In this episode, I take some time to explore the significant changes at Luther Seminary and their implications for mainline Protestantism. With the decision to sell its remaining property by 2027, a reflection of long-standing financial struggles, I discuss insights from Rob Myalis, an ELCA pastor and Luther alumnus, on sustaining a pipeline of pastors. We look at the shift towards experiential learning and its potential impact on future students, as well as the responsibilities of churches to cultivate their own leaders. This insightful discussion on the evolving landscape of theological education and congregational life is both frightening and hopeful.
Where will our next pastor come from?
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[0:11] Music.
[0:36] Greetings, and welcome to Church and Maine, a podcast for people interested in the intersection of faith, politics, and culture. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. So, if you've been listening to this podcast over the last four years or so, you've heard me say probably more than once that I'm a graduate of Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. I graduated there in 2001 with a Master of Divinity. I was there from the late 90s until 2001. It was an interesting time. The seminary wasn't as ecumenical as it is now, and so being a Disciples of Christ seminarian at a Lutheran seminary made it really interesting.
[1:26] But I really enjoyed my time there. I got to meet a ton of people that I'm proud to call friends. So last week, I found out really out of the blue and probably like a lot of other people found out out of the blue that Luther is planning to sell its remaining property by 2027 and find a new location somewhere in the Twin Cities. Now, in some cases, this isn't surprising. The seminary had been in some bad financial shape about a decade ago, and they basically slowly sold parts of the campus over the last 10 years.
[2:08] So, and this is also not the first time that this seminary has moved, in fact, but it's been in its location in a very nice part of St. Paul for about 120 years. And it's also, to be honest, not the first time that a seminary has had to sell its property and move.
[2:31] United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, which is a United Church of Christ Seminary, sold its property. It's in a suburb of St. Paul, and they sold it probably in the late teens and moved to St. Paul proper. So, this is common. This has happened to other seminaries around the country. But the selling of Luther Seminary is the end of an era. For people who are familiar with that campus, it'll be hard to say goodbye to the beautiful grounds that there are. And there's uncertainty. They're going to be moving to a new place. And there's also going to be, at least according to the news press release that came out, a 10% reduction in staff. So that means maybe saying goodbye to some beloved professors. What's happening at Luther is, in some ways.
[3:35] Part of a larger story. It's part of a larger story of what's going on within the church as a whole, especially within mainline Protestantism, as churches and other related bodies are really struggling of how to make their way in this kind of new and, I think, uncertain era.
[3:55] Last August, I happened to stumble upon an article by an ELCA pastor, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor, and he wrote a provocative post on his blog that was called, Where Will Our Next Pastor Come From? And in that article, this author writes about the difficulties of trying to find pastors for mainline congregation. It's really very hard. It was, in many ways, I think, a very honest article. And today I'm actually going to talk to the author of that blog post, Rob Mialis. Rob is the pastor of St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church in, I hope I'm going to get this right, Littes, Pennsylvania.
[4:41] He writes a blog called Lectionary Greek, which is a great resource for pastors, especially those of us that may have supposedly possibly forgot some of their seminary Greek. He also happens to be a grad of Luther Seminary. He graduated maybe about a decade after I did. So, this is a really good conversation, one that might surprise you, one that may in some ways depress you, but it's a necessary talk about where the church is headed. And I think everyone, whether they're a pastor or a layperson, needs to hear it. So join me as I chat with Rob Mialis.
[5:26] Music.
[5:44] Well, Rob, thanks for taking the time to chat this afternoon. I wanted to just start things off by knowing a little bit more about you and your faith background and kind of your current call.
