The Living Church Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Executive Director of TLC, the Rev. Dr. Matthew S.C. Olver, interviews the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Sean Rowe.

Presiding Bishop Sean has been in office now for a few months. We talk about his priorities for his term, and what slimming down some of the structures and programs of the Episcopal church might look like. We also ask what he'd say to Episcopalians who disagree about same-sex marriage, what Christian unity means, and what he most wants the Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church in North America to know about him.

From TREC to the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, this conversation should perk the ears of Episcopalians, but will be of interest to anyone in the Anglican family, or any Christian curious about institutional work and hope in a divided Church.

More about Presiding Bishop Sean

Nairobi-Cairo Proposals and IASCUFO

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For a topic that's truly "on pointe," our guest today reminds us of the joys and rewards of freedom and discipline, just in time for Lent: ballet dancer and choreographer Silas Farley.

We discuss his early journey in discipleship and liturgical dance, holy coincidences that connected him with his Russian ballet hero, how discipline can lead to freedom in the Spirit both in dance and liturgical life, and understanding the meaning of "grace."

We hope you've done your work at the barre, because Silas will stretch our imaginations for worship and discipleship, and even what's possible when it comes to dance in church. Hold on to your leotards. 

Silas is Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He's been a teacher and choreographer at places like the New York City Ballet, the Guggenheim, the Washington Ballet, the Met, and all over the world.

More about Silas

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Today we'll be touching down in Kansas, Japan, Africa, China, and the middle east, for some global lessons in leadership.

How are Christians formed as effective leaders, and how do they in turn form effective leaders? How do we learn leadership from beyond our home turf to serve in fearlessly contextualized ways?

My guest today is Dr. Mary Ho. Mary is an expert in strategic leadership, and she is the International Executive Leader of All Nations International, a global Christian missions training and sending organization. She is currently co-teaching a 3-year class on leadership in the global Christian context at Gordon Conwell. Mary is also the author of a number of articles that I'll link today in the show notes including, "When Leaders Drink Tea Together," "The Transcendent Culture of Servant Leadership," and "Growing Global Women Leaders from the Majority World." 

Are there Western leadership models that can be exported elsewhere? When and why?

How do we lead with vision, or even with a charismatic personality, while building nurture rather than going toxic?

What can global north organizational leadership learn from global south Christianity?

And what are some benefits and limits to reading leadership books? 

Take off that leadership cap for just a second. Sit back, relax. Maybe have a cup of tea. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Check out these articles by Mary Ho:

Global Leadership for Global Missions

The Transcendent Culture of Servant Leadership: Principles for 21st Century Global Missions

When Leaders Drink Tea Together: A Critique of Western Christian Leadership in Light of Global Trends

Growing Global Women Leaders from the Majority World

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Chances are if you're listening to this podcast, you're a reader. And you may have had at some point or another a profound experience with a book, probably with more than one. Books shape our lives, and they shape our spiritual lives. In fact, books have become particularly apt tools in the Christian toolkit for spiritual formation.

What is your relationship to reading and growth in the spiritual life?

Do books have to be great or deep in order to bear spiritual fruit? What makes reading a uniquely powerful avenue for spiritual growth? What are some of its dangers to the spiritual life? What is a Christian way to read, if there is such a thing? Do books and reading make us too "ivory tower" for the "real world"? Can books ever help divides between those with more access to elite education and those with less?

Today we'll hear a really fun conversation I had with the Rev. Dr. Lauren Winner, where we looked at some of these questions. Dr. Winner is a well-known Christian author and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke. She's also Vicar of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Louisburg, N.C., and self-proclaimed book lover. (Book addict?) Our conversation takes us from childhood to incarcerated communities, to a top 5 of some of the books that have had a spiritual impact on her life.

Some of the books we discuss in the show:

Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy
At Home in Mitford
Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons
Radical Orthodoxy
The Making of a Sonnet
Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking
Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews
In This House of Brede
Shakespeare Behind Bars: the Power of Drama in a Women's Prison
Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin
Kristin Lavransdatter (trans. Tiina Nunnally)
Catherine of Siena

Register for the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies conference:
Anti-Racist Ministry for a Global Church

If you're an Episcopalian or Anglican, chances are you've probably heard by now of the release of the landmark project on human sexuality and marriage, Living in Love and Faith. Today, we're going to dive into this project with one of its architects.

