What is a Guerrilla Pastor?

Ryan, Josiah and Brian all hail from the great Pacific Northwest. As Pastors, they have had to learn how to adapt to a culture that is post-christian. As a result, their ministry approaches are considered quite unconventional. Listen as they share some of what that looks like as well as why they might give themselves the title of Guerrilla Pastors. 

[001] What is a Guerrilla Pastor? Guerrilla Pastors

Ryan, Josiah and Brian all hail from the great Pacific Northwest. As Pastors, they have had to learn how to adapt to a culture that is post-christian. As a result, their ministry approaches are considered quite unconventional. Listen as they share some of what that looks like as well as why they might give themselves the title of Guerrilla Pastors. This episode is also available as a blog post: https://guerrillapastors.com/2022/02/16/what-is-a-guerrilla-pastor/ — Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/guerilla-pastors/message

Transcript:

Josiah (Narration): Welcome to the gorilla pastors podcast. My name is Josiah and I am one of these Guerrilla Pastors. Thank you for joining us on this our very first episode. Today, we would like to introduce ourselves to you and share what it is we mean when we call ourselves Guerrilla Pastors. Before we do, here is just a little bit of context.

First, there are three of us at the moment and we hail from the great Pacific Northwest. Our location is crucial as it informs our approach to ministry. We live in a region that is classically designated as post-Christian or post-church. What that means in reality is fairly simple. We don’t have as many congregations meeting in church facilities on a Sunday morning as other parts of the country do.

It also means there are significant cultural influences that we have to take seriously when we approach ministry here. We are also unconventionally employed as pastors. While we are all ordained within our Nazarene denomination, none of us have ministry assignments that could be seen as conventional.

If you were to visit us on any given day of the week, you might not realize that we were pastors until you spend some significant time getting to know us. To be clear, none of us are hiding our vocation, it’s just that our ministries don’t hinge on a Sunday morning worship gathering.

We all started in much the same way serving over the years in traditional churches. But eventually something stirred in each one of us. We believed that there was more to living out our faith than we were seeing or experiencing week-in and week-out. This stirring would eventually lead us one by one to this place.

It would also lead us to each other which in turn, spurred us on to dream collectively about what it could look like to do ministry in Western Washington, a place where it said the church just no longer holds any significance. Y we continue to do our part to remain faithful to God’s calling on our lives, seeking to be part of His kingdom, doing His will on earth as it is in heaven.

We are the gorilla pastors.


Now onto some introductions…

First, I would like to introduce Brian. He lives in Ballard, which is a neighborhood of Seattle. You may have heard of its name before, as it’s the former location of Mars Hill church. Brian has been in Ballard for 10 years and his primary focus has been on presence. He has no traditional congregation or Sunday morning service he is charged with leading. What he does have is a physical space that he offers to his community, which is called the Ballard homestead.

Here’s Brian:

Brian: Yeah, so I was pastoring in a couple of different places, one in Florida for about five years and another time in Kansas City. And during my time in Kansas City had to really start to look at, um, what my theology was, what I’d been trained to do and what it meant to be faithful. Then I found through those 10 years of ministry of starting to not the whole time, but starting it, starting to, uh, butt up against each other to knock heads between what I understood to be our theology as people of God and then what the institution of the church was asking us to do weekly.

 I talk, some of those statements that we always say is I was getting tired of babysitting Christians who were told week in and week out about the love of God, and the restoration work that God’s a part of. And yet at the same time, we don’t, or they don’t move week in and out because of that.

So I didn’t have time to get to know my neighbor. My heart started breaking a little bit for the people in my neighborhood who weren’t attending church. And so over time we started to make the move again. A lot of this was done through conversations with mentors, reading books, reading on a lot of different scales.

So not just reading stuff that agreed with, uh, where my mind was going. Talking with some old pastors about what it was like to pastor in the sixties and seventies. Things like that. And then at some point in 2010 we made the jump to move into a neighborhood and try to understand what it meant, the crossover or the interaction between church and culture.

I make pretty strong distinctions between the church as the body of Christ and the institution of the church.  I think those distinctions need to be made, because again, I think you can work within presence. Even subversive presence like we talked about as the body of Christ as just people livinginto the image in which they were created and functioning as the institution of the church. Those things at times, many times, butt heads and they don’t interact.

