The Tim Ahlman Podcast
The Tim Ahlman Podcast is your go-to resource for inspiring conversations that equip leaders to thrive in every vocation, inside and outside the church. With three primary focuses, this podcast dives deep into:
Leadership: Learn from experts across diverse fields as we explore how their insights can shape and sustain a healthy culture in the local church and beyond. Over 60% of listeners expressed a desire for practical discussions on cultivating thriving environments—and that's exactly what these conversations will deliver.
Learn: Engage in deep theological discussions with scholars who illuminate how Christ is revealed on every page of Scripture. Together, we’ll bridge theology to the realities of a post-Christian America, ensuring practical application for today’s world. This segment aligns closely with the themes of the American Reformation Podcast and resonates with the 60% of you who crave more exploration in this area.
Live: Discover healthy habits that empower leaders in all vocations to become holistically healthy. As followers of Jesus, we’re called to lead not only with faith but also with physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Join Tim Ahlman as we navigate leadership, learning, and living with purpose, so you can lead with strength, wisdom, and a Christ-centered vision.
The Tim Ahlman Podcast
Liturgy or Idol? The Hidden Danger in LCMS Worship
Paul Dickerson, Associate Pastor at Christ Memorial Church, shares his journey from attorney to ministry and explores how business principles can transform church leadership and growth.
While Paul values liturgical practices and their powerful connection to historical faith, he challenges listeners to consider when rituals become roadblocks rather than pathways to Jesus. Through compelling stories – from a young man shamed for wearing a hat in church to a karate instructor finding his place in worship – we glimpse both the pitfalls and possibilities of creating truly hospitable Christian communities.
• From practicing law to pursuing seminary, Paul's transition shows how God redirects careers toward ministry
• Churches are experiencing more adult baptisms as new people discover faith through relational connections
• The "Innovator's Dilemma" explains why good organizations fail by listening exclusively to existing customers
• Value networks in churches can create systems that unintentionally exclude newcomers
• Balancing 70% maintenance, 20% improvement, and 10% innovation helps churches stay healthy
• Traditions are valuable but become problematic when they're not hospitable to outsiders
• Pastoral ministry in 2050 will likely involve more distributed leadership beyond ordained roles
• Relationships remain central to sharing the gospel—each church member has connections with people far from Jesus
Welcome to the Tim Allman Podcast. It's a beautiful day to be alive. Pray, the joy of Jesus is your strength. I get the privilege today of hanging out with a leader that I've admired from afar, and I'm excited to get to know better. This is Pastor Paul Dickerson. Let me tell you about him. He serves as Associate Pastor at Christ Memorial Church in partnership with my longtime good friend, jeff Claytor, been there really since the beginning of his ministry. Jeff has been on our podcast before Paul and his wife Pamela. They've been married 20 years this summer. Hey, bro, my wife and I are 20 years as well. They have two kids, jack and Sarah. How old are Jack and Sarah, paul?
Speaker 2:Jack is a sophomore, so he just turned 16. Sarah is 11. She's in fifth grade, man, okay.
Speaker 1:So I got a sophomore son too, and anyway, yeah, we're in similar seasons of life. Prior to attending seminary, though, in 2016, paul and his family lived in Ann Arbor, michigan. Are you an Ann Arbor grad, not Concordia University ofbor, michigan, where Paul worked as an attorney and Pam, his wife, ran a coffeehouse ministry in their church? Paul's current ministry focuses on discipleship and staff and lay leader development, and Pam oversees a young leader development program. That's pretty cool, called the Harbor Leadership Collective. So, yeah, let's get into your ministry story. First, how you doing, paul. You loving life, dude, life is good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, things are well, tim. Thanks for having me on, Excited for this topic, excited to talk to you. I've been listening to the podcast for a while and you've had some heavy hitters on here, so I feel like a kid invited to the grownups table, so this is going to be silly.
Speaker 1:You are silly. You are more than welcome, dude. You have so much to offer. This is going to be great. So how has your secular career shaped your work as a leader in the local church? I've had a number of kind of bivocation or co-vocational leaders. Now you kind of left that and kind of came full time, but you definitely were impacted by, close to, I think, a decade or so of marketplace leadership, right. So tell that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really kind of a typical story starting off. I grew up Lutheran, grew up in the church. Towards the end of high school and in my college years I'd say my faith was dormant. So if you would have asked me I'd say, yep, I'm a Christian, I'm following Jesus, I read the Bible, I go to church occasionally. But if you would have asked some of the people around me, some of my friends circles, they might not have been able to tell. So that fruit wasn't there. So kind of a dormant faith for a while. There my wife Pam and I reengaged in our early mid-20s at University of Lutheran Chapel up there in Ann Arbor. Our friend and colleague Scott Geiger was the pastor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Scott was Okay, he was influential.
Speaker 2:Scott was the pastor, then Don't let him know, though, that guy will get the big head Shout out to Scott.
Speaker 1:Love Geiger.
Speaker 2:Aside from the Holy Spirit. This guy either gets the blame or the credit for what's happened to me since. There you go, but got involved in leadership there, slowly, elder, eventually, congregation president of it was a three-site, multi-site at the time. And then kind of at the same time, on a parallel track, I'm off on my legal career. So I worked in a county prosecutor's office, did criminal jury trials for seven years and those two things are kind of run in parallel Married, house, kids, all the kind of normal stuff in life in your 20s and early 30s.
Speaker 2:And then, as I was doing that, started considering a career change, looked at some of my experiences in the church and seeing a need for organizational and missional alignment, where the most important stuff wasn't always getting the most attention and the most resources. And so Pam and I started considering, okay, what would it look like to go into private practice where I'm still representing clients, still working as an attorney, but also a portion of that practice is working with churches, either in legal representation or kind of in that organizational alignment, missional alignment area? And as we kept exploring that, we've decided that no, god's actually inviting us to go to seminary. And so, 2016,. We resigned our positions. We packed up the house and moved down to St Louis to start four years of schooling, and then here we are.
