Thomas Risager: Episcopal Candidate for Nordic and Baltic Central Conference

This is Dennis Shaw. I want to welcome you to Mindful Leader.

Today's podcast is going to be released on March the 10th, and it's going to be a re-release of a podcast I did back in 2023. My guest that day was Thomas Riesiger. Thomas is a pastor in the Danish United Methodist Church, and Thomas is about to be a candidate to be elected to the Episcopacy from his central conference, which is essentially the Baltic states.

So I thought it'd be good to come back and do a little bit of a reprise and listen to Thomas talk a little bit about what things were like in 2023. You can get an idea of what this particular Episcopal candidate in a central conference sounds like. So God's blessings to you, and thank you for being here with us today. And it will wrap up at the end when I say thank you to Thomas. Peace be with you. God bless. As I indicated in the introduction, my guest today is my friend Thomas Rieseker.

Thomas is the pastor at Odensee in Denmark. And as I indicated to you earlier, I met Thomas through the Doctor of Ministry program at Wesley Theological Seminary. Welcome, Thomas. Thank you for having said yes to being my guest today on Mindful Leader. Thank you, Dennis. Nice to see you. And thank you for having me.

It's my joy. I think you have things to say to us. You live in a place where church has been less important in the life of the citizens for quite a while, for quite a long time. And I know that you live in a country where Kierkegaard existed, but my guess is that you mentioned Kierkegaard nowadays to most Danes. They won't have any idea of who you're talking about, or they'll see him more as a philosopher. What's church life like in Denmark in 2023?

It is completely different from what you experience in the U.S., I suppose. In this country, Denmark, we have a population around 6 million, and we have a state church which is a Lutheran church. 78% of the population are members of that church. And then maybe 1% of the population may be members in some kind of other churches than the state church. Okay. On a regular Sunday, 2% of the population attends church.

So 78% are officially members of the state church, and almost none of them go to church on Sunday. Exactly. And if you look at the United Methodist Church, which I am a pastor, serve as a pastor in, it's basically the same pattern. Basically, it's better than 2%, but maybe 10-15% of the membership attends church. So, for example, you there, how many members do you have and how many people attend on a Sunday?

How many members do you have? In this particular church, which is a small United Methodist Church, we have 215 members. And on an average Sunday, and this is post-COVID because things have changed during COVID times, Post-COVID, we have an average attendance around 50, 48, 50. Okay. That can be very, very different from Sunday to Sunday. We can have Sundays where we have 20 people. We can have Sundays where we have 80 people or more, and we don't know why.

And that is a higher number than the percentage that I gave you. But we have a lot of people who are not members attending church. Yeah. In this particular church. I don't know how true this is nationwide in the United States. I was particularly a pastor in the West, and in the West, people attend church but don't join.

And so when people would ask me how many members I had, I would often give them an answer, which was both the official members and then the people who regularly attended but had not made this profession of faith to be part of it. I figured if they had—we had one lady that had attended for like 50 years, but she was not officially a member. So, yeah, I can totally see what you're talking about. In the United States, we talk about people that are nuns and duns.

Duns are people that used to be in the church, but they're done with it now. They're not ever going to go back. And then we talk about people that are nuns, and there are nuns who do not express a belief in any higher power, but then there are other nuns who say, yes, there is a higher power, but I don't want to find help. The church doesn't need to help me find that, or the synagogue doesn't need to help me find that.

But are either one of the, I mean, I'm not sure what you would call it in Danish, that's not my point, but are either one of those ideas familiar to you and what you see in Denmark? I don't think we have the definitions that you use, but I can relate to them. And I believe the COVID time, and that's one of the changes that I believe we are facing in this country, is that during COVID times, that has created a lot of dunce. People who couldn't attend church because the churches were closed.

And I think some of them, or a big part of them, actually realized, we do not miss the church. We do not miss the fellowship. We do not miss the meetings. We do not miss the responsibility. So they just stopped attending. But the low attendance on Sunday, that is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for 50 years or something like that. And that means that we have a lot of people who are not raised in the church, not familiar with the church.

That's not the same as they are not religious, but the church is just not considered being relevant. The church has not considered having any answers to the questions and I believe there are many reasons for that in my country and. Here, many of the churches, particularly the state churches, they are quite the same all over the place because the state is controlling how the worship is done and the liturgy is done and stuff like that. So there's not a lot of freedom.

So in many ways, a lot of Danes have very, very low expectations to what church can provide. The music played in the state church is very classical. which is absolutely beautiful. But there's no praise music, no gospel music, no kind of modern music. And in the non-state churches, we have a lot of that. It's interesting you say that because I lived in Germany for four and a half years. And while I was there, I participated in an American English-speaking church.