And so I was really trying to figure out whether or not they could interact. But in the end,  I’m not sure, uh, to be honest. So that’s kind of how I think. It’s a journey. Again, it’s been a 10 year journey in full-time ministry and it’s been 11 and a half years of doing neighborhood ministry and seeing what that looks like.

There’s a continued massaging of thought and practice and what that looks like. I try not to hold the tensions too tightly, actually I try to hold the tension rather than try to get it inside.


Josiah (Narration): Next is me. I recently resigned from my position as a lead pastor at the beginning of 2020. Having some disillusionment with the church as an institution, I’ve struggled with whether I wanted to continue being a pastor at all. A short time after resigning, I ended up becoming the executive director of a nonprofit in Snoqualmie, Washington.

This nonprofit feeds children and offers emergency assistance to the community at large. It also happens to have an office in a church and yes, I am a staff pastor there. Here is some of my backstory.


Josiah: So my journey has some fun stereotypes attached to it. I would say I am the consummate millennial, I have earned that title and that’s fine with me. There are some interesting stereotypes/statistics associated with my generation as it pertains to church. I started pastoring in a time where there was a whole bunch of research put into why people our age were no longer coming.

Why don’t they show up on a Sunday morning?

Why aren’t they part of the life of this thing?

And I had some thoughts, some opinions like “I don’t know some stuff it’s kind of boring?” I mean, the “why don’t we do it this way?” Like this? Why don’t we… I had a whole lot of very selfish and very, maybe immature, opinions on the matter, but at the time… I would say, gosh, when was this… 2015… at the time there was still this mental, emotional force in the church that sort of assumed that, well, we have it right.

And we’re going to make sure everyone else knows that they’re doing it wrong and we will guilt them to Sunday morning. That was, that was maybe the hope. If we were faithful, we will pray hard enough, we’ll study hard enough, we’ll be faithful enough then they’ll come back. They being our kids, our grandkids, because the age those church folks that we have all pastored in traditional contexts have normally continued upward.

There hadn’t been as much renewal in ages, new generations attending. So I started in lead pastoral ministry in a traditional church, and there was this concerted effort to rejuvenate and revive that church. The thought was drop a young, energetic pastor who has never done this before into the mix and that’ll will probably fit. Right?

They’ll see a young person that’s there and it was some sort of attraction model, you know, idea that, that, that they had at the time, I would assume. But the more I continued to try to remain faithful and even have some of those subversive conversations about, well, Hey, maybe there’s a reason why this is… this is an opinion on this or why they won’t engage with that…Or they have these feelings about this….

The more I would almost try to bridge the gaps between those that have remained faithful for a long time and those that have left, the more I saw that maybe they just didn’t care. Maybe they would rather have this, this way of doing church and it didn’t really matter if other people liked it or not, because they had decided at the end of the day, this is how it’s done and you can’t convince me otherwise.

And so, through the mess of 2020, I had been at this church for coming on five years. Some of these issues really reared their ugly heads. I think the consensus was pretty clear to see there was an egocentric, uh, normative approach to things that was deeply problematic for me.

I would continue time and time again to say if we’re following Jesus, part of what it is to follow him is to deny yourself, which I, if I’m going to use my own millennial vernacular, would say “Get over yourself.” This is not about you and your personal opinions. This is about coming and worshiping and trying to align with the will of God and to seek, to do his will here on earth as it is in heaven.

Not to instead try to say “I really like these things, I’m going to see if I can figure out a way to get God to rubber stamp them.” So through 2020, with restrictions, with things that we’re limited, in how we had to change things, Some of those, some of those issues really came to the surface in a way that was irreconcilable for me and for the folks that I was pastoring.

It became clear that you had to name some things you couldn’t skirt. Some of these issues, the classic pastoral training I received was well, don’t really tell people what you think. Well, don’t completely come out and say this, that or basically just don’t be brutally honest, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that.

So there was this impasse where it was clear to me that the things that I was convicted to do, and the things that I felt convicted to say the way that I felt like God had gifted me and given me graces to serve and in his kingdom to be a part of the work here on earth, as it is in heaven was, was categorically incompatible with this traditional church.

That was the long and the short of it. It just, I didn’t fit!


Josiah (Narration): And finally, we have Ryan. Ryan serves in a community called Bellingham. He does so much that it’s hard to know where to start. His pastoral ministry is diverse to say the least. Depending on what day of the week you catch him, he could be farming, writing, church planning, or teaching people about food. He’s also part of a ministerial incubator in his community that seeks to help new faith-based initiatives develop and thrive for the sake of the place that he lives.

