Reimagining Evangelism in an Age of Despair : Andy Root

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each week, I have the privilege and honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we tackle a topic all in an effort to help you and ministry leaders just like you really thrive in both life and leadership. I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation. I’m going to be joined by Andy Root. Andy is a Professor of Youth and Family Ministries at Luther Seminary. He is the host of the thought-provoking podcast When Church Stops Working, and just the title of that podcast probably gets your mind working. As pastors and ministry leaders, we really encourage you to check that podcast out. Andy has written a number of books, including his latest, entitled Evangelism in an Age of Despair. So, Andy, welcome to FrontStage BackStage.

Andy Root
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah,

Jason Daye
Yeah, thanks for making time in your busyness to hang out with us today.

Andy Root
Yeah, in the midst of my family apocalypse, as our hot water heater has gone out and I haven’t even had a shower today, so I’m usually not like this kind of California hat. I’m way too old for that. So, people who are watching this are just gonna have to deal with it. It’s more domestic troubles here. Home ownership. It’s not all cracked up to be.

Jason Daye
There you go, buddy, there you go. A little chaos. And you look good, brother. I’m just telling you, I mean, you’re rocking the look.

Andy Root
Yeah, looks like I’m going for like, mid-30s, and that’s not where I’m at.

Jason Daye
Cool, brother. Well, man, I’m so excited that you made time to hang out with us today, even in the midst of a little bit of chaos there at home. But, brother, your newest book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, you love rocking these beautiful, soft, loving titles of books, like you really just put it out there. But we find ourselves in a time, in a place where, man, ministry is challenging. The world around us is challenging. Not that it hasn’t been challenging during other seasons. We know that, but there’s a lot going on. When you talk about an age of despair, Andy, help us kind of set the scene, because I know we feel this, right? But what do you mean by the fact that we’re living in an age of despair?

Andy Root
Yeah, I mean, this is the second book where there’s been despair in the title. One very early in my career. But in some sense, they’re very different, because I work a tradition here, philosophically and theologically, that kind of looks at, well, it’s Kierkegaard, it’s Luther, it’s Bonhoeffer, that does see the cross of Christ and our own kind of longings and brokenness as a particular place where Jesus Christ meets us. So, for someone like Kierkegaard, there is a sense that the human spirit must despair because it can’t fulfill itself. So, despair actually becomes a very positive, and positive probably isn’t the right way to say, but nearly positive category. But this one is more direct in the sense that I think we’re in really kind of bad times. These first three decades of the 21st Century have led to mental health crises, have led to democracies on the fringe of coming undone across the West, that have just led to a lot of economic inequality, or at least anxiety. People are just fundamentally mad at each other, and social media just seems to create the situation for people to yell and scream at each other and hate each other. Yeah, there’s a lot going on. I think part of the major piece there, one of the reasons we’re just so deeply unhappy, is because these decades have been sad. But they’ve been sad, I think, in major part because we’ve become fully committed to being happy people, and this kind of drive towards happiness, I think, is actually making us quite miserable. That’s not to be a downer on happiness. I mean, if happiness comes into your life, you should take it. It’s like money. If it comes, it’s good. But the question is, like money, is happiness worth living for, and I think we’ve tried to make that the highest good, and I think it’s making us quite miserable.

Jason Daye
Yeah, and that’s such an interesting take, because we feel that even though we don’t want to say, even though we don’t want to admit that chasing happiness is leading to much more despondency, desperation, and feelings of despair, we still want to paint those pictures. We still want to chase those things down. What’s interesting, Andy, is that although we’re really feeling this over the last few decades, this is all kind of been set up kind of historically, this idea of rational logic and kind of the modern Western mindset, almost insisting that progress and everything ahead of us is bigger better, and everything behind us is falling away, and when we think of that in terms of the church specifically, it’s almost as if there is an insistence that there’s going to be a future where the church is the thing of the past, right? That there’ll be better things that kind of displace the church, which is a challenge for us in ministry. So talk to us, Andy, a little bit about kind of that mindset that has become pervasive in our world, that’s kind of set us up for where we are today.