[5:59] Sure. Well, thanks so much for having me, Dennis. Again, my name is Rob Maialis. I am a Lutheran pastor in the ELCA. I grew up in Pennsylvania. In my 20s, I lived in a lot of really big cities all over the world and all over the country. And then my first call was in the kind of more rural part of Pennsylvania. And I'm in my second call near Lancaster. Maybe some of you are familiar with Lancaster, like the Amish and all of that. And like, you know, like the local giant grocery store in a lot of places that Target has a place where, you know, the Amish can pull in with their horse and buggy. Um, but the town where I met is actually home to a lot of pretty modern businesses in, including the world's premier sound and touring. So like if, when Taylor Swift goes on tour, the people are doing the sound and the lights, they typically live in, in the town where I work. So it's kind of an exciting place where old meets new. Um, yeah, I grew up in a pastor's family. I was born on a Lutheran seminary. Uh, met my wife at a Lutheran seminary. So I did definitely say that I have been really involved in the Lutheran Church, but again, have also had a lot of other experiences. I went to a Roman Catholic university, living in New York City. I went to a variety of churches, including Tim Keller's.
[7:26] Yeah, so I feel like I've had a grounded, kind of rooted background within the Lutheran tradition, but have definitely had experiences in other Protestant and Catholic traditions, both all around the country and even in both Africa and in Europe.
[7:43] So, one of the reasons that I brought you on, and early on, it was to talk about an article you had written back in the last summer, summer of 2024, that had a fascinating title of, Where Will Our Next Pastor Come From? And I still want to talk about it, but I think I wanted to talk to something that is related to that, and something that you and I have in common. Common, yeah. Yeah, is that we're both graduates from Luther Seminary in St. Paul. My experience is a little bit different because of coming from a non-Lutheran background. But even without that, the thing that is fascinating is that on June 10th, the news kind of became public that the seminary is selling their property. So they're not closing. They would be moving to someplace else within the Twin Cities. But I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about that because that has caused a lot of stir, both in the news and online. Obviously, I believe it's still the largest seminary in the ELCA.
[9:03] It has a pretty long history. Um, but I wanted to kind of get your thoughts about that and what do you think that means for kind of the, the church as a whole, especially mainline Protestantism, as we're kind of doing a lot, going through a lot of changes within the church at a time, um, which is related to the article that you, you wrote about a year ago. Again, thank you so much for this conversation, um, um, Yeah, okay. I'll admit that my first reaction was probably a little bit over the top. I kind of feel like it's, you know, you have a friend or maybe a parishioner and you know that the marriage is going to end in divorce, but you kind of hope that it's not. You kind of know it's probably inevitable, if not even for the best, but then when you hear the news, you're still kind of sad about it. I feel like Luther selling its campus was one of those, like, I knew this was coming, but I kind of was hoping that somehow magically it wouldn't. It also happened that my wife and I celebrated our 19th anniversary this week, and we got married at Luther Seminary Chapel. So I think it was just like an emotional, like, I'm looking over these wedding photos and like, gone, sold.
[10:25] You know, kind of like that 90s song, and then they tore down paradise and, you know, put up a parking lot. Um, so, so I, I acknowledge I had a little bit of a strong emotional reaction that is grounded in my own love of a particular set of memories that I have that other people don't. Um, and, and I think there's a lot of reasons why the move makes sense for Luther, especially as they kind of shift who they are.
[10:57] But I think it also just speaks in all of these changes as a church right now, no matter what, even if you have good ideas, you have resources, you have vision, even if those are present, it doesn't mean that grief isn't a part of the necessary change, even innovation process that is happening right now.
[11:21] I think what the seminary's move means is that, The bulk of seminary education is no longer going to be done in a monastic-like setting. Really, I would say mainline Protestantism is really moving away from training pastors as if we're going to be monks and more training us like we're going to be electricians. And I don't mean that like in a derogatory looking down on full-collar work. But I mean like you know an electrician there is some education that is needed but a lot of it is learned more in the field you kind of have to become an apprentice to kind of you know or sort of like a guild mentality where you you really have to kind of be a journey you know an apprentice then a journeyman and then you finally can become you know a full member of the guild.
[12:18] And um and so with that comes a lot of loss but also some real benefits, i think in a lot of ways the structure we had for seminary was financially unsustainable i think it was also classist if not racist in certain dimensions of sort of its exclusivity um so i get why it has to fall i get the benefits of moving to a different model um but i still have grief over what is lost and and fear about how this might play itself out even if i know that this is where the puck is moving so how would you define the grief what What is it do you feel is being lost?
