Welcome to the ninth edition of Mockingbird’s preacher interview series! Since the fall, we’ve been interviewing some of our favorite ministers from diverse church contexts around the country to find out more about what is really working in American Christianity today and how to do church well. (See also eps. 1–8.) Our ninth interview is with longtime Mockingbird contributor, author of a forthcoming book on church planting (stay tuned!), and rector at Grace Anglican Church in Grove City, PA, Ethan Magness.
M: Ethan, thanks so much for joining us! To begin, tell us a bit about your background and your congregation.
EM: Well, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, spent all my life in this area with the exception of my time at college. I was raised near Grove City, which is where our church is located. When I went to college at Eastern University in Philadelphia, I swore I would never come back to Western PA, but you know how that goes. You make a vow to yourself and you break it instantaneously.
I always felt a call to pastoral ministry. I discovered the Episcopal Church when I was in college and then came back to do seminary here in Pittsburgh. Before seminary ended, I, along with some others, decided to plant a church here. It’s been 20 years, and we’ve been here ever since. I also have a wife and three daughters who have been stalwartly supportive for some odd reason.
Our church is Grace Anglican. It is somewhat uncreatively named, I would say. It is an unusual church in some ways, simply because it’s so collegiately oriented. We have about 40 professors and then about 300 undergraduates attending, plus about 350 other residents. So it’s oriented pretty strongly around academic life. And that’s been a blessing and a challenge. It’s also been very energizing and galvanizing for the church.
M: So there’s a university in town?
EM: Yeah, Grove City College, which is a fairly large private Christian college. I live about three blocks away from it. Most of those students come from some form of a Christian background, but only a few grew up in an Anglican-like church. Most come from Presbyterian or nondenominational backgrounds.
M: What are the challenges presented by having a lot of professors in your congregation?
EM: Well, because we have professors from so many different academic backgrounds, you’re dealing with a great deal of variety and sometimes interdepartmental complexities — and on occasion, disputes — and some of that will spill over in your church, and you have to try to navigate those waters. But at the same time, we try to put up a slight boundary between work and church. To say: when we’re here, we attempt to take off some of those professional hats, so that in this place we don’t function primarily as “Professor of English” or “Professor of Political Science” but as brothers and sisters in Jesus.
We also have a lot of administrators from the college, and they don’t want to be on when they’re here. They don’t want to be asked about school politics. They want to simply be a worshipper. So some of those dynamics are occasionally tricky to navigate, but most people understand that boundary and honor it.
It’s also a complexity to have so many students at our church. Are we a church of 600 on a Sunday or 300 on a Sunday? Well, it depends on what day of the year. Summers are emptier because the students and many of the professors are away. And it’s also complicated in terms of things like financial giving, because students can’t really do that. At the same time, we never lack for volunteers because they volunteer for everything, and so our ministries are full of volunteers, and we don’t do the 90-10 rule — where 10% of the people do 90% of the work. Most of our people volunteer, so we have no problems there. But sometimes, our numbers don’t match our finances, at least in terms of how most churches think about finances and planning.
M: So, your church has two main Sunday services — at 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m. Seems like odd times …
EM: The worst worship times in all of Christendom.
M: Haha. Tell me about that.
EM: Yeah, we rent from a Lutheran church in town. They’ve been marvelous. They’re really generous with space and with our rental rate. At the same time, because it’s their building, they get the ideal times for worship. Our 8:30 a.m. service gets about 280 people. Which is crazy. If I were in college, I would never get up that early on a Sunday. And then we have a 5:00 p.m. service, which gets more people, and that service tends to be more family-oriented. There are lots of kids and we have our Christian Ed before that service, so it tends to attract families.
M: Are there differences between the two services in terms of music or liturgy?
EM: No, they’re exactly the same. We use the 2019 Book of Common Prayer, and it offers the opportunity to use the 1662 Communion Canon, which is a briefer, more Protestant version of the service. So we use that. We tend to be “formal low church” at Grace, and that churchmanship is reflected in exactly the same way at both services.
I don’t generally like the divide between traditional and contemporary, just because I think it’s a more modern way of defining worship. Our service is pretty stately and pretty traditional in terms of our musical repertoire, but during communion, we usually sing things that I would say are modern hymnody. That mix tends to be pretty effective for what we’re doing. I don’t think it would be effective in every context. Grace Anglican has recently planted a church that’s about a half hour away, and they have a more broadly contemporary repertoire and it works there. And I think that’s cool. But for our culture and situation, more traditional Protestant hymnody works best.
