Pivot Podcast

Every sermon forms a congregation into something, whether the preacher names it or not. At St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, Associate Rector Peter Levenstrong and his colleagues have spent several years experimenting with Living Stories sermons, a collaborative approach to preaching adapted from Godly Play. The preacher reads the gospel while moving simple figures through the story, then asks a series of wondering questions, and the congregation builds the sermon together. Peter, author of Collaborative Sermons, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to describe what that looks like on a Sunday morning and what it...

What did Paul think God was doing about what’s wrong with us and the world? For Pauline scholar Michael Gorman, the answer centers on life in Christ. Paul uses the language of being in Christ well over a hundred times, and when he writes “you,” he usually means a whole community. Michael joins Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile to talk about the Christ hymn in Philippians 2, the cross as both the source and the shape of the Christian life, and justification as God creating a people who practice God’s justice.

Michael, who holds the Raymond E. Brown...

When Luther and his colleagues visited rural parishes in Saxony, they were horrified by what they found. One congregation refused to memorize the Lord’s Prayer because it was too long, and nobody knew the Ten Commandments. Luther’s Small Catechism grew out of those visits, written for the home and printed on broadsheets so parents, children, and servants could learn the basics of the faith together. Mark Tranvik, who teaches Reformation history and theology at Luther Seminary and spent ten years as a parish pastor, joins Terri Elton and Dwight Zscheile to talk about what Luther was trying to a...

What does discipleship look like when the pastor is still growing too? Pastor Edrin Williams leads Sanctuary Covenant Church in North Minneapolis, a congregation that is black-led and black-centered by design and multi-ethnic by conviction. He joins Terri Elton and Alicia Granholm to talk about the Sanctuary Five, the church’s discipleship rhythms of connect, grow, serve, give, and invite, and why he believes formation happens as people share life together more than in any classroom.

Edrin also talks about his own formation: the pastor friends he meets with each month, the therapist who helps him stay wh...

How does discipleship take root when a church walks through crisis together? In Pivot’s first bilingual episode, Dwight Zscheile is joined by Pastor Henry Burbano, executive pastor of Juntos Ministries at Emmanuel Covenant Church in Shoreview, Minnesota, and Anna Schaberg, one of the core leaders of the ministry. Henry speaks in Spanish and Anna interprets as they describe a community where people from about twelve countries share meals, meet in homes, and worship in two languages, with new Christians learning to follow Jesus alongside people who have walked with him their whole lives.

Last winter, during th...

What is discipleship? Everyone is a disciple of something, and whatever we follow shapes what we believe about ourselves, other people, and the meaning of life. In the Season 8 opener, Dwight Zscheile, Alicia Granholm, and Terri Elton begin a season-long conversation on discipleship, convinced that the primary challenge facing the church in North America is a crisis of discipleship.

They reflect on their own formation, draw on Lesslie Newbigin's observation that every culture is religious, even when it presents itself as secular, and discuss why so many churches invest their energy in being church and lose sight...

Season 7 of Pivot has come to a close, and in this finale, hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm look back over eleven weeks of conversations about spiritual practices, church tradition, and what it means to make old forms of faith legible again for people living in a very different world than the one those forms were built for. They talk through difficult moments in church history, questions of leadership and listening, and why exhaustion might be one of the truest words for how people are experiencing church and culture right now.

Dwight and Alicia talk through concrete...

Warren Smith, professor of historical theology at Duke Divinity School, joins Dwight Zscheile and Terri Elton to talk about his new book, Early Christian Theology: A History, and what the first several centuries of Christian thought have to say to church leaders navigating a very different, but strangely familiar, moment. Warren walks through Justin Martyr's arguments to a suspicious Roman government, Augustine's account of pride and the desire for dominion, Irenaeus's vision of a unified gospel, and Gregory of Nyssa's reflections on the endless discovery of God.

The conversation turns practical near the end, as Warren offers...

Rachael Wooldridge is Associate Vicar at St Paul's Church Hammersmith, a Church of England parish in London dating back to 1631, where hundreds of young adults with no prior church background have come to faith in recent years. In this conversation with host Dwight Zscheile, Rachael describes the discipleship program her church built to disciple them well: a nine-month commitment involving daily prayer and scripture, mentoring, small groups, and a fifty-day fasting program called Awaken 50, built in part on the Catholic program Exodus 90. Rather than lowering expectations to make faith more accessible to newcomers, Rachael and her team raised them...

This week's episode breaks from the usual format. Pivot producer Joey Goodall steps in for a solo reflection on what prayer practices are actually for, and what happens when we lose sight of that. He starts in an unexpected place: a line from the 1994 Australian film Muriel's Wedding, where a character compares her life to the biggest hit by the Swedish pop group she'd once used as an escape.