Speaker 1:Wow, well, that's extraordinary. So I'm going to counter lovingly my own thinking sometimes in the past that some men won't pick up and leave. You know, go take that seminary journey you did and praise, be to God. Not everybody's in the position to do that, and for those that are in a local context that can't for one reason or another, but some can and those that can to shout out to both of our seminaries should. So yeah, thoughts there, paul, about that sacrifice of picking up and going to St Louis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was costly. There's no doubt about that. One of the big things I personally had to wrestle with in that was where does, where does all the stuff come from, right? Does it come from my work? Does it come from my skill? Does it come from my position in education and training? Or does God provide that? And if God provides it, he can see us through this change and this change in circumstances too.
Speaker 2:I'd also say it was costly in terms of relationships. You know, as you get embedded in a community, there's friends, there's colleagues at work, there's a church community that we left and we love those people dearly, but the relationship isn't the same and some of those opportunities where you think about who could I be speaking to about Jesus or talking to about the gospel in the context I was in before that don't exist anymore because we're just not there and also at that time, you'll see, was in a pastoral vacancy. So my age and the circumstances there, smp wasn't really an option, alternate route wasn't really an option and as Pam and I talked about it, we said either this has to happen now or it's just not going to happen. And so we decided to take the jump and God has been good. He has taken care of us. We've had all of our needs met and then some, and so it is possible. It's costly, but so is following Jesus.
Speaker 1:So it's a doable thing. Pick up your cross and follow after me. So your first call then was to Christ Memorial, right.
Speaker 2:To partner with Jeff right out of seminary. Did you do like an extended vicarage? Tell that story, yeah, that's right. So I kind of followed the normal route but did local vicarage. So Christ Memorial was actually my vicarage congregation. So fourth year turned into kind of like extended vicarage. It was kind of like field work plus in some ways, because there was a sense that Christ Memorial was looking to add a pastor and that I would be a good fit there, and so we just kind of explored that throughout fourth year and I don't know who the powers that be were that all made the decisions and pulled the levers to make it happen, but I'm grateful that they did. I graduated in 2020, was ordained in July of 2020, and have been here ever since COVID ordination.
Speaker 2:Covid ordination yeah, that was a strange time to enter ministry, but one of the things I'm grateful for and one that I did get assigned back to my Vicarage congregation. So I had relationships, knew some of the people, knew some of the systems in place already, so that was a huge advantage over some of my classmates that were just sent out and it was brand new and they had to enter into a new community during that time. The other thing was you don't know what you don't know, and so I didn't have any kind of ministry to compare it to, so it just became normal. This is just how we do things, and it forced adaptation, forced quick thinking, start small, fail fast, learn, adapt and try it again, and so that's kind of become one of our values as a congregation is to try things, try new things and learn from it, all for the sake of reaching more.
Speaker 1:That's it. So let's talk about the new people that are coming. Right now we're seeing a growth wave. We're going to get into value network and kind of the innovators dilemma. We got some really fun topics we're going to be hitting here. But let's just talk about life on the ground there in St Louis and the new people coming. It's kind of an eclectic group that the Lord's bringing, I think, in both of our congregations right now.
Speaker 2:Tell that story Paul group that the Lord's bringing, I think in both of our congregations right now. Tell that story, Paul. Yeah, so I was talking with you, mentioned Jeff Claytor, my friend and boss. We're just kind of comparing notes on this year. I think we've had 12 to 15 baptisms so far. About a third of those have been infant baptism, so maybe what most folks usually think of when they think of baptism in a Lutheran church or an LCMS church, but that means two-thirds have been young children all the way to adults and grownups.
Speaker 2:And this is something you see a lot of times in new mission fields or emerging missions, where the gospel kind of gets a foothold in a new people group or a new family or an area that hasn't been yet in the local context. And then you see one baptism and then two more and then three more. And we had a few weeks ago two young men were baptized. One is in middle school, the other one's in high school. They've kind of been in and around the church for a while but family circumstances they've just never been baptized. And then Jeff was telling me he had a conversation with another one of our members that her boys who have, or his grandchildren who have not been baptized were asking well, could I be baptized? Because they saw these other boys get baptized. So it kind of has this flywheel effect where you get one and then you get more, and then you get more, and that's what we've been seeing in our context here.
Speaker 1:Well, it's kind of the convergence between the early church and Christendom, right. We're like right in the middle of that, where the norm for many years was, you know, families in the church, way more infant baptisms. But I think that's the trend we're seeing to a lot more adult baptisms, young adult baptisms. We had we had a young man. This is kind of wild. On an average Lenten Wednesday night worship, a young man has come now for a month and he brought five of his buddies to a Wednesday night worship service. They sat down front. You know there's like one hundred fifty 200 people in the room, so like like white on rice, I mean they're just everybody in the church, like these young kids. At the end of the service, like how did you, you know the Holy Spirit's at work? It's pretty extraordinary. But you've got some unique folks that are coming that you said older, adult, former llama farmers that are joining and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, In our current pathways class we've got high schoolers, we've got a 20 year old who was just baptized a couple of weeks ago, all the way up to kind of traditional Lutherans who are just transferring membership to a couple of 90 year olds who are retired llama farmers from rural Missouri and moved back to the city now, and so it's probably one of the more eclectic groups that we've seen.
Speaker 2:And we've had the same experience, tim, of just kind of from one to one to one. So one of my great joys is getting to watch and just kind of be on the sidelines as the Holy Spirit works in one person's life, and then that person tells somebody and they're connected. And then that person tells somebody and they're connected, and we're seeing it go through families, we're seeing it go through from kids up to grandparents maybe the reverse of what you'd normally think and we're seeing it in friend groups and just exploding that way. So it's fun to be a part of. It's not anything we're doing. Sometimes we like to joke that we need to try to manage the Holy Spirit and he just refuses to do what we say, and so we just kind of hold on tight as tight as we can and go along for the ride.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what we can do more by the Spirit's power is let our members know the power of the invite. Right, this is right before Easter. Right now we have an every week push Invite your friends, invite your family, invite your neighbors, come and hear the best story of all time that death has been defeated by the crucified and risen Jesus. I think more people are open to an invite right now. Cool story.