And the church I worshiped at had a very, very good vocal ensemble, about 30 voices, 25 voices. And we would go into the German churches on Sunday nights, Sunday evenings, and we would sing spirituals and gospel stuff. And sometimes the pastors there would say they would have more people in their church to hear us sing than they had in on Sunday morning. So music was an important element of how we brought people into the building.

And I know from your experience, you commented about classical music, but don't you use music as part of the evangelism, the expansion of the story, how you tell the good news story on Sunday morning? Am I right about that? You are absolutely right. We use music very deliberately. And the reason for that is that this church, the main connection to the world outside the church is...

Are two gospel choirs, where people who really don't consider themselves as churchgoers or believers, they are singing gospel music. And of course, we use those choirs in our worship services. We also use singers in our worship services. So we kind of pick one, two, three singers and ask them, will you give us a song on a Sunday? Come sing for us. And then we use that as parts and elements of the normal worship service. And that means that they actually have a decision of what music to bring.

And when a person who is not really singing publicly many places, he or she brings maybe five or six friends to the worship service because, come and see me sing. And then in that way, we have reached a lot of people through music. One of the new things going on in this particular church is that we are writing our own music nowadays. And we are letting people in for the writing process and kind of encouraging people to let's.

We have this song going on let's see how it will turn out and then we have new music and the style you're doing this in is what we would call American gospel is that accurate? Yeah black gospel music yes modern black gospel music but also what we would call refer to as spirituals, So we sing music composed by Kirk Franklin, Lema Campbell, all those that you find on the streaming service. And then we produce our own music. And so that's been effective for you as a bit of an evangelism tool.

Some of the 80 people you might have on a high attendance Sunday might have been people that are there in part because at some point in time in the past, you touched them first through music. Is that accurate? That is very accurate. And having served in this town for 23 years, we have had a lot of people passing through the church as members of the choir. And sometimes I get a phone call from someone I haven't talked to in 15 years or something like that.

Something bad has happened in life, and they ask me to talk with them, pray with them, counsel them.

So we have a lot of contacts. The church is much bigger than the membership growth. They sang with you in 2010, and when they have a pastoral spiritual need in 2023, you're their pastor. And that is sometimes very, very interesting because the only connection is what we had maybe 10, 15 years ago. But people still feel, when I talk to people, I'm very often amazed how connected people feel, even though they're not here.

We often talk about that we should never underestimate the power of feeling connected.

Yeah. And that's actually where I sort of wanted to go, was the fact that even though you may only have 2% of your population, attends church on a sunday it sounds like to me that you've still got a sizable number of people who think of themselves as connected to you even though they may not actually show up on a sunday morning they still they still see some connection how how is that how is that connection played out besides calling you when they're

they've they've gotten a diagnosis of cancer from the doctor how how does that played out in other ways well it plays out that oftentimes when we play give a concert or worship service at one of the public stages in town we see faces that we haven't seen for many many years so so they are kind of in the what is it called the periphery of the church and sometimes they attend one of our gospel music worship services and at those services the church is packed so I don't have

the full picture of who is there and who is not there. But sometimes I see faces and they also connect with me and other people from the church, on social media I believe I have maybe 3,300 friends on Facebook they are mainly connections that I have obtained through my work as a pastor so what I think I'm hearing you say, and I'm not asking for a statistical analysis of this.

The average person in Denmark, they are less likely to be a done with the church and more likely to be somebody who is, I'm not in church, but I am spiritual. I still have a spiritual component to my life. Is that a fair statement, a fair guess? That's what I think I hear you saying. Yeah, I believe that's very fair. I mean, you cannot be a done if you have never attended church, right?

That's a good point. So a lot of them are nuns in that sense that they have really never been introduced to the church and they have really never been connected to a church or a pastor or a congregation. And remember, in this country, like 78% of the population are members of the church and they pay to our church, but only 2% attends. So the normal conception of church is when I need the church, the church needs to be there. and it will be there.

But the thought that since I'm a member of the church, I need to attend worship every Sunday, that is not existing in the minds of our people. And that is what we are up against in a kind of secularized country like Denmark.

I believe we have... Sometimes I really feel like Paul on Areopagus when he was connecting to the Greeks. I see you have many gods and this God, this is the unknown God. So sometimes I really feel like I'm a pastor in a situation just like that because when I talk to people and I meet people and people are coming to our gospel choirs and our worship services, they are religious people in many ways, but they are not, how should I put it? Not organized. Not organized religious people.

And a lot of people in Denmark says, my faith is kind of my own, I find my own way. And that is interesting because you can talk into that. I believe you can talk into that. And how do you talk into that? What is it? I mean, I realize that probably, I guess it highly depends upon the context of where you are when you hear those words, right? Of course.