From there, Joey turns to prayer, scripture reading, and the practices Christians return to again and again, naming two temptations that work against their purpose: holding a practice...

Eastminster Church has been in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood since 1856, and for most of that history it worshiped and looked like a fairly typical Presbyterian congregation. Aaron Teter, the church's current pastor, spent time recently reading through the session's meeting minutes going back to the 1960s. In the 1970s, as the neighborhood changed and members left, the session wrote down a plain conviction: this was a church for the neighborhood. By the early 2000s, a strategic plan named becoming cross-cultural as an explicit goal, and the pastors and staff hired in the years since, including Rev. Nicole Porter, carried...

Katie Roelofs has spent years thinking about the space between Sunday morning and the rest of the week. A pastor in the Reformed Church in America and managing director of the Worship for Workers Project, Katie is co-author of the new book Leading Worship for Workers. She argues that churches, often without realizing it, have widened the gap between faith and work, training people to leave their real lives at the door instead of bringing them into worship.

In this episode, Katie talks with Dwight and Alicia about what it looks like to close that gap. She...

For twenty years, Johnny Sertin has practiced a kind of place-based ministry built on staying put. He and four other families started the Earlsfield Friary in southwest London, committing to live within one square mile of each other while each working ordinary jobs. Along the way, a Franciscan friar became a close friend and encouraged them to find the places in their own lives where they felt most alive. Meg Fry joined the community a bit later, drawn in by her own dissatisfaction with church as usual. That same posture eventually led the group to a stretch of land...

For most of his afterlife in the Christian imagination, Augustine has been a theologian first, a philosopher second, and everything else a distant third. What tends to get lost is that he spent nearly forty years as a working pastor. In this episode, Joey Sherrard, pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church and author of the new book The Augustinian Pastor, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk about Augustine as a pastor for pastors, discovering not a distant theologian but a fellow pastor who had shepherded his own congregation through a world coming apart at the seams.

Second Corinthians is one of the strangest letters in the New Testament: a leader defending himself, a community in open doubt, and in the middle of it, some of Paul's clearest writing on power in weakness. Dr. Lois Malcolm, professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary and author of a forthcoming commentary on the letter, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to explore what that friction opens up for church leaders navigating a culture that no longer grants pastors automatic authority.

Lois traces why Paul turned down money from the Corinthians and accepted it from the far...

"The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists." That's how Dr. Scott Cormode opens his book, and it's the starting point for this conversation about Christian leadership with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm. The Hugh De Pree Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of The Innovative Church, Scott argues that Christian leaders don't have followers — the people in their care belong first to Jesus — and that the real work of leadership is planting and watering while God gives the increase.

Scott shares five questions for discerning what...

Ten years ago, JR and Amy Rozko planted a two-hundred-year-old congregation in Canton, Ohio, only to discover that what their city needed wasn't another program but a rule of life: a shared rhythm of prayer, rest, study, and work old enough to predate the church they'd inherited. Out of that conviction came Canton Abbey, a neutral space with no budget and no staff where churches and nonprofits collaborate freely, and later Common Life Church, a small congregation of about fifty people who've chosen to live under vows drawn from monastic tradition rather than membership on a roster.

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Every generation inherits the same task: figuring out how to receive an ancient faith and pass it on in a language people can actually hear. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm open a new season of the Pivot Podcast by asking what spiritual formation looks like when it draws on centuries of Christian practice, the Book of Common Prayer, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rhythms of liturgy, without losing people along the way. Drawing on Vincent Donovan's Christianity Rediscovered and the idea of incarnation as an ongoing act of translation, they trace the line between tradition...

Why is cultivating community in church so hard right now? In this Season 6 finale, hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm reflect on a full season of conversations with historians, theologians, pastors, and researchers who helped them understand the many layers underneath that question. From the formative power of late modern culture to the provisional nature of relationships today, they name what the church is genuinely up against — and why the tools the surrounding culture offers can't get us to the deep belonging the church is meant to provide.

But this isn't a conversation that ends in resignation. Dw...

The guilt most Christians carry about their prayer life, that it isn't deep enough, consistent enough, disciplined enough, may say less about them than about the world they're living in. In this episode, Dwight Zscheile talks with the Rev. Dr. Wesley Ellis, pastor of First Congregational Church in Ramona, California and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, about what a culture of optimization has done to the Christian prayer life and what might be recovered when we stop treating prayer as one more project to manage.

Wes argues that prayer is primarily something...