Andy Root
I mean, I think it really is true that to be a modern person, and I’m thinking here like for the last 300 years, really, for the most part, has been to be the people who’ve had a hand put on our chins and had it turned towards the future. That everything is about the future, where, really, for most of human history, at least within the West, before this, to live well was always the thought that you had to look backward. That people weren’t not wanting to live forward, but they felt like they needed to harvest the wisdom of the past. That there were even past civilizations that knew things that we don’t now. This is Plato’s whole myth about Atlantis is the idea that there was a society where people knew things, and that it was a more advanced society, or a wiser society, and now it’s overtaken by time and sunk in the sea. But, there’s something that we can get back to, where really to be a modern person, we think, well, what the past is, is only lessons of what not to do. You know what I mean? Like, we even say that about history. It’s like, well, you better know your history, kids, and you better pass 11th grade history because you don’t want to repeat the errors of the past now. So, very instrumental in that sense, like history has no wisdom in it. History can only tell you not to be like those backward people who use leeches as medical devices. That seems to be the only thing there. And this becomes difficult because it then tends to undercut tradition as having any viable way of shaping our lives. To think about the pastor or the ministry leader, really, I mean, in some sense, your vitality rests in the tradition which you represent, that you proclaim. So, when tradition becomes completely undercut, then it feels like, as a modern person, you only have really two options. One option is to try to almost militantly hold on to the tradition, and then turn the tradition into something that’s not living, but in a kind of rigid science that you try to defend in some ways, or something rigid, so you kind of take these kind of fundamentalist impulses. The other deep temptation is that you kind of throw off the tradition and either directly in a kind of punk rock way, or more kind of implicitly, you just decide that, at the end of the day, what your job is as pastor is not to take people into the distinctive visions of a tradition, but to run a small business, essentially. Like, try to take this congregation of people from 80 people to 8000 people, and that you’ll get your identity and meaning from that, not from some kind of correlation to the tradition. Or you become, like, what you do is you undercut the tradition and become this kind of punk rock thing, like you just deconstruct it and try to kind of obliterate it to dust, and then somehow assume that will, well, that might win you attention, but at the end of the day, it ends up working against you. So it’s really hard, I think, for pastors to feel like there’s something they stand on and within in this moment. I think happiness again, to circle us back to that, is one of those realities, is that happiness is almost completely about the future and tends to, like, there’s no real tradition to happiness necessarily. I mean, there’s a historical progression here, and I try to tell it. It’s a kind of French progression. The French are the inventors of “happiness is the highest good”. Again, no one invents happiness. Since the beginning of time, we’ve liked being happy. But, again, it’s this idea that it’s what should shape our lives. Even no stoic philosopher would’ve ever thought that the point of your life was to be happy. They thought the point of your life was to be virtuous, and therefore, you need a tradition. But when the point of your life is to be happy, well, these become somewhat subjective experiences that are embedded in some kind of consumer goods or material reality, and that tends to be the only thing that really matters. But it also means you have to cut off some things. You have to cut off the realities of suffering and death because they really make you unhappy. And you have to somewhat live in a kind of unhealthy denial because if you have to think about those, well, it’s like that actually corrupts your happiness engine, if you will. So, we end up having to become, as late-modern people, we become, I don’t know, we have our faces closer towards the ground, or we almost, sometimes, in a certain way, have our heads in the sand. We think it’s a major purview because we have LTE, screens, computers, and things like that. But in some ways, it’s much more limited than, I think, our ancestors, who imagined a living, speaking God, Spirit in the world, and eschatological future, and a story that was going to overtake existence. All of these realities that we tend to now feel like are just good for an HBO series.

Jason Daye
Yeah, and this kind of addiction to happiness that we see. I mean, it’s pervasive all over the place. But, as you said, whenever that slips into the church, the local church, and how we go about ministry, we lose kind of the cruciform aspect of what all this is about. Andy, you posit, I mean, the title of this book is Evangelism in an Age of Despair, right? And everyone’s like, Oh, an evangelism book. Man, if you dig into this book and you’re looking for an evangelism book, in some ways, you’ll be disappointed.

Andy Root
Yeah, a little bit of misadvertising.