Speaker 1:Well, our SMP pastor I hate using that language, but a bivocational guy he's going to be on this podcast here soon Jeff Sutherland. He'd been invited. He's in real estate, been running a real estate firm for years and years and he'd been inviting a partner in his business to church for years, multiple years. He'd been asking this guy to come and then the one Sunday Jeff was out. This guy happens to show up, says I work with Jeff, I think is he one of the pastors here or something, and anyway they've been coming now straight last four weeks. He grew up five years in a Catholic church and then his wife has never experienced anything connected to local church. And here they are the last month listening to law and gospel preaching here at Christ Christian. I mean it's insane what the Lord is doing the power of the invite. Do you guys have a heavy invite push right? Now, too, we do. Do you guys have a heavy invite push right?
Speaker 2:now too, we do Not as heavy as you guys and praise God for that story. But one of the things I explicitly talk about it with in our new member class or even if we're having a Bible study, is it's really very simple we invite a friend out, You're going to ask what's going on new in their life, like you do, and they're going to tell you a whole bunch of new in your life because they're a nice person, they're your friend, they want to know. And then you get to tell them hey, I started going to this new church and here's one thing I've learned. Or I'm doing this new Bible study, and here's one thing.
Speaker 1:So good.
Speaker 2:And you see, you see if they bite right.
Speaker 1:It's like I don't know Jesus liked. Okay, we'll try again later. That's it. Yeah, this, uh. Another cool story.
Speaker 1:One of our members, Cindy, met a gal in the grocery store and she's very outgoing, and they started talking, heard her story. She was new to the Valley and never had gone to church. She'd not found a church even before she moved here and they became friends. She said after a few conversations hey, I go on Sundays to Christ Greenfield. Do you want to come? She came and now Betty is like in our leadership development pathway. She is so, so, gifted and on fire for the Lord. I don't know how old, you don't ask older, he's 65, 70 years old or something like that, I mean but she's just met Jesus. This is amazing.
Speaker 1:Like there are way, there are way more people who are eager to form friendship with healthy, hopefully healthy heart, body, mind, spirit. Christians who aren't weird, you know, they're just out in the community, living out their faith in the name of Christ and and just waiting for for that invitation. I think that's, I think that's so true back in the day in the LCMS, if you remember this, because we're, we're close, similar ages I remember in my dad's church there used to be Friendship Sundays. Do you remember this? Friendship Sundays, it was kind of an LCMS wide push that on this Sunday or it was maybe even a curriculum whatever makes the most sense in your world. We call them.
Speaker 1:We Are Family Days here. So a great day we're going to go. We do hospitality big, but we go even bigger with hospitality that day. We know it's going to be a great experience for you to invite your friends. Do you guys have any kind of rhythm there at Christ Memorial? For, like, we are family, or invite Sundays in addition to Christmas and Easter, because we know Christmas, easter, mother's Day, those are the three best kind of invite Sundays. Do you have any experience there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we haven't really picked up on that in that way. A lot of it we do around our new member class and pathways, as this is the time, because there's something, there's a specific thing to invite to, right For sure, or kind of in St Louis we're kind of right in the hub, there's 80 plus Lutheran churches in this area.
Speaker 1:That's hard to wrap your mind around.
Speaker 2:Which is, yeah, it's a huge blessing and lots of opportunities for partnership in it. You know some strong Lutheran schools in the area and so there's still kind of that cultural Lutheranism or cultural Christianity where we see opportunities to invite people when the kids are singing, when we celebrate our Lutheran schools, when we're kind of doing these specific community events, where that then becomes the hook or the event to bring someone in and then they get to hear the gospel and we let the Holy Spirit take it from there.
Speaker 1:Hey, I love it. All right, let's shift and talk. You're in leadership development. You have a leadership development kind of hat staff and lay leadership development. Your wife is also caring for young leaders in their journey. You mentioned the book. You and I were talking about the book the Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Tell me about that book and how it shapes kind of the culture there of leadership development at Christ Memorial.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I got to give credit to a lay leader here in the St Louis area, rob Boyle. Rob is a prof in the business school at St Louis University and this was years ago I think I was on my vicarage when he did a presentation for a group of pastors and lay leaders in the St Louis area talking about leading in disruptive times, and he references this book, innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. And so I did what we all do I wrote down the book in the title and I probably ignored it for the next like three or four years until I got to it on my reading list. But when I finally read it, just all sorts of ideas and connections started sparking. It is kind of a wonky book. It's got charts and graphs and data and Clayton Christensen is a prof, he's at the Harvard Business School and he kind of set out to answer this question of why do good companies fail?
Speaker 2:Why do companies like Sears and IBM and Xerox and these ones that at one point were the case study as a here's Kodak, here's the best way to lead and manage and run a company in the US today, and now you look at that market share and other case studies for how it all went wrong. So Christensen kind of sets out to answer this question what, what happened? And he looks at it through the lens of innovation and technology. Now, when he's talking about technology, he's not talking about phones and computers and that kind of technology for his purposes. Technology is the process of turning resources, human resources, capital, information any of that stuff into products and services in the market.
Speaker 2:So technology is that process of taking something and bringing it to the market for the sake of the customer.
Speaker 2:And it makes us this thing, this distinction between sustaining technology that looks to improve on what exists, into existing markets, to appeal to mass customer bases, and disruptive technology that adds a different valuation into it, that looks at well, maybe it can be done more cheaply, maybe it can be more reliable, maybe it does something a little bit different. And disruptive tech is never as good at first, but quickly it adapts and it changes and it starts to take over the market almost from the bottom up. And so that's the innovation, is the change in the process. The dilemma that Christensen found is that the exact same behaviors that good companies and good managers use to become good companies and become the Sears and the Xerox and the Kodak are the same ones that cause their downfall in the face of disruptive tech. So it's actually good management that creates the problem and the opportunity for this disruptive technology or this new process or an emerging market to come in and overtake market share and then overtake the firm itself.
Speaker 1:So this is one of my favorite topics, paul, as a systems guy, as one who seeks to again, this is all this is kind of. I think this is the heart of Jesus is disappointing people at a rate they could handle. Like the disciples had an idea of what the kingdom advancing would look like. And then Jesus elevates it. No, it looks like a cross and an empty tomb. Right, we're in Lent right now. Never do you, lord, get behind me, satan. Jesus says to Peter after he's just given the greatest proclamation you are the Christ, you're the promised Messiah. But you don't understand what that rain looks like. It's a global, it's a cosmic rain. It's not a micro rain, a small rain for the restoration of Israel. I think we can get kind of flip it with that. They had this kind of view. No, no, no.
