What We’re Seeing in the Changing Ecology of the Church

Overview

What if the church isn't broken so much as being reshaped, quietly, from the inside out, into something older and truer than the buildings we've come to call home?

This week on the Igniting Imagination® podcast, Rev. Lisa Greenwood sits down with Rev. Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean, Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, for a conversation about the tectonic shifts moving beneath the church today. An ordained United Methodist minister and a distinguished Locke Innovative Leader recognized by Wesleyan Impact Partners, Kenda has spent decades helping the Church navigate cultural change, emerging generations, and innovation. Together, Lisa and Kenda explore why the pandemic may have spared us twenty years of painful admission, and what it means to lead when everyone finally agrees that things have changed.

Rev. Dr. Kenda offers a gentle but bracing challenge: we have made innovation a magic bullet, an end in itself, when it was only ever a means. She invites listeners to recover the church's most ancient identity as "the way," to take younger generations seriously as teachers rather than exotic birds, and to reclaim the lost art of Christian formation, which happens less through programs than through people who are simply gifted at the ministry of noticing.

Listen as Lisa and Kenda reflect on cathedrals and pilgrimage, on the ecological idea of "refugia" as a picture of faith taking root, and on why one of the most innovative things a church can do is less, saying no to the treadmill so it can say yes to the sacred encounter of relationship.