Episode 103: Danielle Shroyer on reimagining church

Danielle Shroyer is an author, minister and advocate, who has made a life reimagining what church can look like. She does so for people, like herself, who struggle to connect with church as they know it, but have a lot of love for God.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason: Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host George Mason and I am delighted to welcome to the program today Danielle Shroyer. Danielle, we're so glad to have you.

Danielle Shroyer.: Thanks for having me on.

George Mason: Well, Danielle, we are moving through this COVID-19 phase and that has affected Good God also as we are now operating off of Zoom instead of sitting next to one another in a studio. That would be much more intimate but we're learning new forms of intimacy, aren't we?

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. Every day, right?

George Mason: Every day. Well, I want to say to everyone tuning in that Danielle is a Christian minister and has been a pastor and is a writer and a spiritual director now. She has been a friend of mine across many years and we really first got acquainted when I got a random communique from Princeton Theological Seminary asking if this young woman could do an internship with me at Wilshire Baptist Church. How do you remember that whole thing, Danielle?

Danielle Shroye...: Well, so for Princeton's program we had to do two internships and one of them needed to be in a church. I remember being called in and the [inaudible 00:01:33] director said, "I don't know where to place you. You just don't fit in any church" and he said, "I'm trying to find a progressive Baptist church that might be willing to take you on and I think I have someone in mind."

Danielle Shroye...: Thank God you said yes, George, because I don't think he had a backup. He was really not sure where he was going to put me for my church field ed.

George Mason: Well, we are so happy about that as well. I'm sure no thanks to us at Wilshire or me as your supervising minister that year, nonetheless, we have watched you with great favor all these years as you've been a really remarkable minister both here in Dallas and around the country, both through your own direct ministry but also in your writing and leading conferences and things of that nature. It's been a joy to follow you and be part of your ministry.

Danielle Shroye...: It has always been fun to be part of the Wilshire family too. It was a good stroke of luck that he called you.

George Mason: Well, terrific. I'm curious about ... You talk about how in that particular case a church like ours might have been somewhat of a unicorn at the time but here you were, not even a Presbyterian but at a Presbyterian seminary, a woman pursuing ministry and theological education. How did all of that come about for you?

Danielle Shroye...: Well, it took me probably until high school to realize that not everybody thought about theology. You know? I asked my youth minister, "Am I coming in here a lot?" He said, "Yes. A little more than most teenage kids I know, don't come and ask about eschatology on a Friday." You know?

Danielle Shroye...: I guess I just didn't realize it that I was so fascinated with God. I was trying to discern what to do with that and I honestly thought the church was the last place that I would end up, in pastoral ministry, I thought maybe I would be a professor.

Danielle Shroye...: I just knew that I wanted to learn and to study and to help other people understand God. I found myself going to Baylor and I did a religion degree there and then really felt like I wanted to continue my studies in seminary, still not sure exactly what that would look like, and so all my professors were pretty clear about how they thought that was the place for me to go.

Danielle Shroye...: I think they were right. It was a really good fit for me. There were so many different denominational people, giving me so many different views and the student body was pretty diverse. It really allowed me to [inaudible 00:04:27].

George Mason: Going back to your high school years and the church you were in, tell me more about that. What was the church and tell me about your youth minister because I think this is really so important as we think about how we nurture the call in other people.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. I was lucky to be under Daniel Vestal at First Baptist Midland when I was a young girl. He baptized me. The Vestal family has always been dear to my heart. He left I think ... I guess I was maybe in late middle school when he ended up leaving and James Denison came after him and so Dr. Denison was actually the one that met me at the end of the aisle when I walked into ministry. I was really affirmed and empowered by both of those pastors to do this work.

Danielle Shroye...: Charlie Dodd was my youth minister. Charlie's been in youth ministry his whole life and is just such a faithful, wonderful dear servant of Christ. He was so patient with me. I can't imagine what a disaster I was in youth ministry. I had so much energy and so many questions and he was just so affirming and patient and kind and I really feel grateful that I had such encouragement around me.

George Mason: Well, you went to a place that really does nurture the life of the mind when you went to Princeton because Princeton is really known as one of our more theologically rigorous seminaries I would say, part of the reformed tradition and lots of Karl Barth and one of our common favorites, Jürgen Moltmann, who we'll talk about in just few moments.

