We brought somebody in who guided us through a process where we figured out our values. And, you know, we boiled them down to like three fun, catchy things like creativity,

courage, compassion. But like, that's not enough. We had to get specific. So one of our values was to not sell the land, but to build using a ground lease, right? That was a very important thing. The other thing was determining what we wanted to see on our site. High value for permanent supportive housing with supportive services because people assume they'll get them when they come to a church.

We wanted to have multi-tiered usage in the building because we need market rate people as much as we want to house people who have been previously unhoused. We also knew we wanted to maximize revenue streams, and if we built a sanctuary, it should be used as a venue. We should be able to pull another revenue stream out of a space that would typically go unused most of the week. So we didn't want to have any wasted space or wasted opportunity. Every space should have a utilization all the time.

Those were really helpful for us because when we started getting ideas pitched to us, we could run them through our values and say, well, that's a really great idea.

I can see why that would be really helpful to the community, but it doesn't match our value. It's not going to keep us in line with our values. So we can say no to it comfortably, even if it's a great idea. It just didn't fit with everything. That has been a really helpful thing because it's also reduced the conflict and the sort of trauma that can come from decision making. Yeah. I need to look it up and see how it did. But in Salt Lake, there was a Christian church.

There was a church that was in relationship with a Christian college. And they had something worked out where the college could use the space five days a week and the church could use the space on Saturday and Sunday and in the evenings. And I wonder how that all worked. I guess I'd like to go back and see how that worked out for them. Because that's sort of, to some extent, what you're partially describing. Right. It's what Emory did with Glen Memorial. They have a relationship.

Glen Memorial has to schedule their church events with Emory University. Was that where Rosalind Carter's memorial service was? Okay, yeah. It sure was, yeah. I didn't know that. I wondered why this lifelong Baptist had his wife or the family had Rosalind Carter's service there, but it sounded like what I hear you saying. It's right across the street, roughly.

It's across a couple streets from the Carter Center. So they have a very strong relationship with Emory, and that space is really big and beautiful and could hold and host all of the necessary accoutrements for such a funeral. So I didn't, you know, this is, I always tell people that if I ask a question that's not going to work for them, just tell me it's not going to work. But, but when you were talking with your colleagues at Candler on your paper.

I mean, the median number of attendees at a church in Methodism is like 60, 55. So about half of our churches are in the 55 or under attendance on a Sunday. When people you were talking to at Candler about this, did any of them come up and say, you know, Mandy, that'll work well in an urban setting. But in a suburban or a more rural setting, what you did wouldn't work. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And what did you say?

I gave a talk on this at LEED last year, and a really, really thoughtful pastor from West Virginia was also presenting. And he came to me and said, you know, in a rural setting, these strategies would have to be adapted completely. There's not a one-to-one correlation. And that is entirely true. That's entirely true. But what remains are things like, well, what is this community's value? This community and congregation are going to have values. And a lot of my—I

teach at Candler now. I'm a remote teaching parish supervisor. It's super cool. So I work with people who are student pastors, serving in churches, but also they're full-time or part-time MDF students. And because they're remote, some of them are in the Atlanta area, but most are—I mean, they're all over the country. The students I have who are serving in churches in the southeastern jurisdiction, those churches are really healthy. This morning, one of my students is at an AME church in Queens.

Their membership is 24,000. So I was like, oh, churches are still healthy in places. Yes, what you're describing is true, but there are still really healthy, growing churches. And those churches are difficult, too, because they're not at an inflection point of crisis. And a lot of churches can't make really critical decisions until those decisions are about to be made, regardless of their input. So, for rural churches, they have a particular challenge because people do have

to drive, you know, five miles is nothing. That's close by. Insignificant. 20, 25 miles to come to church if they can, if the weather is good, right? And they do. But their particular values and a primary guiding point for me was asset-based community development. How can we look and explore what's rich in this community and how we can connect what the church has with what's already present and thriving? That's why we started a breakfast ministry.

We saw that there was a richness of unhoused people who were really craving community and connection and a place to sit down and eat a warm breakfast sometime between Friday and Monday when no other places were serving food. So we could offer that. We've got space. We've got volunteers. Got a good relationship with the IHOP. So let's have breakfast. And that has been a thing that's really thrived. And we've learned more about what people truly need in this interim time before

we can actually build affordable housing. Now we learn more about how we can be supportive to people. I find it fascinating part of what's going on in our church world in general and the fact that many, many people who believe that the federal government or the state government should help with certain things, with sort of top-down kinds of systems, actually at the church level or the community level are very bottom-up oriented.

They basically get to a place, you know, well, that might work in Savannah, Georgia, but it's not going to work in downtown Los Angeles, and it's not going to work here. Or if we work, it's going to be very, very modified to make that kind of thing work. So it's contextual, and you have to be adaptive. Yes. And there was an article that Malcolm Gladwell wrote years ago, mid-90s. So the numbers are going to be skewed. And I'm with you. I think, you know, numbers aren't the goal,

but they do tell a story. They do. They always tell a story. And he highlighted in Philadelphia, if you took just the Catholic churches and accounted for all of the volunteer hours, labor, and services that were provided in a year, it would amount to like $40 million worth of aid that the city then did not have to provide. It doesn't. And even in Los Angeles, we've seen that, where the mayor, two mayors ago, was talking about, you know, churches really need to step up and share.

We're relying on you to do this good that we see in the city. And we're like, well, first of all, we're already doing it, but we can't do it at the same scale. So without churches, you do lose a really core component of this, you know, grassroots visual on what people really need. Well, and a big part of what I learned through my DMEN process was churches have theologies for lots of things. We've got doctrines of God and of the Trinity and even of the church itself.