[13:13] One of my favorite novels has been the Harry Potter series. And I kind of viewed seminary for me like a Hogwarts experience where I felt like I was going to some place that had depth and gravity and almost houses within itself and alliances and insider language and incantations we had to learn. And there were late night board games of Settlers of Catan where we were processing the uses of the law as if somehow we would master them, you know, arguing over, you know, Athanasius's understanding of the two natures of Christ, thinking about.
[14:02] Yeah, was, is Anselm really one who favored penal substitution or did he have a different conception of the atonement?
[14:10] How the early church did pastoral care that was really far more congregational care and how can we understand that model? How can we learn from our African churches that are practicing with evangelists within a, within a, you know, we would consider a mainline denomination, being open to the gifts of the spirit in ways that maybe were not. So I just felt like to enter Lutheran Seminary was to enter the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of something bigger than ourselves, but it was grounded in a locality. And so I just felt like that was just so beautiful.
[14:46] And so I just think that process of being in a community together where we are wrestling with our calls and within this historic conversation that we knew was at least two, if not three or four thousand years old was just so glorious. And I think if people go to seminary in a more distributed fashion where they're in cohorts, again, there's something really powerful about that. The contextual learning piece is wonderful. But I do think you miss that luxury of going somewhere and just immersing oneself in that, I don't want to say eternal, but getting pretty close in terms of human frame of an eternal dialogue around God that I just really loved.
[15:41] I thought it was interesting kind of observing some of the reactions from people, especially on Facebook, that I knew. And there was a lot of grieving of the physical, the loss of physical space. At the same time, I found out about it actually in a meeting in Virginia with several other people in a pastoral cohort, and maybe I think two or three of those people who are in that cohort of 10 total, besides myself, were also grads from Luther. And one of them was distributed learning and so his was a very different experience as opposed to everyone else's experience.
[16:40] I still haven't really kind of talked to him about that yet but I think it's fascinating, people who may have graduated within the last maybe 10 years and older, have a different understanding of the place as opposed probably to people who graduated within the last 10 years. I think that's a really fair observation. I was on the alumni council in the mid kind of teens. And when I went back to campus, I was struck by how kind of dead it had become compared to when we were there kind of in the kind of the single digits of the 2000s, that it really was just a different campus. And smaller. Yeah, I think for a lot of people, it's not –.
[17:31] It's not as much of a loss as those of us who sort of remember the Hogwarts era. And I think for people to have been there in the last couple of years, I don't think they're as sentimentally as attached. The campus life wasn't as rich. They were likely distributed students. So I think for some people, it's probably not that big of a loss. And it's probably more of like, hey, if the seminary can take its assets and build or buy a structure that makes more sense for their needs, isn't that a model for actually how congregations could function in this time?
[18:06] So I think, yeah. So in that sense, I wish that maybe the seminary had also in their announcement started to put forward a stronger vision for what they actually hope to do. I thought instead of just adjectives like this is nimble. I think they needed a vision and to say like, hey, we're going to be in the wilderness, but there is a promised land and this is what the promised land looks like. Here's what the milk and honey flowing is like. And I think in terms of if I would like to offer a critique here in terms of leadership, it is bold leadership to say the mission is more important than the place. But I think they needed then to really heavily articulate what actually is the mission and not in that really 10 foot like to educate future leaders. I mean, like, how is this actually going to be done? And what is this actually going to look like? So I think I needed to articulate a vision for what's going to happen next. I think that really would have helped.
[19:00] Yeah, I kind of wonder if that's, and I think that that's an interesting viewpoint, because I wonder if that's also a problem within just the church in general, is that we're dealing with a time where there is a lot of change, and ways that we did things don't always work as well anymore. And so we know that we have to change, but we don't have a vision for what does that look like. And that vision is going to maybe change itself, but we're still like, we don't really know how to describe or even try to dream what that can look like. I think in academia, we love words like liminal. It's a liminal space, a liminal time.
