Pivot Podcast

Faith+Lead
  • 4.8 (25)
  • Christianity
  • Updated Weekly

Over the past few years, church leaders have been forced to respond to several global crises in the blink of an eye. In a moment with little information and lots of uncertainty, churches reinvented nearly every aspect of church. Season 5 of the Pivot podcast explores the changing landscape of the church. Our co-hosts will dig into difficult questions that faith leaders are asking now, and provide an understanding of the deeper cultural shifts that account for the unraveling of inherited models of church. What are the four key pivots that today's church must make? New episodes post weekly on Thursdays.

  1. 1d ago

    A Solo Reflection on Prayer, Longing, and an Australian Movie from the 90s

    This week's episode breaks from the usual format. Pivot producer Joey Goodall steps in for a solo reflection on what prayer practices are actually for, and what happens when we lose sight of that. He starts in an unexpected place: a line from the 1994 Australian film Muriel's Wedding, where a character compares her life to the biggest hit by the Swedish pop group she'd once used as an escape. From there, Joey turns to prayer, scripture reading, and the practices Christians return to again and again, naming two temptations that work against their purpose: holding a practice so tightly to its exact words and structure that we forget what it's for, or adapting it so loosely that it no longer reshapes us. He closes with a version of the Examen, a nearly 500-year-old prayer practice from Ignatius of Loyola, as one way to stay open to a God who is always more than our practices.

  2. Aug 27

    Leadership for a Diverse Church

    Eastminster Church has been in Pittsburgh's East Liberty neighborhood since 1856, and for most of that history it worshiped and looked like a fairly typical Presbyterian congregation. Aaron Teter, the church's current pastor, spent time recently reading through the session's meeting minutes going back to the 1960s. In the 1970s, as the neighborhood changed and members left, the session wrote down a plain conviction: this was a church for the neighborhood. By the early 2000s, a strategic plan named becoming cross-cultural as an explicit goal, and the pastors and staff hired in the years since, including Rev. Nicole Porter, carried that work into the life of the congregation. Today Eastminster is diverse racially, economically, and in the traditions its members bring with them, with that diversity reflected at every level of leadership, from elders and deacons to the pulpit. In this episode, Aaron and Ayana Teter talk with hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm about how that history shaped the congregation, and about the practices that carry it now: reading a church's own story back to it, passing the peace before communion, and a kind of leadership built on dependence rather than control. Ayana, Dean of Community Life and Formation at Pittsburgh Seminary and a leader within Eastminster, talks about watching people who aren't fully reconciled in their private lives cross the room to greet one another before receiving the elements. Pittsburgh Theological Seminary - A Seminary of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)Eastminster Presbyterian Church

  3. Aug 20

    What Sunday Morning Teaches People About Monday

    Katie Roelofs has spent years thinking about the space between Sunday morning and the rest of the week. A pastor in the Reformed Church in America and managing director of the Worship for Workers Project, Katie is co-author of the new book Leading Worship for Workers. She argues that churches, often without realizing it, have widened the gap between faith and work, training people to leave their real lives at the door instead of bringing them into worship. In this episode, Katie talks with Dwight and Alicia about what it looks like to close that gap. She describes a congregation that reimagined its offering plate around the ancient idea of first fruits, inviting people to bring forward the actual work of their hands. She talks about developing pastoral curiosity, the practice of genuinely learning what congregants carry into the pews each week, and about why the opening and closing words of a worship service shape people more than most leaders realize. Katie also addresses a question many pastors hear in one form or another: does God actually care about my job? Her answer draws on Genesis, on the theology of vocation, and on a vision of worship as the gathering and scattering of a people formed to carry faith into their daily work.

  4. Aug 13

    Ministry That Doesn't Rush Toward Results

    For twenty years, Johnny Sertin has practiced a kind of place-based ministry built on staying put. He and four other families started the Earlsfield Friary in southwest London, committing to live within one square mile of each other while each working ordinary jobs. Along the way, a Franciscan friar became a close friend and encouraged them to find the places in their own lives where they felt most alive. Meg Fry joined the community a bit later, drawn in by her own dissatisfaction with church as usual. That same posture eventually led the group to a stretch of land next to a prison, where they raised pigs, and to a cafe Meg opened inside the sanctuary of St. Andrew's Church, one that's welcomed everyone from young professionals to asylum seekers to parents with young kids for the better part of a decade. In this episode, Johnny and Meg talk with hosts Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm about what it takes to build trust in a neighborhood before ever bringing up faith. Meg describes waiting years, sometimes five or six, before someone asks her why she does what she does. Johnny reflects on a woman who told him that after a week of feeding the pigs at dawn and dusk, she'd come home to herself again. Together, they offer a picture of urban ministry, rooted in one specific place, that doesn't rush toward results and trusts that presence, patience, and genuine relationship do the deeper work.