Jason Daye
Right, right. But in other ways, it really is refreshing and helps you reimagine what it looks like to engage people in the true gospel, when we’re living in a world that’s addicted to happiness, right? I mean, that’s kind of the heart. It comes through that cruciform piece that what you spend a lot of time talking about, that piece of consolation, right? So talk to us a little bit about the consolation, and obviously, how that flies in the face of happiness when you think about it, right?

Andy Root
Yeah, you’re really right that if you’re opening this up, looking for like models of evangelism, or like a lot of evangelism books that are really helpful will give you four or five different models of evangelism, and then we think about them, and they’re justified theologically, or something like that. That’s not what this book is. Really, what the book gives you is exactly what you’re saying is it gives you more of a theology of consolation, and it tries to look at evangelism as fundamentally a lived kind of theology of consolation. At the core of what I’m trying to do in my whole project and all these books is, if there’s one thing that they all, ultimately, are about, is they’re really about trying to think through the practical activities of ministry. Whether you’re a youth pastor or you’re a pastor, trying to think of those kind of pastoral sensibilities in the broadest way, to try to think through all of those, through Luther’s theology of the cross. I mean, that’s really what I’m trying to do. So here I’m trying to think like, well, how would you think about Luther’s theology of the cross next to evangelism? What would that look like? It really is this idea that at the core of the theology of the cross, as Luther imagines it, in many ways, as Luther is drawing from Paul, is this deep sense that this God made known in Jesus Christ suffers with us, and that the way we participate in God’s life is to participate in his suffering. That turns us, particularly for Luther, always turns us to our neighbor and to look. I mean, really, for Luther, what it ultimately turns to is to look for the ways in the world that you hear the cadence of the psalmist. Where the psalmist is is where he thinks someone’s doing something theological. When they’re crying out to God, when they’re giving worship and praise, and even when they’re in rageful desiring of vengeance. For Luther, that is to be aware of those. We live before God as sinners and as saints, and we live before God in death and in life. So, where you hear the kind of ability to enter into life as the psalmist is where he thinks God becomes particularly present and theology becomes particularly fertile. So there is this sense where I really believe that what Luther is getting at is that the theology of the cross is interconnected, especially pastorally, with the theology of consolation. This theology of consolation is just this assertion that we are pilgrims on a path, and we are pilgrims on the path of saying goodbye. To live a human life in this kind of cruciform way is to be very aware that we all have to say goodbye. That we’re creatures stuck in time. As I was telling you, Jason, before we were recording this, my daughter’s graduating from high school tomorrow, and you just have these flashbacks of your kid being like four or five, right? What happened here? What just occurred? Graduations are really sad, as are other events, because you’re also saying goodbye to something. You’re saying goodbye to a certain way your family was, and that’s tough, and there is a deep sense, for me, that those moments are the most core moments of our lives, in that we can’t live those moments by ourselves. We need to live those moments of saying goodbye, not only with a community of people, but we need to live those in with a horizon, with a vision, and a story. Therefore, we need a pastor to walk us into those and a pastor who consoles us in those moments. Where I find that to be so dynamic as an evangelism reality, is that in, what the theology of the cross says, is in those moments of shared suffering and giving consolation, receiving consolation, that dynamic of that gift exchange, that Jesus Christ is concretely present there as a kind of sacramental reality that we come up against the ministering nature of Jesus Christ, the ministering nature of the Trinitarian reality in doing that. So, consolation becomes this very practical thing that’s just about this other person, but in the mystery of caring for this other person in a kind of non-instrumental way, there’s a way we get swept up into God’s redemptive work. So, this comes then against a backdrop of a culture. Thanks, really, these three decades, social media has been a huge piece of what, well, just kind of, by light speed, ignites our unhappiness and our despair, I think, in many ways. But, social media has become our core space of the world. It has become our public locations where we work out consent and dissent, where we work out issues. It’s become our social space of the world, and it’s one where you do need to present yourself as fundamentally happy, or you’re in a competition of happiness, and you’re in a competition for attention. So, when all of a sudden you have to say goodbye in some situation, your mother dies, you lose a job you love, you have a marriage come undone, or something awful occurs, for the most part, because our primary social space of the world is social media, or the platforms of social media, we tend to have no one who will walk with us. I mean, we get a lot of sad-faced emojis when we disclose a sorrow, and we can find a lot of wellness help. We can find that we can deal with our stress by doing yoga, or going on an asparagus diet, or something can help us deal with too many toxins in us, or whatever. But when your father dies and you’re dealing with the existential crisis and what it means that you have so much anger and yet love, tenderness, and yet rage towards this man, you need someone who will be your pastor, who will sit with you, who will bear, who will simply just bear that burden with you. And your yoga instructor is not going to do that, and social media is a space that’s not set up to do that. And so what I’m really trying to do is fuse that reality and point again to the tradition. That this has been in the tradition since the sixth century, what it means to console and that the Christian life is a life of consoling our neighbors, consoling the world, trying to kind of help us grab a hold of that in this time and say, The church could be an incredible blessing to the world if it is sending its people out to evangelize, not with strategies of instrumentality, but to love and console and to make confessions and even proclamations that Jesus Christ is present in that. Blessed is the one who is sorrowful. That there are all these places where Jesus makes this assertion that he will be present in those realities. And Paul thinks the only place you can look for Jesus Christ is to attend to Christ and Him crucified. That’s all he wants to attend to, and Luther thinks we must look to the cross in that way as well.