M: You said the 1662 Communion Canon is “more Protestant.” What do you mean by that?
EM: Within the Episcopal/Anglican parlance, “low church” never means informal. Most people think it does, but it doesn’t. Low church means formal but Protestant worship where you would never use things like sanctus bells and incense, you would never chant the Gospel lesson, and things like that. “High church” tends to mean a more Catholic-looking or ritually-dense worship. So, within our very broad tradition, there are a lot of complexities that enter in because of our breadth — a lot of blessings too — but certainly complexities. You permit a lot under a big tent in terms of worship styles. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is officially known as our Formulary Text, so that’s the thing that officially forms Anglican doctrine, along with the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. And I’m a confessionalist, so I don’t like a situation in which anything goes. I always like having some sort of doctrinal standards. So for us, the Formularies that form our tradition are really important, and we try to be faithful to those in a generous way, in a kind way and, to use an old word, Latitudinarian way, giving people space, but also honoring those things and not jettisoning them.
So that 1662 Prayer Book tends to be more on the Protestant low church side, and I believe in it. So I try to lean into that identity at Grace. But of course, I function really well with people that don’t.
M: Right. It’s not like you won’t get coffee with them.
EM: Exactly. I prefer a martini, but you know.
M: So, what do you think it is that draws newcomers to your church, and what kinds of things do you do to welcome them and encourage them to keep coming back?
EM: I would say it differs between our academics, our townies, and our students. When it comes to students, I would divide them into three groups. Maybe a third of the students are coming from Reformed backgrounds, and sometimes, at least in their own denominational histories, they tended to not have the same experience of the gospel being present every Sunday — the sense of Christ crucified even for very imperfect Christians who don’t really live this thing out with any consistency, right? So they really need a message that says that God expects more failure from us than we expect from ourselves. They’re coming from a background where that message wasn’t as present as it could have been, and they need that very badly.
M: So you’re giving them more of an absolution message than a sanctification message.
EM: Yeah. Which, as we know, ironically, leads to more sanctification.
Then we have another group of students from Pentecostal and nondenominational backgrounds, which I think is interesting. There’s a cultural turn right now toward more ritualized forms of religion. I actually have suspicions about it — I don’t think it’s all good — but I think this turn is due to the fact that we’re all children of deconstruction. Everything from politics to family to religion has been deconstructed, and after people have lived in the acrid ashes of nihilism and cynicism for a long time, they want something that’s more formal, rooted, connected, historic. I think some of that is premature eschatology — they want the kingdom right now in all of its fullness — and I think there are some traditions that proclaim themselves as infallible, and that’s bonkers. I’ve seen the underbelly of the beast and whatever the Church is, it ain’t infallible, ever. Nevertheless, that more ritualized and structured experience is something that people are looking for. So I think some of our Pentecostal and nondenominational folks have come for a rootedness and a creedal faith that has been helpful to them.
The third group among our Grove City College students are the ex-exvangelicals. In other words, they were ex-evangelicals, but they soon discovered that that sucked. It was really humorous: I had one of them say to me, “Look, I’ve discovered that if you give up worshiping Jesus, you end up just worshiping yourself and you’re a worse Messiah than he is,” which is the best line ever. So we get a lot of them — students who got burned over churches’ social stances, or from church hurt, either real or imagined, and eventually they end up at Grace.
After the students, there’s the townies. With them, what we’ve become in some ways — not in all ways — is a place to have a kind of traditional church experience. For example, during Christmas services or Holy Week services, we always get lots of people from town who don’t go to Grace Church normally, because at least some of them see our church as “the town church.” If you want these things done in a more historic way that has a sense of dignity, then Grace does it pretty well, so, they think, we’ll just go there. We get a lot of that.
The Anglican shtick, with all of its complexities, also tends to attract a lot of the academics, who like it because there is a cerebral significance to the liturgy that is quite satisfying. It’s theologically rich, the cadence is lovely, and so forth. But when that’s coupled with a sermon that is affectively-oriented — that is connecting to the rag and bone shop of the heart — plus a physicalized worship service where your body is engaged, where you kneel, make the sign of the cross, and so on, it can be a great way of integrating intellect, emotion, and our physicality. So I think that academics like it for all those reasons. I also think that the simple gospel-centered conception of the Christian life — not just the gospel as the sort of the entryway into Christianity, but as the beating heart that keeps the body alive — that conception is appealing to all of those groups.