George Mason: In a way, you really went from all that curiosity that you were exploring in your youth minister's office to a place where you could really satisfy some of that kind of thinking and think theologically and get well grounded.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. They helped me ask such good questions and explore so broadly. I loved every minute of it. I know some people go to Princeton and say, "This was just really not for me" but I went there and it was like a fish to water. I just loved it. If I could just stay there forever and take all the classes always I probably would do that.

George Mason: Well, you ended up being a pastor for a season, though, too then. You know, really here you were asking all the right theological questions and exploring that and those of us who know you know that you could do just about anything in this world. You could teach, you could preach, you could lead a big church, you could lead a community church like you did, you could do spiritual direction. Tell us about how you came to think that it was the right thing for you to become the pastor of the Journey Community Church.

Danielle Shroye...: It actually started at Baylor when I happened into University Baptist Church in Waco. This is a little peek into Baylor life at the time. We had to, as our pledge sisters, show up at church together. That was what we did for our bonding experience was we did church on Sunday morning.

Danielle Shroye...: She happened to be friends with Christine, who was opening up University Baptist Church that Sunday and she said, "We're going to go support him." It was a very non-traditional church. He was wearing jeans, which was just shocking at the time. They played Hootie and the Blowfish Hold My Hand as the benediction song.

Danielle Shroye...: I was sitting there in the pew and, I mean, I was having an experience. You know? I thought, "I didn't know that we could change the rules about what church was. Nobody told me this was possible." Then it's like a wheel started turning in my brain and I started thinking, "Okay, this I could do. If I could imagine church in a different way for maybe people like me who sometimes have a hard time connecting in church, even though we love God a lot, this is something I want to do."

Danielle Shroye...: Journey was a church where I was able to do that and it was such a fun, fun and deeply meaningful experience to try to figure out creative ways to help people connect to God and try to do that differently every week.

George Mason: And really differently meant a kind of different liturgical way of gathering, right? I mean, it was more of a church in the round and dialogical sermons and things like that. Say more about how that looked and felt in terms of the way you led it.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. It was definitely dialogical. We had conversations instead of sermons. Me or whoever was leading the conversation, it was usually me, but we had lots of [inaudible 00:09:27] and thoughtful people that attended there.

Danielle Shroye...: We would start with a passage and talk a little bit about the background of the passage and kind of get it started and then we would just ask questions. The thing that was different is it's kind of like a Bible study in that you go in really to ask questions and not to find answers and we really allowed ourselves to just play around in scripture and kind of do a mid-rash and just see what the community came up with.

Danielle Shroye...: It was lovely to see how ... I would have been thinking about it all week and had some things I wanted to say but usually the wisest thing came totally out of left field from someone who commented that night and it was like, "Oh, I hadn't even thought of that." This is the beauty of the community wisdom where the spirit is in the midst of all of us to help us all learn and get closer to God.

Danielle Shroye...: We always would followup after the conversation with something to help it be holistic. We would do a prayer station or a body prayer or art or something to kind of help us figure out how to move that from the mind into the rest of the body and into our lives. That was kind of where the creativity aspects got to be sort of fun.

Danielle Shroye...: We had communion. We always went to dinner afterward as an extension of our conversation and community time together. Just the communal life was really important for us to live together.

George Mason: I know that you were doing church in that fashion for about 10 years I guess, right?

Danielle Shroye...: Yeah.

George Mason: As the pastor of that church but it's also not that you are against the institutional or more traditional church. You're actually a member of an Episcopal church now, aren't you?

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. As I say, it's so funny. People are like, "So now you're at Transfiguration?" Which is super high church.

George Mason: Right.

Danielle Shroye...: So much sacred music. You know, I love all of it and really think that there's a place for all of it. I remember early in the emerging church days people would say, "Well, talk to Danielle. She'll tell you to change everything" and I would say, "I don't think that's right for your church at all. I think your church is doing a great job of being traditional."

Danielle Shroye...: Wilshire is a great example of that. Wilshire is a great traditional church. You do it well. There's no reason for that not to exist. I was only arguing for there to be other options for people who maybe don't fit there. You know?