Jason Daye
Hey, friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation, as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good, and it really makes us kind of stop in assess, when we reflect on the world in which we live today, the reality of that world, and then the Gospel itself, right? We look at these two things, and one thought is, and I think a lot of ministry leaders, a lot of churches, and a lot of ministries have been leaning into this, well, happiness is kind of the name of the game. So let’s out happy, or attempt to out happy everything else in the world, right? Where, what you’re challenging us to do is to dig a little more deeply, go under the surface, and say, What is the gospel really doing in the midst of the real life that people are living? Not the social media life. Not the highlight reels. The real life. And that’s the opportunity for the church is to meet people in the chaos, the challenge, the struggle, the pain, or the sorrow, right? So, so really, if we can embrace that and begin to move into that, the opportunities for the good news of Jesus, which brings the ultimate joy in our lives, even in the midst of pain, can be experienced by more people. So, the question, Andy is, if that’s the flip there, like, stop trying to out-happy everything else in the world, get to the heart of the matter. Practically speaking, local church, what does that really look like?

Andy Root
Yeah, well, one of the weird things I try to do in this book is give this kind of fictional story. The reason I do that, it’s weird. I think it’s kind of weird. But I’m trying to say to you, or say to the reader, that I can’t really tell you what this looks like. I have to show you. So, to give you a picture of it. So the way that I practically picture how this gets lived out is it really starts with a pastor who ministers out of this depth of their own loss and suffering and their own experience of Jesus Christ ministering to them and then giving their people, which I’ve talked about in another book, a kind of watch word, to live with a watch word. A watchword in this story is that these people have this kind of watchword that says, we meet Jesus Christ in sorrow, like where sorrow is, Jesus Christ is. So they’re kind of told that over and over again, and it kind of frames their imagination. It gives them a certain kind of way of imagining themselves in the world. Then what just happens is people are sent out into the world with that watchword. What this really looks like is working HR, and then all of a sudden, you have someone in your office who tells you their work has been bad because their father died, and they’re just dealing with incredible grief. Instead of seeing that person as like, we need more efficiency. There’s a kind of sense, like, oh, in the midst of sorrow, I have to bear this with this person because this is where Jesus Christ is called. What it means to be a Christian is to follow Jesus Christ where Jesus Christ leads, and where Jesus Christ leads us is into this moment. So, I think, what it ultimately looks like is people who simply, this is going to maybe seem very unsatisfying to people, but people who just simply live, and live in joy and in suffering, but live attentive, and attentive to the places where there is loss and brokenness, and attend to those places. Attend to those places because they care deeply about people for people’s sake, but at the same time, attend those places because that’s the very environment where the God of Israel moves. In places of impingement, loss, and brokenness, because this is a God that gives God’s self to suffering and death and brings life out of death. Then, where there are experiences of sorrow, death, or brokenness, the one who’s following Jesus Christ to the Cross has to be attentive to that, because Jesus Christ will always be at that place for the sake of working something new, bringing something new out of it. In the life of the Christian, the life of the disciple is to walk into that. Call a thing what it is, as Luther would say, and then give your presence as a way of testifying to this healing, to this profound transformation and redemption that can come out of these realities. So, it really is deeply relational in that way. But it does have some like practical forms, like this church that I write about, they just have this watchword, and they have some things they do, like they clean people’s houses, in the sense, like they have a Swedish death cleaning team. The church I’m part of, which my wife is the pastor of, has a Swedish death cleaning team, which started by just cleaning out the church because drawers hadn’t been open since 1972, and they needed to clean things out. But then it became a ministry of people whose elderly parents had died, and they hadn’t cleaned their house out in decades, and the grief was so heavy they didn’t feel like they could even face cleaning out the garage. To have people from your church come, or people from a local church come, and simply do the act of helping you prepare these things, to say goodbye, is incredibly profound. Or to sit with people. I do think, in this accelerated age, we miss the utter power of what it means just to be present with people and sit with people in their suffering. I mean, we do have a sense, like, I feel this in my own body, where it’s like, what should I do? What’s the function that I’m supposed to do? How am I supposed to act here? But what people just, ultimately, really need is just your presence, and there is a testifying that, in your presence, God is present in this moment. So, yeah, it’s unsatisfying, because I don’t have, like, an eight-step way to do this, but I do think that what I’m hoping that this shows is that evangelism is not something done by an evangelism team. Like, you don’t just have an evangelism team at your church. It has to be, I mean, in some ways I think you could critique me and say, Well, I’m really narrowing evangelism down. But, in other ways, what I’m really trying to do is broaden this thing and just say every part of the Christian life is evangelistic. It is living out and embodying the good news and proclaiming that with our words and with our deeds, like every part, is this. And it’s not an evangelism team that does evangelism. Evangelism isn’t a bunch of events or programs or strategies, it’s a way of being in the world, and that’s what I’m trying to kind of push towards.