The list could go on, but without further ado here is Ryan.


Ryan: There are three times that the traditional church model broke for me. I won’t get into the chronology of it as much as just name what those three breakdowns were.

The first was when I came to grips with the truth that the traditional church, in my case, the evangelical church in America, predominantly in suburbia was a grab for power. I grew up in the era of the moral majority, which makes me very old millennial, but not just Pat Roberts and the others, but the cultural wars in themselves was a vying for a type of cultural/political power. Even more insidious than that, success (And the church again, evangelical church of suburban America) was measured in speed of growth, which is a type of powerful presence in both individualized, but also in the community asking “how much influence can we garner in our local communities or in our county?”

I realized evangelicalism as imagined in the traditional church model was a grab for power. What I saw in the gospels was a divestment of, and apitomy of a power under where, if there was power, it was the empowerment of the disenfranchised and the voice list to the point that one might be both crucified and then resurrected, not by power of culture or power of empire, but power of the spirit.

And that was an altogether different kind of power. And I had to reckon with that. The second one was curiously enough, another pain. I got married very young, which is just a way of saying my wife and I grew up together. Both in my lived experience and struggling with how to live in a faithful and intimate relationship with my family experience, or my extended family. Stuff that was uncovered in young adulthood, But also in kind of my theological experience. In experiencing and encountering voices from the third world, I realized internally, inter relationally globally, there are so much pain and the evangelical church and the traditional model was incapable of addressing that pain.

If anything, what we’re doing is we’re calling people to come and experience a pain-free environment, and we promise them, which we ultimately can’t deliver on that they will have a life of painlessness.

If they do encounter pain, well, there are solutions to that, which is why we get the sort of gross  prescription that we should pray more worship, more intercede on behalf of each other more. Not so much because they’re acts of faithfulness, but because they give us an avenue out of struggle and pain and lament. I realized that this was a kind of a second time that traditional church broke for me. It was incapable of helping me face the pain in my own intimate life, but also the pain that I saw around the world.

The last one, and I’m thankful for friends I sit around a table with like you two, because I’m reminded of this one, is that the church and the traditional model is dismal at presence. I mean that in a lot of ways, but just to narrow it down the first two that come to mind are presence one to another.

I mean, literally we are asking people to get up out of their lived lives, to come to a centralized location in the sanitized environment, so we can give them a kind of an alternative and an alternate experienced from their world. But then, when they retreat back to their homes, they’re back in their present in the, in the mundane every day that are challenging and textured and full of emotions.

And, and it’s like the church experience was literally a deep presence where when I read the gospels, it’s all about entering in to the textured presence of lived lives. And so the sanitation of it just broke from me, like church can’t be sanitized.

And the other meaning of presence is literally present… in your neighborhood. I live in a semi-rural environment. It still applies presence on the street you live on with other people living in semi-rural American experience. I used to live in a metropolis, in an urban setting and it’s the same thing, but it might be reduced to a block or a street or something like that.

We are present not by leaving the life we live in pretending to be something else and inviting people out of their lives to be part of it but instead by faithfully entering into, on the ground, the hurts, wounds, celebrations, parties, and everything in between that happens on that block in those lived lives between the minivan and the Prius or whatever.

And the church was dismal at being present and employing people or equipping people and employing them to be present. I realize this, you know, when, when it broke in those three ways I needed something that could be present and I needed a model at least loosely speaking that could be present and empower people to be present that could counter and address pain, and what was the third one?

Josiah: Power.

Ryan: Oh, and was a divestment of, or redefinition of power.


Josiah (Narration): We are the Guerrilla Pastors, and these are our stories. Before we unpack that name, you might recall earlier that we spoke of a shift that happened in each one of us. Would you listen as Brian gets to the heart of what that shift was all about?


Brian: how do we be eternally faithful? Like literally, like how do we be faithful in a way that. That in 20 years, people aren’t going, he was evil for doing that in 1980, which is what we’re doing about 1980 & early nineties pastors right now with deconstruction. I saw, and I was kind of like the only way for us to really do that is non-dualism.

And so like literally, what if I was… starting from the city… it would be literally 50 people who were committed to being Christ-like. That’s it. Non-dualism, Christ-like, serving doing. If you just do the Bless acronym, Beautify, Listen, Eat, Serve, Send  I think… If you even just live into that, hold  the tensions on, on divided issues and be present and then every other week or so we’ll gather and talk about how to, how we do that better.