Speaker 1:Jesus was very disruptive in his ministry. Anything more to say about? I mean, this is leadership, it's. People have a certain vision, but our vision is always too small, right, and this can happen in a business, this can happen in a church. God's vision is global. And then you think after his ascension you will be witnesses Jerusalem, judea, samaria, to the ends of the earth, like it's a huge vision and they had to say how in the world is this going to take place? Trust me, it's not going to be you working, it's going to be me speaking. You know, when you're before people who are going to take your life, which inevitably happened for many of them right and could happen for us. You know, but don't worry it, I'm going to be with you. You know, through the disruption that human beings love, safety and security and ritual and the status quo, like, we're hardwired toward that, and so leaders inspired by the Holy Spirit have to disrupt things, but at a rate that doesn't lead toward their demise or or the demise of the institution, right? So let me final final point in terms of like distribution of disruption, right? So let me final point in terms of like distribution of disruption.
Speaker 1:I've heard some research on the sustaining work to manage what is going on. That's roughly about 70 percent of an organization's effort just keeping the system, so it's still a majority. But then the other 20 percent is looking at and that's not 100 percent, I'm all aware. 20 percent is looking at what we're doing and offering disruptive suggestions to do it better, right? And then 10% in any organization is doing an entirely new thing and Google. There's a lot of data around this, google and other industries. And then all of this innovation is given through initiatives carried on by distributed teams rather than bureaucratic hierarchy who get in the way. So bureaucratic hierarchy needs to lower themselves and give as much freedom to those who are doing the 70, 20, and 10 work in an organization and in a local church. So there is a lot of research around this topic.
Speaker 1:It's very, very helpful, but it is very, very hard for a leader to manage through. This is a part of the cross topic. It's very, very helpful, but it is very, very hard for a leader to manage through. This is a part of the cross. I think Jesus is saying as you carry out this kingdom, expanding work. So yeah, I said a lot there, paul. Any thoughts?
Speaker 2:Lots, probably too many to share in the time we've got. But, yeah, thinking about Jesus as a leader, being wholly secure in his identity as the son of God, allowed him to enter into those conversations, right To be disruptive in a way that both challenged and called higher. And, of course, the disciples still don't get it, we still don't get it, and so they all fell away. At the end Mark talks about that they all left him and fled. And so thinking about, yeah, what is the disruption that we can stoke, the kind of healthy agitation, a healthy conflict that helps lead towards change and growth.
Speaker 2:Change and growth happens because of challenge, because there's something to push against. We think about this with our bodies. Right, if you exercise or you want to get stronger, you want to get faster, you want to grow in endurance, you got to kind of push that line a little bit, because if you don't, if you stay sedentary, actually all atrophies and it goes in the reverse direction. So giving the right amount of change, the right amount of stress to produce growth is kind of the key. And knowing all right, how do I turn that up a little bit, how do I turn that down Makes me think of Todd Bolsinger talked about being like a pressure cooker, a crockpot or a thermostat that is able to keep the heat up. It doesn't go away at all, but it regulates it at a temp, at a level that people can handle and continue to grow and, god willing, by the work of the spirit, flourish.
Speaker 1:Have you documented on your team? And we haven't per se, the 70-20-10 split, and I think the reason we haven't documented it is I want every person's week to look like 70-20-10. Like it's not just a team, like it's a team that does 10%. No, it's every ministry team that is looking 20% of the time at what they're doing. They got to get above or this is adaptive leadership conversation right, they got to get to the balcony. They're on the dance floor. 70% is kind of in the weeds or in the whirlwind, and so this is the four disciplines of execution. We got to have some big goals, right that we're then working on the business, not just in it, and the business for us, you know, multiplying disciples, looking at leadership development, and then you've got about 10% of your time to wonder I wonder if, look at this and maybe there's a new thing.
Speaker 1:My problem I'm just being completely transparent is I am inappropriately distributed. Full transparency. I'm like 50% looking at what is probably 20%, looking at what could be done to change what is, and I'm like 30%. That can be a problem, tim. Don't do any new things or say yes to any more initiatives. I get my hands slapped from time to time and so I need to get back in balance. 70-20-10 is a good distribution. Have you thought about that before, paul?
Speaker 2:We have and we're working towards it. We're definitely not there yet, and part of it is we'll talk about value networks here in a minute and part of it, I think, is because of that. But you and I share that same tendency I can be incredibly disruptive. We just did some stuff with Working Genius, and one of mine is Wonder, and so I'm always asking questions why is it this way? How could it be better, how could we improve it?
Speaker 2:And sometimes that can go too far, to the point where it's actually harmful to people and it's harmful to the organization. One of the one of the checks that I often remember and I hit my team and our team here has permission to call me on this is that efficiency and love are often incompatible. It was not efficient. It didn't make any sense for the father to send his son for a bunch of sinners dead in their sins, right, but thank God that he did that. He loved us enough to do that. And so efficiency and love getting everything to you know, the system being perfectly aligned and everything just humming that's not always the most loving thing, and so I need to be called on that sometimes and have that check in place where too much disruption is not helpful.
Speaker 1:That makes you a good leader. You know your your blind spots I'm working on. I'm working on mine too, so let's get into it. You brought, you brought up value network. How does a value network, how does it hurt businesses when they respond to customer needs? Let's talk about that. And when we say customer, are we talking the member in the church? Are we talking people that are yet to come into the church? To put it into a church context, paul.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in a church context, I think of the customer as the existing customer, the one who's a member, the one who's already in, and a part and people can talk about. You know what level of engagement does that represent? Whatever someone thinks of when they think of this person is in. That's the customer.
Speaker 2:And so what Christensen says in the book is a value network is the context in which a firm or a company makes decisions, allocates resources, enacts policies, responds to threats from competitors, listens to its customers, to all deliver a product or service in a way.
