Finding My Religion
We're a podcast that asks the question, "What do you believe?" We talk with people to find out how they grew up, what they think about today, and where they think they'll be in the future. Faith, religion, and spirituality are all such personal journeys. We're honored to be able to tell people's stories, no matter the belief.
Finding My Religion
Phil Haslanger: "Faith and the Future of Churches"
When faith meets personal evolution, it's a story worth telling. Our latest episode features Phil Haslinger, a retired pastor and journalist whose spiritual journey took him from the roots of Catholicism to the embracing arms of the United Church of Christ. Phil candidly shares the tectonic shifts in his faith during the transformative Vatican II era, the conservative pivot within Catholicism, and the life-changing decision he and his wife made to find solace within the UCC. His unique perspective, shaped by a career that balanced the pulpit and the press room, offers a nuanced look at the challenges and triumphs of navigating tradition and transformation.
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Welcome to Finding my Religion. My name is Miles Stelps. This week we're talking with retired pastor Phil Haslinger. He was a pastor at Memorial United Church of Christ in Madison for over 10 years. He was also a journalist at the Capitol Times for over 35 years. He says that he straddles the world of religion and journalism and it was just really, really awesome to talk with somebody as experienced and as smart as him Got it. So where are we at currently?
Speaker 2:So I am allegedly retired or redeployed. Got it. I have spent about a year and a quarter as a part-time pastoral associate at Christ's Presbyterian Church on the east side of Madison. I'll be back there for three months, from January to April, filling in for the pastor, who will be on a maternity leave.
Speaker 1:First of all, thanks for joining. You and I met through a mutual connection. Like I said a couple of months ago, I'm really excited just to pick your brain, not only about your journey, but just the state of religion in general right now and talk about your work as a journalist as well. I know you've written a lot for Madison area. Let's start with where I always start here, phil what's your faith and what's your religion at this point in your life?
Speaker 2:So I'm Christian. I've been a Christian throughout my life, grew up Catholic, joined the United Church of Christ in the year 2000 along with my wife Still am, and was ordained as the United Church of Christ minister in 2007. Still am part of the United Church of Christ, but currently serving at a Presbyterian Church. But that general category of liberal to progressive protest that a Christian is where I would land.
Speaker 1:But can you talk? I guess the first question I've got is was this going into ministry, was that the plan for you all along, or was that something that you fell into?
Speaker 2:What a good question. So when I was grown up I thought about being a Catholic priest. So I went to a seminary for three years of high school and two years of college. At the end of the second year then you had to go to a different place and I thought I wanted to try something different. So I came to Madison to work on a degree in sociology. It was the late 60s. It was a very common quiet time in Madison Not really and I stayed involved with student Catholic Center, st Paul's University Catholic Center on campus.
Speaker 2:Got a degree in journalism, went to work with the Cap Times mentioned around the year 2000. My wife and I were looking for something else. We found the United Church of Christ. We're there for a couple of years. One of the really important things we said when we joined this congregation is let's not get very involved, and you can see how well that worked. So the United Church of Christ had something called a lay pastor program and that sounds interesting. Maybe that could be something I do when I retire. So I started getting involved. I found out I really liked it, so I got on the ordination track, got ordained in 2007, served as a pastor at Memorial United Church of Christ in Fishburg for a decade, saw that I retired in 2017, but I've been back doing some other things since then on a part-time basis.
Speaker 1:Got it so for you. You mentioned that you had always been Christian, or at least Catholic, as a kid. Was religion something that was like a staple of your household, like for your parents, or was it something Absolutely yeah, it was Okay. Talk about that.
Speaker 2:So my father died when I was three years old. So it was really my mom and me and she was very connected to Catholicism, to the Catholic Church. She was from a large Catholic family. Her mother we lived in Marinette, Wisconsin. Her mother lived across the river in Menominee, Michigan. So Catholic Church was very much a part of my life growing up. It was much part of her life. She was really devoted to that. Clearly that shaped me.
Speaker 2:I went to Catholic grade school one year over the Catholic High School in town before I went to the seminary, so really was in many ways surrounded by Catholicism. But it's also important to note that in the early 1960s, as I was really becoming aware of the world around me, it was also a time of great change within the Catholic Church. There was something shorthand was Vatican too, where the Church began to reform a lot of the ways it had operated in the past. It was a very exciting time. It was really opening up to the world in many ways. So that period really helped shape my view of Church, world, religion, God, all those things.
Speaker 1:What were some of the things that did shape it? Because, going from Catholicism, I've spoken with just so many people that grew up in Catholicism in an hour just different parts of their life, whether it's Christian or just have no use for religion. For you, what kind of pulled you from Catholicism to where you eventually ended up being in that different faith?