I'm very when people don't have a theological language or their faith and we are good at that in church we have theological language right, and people have they do have religious experiences they do have religious longings, so I kind of try to connect to the stories that I hear I try to sometimes not all the time but sometimes I try to to talk about how I experienced God myself. And then I connected to some kind of Bible history from the Gospels.

Because I really would like to introduce the Gospels to people. Because, I mean, those stories can change your life, right? It has certainly changed mine. So I kind of look for similarities, look for experiences, look for something that I can connect all the time.

Sometimes it works and sometimes well maybe not i don't know but in this country you cannot say we all know about abraham no we don't know all about abraham right we we all know about jeremiah no nobody knows about jeremiah and so you cannot take for granted that people know stuff like this part of the.

Part of Bonhoeffer's viewpoint in 1930s Germany was that people treated church as a Sunday experience, and that when they left the church in Berlin or Bonn or Heidelberg or Frankfurt or wherever they were, they could they they sort of could leave the church they could leave the building and think about what they had to but but they didn't see it as particularly transformative to their life it was something they could sort of take or leave it was a nice philosophical

conversation but it wasn't something that they saw how you phrased it that it didn't give them answers to the questions in their life and and that's where they and again this was like you were describing the quote state church end quote these were churches that were provided as a part of the state the state and and frankly americans have trouble wrapping their mind around that idea the fact that the state provides a church but i've lived in germany for four

and a half years and the state does provide a church. It's just, it's a different concept. Very different. Very different. And personally, I don't want to be part of that because I really do believe that we have to take responsibility for our own churches. We need to have ownership. We need to guide it and lead it ourselves. We need to pay for it ourselves because it's our church. And I don't want the state to interfere with my beliefs.

You have an interesting situation. You are a pastor of a church, but you also double as the district superintendent for other Methodist churches in Denmark. So you get a chance to know what is going on at other churches. As you have looked at those other churches, is there a common element of how they are being either successful? Or how it is that they might be failing? Is there something going on that you could perhaps share with us of how you're seeing that?

That's a complicated question, but one common denominator that I see in several of our churches these days, remember Denmark is, what do we say, welfare state. I mean, the state provides for everything. If you are unemployed, you get paid by the state. If you are studying to become a teacher, you get paid by the state. If you go to the doctor, to the hospital, it's paid for through our taxes. So we have a system where not many people are poor, not many people are living on the streets.

So the state has been taking care of that. And that is maybe my analysis is one of the reasons for the church to be conceived. so irrelevant is that the church really does nothing. We preach on Sundays and that's it because the state takes care of everything else. So all this diagonal work, that is coming back now because due to inflation, due to war in Ukraine, which is quite close to us, due to higher interest rates and climbing prices on energy, we see people now who are suffering.

We see people now who are poor. We see people now who need the church. So in many of our churches, we have started this good old-fashioned Methodist thing called helping others, giving up food, providing everything that people need.

And that is a new trend. And we are getting in touch with a lot of people in several of our churches through things like that. And of course, it's bad, but we are doing stuff that I think might be something that changes our own understanding of who we are. So you're saying the current context that you're going through, which is high inflation, recovery from a world pandemic, and a regional war which has global implications, has had a big impact there in Denmark.

And it's changing the way you're doing, the way you're interacting with your community. Is that a good summary of what's going on? very good summary because this diaconal work kind of oftentimes also involves people from the neighborhood living around the churches even though they are not members. So we have people donating. Oh, we see the church is doing something. I'm donating. I'm bringing stuff to the church. Because you're a vehicle. You're an agent for the common good.

Exactly. And there is a high level of respect on that. So that is one of the drivers that I see right now. Might be a good thing for us to reach people and do something good. So in your particular context, even though people are not particularly active by being present on a Sunday morning. The church itself, and in this case we're talking the Methodist church per se, has the respect of the community around you.

Does the Danish Lutheran Church have that same level of respect where people will use them as a vehicle for food kitchens, soup kitchens and things like that? Are they getting that same kind of support? Or are you seeing it? They will get a lot of respect because they are very well respected. But they are a very big machinery, so they are not reacting fast. So it is like they haven't really done anything yet. The non-state churches, we have done a lot for the last couple of years.

But the state church is still talking about, should we maybe do something? I'm a little rude, but you'll get the picture. I'm laughing a little bit because part of what John Wesley was doing in 1740 England was that he was dealing with the Church of England, which was still putting people into parishes, sort of how they looked in 1710.

And there had been 30 years of the Industrial Revolution, so they had parishes which had 60,000 people in them, and the priests couldn't meet the needs, and they had other parishes which had 10 people in them, but they used to have 1,000 people in them 30 years ago, but they had not reorganized themselves. They were not particularly nimble, is really the story.