[19:49] But like people, businesses still have, businesses are all facing great upheavals and they still have to tell their employees, this is what we're going to do. even if we're wrong. Um, so I appreciate your saying that we, we don't necessarily know where this is going to. Um, but at the very least they deserve us to tell us the whispers of the spies report of what the promised land might look like. Um, even if we don't know it fully, uh, just cause again, I think that would really help into lessened anxiety and could help us say like, okay, like the vision is we're not going to do sustained campus living. We're going to do distributed learning that has small pockets where we need 40 beds because we're just going to do a cohort model and we're going to be the best cohort seminary education you can possibly find. Like I would just want to hear what that vision is. Because if they don't have that vision, then they can sell the land. But how are they possibly going to know what they're supposed to buy or to rent or to renovate? So there's got to be some vision that's animating this. And I think they owe it to the stakeholders to start to come out with that vision a whole lot more.
[20:59] Yeah, because I think the vision, even just what you had thrown out earlier of seeing seminary education less as, as you said, Hogwarts, or even a monastic, but more of like a trade and trade school, is in some ways a vision. And at least it's a shape of what it can look like and at least could maybe lead some people or at least help people understand, okay, so this is where we're going. Whereas maybe saying that we just need to be nimble, which I never like because everyone uses that language, whether it's business or nonprofits, which also usually means, hi, we're going to cut people, which you've got to do. I'm not saying you don't need to do that, but let's just be honest. It's like, we're going to be nimble. Okay, so who's losing their job? And so it's, you know, like there needs to be more. How do we flesh this out?
[22:04] Yeah. The thing that I might also just sort of segue into what I was writing about, it also really changes who and how people go to seminary. So you really.
[22:21] If you were a young person who had some positive experience in youth ministry with the church campus ministry camps, you're in your young 20s like I know what to do with my life you talk to maybe a pastor at some church you've been at for three months, and they're like oh wanted to go to seminar I went to you're like yeah okay maybe I'll try it and you go do it but I think for a lot of people now you're going to need to come already grounded in a congregation.
[22:51] And I think that opens up the door for a lot of people. But I think for some people, um, That requires a certain rootedness that most people in their 20s don't yet have. In other words, I think this really shifts the model far more towards people in their 30s and 40s, if not older, rather than people in their 20s. Because when I was 22, 23, I was interested in immersing myself in a community at that point. And I, the thought of like pinning myself down to one congregation where I would be after I graduated, that just wouldn't, that would have been too limiting of a vision for myself.
[23:36] And I, and what I think is, so from the people going inside, again, they're probably going to be older and more established, rooted, because you have to have roots now in order for the system to work. I mean, you have to be tied to—in other words, your distributed programs are saying that the loss of the monastic experience is going to be replaced by hands-on experience in a congregation. And for a lot of people, that's a fine tradeoff. I don't know out of that how we actually produce the next generation of people that get their PhDs that can actually teach in that environment. But let's save that question for another day. And just say then again, the people coming in are probably older, needing to be more rooted. The second thing, though, from a congregational perspective, this really puts a premium on congregations producing their own pastors.
[24:35] The system just isn't anymore going to be producing lots of unattached people at their young ages of life willing to go wherever. This is going to produce a lot of second career people who have a particular place and time where they are connected, where their spouse has health insurance, or their kids are in school, where they finally have property, where they have friends in a community, and they're going to want to be there. So I think it really shifts. So if you're a church right now, you've really got to be asking yourself, does this model really produce nearly enough pastors for the rank and file church? And I think the answer is no. This model is incredibly going to favor large churches that can say to somebody, hey, can you work 20 hours a week doing youth ministry while you go to seminary and take the classes? This is not going to be the 47 or 74 people a Sunday where they're scraping every penny just to pay a pass without health insurance. They're not going to have the money for this kind of stuff. So I think, or maybe churches that have endowments or other weird super zips, but I think this really shifts the pressure, like I've been saying in the article I wrote a year ago, where the synods, the judicatories, the districts, whatever you call them in your particular body, likely just will not have enough resources.
