Today's Conversation

In Today's Conversation, Leith Anderson and Claude Alexander talk about the history of the black church, leaders in the movement, distinctions between white and black theology, and more.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Bishop Alexander, a leader in the African American church, share:

How African American Christians think about racism;

What prevents black Christians from attending predominately white churches;

How the black church can teach the white church; and

What excites him about the future of the black church.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: You know the old adage, “The teacher learned more than the teacher taught.” When I have a significant number of African American students in the class, I learn so much. I really do. So tell me — or tell us — what can white churches learn from black churches? What can you give to us to learn from the black church?

Claude: Well, I think one, faithfulness to the gospel in the midst of suffering. Second, openness to the other in the midst of oppression.

The best example I can give you is Mother Emanuel. Those nine people welcoming Dylann Roof into the Bible study. That degree of openness. Not having in their minds what could be the possible outcome — that they could lose their lives just by being welcoming and open. But this openness to the other.

I think the third, which is going to be even more important in the days to come, and that is the capacity to speak with power from the margin or from the bottom. Historically, the Church — now I’m using big “c” — in America has been at the center and has been able to speak from the top and has been able to assume a degree of authority and influence with the culture.

Well that is no longer the case, and increasingly the Church is being pushed to the margin, which is an experience that for the white church is new, but it’s not for the black church. The black church has always spoken from the margin. And perhaps that’s the most important lesson that the black church can teach now is the ability to speak with power from the margin and trust God to work with that.

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In this podcast, you’ll hear Bishop Alexander, a leader in the African American church, share: How African American Christians think about racism; What prevents black Christians from attending predominately white churches; How the black church can teach the white church; and What excites him about the future of the black church. Read a Portion of ...

Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson features two innovators in Christian music: Eddie Carswell and David Crowder. Both have been in the Christian music industry for decades, producing award-winning albums and songs. In addition, Eddie launched Winter Jam, a Christian music tour that has outpaced any other tour’s attendance — including non-Christian tours — for the past four years.

In this podcast, you'll hear two veterans of Christian music share:

The joys and challenges of this unique ministry space;

How they stay connected with the Body of Christ while on tours;

The ways in which the industry has changed in the past two decades; and

Advice for young artists.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: You’re both at a place where you’ve been richly blessed and highly successful. It’s maybe been hard along the way, but it’s gone really well. So what advice do you have for someone who’s just getting started in Christian music? At the beginning, it was mentioned about having to do marketing. And you know, somebody’s got a garage band. They don’t understand about marketing. How do you get started? And what do you tell someone who’s at the front end?

Crowder: Well, I have like a metaphor. If you are doing this, and if you do have any sort of visibility, “success” in the mind of someone who wants to do this, you get asked that a lot. And I tell everybody, “Tune your guitar.” That’d be Step #1. It’s like a metaphor for me, and it’s like there’s not a lot you can control. But there’s a lot you can actually do to at least to create an opportunity for being used, for the thing that God’s put in your heart. If this is what you’re just dying to do — you like your made and built to do this — then it’s probably there for a reason.

And if you can pay attention to where you’re placed — where your feet on the soil that you’re standing in right in that moment — and then give everything you have to that moment and the people you’re in front of right then or around or living with and just play, play, play, play, play, play. And if God wants to breathe into it, fantastic.

I think you’ve got to have open hands. And what he puts in your hand, you’re responsible with. What he takes, you’ve got open hands because that’s what you’re wanting to give. That’d be my deal. Tune your guitar. The rest of it: Don’t worry about it so much. If you’re worrying about getting seen or not seen, or being in that guy’s position or this gal’s position, you start getting really messed up. There are lots and lots of stories in Scripture that show that that doesn’t really end well. So, probably just tune your guitar. Keep your head down. Tune your guitar. Take care of what you can take care of.

Leith: Good advice. Eddie, what are you going to say to the young Christians wanting to get into the business?

Eddie: I love David Crowder’s “tune your guitar.” That’s good. I do think: Just do the things you can do. There’s no magic formula that David or I either one could tell anybody — or that anybody on this tour could tell somebody. “Here’s how you’ll get to do this, and you’ll be on Winter Jam. You do this; you’ll be on Winter Jam or you’ll be doing great.”