LLF is a suite of resources just put out by the Church of England — it includes videos, a book, study and teaching materials — and what does it do? It does a lot. It shares the massive results of research, history, storytelling — theological, anecdotal, traditional, scientific, sociological — and it begins to really closely analyze the sources of convergence and divergence between people who have differently formed consciences and viewpoints on marriage and sexuality to try to come to a truly new place of communal discernment.

LLF is not a project intended to give answers. And that may be frustrating to some folks.

So what is the goal of the project? And what's the end game? How do the people who directed the project hope it will serve the Church? How might it likely relate to Lambeth 2022? Is it really new, or is it just a bunch of old news packaged in a new way? What has it uncovered exactly? And how can people, from dioceses to local congregations, use it?

Today we get to hear from the Rev. Canon Dr. Andrew Goddard, who was part of the team who built LLF, interviewed by the Rev. Canon Dr. Jordan Hylden.

"There are no five easy steps to trusting God in darkness."

Let's go back in time a little. Let's not talk about 2020 for a second. Let's talk about 2017. I don't know how things were for you in 2017, but in 2017, the Rev. Tish Harrison Warren had a terrible year. And it inspired a beautiful book.

The book is called Prayer in the Night: for Those Who Work or Watch or Weep; and it takes up the subjects of pain and grief, in all their opaqueness, in all their dailyness, and our vulnerability in the face of them. It also takes up the way pain can shut down the very things we need most when pain comes: prayer, and a sense of God's presence. And yet, it's also a book about "average suffering" and "common heartache" -- it's not about a pandemic; and it's not a memoir. It's about the things most if not all of us will go through in our lifetimes, whatever the state of the world around us: the loss of people we love, loneliness, tragedies that don't space themselves out politely but come in a quick succession. And it's a book shaped around the practice of Compline. How do the prayers of Compline face and pray through the darkness and dangers of the night?

Tish joins us today to talk about her book, and about her story. She is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. Along with Prayer in the Night, she is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, which was Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year. She has worked in a variety of ministries: as a campus minister, an associate rector, in ministries to those in addiction and poverty, and has most recently served as writer-in-residence at Church of the Ascension in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a monthly columnist with Christianity Today, and her articles and essays have appeared in many places including the New York Times.

She interviewed here by the Rev. Dr. Wesley Hill, Associate professor of New Testament at Trinity School for Ministry.

Purchase Tish Harrison Warren's new book, Prayer in the Night.

Register for the free Lenten course, Grace in the Wilderness.

There are basically four options. When you meet someone you disagree with, you can either kill them, create a system to coerce them, run away, or do politics."

That is one of several quotable quotes in our conversation today on democracy, socialism, and Christianity. Even if you're not Political with a big P, meaning maybe you simply don't want to get into it with Uncle Terry on Facebook, both our guests today would probably venture to say it's not easy to avoid being political with a little p. That is, if being political just means finding ways to negotiate our common life together.

Historically speaking, Christianity is in the very root systems of democracy and socialism. What philosophies, and what Christian ideals, are at the heart of both of these systems of organizing common civic life? How have they actually played out?

Our guests today approach democracy and socialism, not as buzz words, but as ways of enhancing and guiding how we think of each other and how we approach citizenship in the communities and countries in which we find ourselves. And they uncover some fascinating history, like:

Why and when did established churches make the turn toward supporting democracy, a system that sought to de-establish them as nationally governing bodies?

Why were some of the great socialist figures in earlier generations also Anglicans?

What does this mean as we make decisions for how to live in our times?

Listen and find out.

Our guests today include:

Dr. Luke Bretherton, Robert E. Cushman Professor of Moral and Political Theology and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke Divinity School, and the author of Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy.

Dr. John Orens, who is the Professor of European History at George Mason University and author of Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and the Music Hall. (Gotta love that title.)

Our conversation is moderated today by Covenant blog author Dr. Stewart Clem, assistant professor of moral theology and director of the Ashley-O’Rourke Center for Health Ministry Leadership at Aquinas Institute of Theology.

In time for Superbowl season, the presiding bishop and two Texans talk about the enjoyment and ethics of American football.

Books, coziness, and Anglophilia: what die-hard Anglicans love about Christmas can also teach us about Advent. We talk with novelist H.S. Cross about her books, English boarding schools, suffering, and nostalgia as "edenic longing."

Explore titles by H.S. Cross.

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The Rev. Gayle Fisher-Stewart and the Rt. Rev. José McLoughlin are seasoned law enforcement officers. Now, as Episcopal clergy, they share their uniquely insightful perspectives on current policing practices as well as hope for change.

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Learn more about the Center for the Study of Faith in Justice.