In this episode, I speak with Martha Tatarnik, a priest at St. George's Anglican Church and co-host of the Future Christian podcast. We explore the challenges of discussing success and failure in church leadership, drawing from Martha's 2023 article, "It's Hard to Talk About Success in the Church." She shares her experiences in a downtown community grappling with societal issues, emphasizing the importance of humility and community narratives over individual accomplishments. We also discuss the need for meaningful connections in faith communities and how grace underpins both successes and setbacks in ministry.
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[0:07] Music.
[0:35] Hello, and welcome to Church in Maine, a podcast for people interested in seeing where faith, politics, and culture intersect. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. So, over the years, you have heard me talk with Loren Richmond, Jr., the host of the Future Christian podcast. He has been on this podcast a few times. I've been on his a few times. And today, I actually get to talk with his co-host, Martha Tatarnik. Martha is a priest at St. George's Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She's also the author of two books, Why Gather? The Hope and Promise of the Church and The Living Diet, A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating. I have her on this episode to talk about an article that she wrote in 2023 called, It's hard to talk about success in the church. If you've are anyone that is, you know, basically been in the church, even within the last five years, you know, that there is a struggle about talking about the successes that happened, but especially the failures.
[1:45] I'm much more familiar with those failures. So I hope that you will listen to the, uh, to this conversation that I had, uh, with Martha to Tarnik.
[1:55] Music.
[2:13] So, Martha, I'm glad that you were able to join us, join me on the podcast. And this is kind of interesting because I've heard a little bit, a lot about you through Lauren and through Future Christian. So, I've also been listening to your episodes. And actually, we will be kind of on an episode coming up on Future Christian coming up, talking about the 2024 election. So, it's kind of like we've kind of known each other, but kind of tangentially. Yeah. Yeah, it's really fun to be invited onto church and Maine, and I'm glad that our paths have crossed in the podcast universe. Yeah. Well, I wanted to start by talking a little bit, to share with people a little bit about yourself, your faith journey, and then the context of where you serve in Ontario, and kind of to go from there. That sounds great. Yeah, where do you want me to start? Why don't we talk just first about your religious background? Okay. Well, I grew up in a family that I like to say was politely religious.
[3:28] So, we did go to church, although my dad took quite a spell off of being part of organized religion. And he got kind of disenfranchised with what he experienced in small town Ontario as kind of a rampant judgmentalism that seemed to be firing from the people.
[3:55] From church sources in town. So we ended up sort of after a little break from being part of the church, going to an Anglican church in town, the Anglican church in town, because a friend of my parents moved to town and was an Anglican priest. So they went the first day, we trotted down the street and went to welcome him. And that just seemed to be kind of the right fit for everybody in my family, aside from maybe my brother. But we just felt a connection, I think my parents especially, and then as I was growing up, a connection to the symbolism and sacramentalism of the church, but also the intellectual freedom and the ability to kind of wrestle with big questions within the life of faith.
[5:04] So that became a regular feature of our lives. But when I was around 15 years old, I started to feel a sense of calling to the Anglican priesthood, which, despite being in a relatively religious family, felt extremely embarrassing and inconvenient to have to admit that I thought I was going to become an Anglican priest. Because that wasn't really what anybody in my family had in mind for me or what I had in mind for myself. I was going to be a lawyer.
[5:50] And, you know.
[5:54] Sort of talking too vigorously about religion wasn't really a feature of our supper tables and so on. Yeah. So, I really struggled against that sense of calling for a while. I did a lot of the things that I think people do when they don't want to pay attention to what God is calling them to do and be. You know, I tried to avoid, I tried to bargain, I tried to do a bunch of things and really at a fairly young age kind of realized, okay, like, I could spend a lot of time in agony trying to do and be something else. But, like, I know this is what I'm supposed to do. So, yeah, that was my first big experience of surrender. And I was ordained right out of, like, I went right from undergrad into seminary. I haven't had any other career other than being in the church. I celebrated my 20th anniversary of ordination last year.
[7:20] And, you know, by and large has been a really happy experience of ministry, despite being dragged into it kind of kicking and screaming. So, and what and where do you serve and what is that context like? Yeah, so for about the last 10 years, actually coming up to 11 years, I've been in downtown St. Catharines. So St. Catharines is just up the road from Niagara Falls. We're really close to the border with the United States. And St. Catharines is a small city, but it really has like kind of big city downtown problems. So the church that I serve, St. George's, is a bigger Anglican church.