I do think if you are doing this, and you are doing it from “I feel like God called me to do this.” I think, first of all, don’t get so busy trying to do this that you don’t pay attention to reading your Bible, getting up. I think it’s a big deal to get up and start your day. I’m not 100 percent, but I try to be as close to 100 percent as I can get. Get up and spend a little time with the Lord every day, and pray and ask him to help me and show me, and all those things. Be serious about that. If you get to a point where you think your about to do something; You’re serious about your music and you’re not serious about the Lord,

In this podcast, you’ll hear two veterans of Christian music share: The joys and challenges of this unique ministry space; How they stay connected with the Body of Christ while on tours; The ways in which the industry has changed in the past two decades; and Advice for young artists. Read a Portion of the Transcript Leith: ...

In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Rob Lauer talk about how to search for and find the right pastor for your church. As the head of a pastor search firm, Rob guides listeners through the steps he takes in matching up pastors and churches.

In this podcast, you'll learn:

Guiding principles for sifting through candidates;

How to avoid common mistakes made in the pastor search process;

Whether to consider pastors who have been fired from a church; and

What search firms offer churches that are looking for new pastors.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: There have been times when I’ve met with boards and search committees, and I’ve said, “You need to go through the process and you need to do all these things. Don’t start with a name. You are a long way off from that. So, does everyone understand that? Does everybody agree to it?” And then after I finish, somebody says, “Well, you know, last summer I was at a church with my cousin, and I met this person who would be…” And they go right to a name. So how do you keep people on track on that process? They just want to jump over it all.

Rob: Yeah, they really do. It’s one of the reasons why they fail in the searches. They get focused on an individual, and they don’t put the foundation of a search together, which is building a process. One of the principles we have is: Prayer over process, but do process well. It’s important that people map out the process, and then follow that map. It’ll keep them disciplined and systematic in their approach.

Leith: So, it sounds like you use pretty much the same process with every church. Is that right?

Rob: I would say that the primary process is put together, and we utilize that. But we tell churches with every search that we want to know what’s best practices for them. And we want to learn from them. Our best practices are a result of the numerous searches that we’ve done. We want to learn something from every church that we do a search from. So we say, “What is it that you have in mind? This is the way that we approach a search. But how is it that we can best serve you? And what is it within your process that you would like to see us integrate and/or what parts of our process are you maybe not as comfortable with that you would like us to approach differently?”

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If you enjoyed the program, please rate it on iTunes and write a brief review. That will help get the word out and raise the visibility of the show.

Today’s Conversation is brought to you by the University of Northwestern – St. Paul.

 

In this podcast, you’ll learn: Guiding principles for sifting through candidates; How to avoid common mistakes made in the pastor search process; Whether to consider pastors who have been fired from a church; and What search firms offer churches that are looking for new pastors. Read a Portion of the Transcript Leith: There have been times ...

In Today's Conversation, Leith Anderson and Dan Aleshire talk about trends in theological education, including most popular degree programs, student gender ratios, and what makes a seminary successful. 

In this podcast, you’ll hear the expert on theological education in the United States share:

How changing expectations of pastors have impacted seminary training;

How seminaries have adapted to distance and online education;

What evangelicals can learn from mainline and Catholic seminaries; and

What seminaries need to do in the next 20 years to continue being effective.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Let’s start with the basics. What is a seminary? I actually googled “seminary.” And there are a lot of different definitions, so I guess we need yours.

Dan: I think that the definition that the Association of Theological Schools works with is that it’s an institution that provides education for the practice of ministry. And in the ATS case, they would be schools that operate at the post-baccalaureate level. A seminary has lots of other things that it’s doing, and the scope of things that it does is ever increasing. But I think that at the heart of it, seminary education is education for persons who want to pursue or are actively pursuing some form of ministry.

Leith: So, let’s get some statistics, just so we can understand — not just for those that are involved in higher education, but for those that aren’t. Let me just rattle off a whole list of questions, and you can just pick the ones you want to answer. I want to know: How many seminaries are there? What is their size? What percentage of them are evangelical – what percentage of the students and what percentage of the seminaries? Are students, are they mostly men or women, or younger or older? And which degree programs are most and the least popular? And how long to people go to seminary before they get their degree? Just give us a picture of the stats.

Dan: Let me talk from the subset of all theological schools that are the 270 schools that are members of ATS. There are lots of other schools that are related to a particular church or a particular neighborhood that are not degree granting or not related to ATS. And so, I’ll leave that unknown number out of my response, Leith.