  5. Aug 6

    Augustine Was a Pastor First

    For most of his afterlife in the Christian imagination, Augustine has been a theologian first, a philosopher second, and everything else a distant third. What tends to get lost is that he spent nearly forty years as a working pastor. In this episode, Joey Sherrard, pastor at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church and author of the new book The Augustinian Pastor, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to talk about Augustine as a pastor for pastors, discovering not a distant theologian but a fellow pastor who had shepherded his own congregation through a world coming apart at the seams. The conversation moves through some of Augustine's most enduring insights for those in ministry today: why restlessness isn't a problem to fix but a signpost pointing us home, how pride can dress itself up in the language of Christian virtue, and what it means to order our loves rather than simply renounce them. Joey also talks about pastoral loneliness, and about the Ambrose Collective, a weekly practice of friendship he built with fellow pastors, and what it looks like to build a rule of life without a monastery, a vow, or a bell tower.

  6. Jul 29

    A Different Kind of Strength

    Second Corinthians is one of the strangest letters in the New Testament: a leader defending himself, a community in open doubt, and in the middle of it, some of Paul's clearest writing on power in weakness. Dr. Lois Malcolm, professor of systematic theology at Luther Seminary and author of a forthcoming commentary on the letter, joins Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm to explore what that friction opens up for church leaders navigating a culture that no longer grants pastors automatic authority. Lois traces why Paul turned down money from the Corinthians and accepted it from the far poorer Macedonians, unpacks the image of treasure carried in clay jars, and tells the story of her mother's imprisonment in a concentration camp and what it taught her about freedom. The conversation moves through baptismal identity, the ministry of reconciliation, and why Christian community has always asked hard things of the people inside it, without that difficulty ever being the point.

  7. Jul 23

    The People in Your Church Don't Belong to You

    "The church as we know it is calibrated for a world that no longer exists." That's how Dr. Scott Cormode opens his book, and it's the starting point for this conversation about Christian leadership with Dwight Zscheile and Alicia Granholm. The Hugh De Pree Professor of Leadership Development at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of The Innovative Church, Scott argues that Christian leaders don't have followers — the people in their care belong first to Jesus — and that the real work of leadership is planting and watering while God gives the increase. Scott shares five questions for discerning what keeps people awake at night, tells the story of a congregation transformed by teaching lament to middle schoolers, and offers a raw, personal account of reinventing prayer during his wife's cancer treatment. The conversation moves through reinventing ancient practices for a changing culture, the danger of an individualistic model of ministry, and how to build sustainable rhythms of labor and rest. Scott, one of Pivot's original co-hosts when it launched six years ago, brings both decades of scholarship and hard-won personal wisdom to this conversation about what it means to lead Christian communities faithfully today.

  8. Jul 16

    The Church With No Budget, No Staff, and No Sunday Service

    Ten years ago, JR and Amy Rozko planted a two-hundred-year-old congregation in Canton, Ohio, only to discover that what their city needed wasn't another program but a rule of life: a shared rhythm of prayer, rest, study, and work old enough to predate the church they'd inherited. Out of that conviction came Canton Abbey, a neutral space with no budget and no staff where churches and nonprofits collaborate freely, and later Common Life Church, a small congregation of about fifty people who've chosen to live under vows drawn from monastic tradition rather than membership on a roster. JR and Amy join Dwight and Alicia to talk about what it costs, and what it gives back, to ask people to embrace a rule of life in a culture that treats the self as sovereign. They walk through the four rhythms and four commitments that shape their community, tell the story of a congregation that grew almost by accident out of people hungry for something thicker than what they'd found elsewhere, and offer honest counsel for pastors in inherited structures who sense that recovering old practices might matter more than adding new programs.

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About

Over the past few years, church leaders have been forced to respond to several global crises in the blink of an eye. In a moment with little information and lots of uncertainty, churches reinvented nearly every aspect of church. Season 5 of the Pivot podcast explores the changing landscape of the church. Our co-hosts will dig into difficult questions that faith leaders are asking now, and provide an understanding of the deeper cultural shifts that account for the unraveling of inherited models of church. What are the four key pivots that today's church must make? New episodes post weekly on Thursdays.

Information

  • Creator
    Faith+Lead
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    192
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Faith+Lead
  • Show Website
    Pivot Podcast

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