[8:13] You know, Anglican churches in Canada are on a different scale than like kind of the mega churches of the U.S., but for an Anglican church, it's big. And it's a historic church it was founded in 1792 and.
[8:33] And, you know, a kind of big, beautiful, historic building, all of the bells and whistles of mainline organized religion, like the pipe organ and the stained glass and the big choir and all of those lovely traditional things. But also just such a legacy of service to those who are like most disenfranchised in the downtown. And over the course of the past 10 years, I've just seen that need escalate beyond anything I could have imagined, just seeing the lack of housing and the opioid crisis and the mental health difficulties. We have a daily breakfast program at the church, so every day we are kind of face-to-face with all of the attending challenges of trying to serve that community, and I'm just really proud of how faithfully the church seeks to do that.
[9:53] Yeah, I think it's interesting, and I kind of strangely consider myself a Canadophile because I grew up in Flint, Michigan, which is where we're located is about an hour east and an hour south of Canada. Right, okay. If we went an hour east, we went to Sarnia and an hour south to Windsor. And so you could pick up the local Canadian station from Windsor. And so I still kind of follow stuff. And I think it's fascinating to hear how much, especially the opioid crisis, is as much an issue in Canada as it has been in the United States. Yeah. It's really tragic. It is. It's really tragic. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people just are not making it.
[10:46] And do you know how our church is trying to handle that crisis? Well, I would say, like, for our church anyway, it's like a multi-pronged approach. Like, there is just the Band-Aid that is not nothing of, like, feeding people, right? So, like, we're not addressing food insecurity, but, like, we are helping alleviate hunger.
[11:13] But then we've also been really involved in trying to champion some more systemic change. I've been really involved in what is called a community benefits network which seeks to tie some like tangible benefits back into the community around major development projects and kind of leveraging those benefits. You know, opportunities for significant profit into securing some things that the community really needs, especially around, like, investment in young people and affordable housing and that kind of thing. So, I mean, that's an uphill battle, like changing culture is an uphill battle, but I think it speaks well to the church that, like, not just St. George's, but the church in general that, you know, we are seen because of our feeding programs and that kind of thing, we are seen as an important voice in trying to champion that more systemic change.
[12:30] Well, I think one of the things that have been, you know, in our society a challenge for churches is our changing culture. And I think that there was a case to be made maybe about a decade ago that how both America, the United States, and Canada, and how we were handling religion was very different, and that I would say, coming from my viewpoint, that Canada was farther along in secularization than we were. I think that's changed, that we are actually.
[13:11] Really secularizing very fast here in America, and that has had a lot of changes. Most of it's not good.
[13:21] But one of the things that I wanted to talk about in that context was an article you wrote about a year and a half ago that was entitled, It's Hard to Talk About Success in the church. And you kind of talked about a gathering of other priests and how everyone was kind of talking about what's going on, talking shop, basically. But that one pastor said, and it says here, no one wants to hear about success. Can you kind of go into a little bit of explanation of why is that? Why were people hard to talk about that? And then also it's flip side I think people don't want to talk about failure in the church too yeah yeah for sure um I mean we we kind of all have our various relationships with gatherings of clergy because it can so easily devolve and pardon my language into like bitch and brag sessions right like it It can just become like wearisome in terms of the front, I think, that people feel like they need to put up for their fellow colleagues.
[14:39] Because of exactly what I said in that article it can be really hard to talk about both success and failure when things are going well or when you know you're experiencing some kind of traditional version of growth it yeah it can feel to fellow colleagues like that diminishes them in some way. Or if that's not their experience, then they aren't that receptive to hearing about somebody's experience being different.
[15:23] And I've had those experiences of church growth and I have sort of been told, like, don't talk about that. Um, and, and I've experienced the flip side as well, which is that, uh, you know, when things don't work out, that can be really hard to talk about as well because, um, because it, uh, feels embarrassing. It feels like I have done something wrong. And, you know, I think both things, ends of that, well, I think it's the flip side of the same coin, to be honest, because I think whether you're the one talking about those things or whether you're the one hearing about those things, what happens is the ego gets very tripped up.
[16:27] It's so easy to talk about all of these things and to feel all of these things as being about me and about like my self-worth as a leader in the church and whether I am measuring up or not, whether I have like attained something and succeeded in something or whether I have failed. And I, you know, I think that that hero worship and scapegoating of church leaders really feeds into that culture. Like it can just so easily feel like it's all on my shoulders and it's about me. And our congregations can treat it as that kind of question too like when things go well we do get sort of um put on a pedestal and like uh isn't this amazing and like it's easy to succumb to that messiah complex and then when things don't go the way that we wanted or expected or hoped um it's easy to to feel scapegoated it's easy to feel like, oh, well, this is about me.
