In the final episode of season one of the Sacred & Small podcast, Pastor Mike Palmer, District Superintendent of the Missouri District Church of the Nazarene joins the Jasons to talk all things small church.

Pastor Mike first shares the ethnography and demographics of the Missouri District Church of the Nazarene. The Missouri District is a district made up of almost entirely small churches — churches of around 200 or less in worship attendance. Pastor Mike has served the district for 19 years as DS and even longer as a pastor and evangelist. He has seen it all, and he shares from his experience about the challenges facing both small churches and small pastors and how the church can overcome them.

He also advocates for the small church and small church pastors. The small church has a great opportunity ahead of them and is capable of doing even greater things than larger churches, if the pastor and people are willing to pursue God’s mission and not get caught up in power struggles and traditions.

Join with our conversation! We would love to hear what challenges you think are facing the small church and what opportunities God is calling small churches to.

In this week’s episode, Pastor Mike Palmer, District Superintendent of the Missouri District Church of the Nazarene, joins the Jasons to talk about his pastoral journey. Pastor Mike is retiring in the summer of 2025 after 19 years of service in the DS role.

In this episode, Pastor Mike and the Jasons talk about Mike’s call to ministry and his experience as an evangelist/revivalist before being elected to the DS position. Revivals and evangelistic gatherings, like the old camp meetings, aren’t as popular as they used to be. We discuss why that is, the important role that experiences play in our greater spiritual life and discipleship, and the ways that churches/districts are filling those gaps today.

We are so grateful to have Pastor Mike with us and wish him all the best in his retirement!

Sabbath is one of the 10 commandments. But when the week gets busy, it seems like one that pastors — including the two Jasons — too willingly break.

In this episode of the Sacred & Small podcast, the Jasons talk about the concept of sabbath and their personal practices of rest. We then talk about the importance of rest for our congregations, and how we try to work in seasons of rest and recovery for our people.

How do you and your congregation practice rest? We would love to hear from you!

The Easter letdown. The Jasons don’t know who coined the phrase but we have both experienced it.

In this episode of the Sacred and Small podcast, the Jasons gather to talk about how their Easter and Holy Week services went, what went well and what didn’t, and what they expect over the next few weeks.

Don’t let the Easter letdown get you down! Christ is resurrected. And that’s good news for the church, even when you aren’t having an egg hunt.

Easter is nearly upon us! It’s an important day for pastors of churches of any size. In this episode of the Sacred & Small podcast, Sam Sprunger has a conversation with the Jasons about all things Easter. What is it? What are the essential missional and liturgical elements we include for Easter? How do we approach Holy Week in our churches?

Episode Rundown:

What is Easter?

What are the essential elements of Easter?

How are you practicing Easter and Holy Week in your church?

A big part of what we want to do here at Sacred & Small is tell small church stories! In this episode, Sam Sprunger, pastor at Webster Groves Church of the Nazarene in St. Louis, MO, joins us to share his path to ministry and the missional ministry of Webster.

Webster’s story is of particular interest to us because our own Jason Buckwalter was a youth pastor there before taking his current senior pastor position at Fulton Heartland. Sam and Jason are able to share the ways that Webster’s culture has changed over the years and how that’s played itself out liturgically and missionally.

Dr. Tiffany Ross, pastor at Gateway Church of the Nazarene, joined with the Jasons in the second of their two-part interview.

In this episode, the Jasons and Tiffany walk through their understanding of Lent, focusing on spiritual practices called, in Wesleyan circles, the means of grace. The means of grace are transformative in our lives, imparting God’s grace to us, inspiring us to act in faith, and result in grace for ourselves and others. They are the heart of spiritual formation, and the core of what the season of Lent is all about.

Episode rundown:

* What is Lent?

* Lent and the Means of Grace

* What are the means of grace?

* How are we practicing the means of grace this season?

This week the Jasons were glad to welcome Dr. Tiffany Ross, pastor at Gateway Church of the Nazarene onto the podcast!

We follow our ethnographic interviewing strategies to ask her “tell me about…” questions that get to the heart of her call from media production to full-time pastoral ministry. She recently felt called to come to Gateway Naz as their senior pastor, and she shares about that process of transition and what she learned about her people when she arrived.

Tiffany will join the podcast for a two-part series that will take us into the season of Lent.

Episode rundown:

* The season of Lent at Sacred and Small

* Meet Tiffany Ross

* Tiffany’s call to ministry

* An ethnographic narrative of Gateway Nazarene

In this two-part podcast series, the Jasons tackle the LASTS method of participant observation. What is participant observation? It is an immersive ethnographic methodology where you observe a community of people as an active participant within the community. Doing this allows a small church pastor or leader to get a hands-on experience of the culture of a community in action, and helps them better reflect on its embedded theologies and embodied liturgies.

In this second of two episodes, Jason Buckwalter observed a selected church worship service from Jason Hill’s church. This service was chosen because it was the first week that Cape Naz was implementing a new system to receive prayer requests.

Episode Rundown:

* Re-introducing the LASTS method

* Jason B reflects on a special service at Cape Church of the Nazarene

* We both draw some conclusions about the culture at Cape Naz

* We consider the LASTS method of participant observation

If you would like to try participant observation and the LASTS method in your own church, you can use this cheat sheet to get started!

In this two-part podcast series, the Jasons tackle the LASTS method of participant observation. What is participant observation? It is an immersive ethnographic methodology where you observe a community of people as an active participant with the community. Doing this allows you to get a more hands-on understanding of the culture of a community, like a church, and help you better reflect on it’s embedded theologies and embodied liturgies.

Over the next two episodes, the Jasons will watch a selected church worship service from the other’s church, take field notes on what we experience while watching using the LASTS parameters of language, actors/actions, space, time, and symbols, and then reflecting on our experience to try to describe the culture of the church.

This is something that any pastor can do in their own context to better understand the values that you express as a church.

Episode Rundown:

* Introducing the LASTS method

* Critical reflection

* Jason H reflects on a special service at Fulton Heartland

* We both draw some conclusions about the culture at Heartland

If you would like to try participant observation and the LASTS method in your own church, you can use this cheat sheet to get started!