Jason Daye
Yeah. I absolutely love that, Andy, and that idea of embodiment, I think, is key. Because, I mean, the challenge is, we live in a world that’s pressing against this. That’s pressing against kind of the “sit and be a non-anxious presence in someone else’s life”. Like we live in a world where it’s like, as you say, go, go, go. What am I doing next? How do I function? How do I serve? How do I do something? It’s pushing everything towards that idea of, again, how do we get back to happiness? Okay, something’s broken, something’s painful, something hurts. But how do we quickly get it back to that level of happiness? And that’s how we’re wired. So, as pastors, we can take this on and begin to really think through this, translating this from our ministry team to our people who are living in this world as well, that everything is progress, everything is pointing towards happiness. Andy, what suggestions do you have to kind of transfer that? Because I think that’s, I mean, I’m sure there are a lot of pastors right now, watching this or listening, saying, yes, yes, this makes sense. Let’s get to the heart of that. Okay, but how do I transfer that to my people who are inundated with happy, happy, joy, joy, right?

Andy Root
Yeah, yeah. I think two ways come to mind. I think, one, as you say, like with your ministry team, what’s really important is that the ministry team lives the kind of way and practices the kind of discipleship formation they want to see within the congregation. So that means, I think, that the ministry team has to be a community that bears each other’s burdens, that walks with each other through this. So there are kind of two dynamics that always play for me in this. One, the leadership element here is, well, I guess maybe three are at play. I mean, one is to give people this watchword. So there is a sense of like, how do you mine from the tradition? How do you speak in a kind of theological cadence that gives people a way of imagining their lives, their actions, their ways of being? But that has to be connected with a certain temperature of the relationships within the community. What does it mean for us to care for each other? What does it mean for us to know each other? What does it mean for us to see each other, not as instruments or devices for whatever goods we want, but actually as real people bearing each other’s burdens in that way? Then there has to be a level of storytelling, and storytelling that is prayer. We need to pray our stories, and our stories need to be our prayers. So there has to be a sense of, how does the ministry team tell each other stories of the great goodbyes we’re living through, and invite each other to carry those burdens with us? Then, how does that then move out into the whole congregation? So, I do think there’s an element of how do we help the congregation have a space to tell their stories of goodbye. I think in that, you actually are kind of compelled to go out into the world and be really interested in those stories. I think we just, we do have to break the illusion that we can somehow create a reality, which is a complete illusion, where we’ll never have to be sad again. I think about how many middle-class parents kind of raise their kids, hoping they’ll never be sad, or just never have to deal with tensions and struggle, and yet, this is where the depth of life happens. This is where we learn to even, in some sense, be alive. A lot of pastors will tell me that they feel like they do their best work, or they feel the most pulled into kind of resonance as a pastor doing funerals, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you are standing in this incredibly significant place of helping people know how to say goodbye. We talked at the beginning of this podcast about kind of feeling like you’re stripped of any significant place to stand as a pastor. That you either need to look backward or you need to look forward, and both, in their own kind of way, as a modern person, strip you of any significance. Well, at a funeral or helping people say goodbye, you stand at a really significant place, and yet somehow we’ve minimized that so much. There’s something fundamental about Christian leadership, which is helping people die a Christian death, as morbid as that sounds, but particularly for medieval folks, that was the whole point of life, to prepare yourself to die well. It wasn’t just a kind of psychological coping mechanism for your existential state. I think kind of modern atheists like to say it is. It was a way of framing your life and seeing things as they are, which is that we all are living very, contingent, I mean, we’re closer to our demise than