[17:50] Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting things that's hard to, especially for, I think for pastors especially, is that it's not to say that we can't do things that can affect the congregation. But, one, I think that there are things that are far beyond us that are happening. And two it seems like the whole point is to be faithful and being faithful to god is not always.
[18:23] Going to work out the way that we plan yeah yeah yeah i um you know i just really love that word disciple because like disciple is a student and um i think that a huge component of being faithful is being willing to learn and like the only way to learn is to is to try things is to be you know, brave enough to discern and to try. And like, I was listening to another podcast in which the interviewees said, like, so much of ministry these days is kind of like throwing noodles at the wall and seeing what sticks. Like, unless your ministry is just sort of littered with, like, things that haven't worked out, then are you really being faithful? Like, um, like you have to try some things and then you have to learn from those things. And, um, I, but it's, it is scary to do that when it, it feels like it's all about me. Mm-hmm.
[19:48] How do you think that we can learn, especially that to, I mean, for lack of a better word, get ourselves out, get out of the way, to kind of allow God to work? And because I think you're right, it does, it's really easy to think it's all on us. And so are there any things that you have done to learn to kind of.
[20:19] Remind yourself it's not about you. I mean, okay, so I could answer that question in some obvious ways that I think are super important. Things like prayer is really important. And, like, having a strong sense of team in our churches, whether that's paid staff or, you know, a combination of people in the congregation and paid staff. Like, you know, I think that those pieces are really important. Prayer kind of being the most obvious and central one. But I would just like go back to what you said a couple of minutes ago about forces bigger than us sort of being at work.
[21:14] And obviously some of those forces are divine forces. And so like we need to be just always like coming back to God's agency and all
[21:27] of this. and God's promise and God's faithfulness, for sure. But there are also those bigger forces at work that I think you're also hinting at, which is like secularism and decline in religious participation. And for me, and I think for lots of my colleagues, um...
[21:57] Being honest about that is hopeful and helpful.
[22:01] Now, like there's, it can also feel scary. So there's also like very much in my denomination anyway, there is a sort of turtling effect that can go on where like we want to pretend that everything is the same. And we want to imagine that there are easy answers, like, if you're just Christ-centered enough, it's all going to be fine. And, you know, if you just follow this winning formula, then, like, secularism isn't going to be a thing. Um, so, like, I, I actually think that when you don't name what's really going on, I think that that leaves people feeling isolated and anxious, and they kind of feel like it is all about them. And it's all up to you. I think that when we talk about those bigger forces of institutional religious decline and name them for what they are, I find hope in that because it clarifies like what are...
[23:29] Our agency actually is in all of this. And it's not to solve the problem of secularism or save the institutional church as we know it. It is, as you said, faithfulness. It is like clarity of the gospel and what the gospel calls us to do. And I think it's kind of the courage to do that without being totally hung up on results, the results generally being kind of outside of our control. Now, I mean, like, obviously I am employed by the church and I have some pretty practical reasons why I'd like to, you know, why I'd love the institutional church to continue the way that it currently
[24:28] is. I'd like to have a job. I'd like the people that I serve to have a church. I'm very committed to the institutional church. It's just, I have to be really clear about what I can and can't do to serve it.
[24:48] Kind of speaking of those larger forces, I mean, you reference an article in The Atlantic that came from a book called The Great Dechurching, and kind of about how, really 21st century, I think, North American culture has become a lot more individualized, atomized. How do you think that the church responds to that? And also in this context of trying to be faithful and not necessarily so focused on results.
[25:27] Yeah, I mean, it is a great book. I had an opportunity to interview Michael Graham, who was one of the authors for the podcast I'm involved with, Future Christian. It was a really good conversation and a really good read. Um, and I think, yeah, one of the, one of the most interesting things that the statistics and the research tell us, and I, this really bears up in my experience, is that, um.
[25:57] The reason why most people leave the church is for very boring reasons. Like it's not, I mean, people do leave because they get like burned by the church or their beliefs change or whatever. That does happen for sure. But the majority of the millions of people who are like leaving our churches are simply doing so because like modern life is not super conducive to being part of a community. You know, people work on Sundays, people have crazy busy lives, people find it very hard to give time and money to something outside of just keeping their households afloat. Um, people have transitory lives and, uh, and then find it hard to reconnect with a new church when they move, um.
