[00:00:00] I always come back to that moment on the road to Emmaus when Jesus disappears and the disciples say,
[00:00:06] we're not our hearts burning within us when he opened the scriptures to us.
[00:00:10] And I think that's sort of like the mirror I put against my own faith journey often.
[00:00:17] Welcome to episode 328.
[00:00:19] Are your people not coming to church because they're too busy?
[00:00:22] What if the real hearts of indifference? I think that's how you're titling this. Engaging hearts of indifference. How do we do it when people, for those that maybe seem like, I don't know, things have gotten stale
[00:01:41] or they're just sort of making their way through. have you gotten a little lukewarm or cold? What's going on? And it made me think, what's going on in people's lives that they don't feel particularly engaged in the life of the church? Is it busyness? Because that's usually the thing that comes up. Well, it's youth sports. That's the reason. Or everybody's so crazy busy,
[00:03:02] or people work on Sundays now.
[00:03:05] There's always something,
[00:03:06] and it's not anger against the church, it's not even busyness or anything, it's just simply indifference. That people feel for whatever reason just kind of indifferent about going to church. It's not, and these tough line here because on the one hand it's like we're here to worship God. We're not here to put on a show. Yes, I agree with that. However, what do I or something of that. And so when you're talking about compelling, you're not talking about flashy or cool or you're talking about meaningful. Yes. Something that speaks to our hearts and our human condition and what we've gone through this week and why the gospel is good news
[00:07:00] and why God's presence is such a source of peace and joy
[00:07:05] amidst of the circumstances that's as we face.
[00:07:08] And all of that, let's just think about in our denomination, we have two sacraments, baptism and communion.
[00:08:22] Just thinking about baptism, we've seen that, you know, we have, we're right next to the Puget Sound. So sometimes if we have an adult baptism or some young people who are going to be baptized,
[00:09:42] we invite everybody to come down and to baptize and I can be grateful for it. Yeah. Or communion. Even just those those markers for people and not just going through the motions or making it rote or something. Good Friday is always a good moment for us like that where we do communion in a
[00:12:20] special kind of way where we really challenge people to think deeply about
[00:12:23] what does this mean for the part of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, the way of St. to say, or here's how you can engage in your faith in this time and have it be a resource for you as you're navigating this new thing. I think that's really good. Those pivotal life circumstances, I think was what North pointed out, discipleship moments of when we're going through seasonal changes, life changes, pivotal life circumstances. That's a place where people want to know how their faith can be a resource in that and carry
[00:15:04] them through that. So it's an opportunity thing now with his church, called The Church Has Left the Building. Now, were you interning there when they did that?
[00:16:23] Oh, yeah.
[00:16:24] To experience that.
[00:16:25] Or some version of it way back when.
[00:16:26] Yeah.
[00:16:27] Yeah.
[00:16:28] It's been a little while Jason. worship service is comprised of different blocks. What do I mean? So you have your pre-service block. What are you doing pre-service? You have your welcome block. Maybe your invocation or enter into worship block. You're hearing the word block and then you're responding to the word block. And you're transition to
[00:17:41] back out into the world block. So I think working further ahead is what allows more creativity to happen because I'll be honest, sometimes when I hear, we'll be more creative in what you do. And I just go, I'm already so tired. I mean, so much creative content all the time. But when you're working
[00:19:04] further out, there's more space for that to grow elements of that morning that they had time for, but also that would speak to their heart. And it created this crazy cool intersection of all kinds of people gathering for worship.
[00:20:20] And I don't know some, it worked really well make that Sunday. That's fine, but again, what you're doing is you're getting people out of the routine of just sort of tuning out because we're so familiar with everything that it almost becomes rote.
[00:21:43] And that's what we're trying to avoid.
[00:21:45] And it doesn't matter what style of worship,
[00:21:47] it can happen with every style.
[00:21:48] And I would encourage you, to cause people to go, oh, I wonder what's gonna happen today. I can't wait to see what, you know, or whatever it is. Engage them in a broader sense, across their sensory, what'd you call that? Broad sensory engagement or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Because you may feel stuck because you may feel hemmed in
[00:23:00] because of whatever style your worship is.
[00:23:02] But again, you could do all sorts of things.
[00:23:04] We had a traditional Ash Wednesday service a few years back helping people sign up, check in, put their deposit down, whatever, take some sort of action. It helps them be more engaged in what's going on in the life of the church. So you know it could be the end of your sermon you're saying and listen, remember next week we're gonna do Church Left the Building and we want you
[00:24:20] to sign up for this mission. Pray about it and pick one this week because we
[00:24:25] think it's important that you're there, the most and they carry with them for years. And our leaders, it's for some of them, it's the first time they've into groups and talk about this, is to say, tell us how you came to faith in Jesus. We do it at the end after we've broken the ice a bit, because that's a vulnerable question, but there are some powerful stories of life transformation in these discussions.
[00:27:02] So you can't overdo this,
[00:27:06] because again, I do think stories of life transformation, Maybe you just want to take one of these ideas and run with it or come up with an even better one But hopefully this will spark spark your imagination as we had or you know race toward Easter It's coming and and speaking of which next week this is a little bit of transition So next week we're gonna hear from Stan Ott and Lee Zemur who are gonna talk to us about
[00:28:25] Engaging those guests that are coming in, you know part of engaging the heart is