we’d ever like to admit. Part of the illusion of progress is that you somehow can escape that reality, and yet you can’t. I just think about my financial advisor who keeps talking to me about my retirement and never once talks about spending any of the principal down, just what I’m going to live off. You know, my 401-K. And there’s a certain sense where there’s a denial of death in it. It’s like, and if we can get this much in the account, then you’ll never have to touch the principal. Well, but I’m going to die. So, there is a kind of way we live that sense. And it makes you, in some ways, unpopular, but I think the pastor is to remind us that there’s a beginning to our life and there’s an end to our life. How will we walk this, and how will we prepare for this? Even if we want to deny it, we are going to get punched in the gut. In those situations, we need consolation. No human being can, you know, happiness can come individually, you can keep your own happiness, and happiness can be an individual game. But walking through sorrow, you need others. You need to be cared for and ministered to. I really think throughout the biblical narrative, this God wants to be this kind of God for us. The God of Israel wants to be the God who comes close, who bears our burdens, who brings us salvation out of death, slavery, and all sorts of impingements. To me, this is the profound reality of the gospel.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. That’s super encouraging. One of the things as you’re talking there, and just kind of reflecting and thinking about life, and kind of just the reality, the gritty, real mess of life. Whenever we are focusing ourselves on the happiness side of it, we tend to often miss out on some of the beauty that’s right in front of us, right? Because we’re always kind of looking ahead to like, okay, how do we get that next step, that next hit of happiness. Whereas, the consolation, the ministry of consolation, allows us, it’s not just all dull and dreary, right? It allows us to have a realistic understanding in the midst of sorrow, but not miss out on the beautiful things that are happening or can happen along the way, right? And I think that is inviting, if we can help people understand that, hear that, experience that, I mean, that’s a huge invitation to the good life that Christ offers us because of the beauty of those moments, right?

Andy Root
Yeah, yeah. And real joy comes, real joy, all of CS Lewis, is to be surprised by joy. I mean, it’s actually to find yourself in the midst of some impossibility and find yourself held, carried, and find some healing in it, like that’s real joy. I do think, like a lot of the pieces of beauty that we see in art, they make us as sad as they make us full. Not all of them, of course, but some of them. The best novels, the best movies, or the best TV shows, there’s a way that you cry through them, or you feel something touch you that’s also a negative emotion, but it becomes wrapped up in something redemptive that becomes a surplus of just feeling happy or contented with your products, you know what I mean? Like, in some sense, we’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to live is just to be somewhat contented with our products, like somewhat happy, but never get to these places of joy. Because to get to the places of joy, you also have to call the things what they are, and you have to bear in and live in the mire, in the difficulties of suffering and death. So, to me, it’s an invitation, really, into the fullness of life. What might be the greatest blessing to the world in this moment, for the church to be, is communities of people who are living, I mean, who are really living. And pastoring really is about inviting people into life, and you do think of that statement Jesus says in the Johanna text, like he says it in the midst of the whole situation of the death of Lazarus, that he is the life, that he is truth, that he is life, and he’s in sorrow. He grieves when Lazarus dies. There’s real grief in that situation, and real consolation in the moving from out of death into life. So, yeah, I think in this moment particularly, there’s this odd way that late modernity in our digital space sucks the life out of us. One of the reasons we’re so sad is that we so want to be happy, and yet the pursuit of happiness at all costs makes us incredibly lifeless and feel alienated, and maybe the church’s greatest blessing is to be people who are alive, who invite people to be alive. That will mean being bound to Jesus Christ and seeking and finding Jesus Christ where Jesus Christ can be found, which is at the cross, suffering, bringing life out of death.