[27:08] Actually, in the book, The Great Dechurching, looking at the research, what it suggests is that most people leave the church, and people are leaving the church across North America in the millions, that they are leaving for what the authors call very boring reasons. So it's not that people don't leave because they've been hurt in some way by the church or because their beliefs have changed because they do. But the vast majority of reasons why people fall away from organized religion is really just because modern society isn't set up to make it really conducive to being part of a community. It's hard when people are working all hours, all days of the week, struggling to keep their families afloat, struggling just to get by, to be able to have time and energy and money to give to communal life outside of one's own individual family. There's stuff about, you know, the degree to which people's lives are transitory and moving to a new community.
[28:37] It can be really hard to reconnect and establish the relationships in a new church community that make you want to be part of it. Um, so, like, all of those things are kind of working against organized religion in a way that is different from, um.
[29:01] Like, people rejecting organized religion, thinking that it's not good or not meaningful. Um, they just, like, aren't figuring out how to make it part of their lives. Um and so you know how do we address that i think was your question um i you know by no means would like want to set myself up as an expert on how we answer that question because i think we're all figuring that out like i think that we're by trial trial and error figuring it out, I can say that at St. George's I think a few of the things that we've tried to consider are really centering our care for the community in a meaningful way that can be a.
[30:08] Connector um to the the life of faith that may or may not result in people sitting in our pews but does uh result in important christian witness and um and like a public articulation of god's love um we've done a lot around like online ministry and uh you know i know that's a mixed bag because like I know that probably what we all need the most is embodied like Christian community that there are things about showing up physically for one another that are not replicated online.
[31:00] And yet at the same time, I do think that there is an opportunity online to, again, bear witness, to put, to articulate the gospel, to articulate God's love to people who might otherwise not be hearing that message. I think that matters. I think that matters whether or not it results in church attendance going up. I think that we are called to put that message into the world because people need to hear it.
[31:43] How much do you think that we're captured by the past? And I'll try to put some flesh on that. Is that, you know, even I think both of us are of an age that we don't remember necessarily what it was like when churches were full or when the society was, quote unquote, more religious.
[32:10] But we're in it feels like at times we're still captured by that and trying to live up to that um and i just wonder if that's something that you feel at times as well yeah i mean i think part of it is just plain old nostalgia like the the good old days always uh seem better, than they probably were. But I think a lot of it is also practicalities. Like in the Anglican church anyway, like we are still living in an institutional framework that is based on what the church was like, 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, right? So there's just like practical reasons why we still want church success to look like that because it supports the institutional framework that we're supporting.
[33:19] We're paying for, that, you know, like governs how the church functions. So, I think it's both of those things. And, you know, I also do think, and I talk about this in the article too, like if we're talking about secularism, if we're talking about that, those bigger forces of decline network in the world, that's very much tied to capitalism. And it's very much tied to a mindset of, you know, survival of the fittest and a version of success that looks like numerical growth. Like that is the engine that runs North American society. It is capitalism. It is like, you know, you either grow and succeed and make money or you, like, fold. So, it's so easy for that to become the standard for our churches as well without our even realizing that that isn't a gospel mindset.
[34:46] It's like those are just the waters that we all swim in.
[34:55] So, have you seen other examples of churches that are kind of, I don't know, trying things and maybe not succeeding, but keeping to try, keep trying and doing different things? And what does that look like that you've seen? Um, I, I've seen lots of different things. I think it can look like worship at times other than Sunday mornings.
[35:31] It can look like worship in different kinds of spaces. It can look like using our traditional spaces in some untraditional ways. Um it can look like you know sometimes it can look like a real embrace of like some of the traditions um and and just like really kind of leaning into how like weird and different and kind of exciting that can feel to a new generation that hasn't yet had the opportunity to reject all that like I have two teenagers and I mean they're pretty enamored with things like stained glass and church pews and um like choir robes and like all of the traditional fixtures of church, like, they think that's all quite countercultural.
[36:39] So, yeah, like, I think that I could list probably 250 other things, but, like, I think everybody who is kind of embracing the possibilities of the day is throwing some noodles at the wall and trying a variety of things in our traditional and virtual and non-traditional spaces at different times in different ways with kind of different versions of music and proclamation and all of those things.
[37:29] You know, one of the things that you also talk about, and you hinted at this earlier, is that especially our modern culture is very much more atomized, kind of hyper individualistic. But you talk about the fact that, and you say this, that the truth is that we're not a collection of single cell organisms called to compete for diminishing resources. We are a body. What does it mean to be the body of Christ in this context.