What I hear you saying is that your smallness of the Methodist movement in Denmark gives you a certain amount of nimbleness that you don't see in the larger organizations because it takes them so much more time to make a decision and how are we going to deal with something and just the chain of information. Am I making that up as I go along or is that what you're seeing? I mean, that's a fair description.

And it's also a fact that many of the Methodist churches kind of have this social awareness in their DNA. So if they kind of identify a need, they immediately do something about it. And we have been looking for needs to cover, one could say, because the state has been very affected. The new reality now is that maybe every week my phone is ringing in my office. Please, pastor, you don't know me. We don't know the church, but we have heard that you are good people.

This month we cannot make ends meet, and one of our kids have a birthday. Can you help us? That is a new thing. So it sounds like to me that if we looked at what's going on in Denmark and we treated that as what would be going on in the United States, let's say, 30 years from now, let's just say 30 years from now, hypothetically. I hear coming from you a voice of optimism. You still, you're enjoying what you're doing.

I hear you, you haven't used the words of the fact that we are the hands of Christ in Odense or in Denmark.

But I hear that coming across. And despite the fact that your attendance is low, I hear you saying that we are Christ in our world. Am I hearing you right? And I do feel like that, too. And it's one of the interesting things is actually when we have some of the days where we kind of bring people to the church and we give them food and supplies and stuff like that, that is quite a big arrangement.

Then the church is packed with volunteers who wants to help i mean people really want to make a difference but going to worship sitting listening to a sermon maybe not so much but they want to do stuff so that we have we have no problem finding volunteers to help us that is really easy and the reliability and the respect of what you had from previous generations previous its time, is part of what makes you credible in 2023.

I believe so. I believe so. And to me, I mean, yes, the world is changing. Maybe the world doesn't need a church the way we perceive church.

We need to adapt and do whatever needed i mean yeah you you can you can you can proclaim the gospel in many ways you don't have to use words i believe what who was somebody saint francis saint francis that's the name in your in not in german in english well how would you say that in danish saint francis francis we would say okay yeah it's it's a fairly famous of saint francis quote among at least pastors i don't know if the average layperson would

use it or not but uh i think it's somewhere along the lines of preach the gospel and everything you do and when absolutely necessary use words something like that yeah i usually wrap up my podcast now first everybody here i'm i've already talked to thomas about this was sort of conversation number one and we'll talk to him again at some future time but usually i'll try to wrap up my podcast with of an individual episode

by saying is there any question i should have asked along these lines or anything you want to clarify that i talked about that you feel needs clarification you you sound optimistic optimistic. And I am. I am pretty optimistic. But I'm also worried about us being able to change our structures and our behaviors and our way of doing worship to meet the needs of the people who we are connecting to.

So what I learned in seminary, kind of, a lot of that stuff, I mean, I think you and I are pastors in a world that is changing so rapidly that we are We don't know what we're doing. It's like traveling a place where we don't have a map. A great quote that I was once given was, 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. And I'm with you. There are times that what we know isn't what we need to do. We need to be a little bit more creative.

And or maybe a lot more creative and i think as you and i talk over the next several weeks and or months that may be the next topic we go to about. Being creative, but being creative in the future, future creativity and how it is that we go about visualizing that. I'm personally, I'm reading a book on fresh expressions, which is out of England. And we're trying to do some fresh expression stuff in the United States. And I wonder how much of that might have some impact. So I'll read the book

and you and I'll exchange some email. And maybe that's what we'll talk about next time. Maybe, maybe. And my fear is all in all this, my fear is, In order to do new stuff, there's stuff we need to let go. Yes. And I hope we let go of the right stuff. And I hope that the past is not controlling our future. What to control our future is the gospel, not the structure. There's a lady in Los Angeles, and she is the pastor of Los Angeles First United Methodist Church, which doesn't have a building.

It let go of the building. And I need to talk to her and see how that works. They let the go of the building about six, seven, eight years ago, and they meet in parking lots. They still gather up, but they don't meet in a building anymore. In this country, one church who never got their own church, it was a church plant out of a central church in Copenhagen and planted a church in one of the suburbs. They have been there for 30 years. They never bought a church.

They meet all kinds of places. and right now I'm a DS for a church which is in the process of setting their very beautiful building actually that's the newest Methodist church in Denmark because they want to be liberated and free to do diagonal work for the town, it scares me but maybe they are on the right path yeah, so as a DS I'd like to help them doing that wonderful, Thomas thank you for your time today and I promise to those who are listening

that I will come back to Thomas again another day, probably three, four, five months, something like that. Thank you again for your time.