Speaker 2:And a value network can be a really good thing because it develops into this symbiotic relationship between the customer and the company or, in the church context, between the member and the church, where we say, well, what is it that you need, what is it that you want? The customer tells the company, the company says we can deliver that and off we go, and it kind of becomes this symbiotic relationship. The problem comes up when, in that relationship, certain capabilities get developed by the company. That's a good thing, but that also defines the company's disabilities and the things you're not good at, because nobody can be good at everything, nobody can serve all people, and so it starts to foreclose opportunities in different markets that a company could enter, so that when disruptive tech comes in, the company's actually unable to pivot and respond to the changing market, precisely because it listened to its customers again and again and again. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, so would you apply this to serve me, pastor, you do your thing, keep me comfortable, don't forget, don't forget, and all your new ideas, don't forget about us. So the discipline between discipleship and outreach and kingdom expanding work, that kind of interconnection between the disciple and disciple, making and multiplying, is that the dance I think that we do in the local church, paul?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it is. And so, you know, for the pastors listening or anybody who works in the church, you can kind of think of all sorts of different ways, that little decisions that you have to make, that navigates this sort of thing right, where you look at hospital visits or a funeral, or attending the Women's Guild luncheon, or am I going and knocking on doors with the evangelism team, or how much time do I give to the school? You know, in our context, you know we do confirmation in a few different modules throughout the year, kind of like these six to eight week sprints, and it's every week for those six to eight weeks, and our seventh and eighth graders are coming, and a lot of times we ask a parent to come. That's kind of the format that we followed for a while. Well, now we've got students who are in single parent households, or we've got one student in particular, who I'm thinking of, who has four households that they're a part of. So there's mom and there's dad, and there's maternal grandparents and there's paternal grandparents, and so they're divided between all of these different places and not all of those people are part of our church or connected to our church at all. And so how, what kind of processes, what kind of systems do we have in place so that person can be a part of part of the church? Because they don't fit neatly into the you know, mom, dad, two and a half kids, white picket, fence, family system that we might think of as the ideal, and so how do we leave room for that?
Speaker 2:You know, part of what really got me thinking on this and kind of I shot the email off to you on it was a conversation you had with our friend and colleague, scott Seidler, and we heard him present at a conference where he was talking about how there's someone on his team and I forget her name and I forget what she did before, but she's retired, did not work in ministry, but it is her responsibility to make sure that Scott and the pastors on his team are calling the first time visitors Because, in Scott's own admission, if this woman does not make sure that he does it, it won't happen because it's not urgent. It's incredibly important but it's not urgent. All of the other stuff is urgent. Right, that says you know, pastor, pay attention to this pastor, no-transcript.
Speaker 2:And maybe we are inadvertently creating a culture within a church or a way of doing things within a church. That's not bad. It's not against scriptures, it's not against the confessions, but maybe it's creating barriers to those who aren't here yet because they're not within that value network and we don't have a ear to hear what those people would be for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so good. So how do we change it? I'll share how I kind of conceptualize about it and get your take. If Jesus led you here, you belong here. And then it's stories like the story I told about Cindy inviting Betty, like those start to be a part of the grounding, or you could say even met a story about who we are as a community. We're a hospitable place that we're not perfect, but we seek to create a space that everyone feels welcome to hear. Word and sacrament. No, no matter how much you know about Jesus, jesus welcomes you with arms open wide and we got to tell the stories about that taking place. We're, for the least, the lost, the lonely, the hurting.
Speaker 1:La Mesa and different ministries in our community kind of prove it. And then what are the structures? Right and structures for discipleship, for depth and wit, at the same time Pouring into small group leaders, pouring in to the vicars and those that are launching into ministry. There's a boomerang effect of Jesus. It's ascending out of the 12, ascending out of the 70, and then we gather consistently for training. But then there is very evidently a pathway for you to continue to grow here and for us it looks like our servant leadership development pathway, serve, lead, coach, direct. There's always a next and in philosophy or even internal motivation, there's a hill to climb. And then, once you get to that hill, oh, there's another here, there's another. So it's always talking about next steps for the person knowing and following and growing as a Jesus follower. So it's language, shared language, shared story, shared structure. Any comments on that Paul?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really good, and the fact that there's a structure around it, I think, is maybe one of the keys to unlocking kind of this trap of the value network, because that gravitational pull is incredibly strong. It's also incredibly subtle to the urgent, to the need right in front of me, to the person who's here that I see, and to kind of not think about or not consider the person who's not here yet. You know you talk about structures. You know I give Scott a lot of credit, seidler, for the wisdom of saying I need someone to hold me accountable to make sure this happens.
Speaker 2:A lot of times on our team we'll talk about what's the language that we're using. Are we using insider language? Are we explaining the terms that, either in preaching or in our worship service or in our liturgy, are we saying what this stuff means and not making that assumption that well, we've all been here for 30, 40, 50 years and so we all know what this is, of course. But the problem is there's, you know, 20 people sitting in the back that have no idea what's going on. You sitting in the back that have no idea what's going on.
Speaker 2:You know how are we thinking about them and then having an eye forward towards kind of who's next you know I know Jeff talked about this, someone he has on with you but kind of who's the next leader, what's the next people group, what's the next generation and how are we bringing them in? So that kind of, as you talked about, that 70-20-10,. Are we intentionally structuring our time and our resources and our policies to say that 20% and that 10% we're going to lose on this? This is not going to be like a net gain in terms of the resources and the people, hours and everything else we have to invest in it, but it is so important for those who aren't here yet and for that who's next question that we have to spend it. It's a good investment, even though it's going to lose in the short term.
Speaker 1:Yes, Well, human beings, we have a preference for short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term pain. Right, that's the way it goes. And then we idolize our rituals, right, and Jesus was so, so against this. Like this is a pharisaical tendency. Your hearts are far from me. You're trying to define your self-righteousness on the way we do our Jewish thing. Right, and for us today in the church, the way we do church the way we do, and this is why I think in the wider conversation, there's a overreaction to rituals around the liturgy today. Jesus never talked about that Like, if he did, he talked about how you have these traditions that you put. And that's getting in the way of me. One of the sermons we just preached yesterday. Actually, rituals are for relationship and we were preaching on Mark, chapter seven, and the washing of hands, and they developed this whole theology around washing of not just their hands but these other. I find it funny dining couches, you know, was it a sprinkling or was it an immersion of the dining couches? Because baptism is the same words there. And so Jesus brings right was Isaiah when he prophesied against you. You hypocrites you have. You're defining yourself based on what is outside. I define what's on the inside. Jesus is concerned about the heart Right, and so we can turn these rituals, these behaviors, these things that have grounded us into an idol, and it hurts. Why was Jesus concerned about this? Because it hurts the mission. Jews, you think this is just about you? You guys have forgotten. It was always about the nations. It was always about being a light to the nations, and so this is, this is the spirit of the risen Jesus that lives in us, that has to like, lovingly, challenge.