Anyway, those are probably the principal reasons why we’re doing okay. But I’ve asked myself that question, too — why people keep coming — because I don’t really always know what I’m doing.
M: Haha. Perhaps you don’t have to.
EM: Yeah. I’m not a great strategic thinker in terms of what programs we need to implement for the next five years. I always say the phrase “five-year plan” was invented by Joseph Stalin, so I’m a little skittish when it comes to employing it too frequently. But at the same time, after 20 years, I’m seeing now that there’s an enormous gift to that kind of systematized thinking. It’s almost like Luther’s “first use of the law.” I just think it keeps things on the right track, and that’s really useful. Thankfully, in ministry, I’ve developed relationships with people at Grace Church who are very good at that kind of thing. So even if I’m not good at it, there are people who are doing it. I’m more of the theologian guy — I’m not even a professional theologian, but my interests are more in line with that, and so I just try to keep the gospel as central as I can.
Our new tagline for the church is “Where the gospel is the main thing in everything,” which I like. And that’s my job, just to keep that central in a warm and winsome way. I think that’s probably the secret to things.
M: So, by God’s grace, you’ve managed to keep this church plant alive for 20 years now. I guess it’s not really a plant anymore — it’s a thoroughly established church. But I’m sure in the early days of the church, it was pretty tenuous, right? Was there a particular decision you made or something you did — like a program or form of outreach — that, looking back, was the key to becoming less tenuous, something specific that helped to solidify and sustain the community, long-term?
EM: I’ve had to think about that question a lot lately because, as you may know, I’m writing a book for Mockingbird right now about church planting. It’s a gospel prolegomena. So I’ve had to ask that question, but I have a very unsatisfying answer for you, which is: no.
When we were first thinking about planting, I was still in seminary. I was only 24 at the time. And we had a group of five people who were leading this effort, none of whom had any experience church planting. But there was a local priest, and they were all coming down to his church, which was about 30 miles from their home. He asked me: “Ethan, would you plant a church so that they would have a place to worship? I think there’s potential in the Grove City area for a plant.” After hemming and hawing, I eventually agreed. But we didn’t have money and we didn’t have experience. We didn’t have a ton of connections in the area — the others knew some people, colleagues and so forth, but not necessarily people that would want to jump ship from their own ecclesiastical communities and join some new upstart thing.
Bob Duncan, our bishop at the time, said: “Ethan, I think you should be very careful and cautious in wanting to do this, because you’ve not yet led a church, and you don’t exactly know what you’re getting into. I’ll support you no matter what, but this is going to be rougher than you think.” And he was 100% right. One of the leaders, in fact, turned out to be, well, difficult is an understatement — he really harmed me. In other words, everything that could go wrong in the first year did, and we lacked the experience to solve it with our own intuitions.
But in spite of all that, what I saw was that “the Lord added unto their number daily those who were being saved.” Somehow new people just kept showing up. And so we had developed within about six months a pretty solid core of people that could keep this thing going. We tried little things here or there — we did mailers and open forums and things like that — but none of that really seemed to garner as much as just a gospel-centered homiletical model. I know maybe that sounds unsophisticated or not creative enough, but for whatever reason, that message resonated. I wish I could say that we did something sexier or more interesting, but we just didn’t.
M: Well, that’s actually encouraging in a way.
EM: Yeah, I’m just not that creative otherwise.
M: I know a lot of churches have communal meals, and that can be a good way to bring the community together. Did you do any of that?
EM: I forgot about that, actually. Yes. My wife and a few other women and men from the congregation would cook, and we would have meals after every 5 p.m. Sunday service. We did that for about a year and a half, and that was really valuable. It did create real bonds. And there was a wonderful brewery right down the road, so after the service and the meal, we would also have an after party. We would go get a beer, and so there was a lot of relational bonding back then, and that helped.
M: I love that. So what is the vision for children and youth ministry in your particular context?