Pray for wisdom and trying to do that, I don’t know. It would be that simple. Now that would never fly on a denominational scale because there’s nothing to measure and really just talking. I mean, this has been my critique the last 10 years from people. It was like, what you’re talking about, you’re just being a good Christian and not being a pastor, not leading. But that’s really where my mind is. Like, how do we be, how do we lean into truths that are being eternally faithful and not just lean into social issues today?


Josiah (Narration): Brian nails, it articulating what is at the heart of our vocational ministries. It’s what drives us and binds us together. But there’s more to this story than just sharing conviction. You may have noticed, we gave ourselves a name, one that may need some explaining. So listen, as we sit around a table discussing what Guerrilla means and why we find it so captivating.


Ryan: The first thing that comes to mind with gorilla, the metaphor of gorilla is the irregularity of the engagement. Its antithesis of course, would be some kind of organized front or something, which of course is a metaphor we use to reference war. We can deal with that in time, but the sort of counterinsurgency or the opposing force or the opposing strategy is irregular in origin and engaged in this sort of like granular on the ground level.

That is particularly fascinating for me, not only because we can pin it down and say it’s opposite of this other way of doing things, but instead that itself is something that is constantly evolving and exploring and learning from context.

Right. So, not only interesting because it’s new and fresh and on the ground and engaged and irregular, but because over years we get to explore what this sort of new metaphor. One that’s unprecedented, a new metaphor for a type of ministry, right. That is engaged locally.

Josiah: But it’s not all sunshine and roses. I mean, there might be some negatives to it. Brian, do you have any thoughts on that?

Brian: Yeah, I mean, I think we all go to guerrilla warfare. And so I think,  within that metaphor, you go to the distinctions of, are you pitting one side against the other?

And then if so, who is the enemy? Uh, but all that can be taken apart. I think within the conversation. Uh, there’s, there’s still room. I liked what Ryan said about Guerrilla being of the people. Typically, they were locals. So I think that’s an important concept.

Josiah: You had another way of saying it though. What  was the term you used instead of guerrilla pastors?

Brian: Subversive presence. I think is more just an idea that, you know, you’re, you’re functioning underneath. You’re always present. It’s a little bit more of a peaceful presence in my mind, just rather than a pitting two sides against the other.

But I think Guerrilla Pastor probably still intrigues more minds. To get towards what, uh, even if we unpack the wartime metaphor, there’s something there that can be translated to sort of the everyday imagery that we have of a pastor.

Josiah: I thought of this term from, from kind of reading some history on how once upon a time America sent a bomb to a country in the world.

There’s this big empire,  this Imperial machine that wasn’t hiding. It was very institutional. It was very direct. It was very overt. But then in recent years and months, there has been this question of like, well, what happened in Afghanistan? And I’ve heard a number of, whether they were generals, veterans, or just pundits talking about how you can’t kill an idea. You can’t kill a conviction. You can’t kill this thing that binds people together that doesn’t have these clear cut borders and boundaries.

So the metaphor, even if it is of war or this clear-cut country with borders, I mean, those things can be killed. You can kill a country. You can end it, you can redraw its borders. You can change its leadership structure. You can change its economic methodologies, but you can’t kill an idea. You can’t kill these convictions that bind all sorts of people groups together. So for me, it was this easy step to see traditional churches, while for the record, very necessary to continue… that the hope is not to kill any sort of traditional model… But you can very easily kill a traditional church in my opinion. We see it happen all the time. We see all these big mega church pastors and all that has to happen is a big enough scandal and that church will probably implode.

This big organization, this big institution will fall to its knees the moment you hear that they did this or that or the other. There’s a, I mean, there’s other podcasts all about it. The other thing you can do is you can just have a pandemic and then the attraction or church or church growth model is done.

If there’s a specific methodology, based on how this institution does what it does, and you remove the possibility or the opportunity for that methodology to be executed, and there’s no flexibility within the institution… The institution can crumble. The difference though, in my mind with Guerrilla Pastoring is if you just base what you do off of good theology, you just, you can’t kill that.

You can’t kill good theology.

If you’re bound together by good theology, not bound together by buildings or polity or the latest and greatest pop culture hot takes on how to build whatever, some podcast on whatever the case may be… If it’s built on this good idea of simply being this subversive presence, of trying to be a blessing to our neighbors, that’s something that doesn’t just get killed overnight.