[38:05] Yeah, I mean, I think to a large extent, it looks like learning how to be a community. And I think that we do have to learn how to be a community because, again, like it isn't how modern society is set up. It's not easy. I'll just share with you like a story that really drove this home for me over the Christmas break. At the end of the Christmas break, our next door neighbors, so like the people who live in the home next to us, their son tragically died at the end of the Christmas break. We, they moved in during COVID, and English is not their first language, but we never saw them. Like, we didn't know their names. We barely knew that they had a teenage son.
[39:13] Like, people hang out in their backyards, not their front porches. People drive into their garage and enter the house through the garage. You don't even see them coming and going from their driveway. Depending on, like, what hours people work, they might be coming and going from their house at a completely different time from you. And, like, people lead indoor lives. And so to realize that the people who live next door to us experience this profound tragedy and we didn't even know their names, like, it was just such a referendum on, like, the isolation of modern society.
[40:15] And, you know, I'm somebody who is invested every day in building up the life of community and nurturing relationships. And I didn't know the names of my next door neighbors. Like, it's so like, we can't assume that people just like, know how to be part of a community or that it's easy to do so like we do have to um invest in in the the work of, of calling people back to just how connected our lives really are to one another whether we acknowledge it or not like we actually do need each other like a modern society where we don't even know the names of our next door neighbors is not healthy like that is not healthy it's not life-giving it's not who we're supposed to be like so how do we relearn who we're supposed to be mm-hmm, Yeah, I think that that's, I mean, that's a hard thing to hear.
[41:24] And it's, but it's also just kind of a fact of our culture. We are, just the way things are set up, we just don't know how to connect in the ways that we used to. Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
[41:41] And so how do you think that the church can be kind of an antidote to that, or at least a response? alternative?
[41:50] Well, I think that it goes back to a couple of the things that I've named that do bear witness to that other reality. You know, I think that when our church opens up our doors and serves people breakfast, I think that if you come and are part of serving that breakfast and you spend any time at all talking to the people who are coming in to eat that breakfast, you realize, like, they are people like I am. And, like, are, they're not other. And like we're all involved and invested in the kind of society that we create and whether people are fed or not and whether people are looked after or not. So I think that that kind of on-the-ground experience of just having to address need can call us back pretty quickly to...
[43:11] The realities of interconnectedness. I think that, you know, our gospel proclamation calls us to recognize that, yeah, like we're, there is no way of loving or knowing or serving God without figuring out how to be in relationship with our neighbor. Like, Jesus makes that just so abundantly clear at every turn. Like, there's no option presented by Jesus for just having a nice, neat, tidy, individual relationship with God. Like, if you want to walk with Jesus, if you want to know the God of Jesus Christ, then you have to figure out the mess of being in relationship with other people.
[44:17] Yeah, and I think, I wonder sometimes in our culture if we're a little bit afraid of that mess of relationship in a way that we weren't in the past. Um, we don't, you know, there are a lot of different things that in the way that we do things that make it a lot easier that we don't have to deal with other people. Um, it's a strange aside, but somehow it seems to, to make sense. It was something I read in slate recently about the rise of, um, restaurants, especially at kind of fast-food restaurants that don't have, and coffee shops and other places that don't have seating. It's basically you order and go. And.
[45:10] On the one hand, there's a convenience to that. I get it. But on the other hand, there's no chance to just sit and talk.
[45:20] It seems to feed into that whole atomized culture that is, I think, not healthy and seems to kind of go against what God is calling us to. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that is kind of the pinch of the whole thing is that, like, people are wildly inconvenient, other people.
[45:46] And like, and relationships can be really challenging and disappointing. And like, people can disappoint us every which way and frustrate us and annoy us every which way. So, of course, if modern culture can evolve to make it, like, just way easier to be on our own, of course that's, like, less frustrating, I guess. Um, but like you say, it's not healthy. It's not life giving. It's, um, it, it might feel like, you know, what I really want is just to be in my nice, neat, controllable environment with, you know, quiet and, um, and nobody annoying me. Um but but that's gonna run its course pretty quickly right like we actually do need each other.
[46:54] Yeah and i think that the church and i think how god works is not necessarily in that, me myself and i environment it's always been in a context of of others yeah truly and you know like By no means am I suggesting that there isn't room for quiet and introversion and solitude in the life of faith, because I think all of those things can be quite countercultural as well and are really important. And it's just that like even those things like solitude and contemplation and quiet are figured out within the context of community and a responsibility to one another.