George Mason: Well, let's extend that conversation even a little more because whether you're in a more traditional church or you are in a less traditional or more improvisational kind of community church that you were leading there is something really deeper at work in all of this and that was a much greater theological movement that has been taking place in American Christianity.

George Mason: You were part of this as one of the founders and leaders of a movement called Faith Forward, which is to be distinguished somewhat from our local group called Faith Forward Dallas, which is a local interfaith advocacy group but this is more a group that helped to spur people's imaginations about where the spirit of God was moving the church, right? About how some of the old forms of thinking and doctrines that had not been well examined and were choking people were really having to give way to new life and reexamination in what was coming to be known as the emerging church, right? Or the emergent church depending on which you prefer.

George Mason: What was it that you were trying to do with your colleagues in that movement? In various different ecclesial settings.

Danielle Shroye...: I think we realized that so many people were walking away from church not because they didn't believe in God but they weren't buying some of it. The things that they had questions about weren't rude. They were fair. You know? It's like, "Well, if my gay sister can't come here I feel a sense of disease" or, "I'm a little concerned about the marketing budget when the budget for the poor isn't as high." You know?

Danielle Shroye...: People have really valid theological questions. Or, "I just don't think I can believe that I'm terrible and that Jesus had to be murdered by his father for that to be okay." You know? People had really fair questions theologically that they didn't think the church was answering well.

Danielle Shroye...: We agreed and were asking those same questions. I thought, "Yeah. These are some of the reasons why I didn't connect either. What would it look like if we really took them seriously and took their doubts about the theology that the church in the west was practicing and said, 'Okay, if that's valid let's think of another way to look at that and how can we live that out in communal life?"

George Mason: Well, I think it really did breathe new life into even traditional churches and gave new hope to pastors, myself included, as we engaged in these conversations theologically. It just caused us to get out the duster and really clean off our doctrines a bit and say, "What is this like? How does this live today in our society and in our culture?"

George Mason: There are some specific ways in which I'd like to talk about some books you've written in the second section of our conversation here in just a moment. We're going to take a break here for a minute. I want to say, I think you have been pushing these boundaries, and that's part of the title of the book that we'll talk about in a moment, for a while and refreshing our faith in important ways. Danielle, thanks for being with us and let's take a break and we'll be right back.

George Mason: Thank you for tuning into Good God. We're grateful to provide this for you during this time of COVID-19 isolation. We hope that it is a consolation to you during this time. There have to be lots of ways that we reach each other and even though we can't be in a studio as we normally are producing these, we're finding the technology, using Zoom and communicating it to you through this programming, we hope that you'll find it to be encouraging to you as we make our way through these difficult days.

George Mason: And we're back with Danielle Shroyer for our conversation about the emerging church and about theology and how it is being refreshed in our generation in significant ways.

George Mason: Danielle, you've written three books and contributed to others as well. I want to talk about two of them now. In light of also this emerging church movement that you are so much a part of, the first was sort of a book out of the gate, so to speak, called Boundary Breaking God, in which you were trying to apply some of the theology of Jürgen Moltmann, which just entranced you and did me because as you know, I wrote my dissertation on his doctrine on the freedom of God in his trinitarianism.

George Mason: But I think Boundary Breaking is a really key phrase that is ... Well, explain what you meant by that and how you think his theology helps us do just that.

Danielle Shroye...: Well, in his Theology Of Hope he explained basically all of scripture as this process of God moving outward, that God is always gunning for the margins, that God is always thinking about who to include next. That was such a compelling and beautiful vision to me and it seems so different sometimes than the way that people experience religion, which is about clamping down or saying, "We're in and you're out" or, "This is what we have to do for this to be right."

Danielle Shroye...: It was my hope that in the book I would be able to make Moltmann's really brilliant theology accessible for everyone who maybe doesn't want to sit down and read and to understand that God is constantly calling us home but also calling us out and that we should have a sense of bravery and a little bit of a heart for risk, that we can step into that and know that God is going to be there and maybe the spirit has even prepared it for us before we get there.

George Mason: This is an interesting point you bring up because I think this has been one of the biggest shifts in Christianity or one of the great tensions in Christianity in our generation of doing ministry whereas I think for a very long time we thought of the church and the gospel as a kind of somehow sin remedy and sin management program, something of that nature.