Speaker 1:I got to tell you a story and then let you respond. We have I'm looking out my courtyard, out my window right now, into our courtyard we have a bell that has been here since the order of Melchizedek. Right, we don't know, the bell predates me. It will be here long after me. But I'm looking to my right and there's a bell tower here.
Speaker 1:The grounding narrative has been that bell won't fit in that bell tower. So it's right in the middle of the courtyard and it has kind of a neat effect. We ring it seven times, et cetera. But if I were to say we're moving the bell, Paul, like there will be a visceral reaction because it's like the centerpiece in our courtyard. But anybody that is reasonable is like no, there should be like a welcome spot right in the middle of your courtyard, but there's this huge bell. So this is awesome. Our campus director said I just was talking about the bell yesterday in worship and it was fascinating sociologically to discuss with such varied views. Our campus director, Dan, said you know what? We did some work on the structure of the bell tower. It will hold that bell, so like we're going to move in time.
Speaker 1:It's going to go up there. It's just a matter of time, but like the reaction in the community is going to be fascinating to watch Every month you move it like a month foot and just slowly migrate. That's so good, Paul. Any response about how we turn rituals and even things in our world into idols that could decrease Because people that come from the outside, they could care less about that, right? I mean, oh, there's a bell.
Speaker 2:Well, they don't know the story behind it and they don't know why it's there. Right, we've talked about our hearts being idol making factories, and so I think of the distinction between tradition, which can be good and helpful, versus traditionalism, which holds to the tradition as the main thing. That's a little bit of you know kind of why I got into ministry is this seeing those types of things, and not even just around traditions, it could be current practices where the practice becomes the thing and the mission gets put in the background a little bit. And so, yeah, it's, traditions are good, I think, as George McDonald talked about, you know, before you go knocking down fences, you should at least pause and ask why they were put up in the first place. For sure, but those things can be really helpful.
Speaker 2:You know, I visit with some of our senior members, you know, who have memory loss or dementia or things like that, the tradition of saying the liturgy for week after week after week, for decades. They still know it. They might not know anything else, but they still know bits and pieces of that, and that's a beautiful thing. At the same time, when we hold on to that tradition to the point it becomes traditionalism, where our faith isn't doing the thing because we did it right. Well then, that's displaced God. Maybe subtly, maybe not so subtly, but that has displaced Jesus as the foundation that we stand on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, rituals should be held hospitably is, I think, what Jesus is saying. These things are not bad, they just could get in the way of my work.
Speaker 1:Go ahead and they need to be in service of the mission and in service of the work of Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, they're a means toward the object of our worship right, which is the elevation of the crucified and risen Jesus. You know, there's a story that's in our world it's probably happened in other churches where a young man late teens walked in and he's wearing a ball cap. Jack's told this story before wearing a ball cap and one of our this is over a decade ago one of our ushers came up and kind of rudely, in my estimation, said hey, son, move that ball cap, we don't wear ball caps here. He did and kind of in shame, sat through the rest of service, never came back, and so if we're not holding our rituals with an open hand and explaining the why behind the what that we do, I think it's way more necessary Now, at the end of the message.
Speaker 1:Actually, yesterday I walked through the divine service and I love that. God is the primary actor, right, that's the heart of it, not just page five and 15 from the red hymnal back in the day. No, the reason we call it the divine service is because God is serving us, and all of these steps, these rituals, this liturgy, is a means toward that end, and so even telling the story through the liturgy, giving a new frame and there's a lot of new Lutherans in our community and they're like oh, I could see literally in time the light bulb going off and you got to do that more consistently, I think now, with way more outsiders coming into our Lutheran liturgical context. Any comments there? Paul?
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. It makes me think of a newer guy around our church. He is a karate instructor, so he runs a dojo, and he actually got connected to us because he emailed info at cmstlorg Like that email actually goes somewhere. Someone actually responded. We had a cup of coffee and we were off to the races.
Speaker 2:But after a couple of times of attending worship he asked me he's like okay, I don't know what I'm supposed to do, I don't know when I'm supposed to stand up, I don't know what I'm supposed to, but how is this supposed to work? And it was a really beautiful example because we got to talk about how, when a new student comes into his dojo, it's not just downloading the information or like handing them the packet and saying here's how we do things around here, but it's through example and you pair a more experienced student with the new student and to help them go through the motions, maybe even a little bit more slowly, maybe have that individualized instruction, but someone to model after. And that's when kind of the light bulb went off for me and I knew this already, although even if I didn't always follow it or adopt it in my practice is that following Jesus, being a disciple is a lot less of a knowledge transfer, as it is modeling in a way of life. It's a lot less like two plus two equals four and we can do the times tables and we can learn all the rules and we can say it in the right way. It's a lot more like learning karate or learning how to swing a golf club or to shoot a basketball.
Speaker 2:You can only talk about it so long, you can only watch it for so long, but at some point you just got to get out there and start doing it. And once you start doing it, that's when it makes sense. And so that's where I look at some of the traditions and some of the rituals and practices. Like, once you start doing it, it makes a lot of sense. It can actually point us to Jesus and point us to the cross and help us grow in our faith. But when they become the sole thing, you know it works because I did it that's when it can become a barrier.
Speaker 1:Well, you hear this with Jesus, and I think it's the rich young man, right? What must I do to be saved? Yeah, what does the law say? Jesus says right? Well, I do that. He's lying. There's no way he keeps all the law.
Speaker 2:But he says I'm doing, do the law, yeah, fine.
Speaker 1:Do the law and good luck. Good luck there, I've done that. Ok, you want to elevate it around? Go, sell all your stuff and come and follow me. And he doesn't want to do that because he has the way of the greatest adventure of all time.