ATS has about 270 member institutions in the United States and Canada. And about 110 of them, we classify as evangelical Protestant. About another 100 or so are classified as mainline Protestant, and the remaining schools are Roman Catholic or Orthodox. Together those schools enroll about 76,000 students. The dominant degree program that has the plurality of the enrollment is the Master of Divinity, and that would be the case across all those ecclesial families. The highest concentration of M.Div. enrollment would be among Roman Catholic schools, and probably the lowest concentration of M.Div. enrollment would be among evangelical Protestant schools.

The two largest age groups of students in ATS schools are students under 30 and over 50. Those two groups constitute about 54 percent of the total enrollment. We thought one time that we should rename ATS as the Association of Schools of Parents and Their Children. We have two very different age groups. At one time, it appeared that folks were leaving careers and entering ministry, and students in their 30s and 40s were a large group. That group has as a percentage of enrollment has shrunk, and the group that has grown most fast over the last 10 or 15 years are students over 50.

We’re not quite sure what all that means. Our hunch is that one: The Baby Boomers — that bulge in the population — have gotten older, and they’re still going to seminary. The other is that these are not career changers; they’re career completers. They’ve taught school for 30 years. Or they’ve been in the military,

In this podcast, you’ll hear the expert on theological education in the United States share: How changing expectations of pastors have impacted seminary training; How seminaries have adapted to distance and online education; What evangelicals can learn from mainline and Catholic seminaries; and What seminaries need to do in the next 20 years to continue being ...

Almost every day we hear about another tragedy in the world or in our country. Sometimes those tragedies hit home. In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson talks with Joel Hunter about how to respond to crisis when it comes to your town.

In this podcast, a longtime pastor and respected leader reflects on the recent Pulse nightclub shooting in his hometown and shares:

What kind of leadership pastors can bring to communities in crisis;

How churches can prepare for such events;

How his conversion story impacts his ministry approach; and

What messages need to be communicated to church members and to the broader community, including the media.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: What do we do when crisis comes to our city? What kind of leadership should pastors bring to the table? This is our topic for today. Joel, on June 12, 2016, a shooter killed 49 people and wounded 53 others inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, your city. That happened early Sunday morning. How did you first hear about what had happened? As a pastor, what was your first reaction — your gut response?

Joel: At four o’clock in the morning, I received an email from a police officer in our congregation who was headed to that scene. The email simply said, “Pastor, there has been a multiple casualty shooting event. I am heading there now. Please pray. If we ever needed prayer, it’s now.” And so, I was up at that time, but I usually do my devotions, and so I didn’t see the email until five that morning. Of course, I immediately began to pray, and after that time of prayer, switched on the news to see the horrible event of the biggest mass shooting in the history of our country. So I just rocked back. I was driven to my knees. I wasn’t preaching that weekend, but immediately began to hear from other community leaders about the event and about how we could respond.

Leith: In some ways your not preaching made it easier that you had one less responsibility. So what did that Sunday look like for you? What did you do the rest of the day? Did you go to church? Were you able to do that? Were you out in the community? What happened?

Joel: No, I wasn’t able to be at church. I was kind of out and about. Mostly I prayed. You know, when you don’t know what to do, you don’t know the extent of a tragedy… Because it was both a hate crime and a terrorist attack, and because it happened in a gay nightclub. I told my congregation soon after that; I was so gripped by this tragedy not because I had so many relationships in that community but because I had so few. And so the first reaction I had was “I don’t know if I know any of these families.” The second reaction I had was to pray that God would undergird, personally, each of them. And then a group of us pastors soon were on the line together. We have a pretty close fellowship of pastors here, and we were all saying,“Okay, this is a community tragedy. How can we respond to this together?” Because many of the injured were from the Latino community, and so El Calvario and other Hispanic pastors that we knew would be dealing mostly with the families. But, there was just this reaction like … it’s almost surreal. You don’t know what to do, so you do the two basic things you do know to do. You pray, and you talk with other people who are spiritual leaders who you respect and try to get some sort of response plan together.

Leith: So what did churches in Orlando and in the greater Orlando area — how did they respond? And Joel, I think what I am most interested in is not hearing the outlier story of some church somewhere that did something inappropriate or bizarre. What did most of them do? And especially what did they do that was good?

Joel: Well, thanks for that question, because there were so many events, they continue to this day, to memorialize and sympathize with this horrible event.

In this podcast, a longtime pastor and respected leader reflects on the recent Pulse nightclub shooting in his hometown and shares: What kind of leadership pastors can bring to communities in crisis; How churches can prepare for such events; How his conversion story impacts his ministry approach; and What messages need to be communicated to church members and ...