George Mason: Usually that was, in the phrase of Jesse Jackson, it's about the sin within but what Moltmann and others are pointing out is there is also this sin we're in. That is the sin that's systemic, that keeps people from one another, that keeps people from the fullness of life that God wants for them.

George Mason: Instead of seeing that as sort of a sideshow to the church and the gospel when you start thinking deeply about that and reading the Bible again, all of a sudden you realize, "Wait a minute. That's actually the main event. That's actually what God is up to", right?

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. Right. The idea that Sunday is supposed to help [inaudible 00:19:20] that we're supposed to be doing. You know? Instead of getting right with God and not thinking about how to get right with others. You know?

George Mason: Right. You create a community that is fully open and some of our churches are coming around to that now and it's hard work when you are more traditional church and you're not just starting out saying, "Here's the way we're going to organize ourselves."

George Mason: There's a lot of pain going on in the church breaking those boundaries because most of our churches traditionally have been what you might call a bounded set, that is let's establish the boundaries and instead of being what's known as a center set church, right? That is you talk about what you have in common in the middle and it all gravitates toward that, that's what organizes you rather than the fence around where you're either in or out.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. That is very tough to make that transition when you're really committed to the bounded set form of church.

George Mason: Right.

Danielle Shroye...: Because it requires a completely different form of leadership too, right? The center set is you have to have a high level of trust and an openness to flexibility. I can't say that we were as stable at Journey as we would have been if we were an institutional church and so there's some really logistical problems that come with trying to make that work. It's fair to be a little bit afraid of it but I do think that it's a pretty beautiful way to live.

George Mason: Moltmann's Theology Of Hope and all of his other writings are filled with this beautiful both andness to them, right? This dialectical approach that he has that Good Friday and Easter belong together, that the here and the now and the then and the future are all together, you don't have to choose, they're in tension with one another. What do you think Moltmann's theology has to offer to people during this COVID-19 period of time that we are going through?

Danielle Shroye...: The phrase that comes to mind first is the horizon of hope. You know? The idea that we're in a time when we don't actually know what the end date is. We don't actually know what normal is going to be and if there's going to be a "return to normal" and how for Moltmann that would be a call to faithfulness, that we look at this horizon of hope and say, again, we trust that the spirit is making the way where maybe right now we don't feel like there is a way.

Danielle Shroye...: I think it requires a high level of trust that the spirit of God might be up to something even if this wasn't a plan or something we can say that God did or whatever but that there is this deep sense of faith in the spirit to hover over all of these places and bring life from them. I think he has a lot to say about that.

Danielle Shroye...: I think also it's really, gosh, showing us the flaws in our system, isn't it? This idea of the crucified God and Moltmann, certainly not his words but his affirmation of the liberation of the oppressed and the preferential option of the poor. I think we have to look at our structures and systems and say, "We can't unsee this now."

George Mason: Yeah. Yeah. This is really an apocalyptic time I think in that the real true sense of how what has been hidden from our eyes is being revealed, that the things that are now, not just the things that are to come and I think a lot of this is rooted in Moltmann's own experience and so much of his theology is experiential, right? He thinks it should be but it should also include the experience of God, which is even more extraordinary in that God is deeply feeling and experiencing with us this time of social alienation that we're going through, the anguish of creation, the sense of hopelessness.

George Mason: He used that phrase, "Hope against hope", which when he was in a British prisoner of war camp and was looking through the barbed wire fence out into the open field wondering if there would be anything in the future for him, that's when God really showed up for him. It really distinguished hope from optimism, didn't it? Can you make that distinction, the difference between optimism and hope?

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. Optimism is what we're seeing on Instagram, right? Like, "It's going to be fine. It's great. Make your sourdough bread and [inaudible 00:24:21]" or whatever. Hope holds the darkness and the light together and knows that there's beauty and goodness in both of them that's waiting for us, right? That there's something about the alchemy of both of those things, about the difficult and the joy that actually forms us and brings us wisdom.