Church community building has never been more urgent or perhaps more difficult. In this episode of Pivot Podcast, Jeff Galley and Phil Smith, co-authors of The Way Back to One Another, join Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk honestly about the loneliness epidemic reshaping American life and what it means for the church. Drawing on years of experience in large church ministry and global relief work, Jeff and Phil bring both data and personal longing to this conversation. Since 2014, time Americans spend with other people has dropped by roughly 50%, and the church is not exempt.

Jeff...

What is the meaning of Pentecost? In this reflection episode of the Pivot Podcast, Luther Seminary theologian Dr. Lois Malcolm moves past the familiar imagery of wind and fire to ask what the Spirit was actually doing that day in Jerusalem. Her answer is both clarifying and unsettling: the Spirit arrived not so the disciples could possess it, but so it could send them out.

Lois draws three claims from the Pentecost story that speak directly to the life of the church today. The Spirit belongs to no one. Speaking in other people's languages is a divine...

The debate over whether the church's primary calling is evangelism or justice has been running for over a century, and Dr. Al Tizon believes it has cost us more than we know. In this episode, the lead pastor of Grace Fellowship Community Church in San Francisco and affiliate professor of missional and global leadership at North Park Theological Seminary and Fuller Theological Seminary joins hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to make the case for a missional church grounded in the whole gospel. Drawing on decades of ministry in the Philippines and the United States, Al offers reconciliation as...

What does first century Christianity have to teach the church about belonging today? In this episode of the Pivot Podcast, Dr. Kristofer Phan Coffman, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, joins hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to explore the early church as a community of genuinely unlike people navigating real social upheaval. From the chaos of the Roman Empire to Paul's fledgling congregations scattered across the Mediterranean, Kristofer helps us see that the early church was not a settled institution with established patterns. It was a community figuring out, often under pressure, what it meant to...

What does it mean to find your identity in Christ, and what does the Old Testament have to say about it? In this episode of the Pivot Podcast, Dr. Kathryn Schifferdecker, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, walks hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm through the Bible's vision for human community, from the boundaries woven into creation in Genesis, to the covenant at Sinai, to the prophets calling Israel back to account. Along the way, she challenges the modern assumption that identity is something we construct from within, offering instead a picture of people called into being by...

Why does God allow suffering? It's one of the oldest and most urgent questions in human experience, and Dr. Rolf Jacobson has lived inside it. Diagnosed with bone cancer at 15 and losing both legs, then decades later walking alongside his brother Karl and close friend Mike through simultaneous cancer diagnoses, Rolf has wrestled with that question personally, pastorally, and theologically. In this conversation with host Dwight Zscheile, he draws on the theology of the cross, the Psalms, and the hard-won wisdom of his own experience to offer some of the most grounded and practical guidance you'll hear on faith...

What does real church community cultivation require? The Rev. Dr. Eun Strawser, physician, author, and pastor of Ma Ke Alo'o, a network of multiplying missional communities in Honolulu, Hawaii, has spent years working out a practical answer to that question. After planting her first church and growing it to 450 people, she realized a crowd had gathered but a community hadn't really formed. Her second church plant took a radically different approach, starting with 15 people, a discipleship core, and weekly community dinners before ever launching a Sunday service.

In this conversation with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm, Eun...

Why is Christian community so hard to cultivate in contemporary culture? In this episode of Pivot Podcast, host Dwight Zscheile continues his conversation with Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski, a professor of church history at Luther Seminary, tracing the deep cultural roots of our present challenge. From the Enlightenment's reimagining of the human person as an autonomous individual to the seismic cultural shifts of the 1960s and 70s, Jennie and Dwight examine how Western culture arrived at a place where shared frameworks for truth and the common good have largely dissolved, and how both mainline and evangelical churches have accommodated themselves...

"Your labor is not in vain." It's one of Paul's most direct declarations in 1 Corinthians 15, and Dr. Jennifer Pietz, Assistant Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, believes it has everything to do with how church leaders carry their work today. In this Easter reflection, Jenny addresses three common misconceptions about resurrection that quietly hollow out hope in ministry, and grounds each one in what Paul actually argues in 1 Corinthians 15.

Resurrection isn't only about Jesus. It isn't only a future promise. And it isn't an escape from the world. It's the present foundation of Christian vocation, and...

Cultivating Christian community can feel really hard today, but the reasons run deeper than most church leaders realize. In part one of this two-part conversation, Luther Seminary professor Dwight Zscheile sits down with church historian Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski to trace the roots of today's loneliness epidemic and discipleship crisis from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into our present moment. Along the way, they explore how thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Nietzsche quietly reshaped the West's story about what it means to be human, and how that story is now shaping the people sitting in your pews.