Speaker 2:I think it was a few things. One is I was being shaped by that Ethos of the church in the 1960s and 1970s was very much an outward-looking church, very involved in issues around social justice there were. The church was opening up, both in terms of who it was connecting with and the kinds of worship it was having. There was a retrenchment within Catholicism during the 80s and 90s and my wife and I just lived with that because we were in parishes where we really felt part of the community there. But over time the parish we were in was less nurturing and we said this isn't working for us anymore. The sort of conservative turn of Catholicism was harder for us to deal with. We said let's find something else. What we found was the UCC, which in many ways hey, these are all Christian churches, so we're still dealing within Right, that's right.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that the UCC, if the Catholic Church is very hierarchical, the UCC in Antichrist is totally congregational. It's very much more flatly organized. Part of it one of the things we loved about the Catholic tradition is the rich sense of liturgy and contemplation and social justice and all of that. The UCC certainly had the social justice element. Its worship is a much different style which we have grown used to and come to, but there was a transition involved there. Some folks leave Catholicism being really angry at the church, either for personal reasons, things that happened in their own lives or a particular issue. I don't think for either of us there was so much a sense of anger or a sense of change.
Speaker 1:It's time to do something else.
Speaker 2:We still have a lot of good friends who are Catholic, including members of priests, and there are things the Catholic Church does now that I still have high regard for. There are other things it does that I don't have such high regard for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense For you as you're trying to see what else is out there before joining the UCC. Was there ever a faith crisis that you and your wife had? Or was it just the matter of we just need to find a better home so that we can believe what we know we already believe?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was just a matter of finding a better home, I think, as with a lot of folks, I think, over the decades our faith involved, our understanding of the faith involved, our understanding of God evolved, but I think we never hit. Well, some people hit which is, oh, this is a bunch of garbage, I've gone, and then come back later. We were always connected in some way.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. Why do you think that is? Why do you think some people have different experiences from a faith perspective? I guess speaking from a ministry perspective, because you've had to have had these conversations a lot Sure- it really depends.
Speaker 2:I think experience is really often the operative word there. Something particularly bad has happened to them in whatever religious setting they're in, whether it's they feel rejected, they feel ignored Within Catholicism. If you were divorced and got remarried you were on the outs. That softened over time but that was a big deal for folks. Certainly, issues around sexuality became a big piece of the puzzle. I think that's for a lot of folks. Whether it's in it could be the Catholic Church, it could be some other congregations also. Within Judaism and Islam and other faith traditions. You bump up against something that just doesn't square with how you think a faith community ought to be dealing with you. I think the other piece of it is for some folks on the scale of things you can be involved in. Religion doesn't matter that much. We've got things that where you find meaning in your life or where you find community in your life and church, synagogue, mosque, whatever just does not. It doesn't matter so much.
Speaker 1:For us.
Speaker 2:For me and also for my wife, having that sense of community and having that framework for meaning, I think has always been important.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, yeah. I feel like that's the same for a lot of people, that sense of community, and it's an easy way if you already know that you believe that thing to just have people that you can bounce ideas off or just be around them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think we've also been lucky to be in settings where questions and wrestling with no-transcript issues of faith and guidance were always welcomed as opposed to oh, just shut up and believe. It's never a message we got.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I know a couple of people that got the opposite of that and it really turns your radars off or like even wanting to learn about it Totally. Yeah, we'd love to talk to you a little bit about your work in journalism. What types of things were interesting for you? What types of stories were you after from a religious perspective?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I worked at the Cap Times for 34 years, started out covering politics, did that for several years, covered education, which I loved. It was a really great thing to cover in a city like Madison. This was elementary and secondary education, not university or higher education, but that was fascinating. I really enjoyed that. Then I had a series of editing jobs city editor, editorial page editor, managing editor that through all of that I was always interested.
Speaker 2:I was one of the people on the staff who knew something about religion. If there was something involving religion, I would wind up often meeting the one who wrote about it with candidates. Sometimes I would do some fascinating conversations with some mayoral candidates about. So what shaped you? What are the values that you hold? Not necessarily religious values, although sometimes that was it but more how do values play into your view of the world? And it was easier to do that than it might be to get people to talk about that now. Then I also wrote stuff about faith communities in town on occasion.