EM: We have an incredible youth ministry. We take a non-siloed approach, so it’s hyperintegrationist. We try to get as many college students and adults from the church as possible involved in children’s and youth ministry. We don’t really take kids out of services — they’re in the worship service. We have a nursery, of course, and during the sermon we have a children’s liturgy for littles who need something more age-appropriate, but they’re in the service for 80% of it. We also have good curriculum. We’ve used Storymakers for a long time, and that’s really worked well. At the church right now, we have about 60 children under the age of 12, and then we have about 60 youth. In the youth ministry, for every two high school students, we have an adult volunteer to mentor them. So again, it’s hyperintegrationist. We do a lot of overlap on purpose that way to really connect them to the main life of the church.
The reason we do that is because one of the trajectories that we’ve seen, and Fuller has done some good work on this, is that if you take students out of worship consistently to do their own thing, then when they graduate, they have no connection or bond with the normative practice of church, so they don’t feel at home there, and they don’t really stick around. So we’re trying to help them integrate into worship, and we also, of course, include them in all liturgical functions. I’ve been really happy with that model, and it seems to work well.
It also has an evangelistic edge to it, too, because within our youth ministry, we have a lot of kids who didn’t grow up in the church, and so they’re getting acclimated to it via the youth ministry. We have a large high school population, especially, that has very little background in church. I just baptized one of them two weeks ago. But it’s a very friendly form of evangelism. “Come hang out with us. You don’t have to nod your head. You can be yourself and have your perspectives and we’ll hear you out, but we also have our own and we’re going to share that kindly, but we’re also not going to also bury it in the name of a false inclusivity.”
M: So what would you say is the most important thing that happens in church on a Sunday?
EM: I think that depending on who you talk to, you’ll get a different answer. For me — I cribbed this language from the Second Vatican Council, though I use it in a very different theological direction — I think the source and summit of the Christian faith is the word of God proclaimed. I actually think that sacramental ministry, including the Lord’s Supper, is a subsidiary crater of word ministry. I think within Lutheranism, you have a parity between word and sacrament. It’s seen as equal. In Anglicanism, it’s different. Anglicanism is a word ministry, and sacraments are a visible manifestation of the word ministry. So that’s why Cranmer calls them visible words, and Paul says that when we eat the Lord’s Supper, we “proclaim” his death. So for us, I think the sermon — which hopefully, in a clear, biblically rooted way, offers people Christ for them as they are with all of their pains, hurts, idiosyncrasies, self-sabotaging, etc. — is the center. And then the sacrament doubles down on that.
So I would say at Grace Church, the word proclaimed is central, and that happens both audibly and then edibly.
M: So you still do the Eucharist at every service?
EM: We do, because that’s just a pattern now in our diocese, and it’s the pattern of most people. At the same time, what frequently happened in Episcopal and Anglican churches during the ’70s is that weekly Communion became the dominant service, and then sermons got short-shrifted and became sort of topical homilies that the minister didn’t put as much time into. So they didn’t really root people in the same way, and I think that actually led to some real crises in the church because people didn’t find themselves as biblically or gospelly oriented. At Grace, we do the Lord’s Supper every week, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to short-shrift the sermon. The sermon is really important.
M: Do you limit yourself to a hard 15 minutes or so?
EM: No. At Grace, the sermons are about 25 minutes, and our whole liturgy is probably like an hour and ten minutes. It’s interesting, different ministers have different opinions about sermon length, but I find that if the minister is deeply connected to the intricate pains of the human condition, has clearly thought through the Bible and this particular pericope in a clear way, and then can proclaim Christ from it — if those things are in place — then I’m cool. Like, I’m on the roller coaster and I’m willing to ride wherever. But if the minister isn’t keyed into those things, then even a five-minute sermon can seem interminably long.
M: So what other advice on preaching might you give to a new minister right out of seminary?
EM: We’ve had so many seminarians over the years, and I always say to do three things. First, others will disagree with this and that’s fine, but I never preach using the golden thread model. Most Anglican/Episcopal services give you three or four lessons per service from the lectionary — an Old Testament lesson, a Psalm, an Epistle lesson, and a Gospel lesson — and preachers try to find the golden thread that connects all of the readings and then preach that thread. The problem with that is that those who designed the lectionary couldn’t make all of those lessons connect thematically, and sometimes they just don’t. So, I don’t know how to say this felicitously, but I think you kind of half-ass your preaching whenever you try to find a golden thread, because you’re never preaching any of the texts in all their richness. You’re just trying to find something that binds them all together. So I say to our preachers, “Just pick one of them to focus on, and try to find two or three gorgeous things about it that you can highlight. Then preach Christ from it.”
