Rachael Wooldridge is Associate Vicar at St Paul's Church Hammersmith, a Church of England parish in London dating back to 1631, where hundreds of young adults with no prior church background have come to faith in recent years. In this conversation with host Dwight Zscheile, Rachael describes the discipleship program her church built to disciple them well: a nine-month commitment involving daily prayer and scripture, mentoring, small groups, and a fifty-day fasting program called Awaken 50, built in part on the Catholic program Exodus 90. Rather than lowering expectations to make faith more accessible to newcomers, Rachael and her team raised them, and found people hungry to meet the challenge.Rachael also reflects on the leadership shift that made this discipleship program possible: learning to lead through discernment rather than strategic planning, watching for where God seemed to already be at work, and building worship and pastoral care around what they found instead of a five-year vision statement. She shares stories of physical healing during worship, a former drug dealer now preaching in the prison where he served time, and what it's meant for her personally to loosen her grip on control as a leader.Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB)Awaken 50
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.
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
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.
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.