So that’s where it came from for me. I appreciate that there could be some tension in unpacking more what this enemy, drawing lines sort of mentality is. It’s not just war though. You’ve heard of Guerrilla journalism. Ryan, you told me about Guerrilla Education. What was it?

Ryan: Guerrilla education and Guerrilla gardening.

Two other times that guerrilla… My family and myself personally have employed, um, a type of strategy towards Guerrilla education. A self-directed and organic interest driven type of education that we employ with our children. Then there guerrilla gardening, which is this concept of urban growing and abandoned spaces. You know, in a metropolis that’s unrestrained, uncontrolled, often unmeasurable, but has this, you know, you know, uh, you know, thousandfold kind of harvest in a season or all beginning with a type of subversive, to use the language that we’ve leaned on, a type of subversive presence. The case of urban Nashville, it was soil bombs or seed bombs with just a cup full of a handful ofsoil packed with a bunch of seeds. In our case, it was flowers and, you know, in your you’re bombing, literally empty lots and the following spring, you have this proliferation of beauty. Right?

So is this subversive presence, knowing  the context you’re in, desiring something beautiful and acted, right? Not, programmatized, not top down, but bottom up type of presence. And you know, the following spring would be this remarkable, you know, abundance of flowers and, and such, but anyhow, so we’ve, you know, I’ve employed guerrilla gardening and guerrilla education in my home.

Josiah: Well, and the other, the other reason I was drawn to this term is because I have seen both of you in my own twisted way of being a Guerrilla. I mean, for 10 years, do you feel like you’ve functioned almost as if you had to put it in those terms, a Guerrilla Pastor Brian?

Brian: Yeah. And I think that that has been a point, a driven point.

Like not being a personality driven, not being the “Hey, come and see our show.”  Just being able to be where people are and for long enough, where you become a part of their lives, and they started inviting you into their lives rather than you trying to figure out necessarily what they want and then feeding  that consumer kind of culture and then going, “Hey, I’m providing what I think you want.”

So come, come to me!

So just being present long enough where impact comes through relationship and consistency. Even when there’s tensions in that, even when there’s tensions in the presence, when you’ve been there, when you’ve been consistent, then people are willing to forgive the inconsistencies and go forward.


Josiah (Narration): That connection to war still lingered in our minds. It seemed to be an issue that we just couldn’t get past, but then Ryan shared why guerrilla does not have to be synonymous with warfare.


Ryan: With like historical war references. Now I’m going to have to reckon with the violent layers of the concept of guerrilla. But I think it was, I want to say it was in the Cuban liberation movement 50 or so years ago, 70 years ago. NO it’s 65. Where, you know, and because of every, because of half the posters in college dormitory walls were, were emblazoned, a beret wearing men known by Che Guevara.

We all sort of loosely know the story. Um, and so, uh, you know, I don’t need to go go into it, but there was something he said that I picked up on in passing one time that has stuck with me. He says, “insurgent revolutions, i.e. guerrilla warfare, is 20% bullets, an 80% blessing the people.

In other words, it’s 20% violence and 80% popular opinion. Popular opinion doesn’t  unexpectedly and needlessly sort of arrive or materialize in thin air. It’s done, It’s the result of acts of service, protection, wellbeing, and access to the means of life. Without those things, no movement of people, violent or otherwise, gains sort of the favorable perspective and opinion of the people.

I mean, consider that 20% measurable programmatized execution and 80% gifts care, generosity, and access to the means of the writing. I’m not sure if you spent time connecting it with what Guerrilla Pastoring might look like  in partnership with tradition church pastoring, but those percentages… I’m already just, I got lots of, I don’t know, I’m not quite ready to talk about them because I immediately got some wheels spin, like, okay, there’s a framework there.

There’s a frame of reference at the very least.

Josiah: Yeah. Any other thoughts?

Brian: I’ll go, I’ll go to the natural place. And there’s so many, you know, anytime you use an analogy, um, it’s, there’s issues with it and. Plenty of places to tear down. But  when you said the name, I immediately went to the movie Patriot with Mel Gibson.

And again, at that point there, again, the issue is that you’re putting two sides against each other, but in that setting, you had  kind of what was known as at the time, I think this disrespectful way of fighting against the Institute. The institution stood in their red coats facing each other, where both sides  stood there until you took a bullet or… and they didn’t! All of a sudden they’re hiding and doing ambushes and things like that.

 I also see the parts in that movie in which they’re of the people and they were trying to help their families, you know, thrive and stuff like that. So I’ve always gone there.