That’s the second thing I tell new preachers. In other words, Jesus in Luke 24 says: the law, the writings, and the prophets all speak about not just me but me crucified. So you have to take the Christo-centric and passion-centric model that Jesus himself taught us. That’s why I don’t think grace-centered preaching or Christ-centered preaching is controversial, because it actually is what Jesus said you should do. So being that he said that, I think we probably should listen and preach Christ from the passage.
So, you have to (1) pick a text and preach its depths; (2) connect to Christ; and then, of course, (3) connect to the rag and bone shop of the heart. That’s the third thing. You have to deal with the beleaguered human condition, because everybody in that church is carrying with them enormous amounts of agony and undiscovered darkness within and relational ambivalence. And if you don’t attach the themes of scripture and Christ to those, then it just seems like an academic exercise that is divorced from actual proclamation. It’s more teaching than preaching. So there has to be a sense in which people conclude that whatever the minister said was for me.
“I showed up and this was for me today. Something about me was addressed, and I’m seen, and it matters, and I’m really treasured and forgiven, and I’m going to be okay in the long run.” That has to be a takeaway. And I think most of the seminarians and young clergy I’ve talked to, especially if they grew up appreciating the Christo-centric and passion-centric homiletical model, are decent at the scripture bit. They actually tend to preach too much out of the text because they find everything interesting and think that the single mom who has three jobs will find it equally interesting, which is not true. So they preach too much of the text, and they often do get to Christ in a compelling way. But then I find where they are lacking is that kind of existential connection. I grew up with people that were good at that kind of connection, whether it was Fitz Allison or Janet Broderick or Paul Zahl — they were all geniuses at doing that. So I was forged in those fires, and I got used to it. But I find that’s sometimes the hardest part for the newbies to engage with, and part of that is because they’re just not old enough or they haven’t been to enough therapy yet or because ministry hasn’t done what it does to you yet. Because ministry hurts you, it just does. Like any job would really, but ministry is very people-rich, and so you get hurt a lot. And that kind of experience shapes how you say what you say to and how you connect.
M: I’m curious about how your time during the week is generally organized. Obviously, things constantly come up. Being a priest is all about interruptions. But what might your “average week” look like?
EM: I wish I could tell you. It’s always different. And I’m not a hyperscheduled person. I’m not good at that. I kind of wish I were. I think it would help me in some ways. Of course, I have a Google Calendar, and it has all sorts of things in it. But at the same time, I find that if I overschedule in this business, then I don’t have time for the interruptions in the same way, or the interruptions will end up skewing everything.
That said, I tend to have about four or five pastoral meetings a week with people. I tend to put in about 15 hours into sermons. I probably spend at least 10 hours doing admin. I do premarital counseling at least once a week. Then, of course, there’s weddings and funerals and crises and hospital visits. And as the church has grown, I find that a lot of my life is also given to meeting with staff and dealing with vestry and building quirks. So I would say that every day almost feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. And I kind of like that, in the sense that I like being nimble in ministry.
There are some times where people who are having a moderate crisis just need to wait two hours till I can get there. But there are other times where you just have to cancel what you’re doing and drive there to be with a person. And I like having that kind of nimbleness.
We can see that with Jesus too. I think it was beautiful when he’s asked to heal Jairus’s daughter, then he immediately gets pulled away to heal the woman with the issue of blood, then has to go back and take care of Jairus’s daughter. I just love how he was willing to say, “okay,” and let himself be moved in a different direction. Not always, of course. I mean, he had to go away and pray sometimes and just be alone, but he was also very nimble. And I just appreciate that tendency in people. I think it’s perhaps an overflow of the theology of grace that you don’t take yourself or your schedule so seriously that you end up ignoring people, because even if, by the way, their crisis doesn’t seem to matter to you, it might be their whole world? So I try to be available for those things. I also have a marvelous staff that is willing to do that too.
Even when I don’t over plan, man, my weeks are always full. There’s no such thing as a 40-hour week in this business, at least not for me. Maybe that has to do with my own tendency to overdo it sometimes. I have weeks that are a little more relaxed, but I never have one that’s very empty. Something always fills it up?
M: So as a church that preaches grace, how do you deal with difficult people?