Speaker 1:Jesus is more about a way, right, it is about the heart, way of viewing the world and our character, becoming more and more like Christ. This is the fruit of the spirit love, joy, peace, patience. So what is the summary of the law? Love God, love others. Okay, what does that exactly look like? Well, it's going to look like your context, your community, in your home, and this is why the power of vocation, right, luther hits on this. It's going to look like becoming more like Christ, less anxious, more peaceful, et cetera.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not rules, do this, do this, do this. You know it's an invitation toward a way of being that the Spirit is constantly. This is the role of daily repentance, right, it's constantly dying to my way of being, which is sinful, selfish, small, to God's way of being, which is love, huge adventure. Right, there's a big time juxtaposition, and I think the more we talk around discipleship in that direction, rather than do this, do that, and that's really anti-Lutheran for us to establish all these laws, because then it's going to be about I'm going to complete it and then I'm going to have some self-righteousness, or I'm not going to complete it and I'm going to live in insecurity and shame. Neither of those responses are helpful. Anything more to say there, paul.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's well, it's the process of sanctification, right, it's the work that the Holy Spirit does on us which is his work. It's not our work, it's not self-improvement, it's the Holy Spirit growing in us. And I think there's I forget where it is in the confession. But I think there's this line of like in this life we make but a little progress. And you think of the people who are writing that, or you know the greats, Augustine or Bernard, or some of these folks who wrote that. It's like, wow, they're saying they made just a little bit of progress. And I actually hear that as a comfort, that like it's going to be okay, the stakes aren't as high because, well, Jesus paid for all of it already. It's done, it's won and we get to live in the joy of that and the growth that God gives is something to celebrate.
Speaker 1:Hey, so good, maybe last question or two here Get back into your. I think there's a lot to learn in the marketplace. What marketplace principles? I guess the first article, how the creator works in his creation from From your business life, our most applicable to your work today as a pastor, paul.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say the first one, the most one that comes to mind is it's about people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all about people.
Speaker 2:So working with in the prosecutor's office. It was always working with people and a lot of times it was seeing people on their worst day. They either had something happen to them their victim or they did something, whether for whatever reason, that this is probably the worst time of their life. And sometimes, as a pastor, you walk into that room and this is the worst day of someone's life. But at the same time, people are just people and so it helps to say all right, how do I relate to this person where they're at right now, with whatever is going on, and most of the time, thankfully, it's not the worst day, and so it gives a little bit of perspective that you don't get too high, you don't get too low. As we were just talking about, jesus did it all. It's going to be okay. It might be painful, it might hurt now, it might have some consequences for the immediate or even far future, but ultimately it's going to be okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I kind of laugh because you say you might have said no, you will have suffering and trial in this life. Right, it's going to be. I love that we like in the West, we like to soften the blow. No, it's going to be. It's going to be hard. Paul Right, this is a. This is a cross. It includes suffering and death, but Jesus swallowed it all up for us through his suffering and his death, giving us the perspective, the hope for new life now and into eternity. Put on your spec, go ahead, paul. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was going to say, in a strange way, there's joy in that right. So I'm getting ready to preach on Zacchaeus, and it's kind of funny. Zacchaeus' life got objectively worse when Jesus showed up. He talked about I'm going to give away half my money and I'm going to repay back four times, like this guy's broke now, but he's joyful. Okay, how does that go together? It does. That's what Jesus can do, that's the work of the Holy Spirit, and so that's it.
Speaker 1:Hey, last question Put on your speculative prophet hat, if you will. What do you think pastoral ministry will generally look like in 25 years? Let's look at like 2050. What will be different? You and I will potentially, if the Lord gives us health still kind of be in this to some degree. Praise, be to God. What will be different? Do you think at the rate of change today you just think of how much change has taken place. It would have been hard 25 years ago for people to understand everybody's going to be on. What does that even look like? Preaching online video venues, for, I mean, what are we even doing? What will be different? Do you think what will be the same?
Speaker 2:Yeah, working in speculation. Prophecy is always dangerous. We're working in speculation.
Speaker 1:But it's all right, we're working in speculation, yeah, imagination.
Speaker 2:What will be the same? The word's going to be the same, the sacraments are going to be the same, jesus is going to be the same. That doesn't change. And that's, I think, are going to be the same in our context. They've been around for 500 years. Depending on which document you're looking at, I imagine they're going to stick around for another 25 years. So that can kind of be an anchor point for us.
Speaker 2:People by and large, are going to be the same. I think there's going to be some changes in how they look and how they respond. Culture is always changing. You talk about that acceleration, that speed of change, but at the end of the day, people are just people. God's word kind of gives us this, this accurate, low anthropology of who people are and what they need. And so, you know, it's almost like we got the playbook. We understand that maybe better, probably better than anyone else, because God understands it better than anyone else, and so we can relate to people with the thing that's most needful the word of God, the gospel of Jesus, and by the work of the Holy Spirit they'll come around to that.
Speaker 2:But what will be different? I think the way our churches look will be different. In seminary one of my profs, we were talking about global Lutheranism, so not just LCMS Lutherans, but anybody who kind of wears that badge around the world. And so if you line up all the Lutherans in the world, the median person is female in her 30s and a black person of color. That is not what my church looked like growing up and in a lot of ways that's not what Christ Memorial looks like now. Or you think the LCMS, the traditional LCMS church, that's not the picture of the average Lutheran you think of. And yet I think we're moving in that direction as the culture around us becomes more multicultural, of different people, groups and things like that. I think we're moving in that direction. But what else will be different? I think culture, the culture at large and the church, those who are actively following Jesus, will continue to. The gap between the two will continue to widen.
Speaker 2:Dr Justin Marchegiani, if at any time we lived in Christendom in the last hundred years, if that was ever true, I don't think it is today and I think it's going to start looking a lot more like the book of Acts than it did in the 1950s or the 1850s or you know, pick whatever era, and every era has its own challenges and its own problems. I don't think we're unique in that sense, but with that will come loss, with that will come challenge, with that will come crosses, but also tremendous opportunities, and so it's exciting to think about where the Holy Spirit might be leading in the next 25 years. And then the last one. I've been pondering a little bit and I'm still kind of trying this on, so I'm not certain about this one, but thinking about the difference between, when we're talking specifically pastoral ministry, that word pastor as a noun versus pastor as a verb, and so I'm thinking pastor as a noun is the office, the person, it's a career, right, and so you go and just talking to people and you say, well, what do you do? You say, well, I'm a pastor. They have a particular idea of what that is, and I don't think that's going away. We need pastors, we need word and sacrament ministry, we need these things to happen publicly in churches so people can know where. Here there is the gospel, here there is the good news. That's not going away and in fact we need to, we need to double down on it and grow that part of it.