What does Christian community look like when a city is in crisis? In this first episode of Season 6 of the Pivot Podcast, Faith+Lead scholars Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm go inside the last eight months in the Twin Cities, a period marked by targeted violence, a school shooting, and a large-scale federal immigration enforcement operation that left communities shaken and afraid. The church showed up quietly and persistently across every theological tradition, delivering food, organizing legal assistance, moving worship into living rooms, and rallying around members who were detained and flown out of state without warning.

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What does Ryan Burge's research on religious nones reveal about the Americans sitting just outside your church doors? In part two of this two-part conversation, Dwight and Alicia continue their discussion with Dr. Ryan Burge, data scientist and author of The Vanishing Church, diving into what the data actually shows about faith, formation, and the roughly seven out of ten Americans who are neither fully in nor fully out of religious life. The picture is more nuanced, and more hopeful, than most church leaders expect.

Ryan walks through what the numbers say about the much-discussed religious revival...

What happens when political identity becomes stronger than faith identity? Dr. Ryan Burge is a data scientist, professor, and pastor who watched his own 150-year-old congregation close its doors in 2024. In part one of this two-part conversation, Ryan brings the data to bear on one of the most urgent questions facing church leaders today: how faith and political identity have become so entangled in American life that millions of people now choose — or abandon — their church based on politics rather than theology.

Ryan walks Dwight and Alicia through what the numbers actually show about church decline, the rise...

Dr. Verlon Fosner's Seattle congregation was declining 14% every year despite doing everything right—improved worship, new programs, upgraded tech. So Verlon stopped trying to fix the decline and started asking a different question: Where is God already at work among people who will never walk through our church doors? His answer transformed his understanding of missional church. In 2008, his team opened their first dinner church in a struggling neighborhood with just tables, food, and Jesus stories. The room immediately filled with never-been-churched people who'd never wanted anything to do with traditional church.

In this conversation, Verlon shares ho...

Church leaders often approach Lent with a familiar script: add a devotional practice, give something up, host a midweek service. But what if this season called us to something deeper? In this special Pivot Podcast Lenten reflection, the Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson invites us into four transformative Lenten practices for church leaders that meet our exhaustion head-on. He offers: 1. sacred honesty about what hurts; 2. holy slowness as resistance to constant rushing; 3. embodied compassion in places where people are hurting; and 4. courageous imagining that refuses to let harshness shape our vision. Willis doesn't turn away from the brokenness around...

Many church leaders feel crushing church growth pressure—the constant anxiety that if you don't reverse decline or manage outcomes perfectly, you've failed. But what if that pressure is actually destroying the very connections you're trying to create? Dr. Andy Root and Rev. Kara Root discovered this truth on a 63-mile pilgrimage through Scotland with their teenagers. As they learned to let go of control in parenting, they began to see how the same dynamic plays out in pastoral leadership. When consultants use decline statistics to scare congregations into action, when the main issue becomes lack of growth instead of...

Many church leaders love the idea of lay ministry in theory, but struggle to understand what it actually looks like in practice. In this special Q&A episode, Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm answer your questions about the shift from clergy-led to lay-led ministry, sharing concrete examples from small congregations to megachurches that are making this work.

You'll hear concrete examples from small congregations to megachurches that are making this work, learn how to renegotiate expectations with your congregation, discover what clergy are actually called to do when they stop doing everything themselves, and understand why this...

What if the church planters God is calling are already in your congregation? John McGinley, executive director of Myriad in the UK, shares how they're equipping everyday disciples to start new worshiping communities in gyms, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. Since 2022, over 100 teams and 400+ people have launched contextual churches led by non-ordained believers. John explains how to recognize potential church planters, why a two-and-a-half-year community journey sustains these fragile new communities, and how ordained leaders can shift from delivering ministry to equipping it.

In this conversation, you'll hear stories of a former bodybuilder who turned his gym into...

What does Protestant identity in Christ mean for today's church leaders? In this conversation, theologian Beth Felker Jones explores why Protestant faith still matters in a moment when many are converting to Catholicism, embracing Orthodoxy, or deconstructing entirely. Beth unpacks the unique gifts of Protestant tradition: scripture as our primary authority, communal interpretation led by the Spirit, and the freedom to contextualize the gospel for new times and places. She challenges the myth of a "one pure church" before Protestantism and offers a compelling case for reclaiming Protestant heritage without fragmenting the broader body of Christ.

Beth...

Discover how to read the financial parables of Jesus Christ with fresh eyes in this conversation with Dr. Keith Bodner, author of "Exploring the Financial Parables of Jesus." Keith shares how a moment of panic in the pulpit led him to rediscover the confrontational power of Jesus' economic stories—parables about treasure in fields, workers in vineyards, servants with talents, and rich men who know their neighbor's name but never open the gate. These stories reveal what Keith calls the economy of grace, where God's generosity turns our assumptions about wealth, fairness, and resources upside down.

The fi...