[26:01] And the congregations, if they're serious about having somebody, it's probably going to be somebody homegrown who has anywhere from a weekend's worth to four years of training. And I think the training standards are really going to go down now. And I think it's just going to be the wild west as congregations desperately seek to find somebody who can minister to them.
[26:25] One thing that you talked about earlier about the current system and changing system is that basically that it could be rather limiting. And to use your words, you could say it could be classist and maybe in some ways racist. And that made me kind of think about that, because especially in the context of Luther.
[26:52] I was probably one of the few persons of color at the seminary. And I also know that it was particularly for some people, and again, because I'm not a Lutheran, it was a bit easier. But if you were a person of color and Lutheran, I think it could be harder because there were certain networks or things that may—, make you feel outside of the process or outside of the culture, could distributive learning change that and make it a bit more that more people have more of a chance to be kind of a part of something where they're kind of rooted in their communities, but then also can come together and meet in a cohort and maybe even meet physically a few times during the year so that it's a different way of kind of creating relationships that doesn't require just kind of totally trying to fit in when you may not.
[28:03] So I would, I would say that demographically I would be part of the majority culture. I mean, I super Lutheran. I mean, I, I speak and have lived in Germany. Like, you know, like on the Lutheran scale, I score a lot of points, but I felt like an outsider at Luther because I didn't grow up in the upper Midwest. I had no Norwegian heritage. um i i felt very much aware of like different cultural things so there definitely was a culture at luther that was shaped a lot by kids coming out of like four or five upper midwestern kind of historically lutheran schools no doubt um yeah like quickly i had to learn all about the differences in gustavus adolphus and concordia and saint olaf and why they all didn't like each other, or why they all loved each other, whatever. I mean, it just was a whole thing. And so culturally, I think there was a way in which the seminary, this is why my experience may be different than a lot of others. I felt ultimately that I was a part of that community, took about a couple months. Actually, it's really funny. When I first got there, I think I was like, why is everybody so quiet, indirect, never critical to people's faces? They never interrupt. There's like that three second pause after everybody finishes something. This is so slow.
[29:32] Then like my second year, a couple of people from the East Coast showed up at Luther and I was like, why do they talk about themselves so loudly and interrupt everybody all the time?
[29:44] So yeah, there's definitely cultural norms. And I think if you have a distribution distributed model, those norms are going to be shaped by all these different groups that are coming together. And there might not be singularly like a monolithic or a dominant culture. So I could see there could be some more fissures and cracks where people could fit in more easily.
[30:05] Hmm. And again, you wouldn't have to be at a point in your life where you could say, oh, for two or three years, I can go without making any money and just simply run up student debt, which is what many of the people going 20 years ago were in a position to be able to do. Yep. And a lot of people did. Yeah. So again, so to me, I see, like, I have my own sentimental grief. I have a sort of an intellectual openness to this. But I also think just concretely, like when it goes back to like how the denomination and the structure is changing, seminaries and synods are just, or mid-level adjudicatories are just not going to be as powerful anymore. And their power was in their numbers and their ability to just kind of supply congregations and be the gatekeepers for pastors. And if they don't have that supply anymore, then congregations aren't beholden to that. And congregations are just going to do whatever they want because they're anxious and they want pulpits, people in their pulpits. So I think it just hastens, to me, this is one more of the canary in the coal mine in terms of the just radical shifts, the tectonic plate shifts in terms of how the power works within Protestant denominations. And the winners of the change of Luther are the largest ELCA churches in the country, because now this means that they really, yeah, they're going to call the shots in terms of where they send candidates.
[31:33] And they're the ones that are going to be doing most of the educating of pastors now.
[31:39] So then where does that leave smaller congregations? What it leaves them is negotiating with synods around how to get pastors who probably don't get as much theological education. This is just what we're seeing at the margins where people are suddenly beg, borrowing, and stealing to find pastors.