Now, it doesn’t help us in taking apart the war metaphor of the guerrilla warfare by going down that road, but I think there’s pieces of looking at adjust a ways of coming off of the ground and protecting the land and protecting faithfulness and fighting against things that push against the faithfulness of the land. I think of the place someone else coming in and saying, this is, there’s a new way of doing it, and you need to do it this way and not hearing and not listening to how, what it means to be faithful on the land and in the land.

Then those people are willing to fight and say, no, that’s not the way, we’re going to fight, fight against you in a new way. So it’s almost, it’s almost as if, if there are lines drawn in the, if there is a metaphorical war, uh, the war is against this idea that there’s a one size fits all or a one stop shop approach to having church ministry, living out this kingdom life that we’re trying to live.

So maybe if there has to be lines thrown in the sand, I don’t know. That’s a place that I continue to go back to because it won’t necessarily be helpful to draw lines in the sand demographically maybe, but maybe, maybe if there is a war, I’m using air quotes, even though no one will be able to see, it’s an intellectual ideological, um, discussion who is against who. That still might not be helpful to lean there.

Ryan: So let me make a final statement that intentionally disengages this from what seems like the inevitable entanglement in violence and violent activity. The he most explicit connection with an analog and ministry for me is actually not  a ministry context at all, but as equally part of my vocation, and I mentioned it in passing earlier, but I’ll mention it again. On the fringe of compulsory education, which is basically public school in the United States, would be anything that any required education for a kid under 18 on the fringe of that is the sort of homeschool movement, regardless of your opinion, on what the homeschool movement is, it’s there and it’s a growing number, but it’s still super minority on the fringe of the homeschooling movement would be what is called the unschooling movement, which is kind of project based student driven interest and intrigue inspired type of education.

Well, there’s actually a growing conversation by people like John Holt and John Gatto, and some others that are renaming that guerrilla education and guerrilla there doesn’t have any reference to violence and is particularly inspiring for me, a father of kids that are alternatively schooled and also as a pastor.

What it basically means is all of the material for the richest education imaginable is immediate, like immediately accessible to every child. It is the roadblocks we put in front of them or between them and the material, uh, for learning that is the problem. So the question is not like, how do we employ tactics with our kids to, you know, enrich their educational experience?

No, the question is how do we remove the inhibitors between a kid and their natural inclination to learn, their natural curiosity and the world of learning. Right? So that they can fully lean in, fully dive into the educational process that is innate in them. So to make again, to make the connection explicit, a type of Guerrilla Pastoring is asking the same kinds of questions and yes, it’s not lost on me that it is still, it is fringe, maybe fringe of fringe.

But the question is how do we remove the barriers, the impediments and the inhibitors from the people, right? From the people that have a natural inclination to lean into and realize the kingdom. Right? And so it’s not a strategy, right? It’s not some tactics that we’ve materialized in an office that we’re going to deploy.

And other it’s maybe more so how do we, as leaders and pastors finally impediments and remove them that people would experience the kingdom of God… That’s Guerrilla Pastoring.

Josiah: Hmm. I like it.


Josiah (Narration): Call it subversive presence, call it inhibitor removal, or simply name it Guerrilla Pastoring, whatever label you choose is really secondary to the reality that our ministries don’t hinge on cults of personality, church growth programs or attraction models. All we’re trying to be is of the people, immersed within our communities and aware of the hopes and needs of our neighbors.

It might look different than the example of pastoral ministry you have seen, but that’s okay. The future of the church will be better if it fosters and encourages this sort of diversity of practice. And this isn’t to say that traditional churches need to go by the wayside. If anything, we are better when we’re in this together. Still, change is controversial.

Let me reappropriate a timeless proverb: “Necessity is the mother of innovation.” For some, innovation is a bad word, for us it’s simply what must be done to address the deconstruction that is so prevalent where we live in and serve. The way we gather or do church is going to change. It might not for everyone everywhere, but it’s changing for us.

It’s changing for our communities and we see that as more than just a necessity. We see it as something that is good. Out of the ashes of deconstruction we are trying to construct something that is both timeless and new. Join us in our work as we draw from this Orthodox Christian belief to envision a broad kingdom imagination, practice a generous orthodoxy while celebrating a neccissarily diverse practice. Join us on our next episode, as we dive deeper into what that work looks like. Thank you for listening to the Guerrilla Pastors.

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