Danielle Shroye...: Hope doesn't have to shun the difficulties. If you're having a terrible time or if you're feeling depressed or if you're worried about a loved one in hope there's room for that and in optimism it feels like that's unwelcome and you're almost shamed for it, right?

George Mason: Right [crosstalk 00:24:59], which makes it difficult for us to honor the feelings that we have of sadness and grief and loss and all of those things that if you look at Biblical faith are very valid. In fact, they make relationship with God truly genuine.

George Mason: Well, that moves to want to address ... Also, we were talking about this matter of how the church sort of got into interpreting its work as sin management really and the overcoming of it and all of that.

George Mason: Your book called Original Blessing really goes into some great detail that unveils some of the missteps the church has taken across the centuries about this, that it's really warped our understanding of the goodness of God and the dignity of human beings and what the gospel is.

George Mason: Instead of original sin, you want to assert that we bear an original blessing. How did you get from the one to the other? Because Christianity we know has been filled with this history of original sin.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. Original blessing, Matthew Fox coined that term in the '80s and I think it's the perfect term and I hope it gets widely used in the years to come but it's the idea that we're not born sinful, we're born human. It's just as simple as that. Adam and Eve were human when they ate of the fruit, they were human when they left the garden, there was nothing that changed in how they were human before or after except for that they learned something about themselves, which is that they can make mistakes and God can still love them.

Danielle Shroye...: It's only through those mistakes that we actually start to see ourselves clearly in ways that we didn't want to confront before. Maybe it's not a fall, maybe it's a revealing. It's an apocalyptic moment inside of each of us that we have to confront that says, "I didn't know I was capable of that but now that I know that I have to change." You know?

Danielle Shroye...: I think this is how God works transformation. Seeing ourselves as good, as inherently good and knowing that that's not lost anywhere, it's that we maybe get disconnected from our own sense of it but it doesn't actually ever go away is a very different way of approaching our own human errors.

George Mason: Yeah. It's interesting that you should come out of Princeton seminary and write that book, right?

Danielle Shroye...: It's maybe because I had to read all that Calvin and Barth that I said this, right? I had lots of nice rousing conversations about this. I've had these conversations for years.

Danielle Shroye...: I do think it's a huge misstep, like you said, when we give way ... When we give away our sense of human goodness, everything else down the line theologically gets really messed up. We could spend two hours talking about that back and forth, right?

George Mason: Sure. Well, this is the nature of systematic theology, isn't it? It's like a spiderweb. When you touch any part of the web every other part of it is affected.

Danielle Shroye...: Yes.

George Mason: We had a very, very significant moment happen with Augustine in making certain interpretations of St. Paul in which he really made central this idea of our sin and guilt being in need of removal in order to be acceptable to God and that that became a matter of the foundation of grace, if you will. Instead of creation, it became something that Christ had to do and really grace has been all the way from the beginning, hasn't it?

Danielle Shroye...: Yes. Yeah. I mentioned in the book that it's like we've setup this set of grace-induced PTSD, that we have to feel really bad and almost think that we are really bad for grace to count in some way. You know?

George Mason: Yes.

Danielle Shroye...: The [inaudible 00:29:20]. I mean, that is just a really ... Talk to any psychologist and they'll say, "Well, that's just not the way we should do this." You know?

George Mason: Right.

Danielle Shroye...: We know enough about human psychology to know that doesn't work that way. Instead to just know that God has been just deeply faithful to us forever. That's God's way is that we continually turn away and God continually pulls us back home and goes after us and that is the story as long as it's been around.

George Mason: Well, Danielle, I think you and I could talk theology like this and let people overhear this conversation from now until kingdom come but what we both agree is that the kingdom has come among us. That is God's presence is with us even now, it's near to us, and we're invited to join it and to be on the trail of what God is up to in Christ.

George Mason: Thank you so much for all the different ways in which you are contributing to our spiritual life and our Christian convictions in the world. I look forward to another conversation with you real soon.

Danielle Shroye...: Thank you, George.

George Mason: Thanks for being on Good God.

George Mason: Good God is created by Dr. George Mason, produced and directed by Jim White, social media coordination by Cameron Vickrey. Good God: Conversations with George Mason is the podcast devoted to bringing you ideas about God and faith and the common good. All material copyright 2020 by Faith Commons.