But what we didn't have was a formulated theology of land or space. And now, you know, you and I are living in areas where there's been a really big push to investigate and honor the original inhabitants of the land that we are on. And even if you want to push into talking about reparations, we're at least understanding better now than we ever have what we owe to the people who originally inhabited these places.

So, a theology of land is really important. The quote from Brueggemann that has really guided a lot of my work and my thinking and my reflection is, land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith. Land is a central, if not the central theme of biblical faith. The idea that land is as important to us as a biblical people as anything, right? Like, the biblical story is interwoven with our relationship to the land.

I mean, that's a very minor undercurrent of everything that's happening in Gaza, right? People are fighting over the land, and to whom does it belong? And we haven't done a good job of establishing our theology of land at the church and how we own it and utilize it and then give it back in whatever ways we are capable.

The other thing we haven't really developed a theology of is space. How are we going to use this space? Space tells a story. A thing that really struck me was that churches think of ourselves as being public, and we're not. We're community spaces, and there's the distinction. Parks are public. Anyone can come and go in a park. Dogs, cats, bears, people, anyone can come and go in a park. Churches have community rules and expectations, like I mentioned earlier.

And sometimes we have to remind people what the expectations are. Even in an unhoused church, we still have expectations. And some churches will say, you know, we've got homeless people sleeping on our steps and we just can't have that. And that sounds really offensive because if someone's going to find sanctuary somewhere, it should be in a church. But what they're really saying is we're a community space that's not designed

to be public. And we're not equipped to help people in the ways they need to be helped. And as much as we want people to be safe, we can't protect them at night. We're not equipped for that. We don't have security or volunteers or anyone here who could provide the level of safety and structure that somebody needs to feel safe here. And that's a very different thing than saying, my church doesn't want homeless people sleeping on the steps.

Like, no, your church wants it to be a safe, welcoming people for all.

And we need to be clear and honest about what we're effective at, what we're equipped for, and what we can and can't do. I normally sit down, I'll be very honest with the people that are listening. I normally sit down and I've gone over an outline with my guest. Mandy and I did not have an outline to work from. I just sort of thought I would go back and forth with her. Maybe we will one day talk about St. Mark's in downtown Atlanta. I'm from Atlanta.

Long, long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I lived in Atlanta. But yeah, I may have sat down and talked about that sometime. Is there anything I didn't ask that I should have asked that you said, oh, hopefully Dennis would ask me about. Whatever. Is there something you hoped I would talk about? That's a great question. I'll tell you what I get asked a lot. Some people don't realize that we're outside every Sunday. We don't have a choice.

This isn't like a party trick for us. And we do have weather periodically, and we do have to make some adjustments. I saw that. You had something where the wind was 45 degrees, and the wind was blowing more than 15 miles an hour, and you didn't have service.

You didn't have an outside service. we didn't have an outside service because it becomes unsafe for people and again when you know your values like well we're pretty clear we want to keep people safe if it rains we used to just kind of again no pun intended we'd power through that's dangerous now because we have so much electronic equipment and frankly the weather has changed and the weather is more severe and it is cold and when people are safe and tucked away we do not

want to impel them to move if they're in a safe space. So we serve breakfast every Sunday, rain or shine. Sometimes we have to modify how we serve it, but we still serve. The only thing we do is that four times a year we take a Sabbath. And this is an idea that I also sort of borrowed from a beloved colleague of mine, Cara Root, at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church in Minnesota. She had a small congregation in a neighborhood, and they knew their limitations.

They weren't going to be the church they were when they were built in the 1950s. And instead of fighting that, they embraced it and decided to do things like have a Sabbath Sunday. And I think it's, I forget their schedule now, I think it was first Sunday, they would take a Sabbath and people could sleep in, you know, go to worship with someone else if they wanted, you know, go see what else is out there. But the night before their Sabbath, they would have a community meal at the church.

And so they'd still get to see each other. That was their biggest concern. Well, if I don't have church on Sunday, how am I going to see people? Well, come to dinner Saturday. It was at 5 p.m., crock pot, you know, everybody brings something. They have a community meal and send everyone into theirs. We had to borrow that idea because our setup and takedown, we have a really strong starting lineup in a pretty short bend.

It's a lot of work. So we have a Sabbath four times a year where we tell everyone, sleep in, rest, go to church somewhere else. It's a commandment. And we've got to give ourselves that time. That's been one of the best pieces of this ministry is giving people space for that. I usually close up with saying now that we had so much that we talked about here that we need to have you come back as a guest another day.

And then we schedule in front of the day. And then you basically, on your own, without me having to coach you to do that, said, you know, well, that's another podcast another day. So I think you said that at least twice. At least twice, yeah. I think I'll listen through and I'll say, okay, you said we could talk about St. Mark's, Atlanta. And so that'd be a good one to talk about as well. So, Mandy, thank you very much. This has been very rich, very meaningful.

If you thought this was a good experience, don't hesitate to let some of your buddies in the California Pacific Conference know about it and say, if you've got something you want to share about leadership, don't hesitate to let Dennis know. He'd be glad to have you as a guest.

We're not we don't we don't have a lock on all the good ideas at mount sky conference i assure you well i've been led to believe that you do because you're doing a great job there so thank you it's an honor to be on today well thank you very much everybody i want to just say thank you for listening to mindful leader and i pray that there was things that we said here today that were helpful to you in your leadership at the local church peace truly be with you thank you. Music.