[32:02] So I think that it may be that Luther Seminary is able to develop all sorts of ways to The ELCA used to have all of these different rosters of various levels of education, but because we're so clerical, like we literally had a multi-tiered system of rostering with like kind of one year of seminary, two years of seminary, three years of seminary, four years of seminary, and we just kind of all compressed it into one. We don't have any more of sort of that kind of like along the way people that we could deploy quicker. So it may be that the church is able to come up with sort of some evangelists or whatever title they want to use to kind of do this. But my sense is that it won't be driven by the national church, that different seminaries will be coming up with different programs, different synods or different kind of districts will be coming up with their own programs. I just think it's the balkanization of the church where everybody's kind of going to do their, in an ecosystem that's collapsing, people will find a way to survive. And they will likely care less about the other members of the ecosystem and more about their own denomination, their own region, their own synod, their own district, rather than the whole.
[33:16] That's my sobering take. So then what does that mean for the church? I mean, when you kind of have everything that's so kind of bespoke.
[33:26] You know, what does that look like? Is it more Wild West? Is it more? Oh, yeah. I just see it being the Wild West because I think, you know, I just found out I'm in a synod, again, a mid-level adjudicatory. We have 220 churches in central Pennsylvania. I just found out that last year, half of those churches didn't have a baptism.
[33:49] And those are churches that reported, right? So you figure a lot of churches that didn't have baptisms, they're not the one. So that statistic of half is an upper bound. It's probably only like a third of churches in my synod actually had a baptism last year.
[34:06] And that just means that there's so much more contraction that's likely to happen. So I think there'll be a way in 10 or 15 years when different networks have solidified that likely ignore some old denominational lines. I think there'll be a handful of seminaries that have figured out how to do either in-person as a niche or distributed. I just think the next 10 to 15 years are going to be a lot of people pushing in a lot of different directions for their own survival. And then we'll get on the other side, and there'll be a lot fewer mainline Protestant institutions, but those that survive will be those that adapt it. And they'll probably be healthier. So I think it's going to be just a grand winnowing the next like 10 years or so, which again is terrifying. There's going to be a lot of grief, a lot of bad theology, a lot of really cool things that happen, a lot of innovation.
[35:11] And in the end, we'll kind of like take stock and be like, whoa, that was a whole kind of quarter century of seeing the breakdown of 20th century institutions.
[35:24] And again, then we'll have them be on their side. And I think we'll have at least a better sense at that point of who made the right bets and what institutions had the right combination of leadership, of piety, to kind of survive.
[35:43] What do you see happening, especially kind of talking about Luther but also congregations that, I mean, how do we kind of make sure in this time, or maybe we don't, maybe we're not able to do this, but in a time when there's going to be kind of, in some ways, a lot of chaos that will ultimately lead to some kind of a new paradigm, is there a way of making sure that there aren't kind of the downsides of that chaos? Where there could be abuse of some type. So it's going to be creative disruption. Hopefully it's just not creative destruction. Yeah. So how do we have this, how do we acknowledge there's going to be disruption without it being totally destructive? I don't know. That's something I ask myself about a lot. You know, what is my obligation to other congregations in my area? Who can I help? Who would it be presumptuous of me to think that I could help?
[36:50] So I'm not sure about that. I think, again, there will be congregations of different sizes and shapes and historical heritages that are able to kind of figure it out. But I just don't know how to, besides really trying to be open to working with churches in creative ways, I just don't know how there's not going to be a lot of hurt feelings. And people like, you know, I was talking to the former president of Luther Seminary. He now is working at a seminary in Florida that he's helped get off the ground that other ELCA seminaries don't like, but the bishop down there thinks it's a great way for them to train people who are able to serve in Hispanic communities. So from their vantage point, they're doing something that is innovative, reaching out to a community that wasn't able to acculturate or have easy access to Lutheran theological education. Lutheran seminaries look at them as like, he went rogue. So, yeah, I think it's going to be a lot of misunderstanding of each other and hopefully then just a lot of grace that everybody's trying ultimately to do what's best. But it's going to get messy, I believe.