Speaker 2:But I'm thinking too of pastor as a verb or like the act of pastoring. What are those things that, yes, pastors do but also others do? That kind of falls under that umbrella of pastoring. So, like your colleague Jack has talked about, you know that role of deacon in Act 6, that was like it's part of pastoring people. Well, you know all of the auxiliary offices that we have in the LCMS. It's part of pastoring people well.
Speaker 2:You know, I think of the elder or the council at a congregation that's been in vacancy for three or four years. Someone is pastoring that church, someone is tending to that flock in some way and I'm not talking about public preaching or administration of sacraments, not in that sense, and that needs to stay but who's doing kind of those other acts of pastoring, as it were? And I see that growing when you think about trends in pastoral ministry and retirements coming up, bivocational ministry, all these things. I think we will need more and more people, active, devoted, dedicated followers of Jesus, pastoring in whatever context they're in, whether that's in their small group, in their workplace, with others, families, moms and dads in the home. Luther talked about how the dad's a bishop, the mom's a bishop. That kind of context is. I think we'll see more and more pastoring happen by those who don't necessarily hold the title in an appropriate context in that way, hey, prophet Paul, those are some really good words, man.
Speaker 1:Thank you for spending some time thinking deeply about that, and I agree on those trends To your last point. In terms of pastoring, it's so much fun, so much fun to be in a place where I am one pastor among many pastors now, right, and we have three that are ordained and rostered right in the LCMS, and then we have hundreds you know, at least over a hundred who are in our servant leadership kind of pathway, like they're a leader or they're a coach or they're a director. There's over a hundred people in our ministry who are in one of those categories. And what are they all doing? They're a leader or they're a coach or they're a director. There's over 100 people in our ministry who are in one of those categories. And what are they all doing? They're pastoring Paul, they're loving people, they're the hands and feet of Jesus To make a link between another and this is already present today AI and kind of content generation.
Speaker 1:It was. Content has been dispersed, decentralized right now, and I think for those of us in the LCMS, we think it's about place and content with a person. No, why aren't a lot of our on podcasts and stuff? Is there a channel for us to? He's actually got his own channel on YouTube, to be quite honest but is there a way for us to get dispersed, centralized content for every level of leadership development? That could be something the Synod could work on together and to partner with churches like ours toward that end.
Speaker 1:Anything about? And so then, it's not as much about and this is this is Jesus, is the word right. It wasn't as much about the content, though. They needed to get the truth of the content of the gospel right. It was about, then, the character of the leader who had the heart of Christ. That's what we need to be evaluating more. Do they? Is the fruit of the spirit seen in their life? Is humility, holding whatever they know open for others rather than pridefully positioning themselves? You know, as the Bible guy here in this community, that's not going to work, and I think it is very evident for me in my, in my context. My greatest influence as a pastor is my relational connection and the character of Christ in equipping and releasing and empowering Ephesians for the people of God, for love and good deeds in their various vocations. Rather than being the Bible answer man, the Bible, the word of Jesus, has been decentralized, spread, and that feels wonderful. Any comment there? Paul?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it makes me think of. We talk about how the gospel runs along relational lines. It's life, on life, on life. And so I don't know, there may have been a time in America where our culture was much more homogenous and so you could just kind of, you know, graduate from seminary. Here's your playbook, doesn't really matter where you land and off you go, and it's going to work pretty well. That value network was alive and active and good.
Speaker 2:I think much more relationships matter, context matters. I know you guys have talked about the dawn ratio. There's another one I think of. You know Robin Dunbar, sociologist, has done some research on the greatest number of relationships any one person can maintain at a time is somewhere between 200 and 400. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:And so what that tells me is we need more people intentionally building relationships with the goal of sharing the gospel, sharing Jesus and God's word in that way, because I can't know that many people, you can't know that many people. We work hard in the context that we've got, but we need more, because there's a whole lot of people who don't know yet, haven't heard yet, and they need to know. And so I think about those relational networks and I see the people who are in our churches as a huge asset to that, because all of them know somebody who is far from Jesus. Whether they've never heard yet or they've walked away for whatever reason, they all know somebody in that context. And so how can we equip and encourage and empower and send them out with this word of the gospel so that the Holy Spirit can then work? I mean, because that's how he said he wants to do it. He wants to do it through hearing, he wants to do it through proclamation. So let's get going.
Speaker 1:Well, this has been so much fun, dude, so grateful to be in your network, a friend of yours, friend of Christ Memorial, to tell really great stories of what the Lord is doing. If you don't have the book the Innovator's Dilemma, check it out. And I'm having a husband no, not a husband, a father and son author team who wrote the book leading through in this paradigm rather than leading over. There's a lot of the innovators dilemma that's also present in that book, leading through the Clark. It's the Clark family. They're a Harvard business folks too. Yeah, so much first article wisdom to be gleaned, which you can just look at the message of Jesus and the humility of Jesus and the humility of Christ and see a distributed, decentralized leadership development in Christ. Paul. You're a gift to me, man, if people want to connect to you, how can they do so?
Speaker 2:Appreciate you too, tim, and your team and all the work you put into this. It's wonderful to connect with me. Probably the easiest way is just my email, pauldickerson at cmstlorg. So, like Christ Memorial, st Louis, cmstlorg. Or if you want to see some of the stuff that we're doing with who's Next and kind of that generational stuff lovedcentorg, l-o-v-e-d-s-e-n-torg and some stuff that we've got coming up in terms of new generations, new leaders, new people, groups.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Leaders, new people, groups, let's go. This is the Tim Allman podcast. Please like subscribe. We have so many amazing guests that have been on this podcast and are lined up, so please keep listening. Every single Wednesday, a fresh episode of this podcast comes out, and I know I am better today in getting to know you and talking about Jesus with you, paul, and I know our listeners feel the exact same way. It's a good day. Go make it a great day. Thanks so much, paul, thanks Tim.