EM: It’s interesting. I’m okay with difficult people. I think they’re there to teach me how to love. I’m not being romantic about it. Sometimes they hurt me. But at the same time, I’ve really appreciated, for example, dealing with borderline personality folks and people with certain mental challenges. Because that helps me to realize the church has all sorts of people in it who are coming from beleaguered backgrounds and are imperfectly healed and imperfectly healing. And that gives me an opportunity to say maybe I could grow too.
The types of difficult people that I have a great deal of trouble with are people that are blind to their own faults and very self-righteous. People that can’t admit that they could be wrong about something. I don’t know what to do with that. It’s really funny too, because sometimes with folks like that I think to myself, “I’ve been offering this message now for so many years and I thought you were hearing it, but it doesn’t seem like it got in.”
M: Haha.
EM: Now, there have been times where we’ve had to confront people. And sometimes when you confront people that are so angry with you, they just leave. You’re saying, “Look, what you’re doing is hurting people,” and they project on you and they blame you, and then they just bolt. But the best of them — and I have seen this on occasion — they’ll be mad at you at first, and then after three days or so they’ll say, “You know, I was really annoyed at you, but that gave me things to think about. Will you work with me?” And that’s beautiful.
Of course, I’m difficult in my own way, too. I don’t always see it because I’m me, but my wife sees it! She’s cool, but she’s Italian, so she does express things. At the same time, God’s been very patient with me and kind to me in the midst of my own calcified nature. It’s taken a while to chip away at that. But I also have seen what can happen in the long run. I’ve worked with some people for 20 years here, and I’ve seen where people who were once hypercritical have been softened and opened. It’s gorgeous. So I’ve gotten to see what happens to people in the long run. I always think God is in the long game. Not everybody has a Saul of Tarsus moment where you get knocked down and the scales fall off. With most of us, it’s like you have astigmatism slowly healed over 30 years, not scales ripped off in a second.
So I want to be there for that. I want to have patience for difficult people. Because I know I’m ridiculous too. But again, the type that’s harder for me are just people that can’t take any ownership over their own faults — because the gospel is predicated on that. It’s like with the Parable of the Prodigal Son — he has two epiphanies, right? “And he came to himself,” and then later, “And he came to his father.” If you can’t come to yourself and have that eye-opening epiphany of: What am I?! What is in me? What snakes are slithering in this heart of mine? Then you never seek any deliverance because you think that’s what other people should do. And so that’s harder. And I don’t have a perfect answer for how to deal with that, other than to trust that maybe God is using this ministry to give them something in the future for when they do have their revelation.
M: I think that’s really an important point. In my own experience, I don’t think I was really ready for the gospel, for whatever reason, when I was 15 or 20 years old. I thought “I’m not really that bad.” And what I was really interested in was hearing some hardcore law.
EM: Totally. I think that attraction to the law is why people really get into what they call discipleship. I believe in discipleship, but not like that. It’s like when people talk about Jesus being your “Lord and Savior.” The “Savior” bit’s the nice bit. The “Lord” bit is when Jesus becomes like General Patton and says, “Enough’s enough. No cheap grace for you!” And that’s stupid.
But with a lot of people, I think it’s because they want to be different. I see this in young ministers. I think what it is is projection. When you start getting mad at your congregation, and you yell at them about how they should change, it’s because the minister wants to change. They wish that they were different. They don’t want to be slothful. They don’t want to drink too much on a Saturday night. They don’t want to have libidinally oriented thoughts every day. They want to be free, and they want other people to be free because they see the damage. But they get so frustrated inside that it’s not happening fast enough that they start hurting their congregations through a lot of rants. I’ve just never seen anybody cured by a rant. I mean, I rant at my kids sometimes and then I’m like, “Why?” I’m contradicting myself, because I know this isn’t going to work. It may shut them up for a little while, but it doesn’t cure the interior. So I like Luther’s dyad of law and gospel.
I’ve been to churches, by the way, that are so gospel-centric that they never include the law, meaning they never talk about what’s actually wrong. They just say, “You’re loved, and God is inclusive” and all that kind of thing. But that approach is so nonbiblical. The biblical message is more dyadic. It’s saying, well, the only way the cross makes sense is that you first recognize your sin, that you come to yourself and realize, Oh, wow, Ethan is kind of menacing. He’s got a lot of issues. But that doesn’t negate him from love. It just means that, holy crap, somebody needed to do something about this! There needed to be a grand intervention.
But then if you have that dyad going into the pulpit, I think that really helps people. You’re not lying about the human condition and pretending that all you need is affirmation. No, what you need is absolution.