[47:49] One of the things that you, when you close out the article by saying something to the effect that in the mindset of community, there isn't success or failure, that what there is are stories.
[48:03] Could you kind of expand on that and what you were talking about there? Yeah, I mean, I think that when we can kind of get over ourselves and share what we're actually experiencing, whether that's, you know, growth and excitement or whether it's loss and grief and disappointment. I think when we actually realize, okay, maybe this isn't just about me and we can share what's going on.
[48:46] A, I think we often find out that we're less alone than we thought and that other people have experiences that might parallel our own. Um, but even when that's not the case, even when we're sharing something that is quite different from other people's experience, we always have the opportunity to learn. Like, we always have the opportunity to, um, for our collective life to be richer because of individual stories within that life. And I think that that's very, like, I think that's very scriptural too, right? Like, the Bible isn't generally full of magic formulas for how to live, like, a rock-solid, you know, nothing-ever-goes-wrong kind of life. Like, the Bible does its best thing when it's telling stories about people getting it pretty epically wrong and, like, God's grace meeting them there. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think that that's, kind of closing this out, the important thing here is God's grace in all of this.
[50:04] Because we are going to, some things are not going to work out. We're going to fail. And the important thing is really the grace. And even in our successes, there's grace there too. Because sometimes it's not things that we have done, it's just they happen. Yeah, I know. That's happened more often than for me than not, that things that I have meticulously planned don't work and something I just, I had no idea what I did and it works. Yeah, I know. So, you know, it's grace all about.
[50:35] Yeah, yeah. I think that being regularly humbled by God's grace is a pretty good antidote to a lot of the things that we've been talking about. Yeah. Well, if people want to know more about you, kind of follow you, where should they go?
[50:57] Well, I am on Instagram and Facebook, just under my name, which I think I'm the only Martha Tatarnik in the world. So if you look me up, you're going to find me. I do write on Medium. So again, you can just search me up under my name. I've got lots of articles there. I do have two published books. One is called The Living Diet, which is about our relationship with food and our bodies through a Christian perspective. And my more recent book was Why Gather, which really was written mostly during COVID and kind of wrestling with those basic questions around church decline and everything being so different in the life of worship. And is there a compelling reason why we continue to try to do this? Why the church matters other than just nostalgia or continuing along with a personal hobby?
[52:10] Um so those are my two books and i write in a variety of other publications here and there uh christian century and the anglican journal and things like that but uh but yeah you can sort of find me in all the usual places just under my name well martha thank you for for taking the time to chat today and hopefully we'll have you back here again to talk a talk a little bit more about the life of the church and in our culture. Well, thank you so much for inviting me and for such an enjoyable and interesting conversation.
[52:49] All right. Thank you.
[52:51] Music.
[53:22] So I hope that you enjoyed that episode and I would like to know how does it feel for you if you're someone, a church professional, even a lay leader, how does it feel to talk about success or failure in your church? If you feel brave, send me an email. You can do that by sending it to churchinmain at substack.com. Also, I'm going to include a link to Martha's website, which also has information on her two books, but I'm also going to include a link to a recent episode that I did on Future Christian. Actually, it just came up this week. I participated in a post-election panel. So, we talk about what went on with the election here in the United States, and it is fascinating. We had myself, Lauren, another pastor, Larry Lynn, and Martha, and it was especially to me fascinating having the perspective of Martha being a Canadian and kind of watching this from the other side of the border. So I hope that you will listen to that podcast. It's a really good episode, and I think you will find it very rewarding.
[54:38] Also, I hope that you will consider that if you want to learn more about this podcast, if you want to listen to past episodes, And if you'd like to donate, which I would very much love if you did, visit us at churchinmain.org. You can also go to the substack, which is churchinmain.substack.com to read related articles. And I have one up that actually might end up as a future, in the very near future, an episode on why I will pray for President Donald Trump. Even though I don't care for him much. I hope that you will listen to read that article and that you will listen to the episode once it comes out. Also, please consider subscribing to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. And if you're on something like Apple Podcasts, I think that there's something that you can do with Overcast. Please leave a review or rating. When you do that, that actually helps others find this podcast. And I would be much thankful, very thankful if you did that. So that's it for this episode of Church in Maine. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. As I always say, thank you so much for listening. Take care, Godspeed, and I will see you very soon.
[55:58] Music.