Season four of the Pivot podcast from Faith+Lead provides lessons and stories from church leaders who are igniting imagination, creating collaborations, launching experiments, and dreaming of new possibilities for God’s church. The podcast focuses on two questions: How might we use the uncertainty and disruption of this time to reimagine church, ministry, and leadership? And how might the Christian faith be a resource for making spiritual sense of current realities and leaning into the future that is emerging?
The primary focus of this season is the “mixed ecology,” a term for the blending of inherited forms of Christian community with emerging ways of reaching the faithful. Individual episodes dive deep into topics that include:
- Cultivating leaders for the mixed ecology
- The role of church planting in the mixed ecology
- Dinner church
- How to get started in the mixed ecology in a local church
The Pivot podcast is hosted by Terri Elton, dean of academic affairs and professor of leadership, and Dwight Zscheile, vice president of innovation. To kick off the podcast’s fourth season, they connected with guest and season four co-host Dee Stokes, director of The Seeds Project at Luther Seminary, to discuss the changing church and why it matters.
“God doesn’t just speak to the clergy,” Stokes says. “God speaks to all people. And what we haven’t done well in the church is to acknowledge that people sitting in the pews have ministries as well, and they have vision and they have insight, and we need to tap into that.”