M: Absolutely. In other words, you’re preaching the law in its second use, not in its first or third use, right? You’re not saying: here’s how you need to go out and be better.
EM: It’s interesting, I was doing this research about the Lutheran understanding of the law, and I’m convinced that Luther sort of combines the first and third use when he talks about the creational use of the law. But what he suggests is this is just how things are. You can not like it, but it’s still true. That’s just to keep the trains running on time. But the second use, the theological use, is more like this: here’s your CAT scan and it shows the tumors, and you better pay attention to it.
M: And the pain.
EM: Yeah. It kind of unmasks the Phantom of the Opera, right? But that’s needed. And I think the pulpit is a great place for that diagnosis, but it can never end there. That’s why, for example, sermons ought never end with a challenge. I just hate the word “challenge” in general, because it’s a flogging kind of word. And by the way, the minister isn’t keeping his own challenge, right? So that’s funny. But the sermon should always end with Christ for you. Even Paul’s epistles almost always have a gospel ending. They begin with the human condition, then they apply the gospel, then Paul says how you ought to live in light of the gospel, but then he always ends with the gospel. He summarizes it in usually a benediction of sorts to say what Christ has done. So Christ gets the last word. Epistles aren’t sermons, but I just think that’s a good example for sermons — let Christ for you be the last word.
M: Do you have small groups at your church? How do you bring people together in ways that allow them to be vulnerable and develop relationships outside of the normal services?
EM: Yeah. I would actually say that this is a growing edge for us. We’ve always had small groups. We’ve had Christian Ed. We’ve had lots of dinners. We’ve had programs, in other words, that gather people in lots of ways. But our church has doubled in size in the last three years, and that radical shift has really rocked us. It sounds great — who doesn’t want to grow? But growth is really complicated, and it’s often difficult and it hurts ministries in certain ways. It hurts a sense of connectedness between people. For example, now there are two services, so you don’t know who’s going to which one, and there are all these new people, but you don’t know if they’re new. And so it’s really complicated, and we’re working on building that connection big time.
When it comes to small groups, we actually have three models. First, we have sermon discussions where people just talk about the last sermon and how it’s impacting them. Then we have Bible studies. And finally we have prayer groups that just do Evening Prayer together — they get together, have a meal, and do Evening Prayer. That’s been a big new growing thing for us.
So we’re doing all that, but we’re increasing parish dinners as well, just because breaking bread together, to use that old cliché, is beautiful and helpful and holy. It’s really bonding. And we also have lots of people who are doing those sorts of things unofficially, that is, they don’t have a banner over them or a church program title, but they’re doing these things all the time. But I would say that still needs to be a growing edge for us, simply because with that massive growth, we’ve experienced real relational strains. It’s been an unexpected challenge, actually, because some of the people who remember when we were only 20 people in a living room have struggled to adjust. It’s not that way anymore. You don’t know everybody’s children. “Who is that getting baptized? I mean, he’s been here a year and a half, but I’ve never met him.” That kind of thing. So we just need more community, more ways of connecting, and to alter some of those in order to be more inclusive.
M: I love that. Last question: what aspect of your job do you hate the most, and what aspect do you love the most?
EM: Hmm. My kryptonite is relational strain. That is to say, whenever people are estranged from each other or estranged from me personally — living into that kind of pain in order to be a reconciler. I find that kind of thing hard, partly given my own family background, maybe harder than for some other folks, which makes ministry difficult because ministry often involves that kind of thing. I would say I’m growing in that aspect of the job. I think I’m a little better than I used to be, maybe just because it’s happened so much that I’m getting used to it a little bit. But it’s never going to be something that I look forward to. Relational strain is always hard for me. It’s like a Vulcan neck grip, it just makes me lose my power.
What do I love the most? This is cliché, I suppose, or maybe just predictable, but I love ranting and raving about the love of God in Christ for destroyed people. I mean, I love creatively connecting the gospel to people’s hellscapes and agony. It’s my favorite thing to do in the world, to build bridges from the truths of scripture and theology to people’s crises and to see what happens whenever those worlds meet, whenever God meets the sufferer, to see the gorgeous fruit and the loveliness and holiness and cured relationships that flow from that place of reconciliation. That happens so much, and I’m just blown away by it. I just love it so much.
M: Well, Ethan, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much.