[38:11] Where do you think deacons fall in all of this? Because that's, in the LCA tradition, that has, it doesn't have a long history, or it has some predecessor bodies, but I do see more and more churches kind of having deacons. Is that going to be part of the future? Hmm well first i i'm gonna need to go pretty soon for a my church is gonna actually doing a strategic planning meeting tonight but that question is kryptonite for me because my wife is a deacon in the lutheran church oh okay so you'll have to you'll have to call both of us back and then we can both talk about that so i want to be careful i got it if my wife hears this that i don't say anything uh but you know i the short answer is yeah there's gonna have to be, ways in which we have people in ministry that aren't just going through word and sacrament ministry, that we're training for different ministries. The history of the deaconate and the Lutheran church is complex, varied. It's its own sort of romance and tragedy novel all at once. But definitely there are plenty of churches that have been able to utilize.
[39:28] Non-pastors who have theological education, who have been consecrated or now ordained, as well as other forms of lay leadership. So just to sort of the broadest answer is, There's going to be all sorts of levels of education and alignments of training to make this work. Okay.
[39:50] Well, I do want to, knowing that you have, keep you and that you have a heart out. I do have one final question is, if people want to know and communicate with you a little bit more, where should they go? And this is also a way of letting people know about your blog. Sure yeah so i i do a greek blog sometimes hebrew but on the lectionary passages, and it's lectionarygreek.blogspot.com lectionarygreek.blogspot.com you just type in rob my alles greek it'll probably take you there and i also have some passages there from the narrative lectionary you can search by scripture um and i've just that hopefully provide some nuggets for preaching you know a couple maybe words tenses um constructions um you know verb tenses so forth um yeah that's probably the the best place to go you can also just email me you can do uh yeah rob you either do my work at rev.rob rev.rob at st paul lit it's dot net. And if that's too hard, you can just do robertmialis at yahoo.com.
[41:03] But that's how we, that's how you, that's actually how we ended up connecting. And I love that it's become a resource for others. And it gets me to meet people who I have something in common with. We both went to Luther Seminary, yet you're in a different denomination in a different state, yet we still have the word in common. So maybe we can end on a note of common that as the church moves ahead, we may not have the same denominational structures. They may all be crumbling in some ways, But the word endures. Yep. And that's the final hope. I think so. I think the unity in Christ is what matters in the end. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, Rob, thank you so much for this time. And hopefully we can talk again and maybe include your wife to talk about the diaconate a little bit more. Yeah, I know. She's much better looking than I am. So you would be better. So anyway, well, hey, thank you so much and have a good night. All right. Take care. We'll be right back.
[41:57] Music.
[42:26] So I'm really thankful for Rob for taking the time. And this was kind of last minute to put it together. So I'm thankful for him to chat with me on this about this important issue I'd like to know what people's thoughts are especially if you are a part of a graduate of Luther Seminary and even if you're a graduate of another ELCA seminary there are others out there Wartburg Trinity, I know there are others that are out there I'd love to hear what you are thinking about all of this um, If you would like, please drop me an email at churchandmain, that's all one word, at substack.com. I will include a link to Rob's article. I think, like I said, it was a really good article and I think worth reading.
[43:24] Also, if you want to learn more about the podcast, if you want to listen to past episodes, visit churchandmain.org. And you can also go to churchandmain.substack.com to read related articles. If you'd like to donate, you can do that two ways. You can donate via Substack. So go to the Substack site. You can also go to Buy Me a Coffee to leave a donation. The link is in the show notes, and you can do that there as well. So doing that helps to make sure that I can continue to produce great contents such as this episode. Don't forget to rate and review this podcast. You can do that on your favorite podcast app. And that really also helps others find the podcast. So I would really love if you did that. And pass the episode along to family and friends who might be interested. That is it for this episode of Church and Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. Thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.
[44:43] Music.
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