Jason Daye
That’s beautiful, brother. I love it. I love the challenge. It takes slowing down and thinking through the world in which we live. Thinking through, like, we get so kind of caught up in ministry so many times that we’re just trying to get to the next thing, do this to take care of all this stuff. But it takes that slowing down and saying, Wait, where’s the grittiness of this? Going back to the Beatitudes, as you said, Blessed are the sorrowful. What does that mean? What does that invite us into? Which, I think, is so powerful for us, especially in the world in which we live right now. With the challenges before us, we can get very discouraged in ministry, but really, those challenges are opportunities, and this seems to be the path that we’re invited into, that we have been invited into historically. We just might have forgotten about it or got caught up in other things, but this is reminding us of that invitation. So, Andy, I love that. Appreciate that, brother. As we’re kind of closing down, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, an absolutely fantastic book. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, I encourage you to pick it up. Encourage you to dig into it yourself. It’d be great to invite other ministry leaders, whether they’re staff or volunteers, your board, or your elders, to dig into it as well. Because I do think, Andy, that this does resonate with the local church in such a way that it helps us reimagine, really, what it means to be the church in today’s world. So, thank you for that. If people want to connect with you, Andy, learn about your other books, other resources that you have, or things that are going on, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Andy Root
Yeah, this is where the ultimate performative contradiction comes in, because you just throw shade all over the internet, and then you’re like, oh, find me on the internet, find me on the cesspool that we’ve said is destroying our world, but here we are. This is the space we have. So, probably the easiest way is I just have a website that’s AndrewRoot.org, you can find me there. Yeah, that’s probably the easiest place to look me up.

Jason Daye
Awesome, brother. We’ll have links to the book and to Andrew’s website in the toolkit that we create for this episode and every episode. You can find that toolkit at PastorServe.org/network, so be sure to check that out. Andy, as we’re winding down, I want to give you the last word. An opportunity for words of encouragement. You’ve got the ears and eyes of pastors and ministry leaders. What do you want to share with your brothers and sisters?

Andy Root
I think my word of encouragement, and maybe even my little kind of benediction, is, first of all, admitting that these are really hard times. That there’s no doubt that the first three decades of the 21st Century, probably the first five or six decades, who knows, are not going to go down in church history as like golden eras of, for sure, Protestantism, but probably all of Western Christianity. But even with that said, even with maybe being unfortunately born and needing to do ministry in these tough times, the Gospel is beautiful, and this God is a God who comes near, heals, and brings life out of death. Again, to continue to use my own watchword. The Gospel itself is an incredible, incredible gift. So, my big word for pastors all the time is like, don’t evaluate or think that this is all worth it because two people got it, or we had 10% growth next year. Those are all fleeting things. What is given to you as the gift that can sustain you is just the beauty and the depth of the Gospel itself. So, waking up every day thinking that you get to do the very difficult task that we should never deny is difficult, but the beautiful task of trying to help people imagine how it is that this God, made known in Jesus Christ, is moving and acting in the world, is an incredible privilege filled with suffering and joy.

Jason Daye
Love it, brother. Great word. Andy, it’s been a great time hanging out. Thank you for sharing with us. Thank you for making the space and the time to join us on FrontStage BackStage. Appreciate it, brother.

Andy Root
Thanks. I gotta go see how my hot water heater is going in my house now.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I hope it all comes together. God bless you.

Andy Root
We’ll see. Thanks.

Jason Daye
Here at Pastor Serve, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.