Speaker 2:The more specific involvement around religion is there's a national organization called a Religion News Service, which is like the Associated Press of Religion Coverage. It's not denominational, it's journalists who cover religion, in fact. Now it is, in fact, partnering with the Associated Press for Religion Coverage. I was on the board of that for half a dozen years in the 20 teens and I'm still connected with them in a variety of ways, less writing myself, but more involved with people who are covering all facets of religion All facets of religion and all facets of unbelief as well. It's a great organization to be part of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's super interesting, david. There has to have been different themes that you've noticed from a religious perspective doing this work for as long as you have. What have you seen from maybe 20 years ago to now? What's different from the religious perspective? People's involvement has that changed?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, Certainly their involvement has changed. The most notable and most frequently commented thing are people who no longer see themselves affiliated with any particular religious organization, not with religion. One of the catch terms is they're spiritual but not religious. I think a lot of people have a sense of spirituality in their lives that may come from all kinds of different sources, not necessarily something within a faith community. That's been the most dramatic change in this country over the last quarter century. Now somewhere between a quarter and 30% of Americans would define themselves as not affiliated with any particular religious organization. That's somewhat higher with the 18 to 30 year old group. That's been the biggest change.
Speaker 2:The mainstream Protestants, episcopalians, presbyterians, lutherans, methodists of all seen declines over the last quarter or half century. There was a real boom in evangelical Christian congregations and that's leveled off into some degree. That's going down a bit Again because of that disaffiliation. Well, I'm not part of any group. I find my own sense of spirituality. Then Catholicism has really shifted to becoming increasingly. The growth in Catholicism has been among Latinos, with immigration in this country. Then there's more diversity. Percentage-wise there are small percentages, but the growth of Islam and Asian immigration and religions that they have brought with them, all of that has the religion, whether it's landscape is much more varied than let's go back half a century ago, when we were predominantly a white Christian nation, there were black Christians, a very vibrant black Christianity, but they were not on a lot of people's radar. Now, white Christianity is less than half the population of the country.
Speaker 1:What has been, in your experience, the response or is there a response from churches about, because I assume they're losing members?
Speaker 2:Many are not everybody, but a lot of them are. So what's their?
Speaker 1:response how do they? I assume if you're a company and you're using losing customers, you're going to have some sort of plan to refer to them.
Speaker 2:I think the response is very from sadness, anxiety, panic, resignation, all of those things depending on the congregation. It's really tough for smaller congregations that have not seen a lot of new people come in, so there's a lot of aging going on. Some congregations have found ways to repurpose themselves. Let me come back to that in a minute because there's a really interesting cases of Madison involved in that. Some congregations let's see how many different bells and whistles we can try that will make people want to come here and typically those don't work. Some congregations, I think, say let's just be who we are and be intentional about what we're doing and try and live out our sense of following Jesus on the best way we can, and that may attract people or it may not.
Speaker 2:The story I was saying, one of the really interesting stories in town, is St John's Lutheran Church, which has been on East Washington, about three blocks east of the square Between German congregation declining membership got this building. They go back to 1856 as a congregation Building was built in 1905. For a big chunk of their history they have been focused on how do we serve the community. There were a number of social service entities that have operated out of their building but aging, large building costs and everything. Over the last half dozen years they have worked to have their building transformed into predominantly low-income housing, some American housing at the top, with a place for a church sanctuary and social service offices on the main floor. They had their final service in this building about a month ago.
Speaker 2:Excuse me a second. I'm in a cough. Sure, you're fine. They had their final service in this building about a month ago. It's a great send off as they prepare to. They will still be a congregation, a smaller congregation, but seeing their mission is serving the community in some way, that's a really neat. There are a couple other congregations in this city and across the country that are looking at that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. It was weird to hear you say Saint John's was in church, because that's the church I grew up in, really In my hometown.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh different, not Madison.
Speaker 1:Not Madison. No, yeah, I grew up in the like just outside of the suburbs in Chicago. So my dad was a pastor for the LCMS of Missouri Synod. So, yeah, it was interesting growing up. So yeah, it was interesting to hear you say Saint John's, that's the church I grew up in For you. So yeah, speaking of just growing up in church, like so my dad was a pastor. Seeing him do his job every week was super interesting For you. Like, how would you define your experience in the ministry? Was it what you thought it was going to be when you got into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I crept into it slowly. So there was, I had a chance to explore it. It was in many ways it was, and still is, I think, better than I might have expected. I really enjoyed it. There are things about it. I really love being part of shaping, worship and preaching. I love the interaction with individual people that happens within the life of the congregation. I've been in settings where I have a chance to connect the people of the congregation with issues in the community in a variety of ways. Those all fit really well with who I like to be. It's not like there's never issues, because it's life, they're human beings things, but I think, and also because I came to this later in life, there are also issues in newsrooms. It turns out there are also issues in families. All of this, and after you have some experience with that it's not quite so intimidating. But I really enjoyed it a lot, which is, I think, one of the reasons I am only partly retired, sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can't say away, so you mentioned just the individual engagement. I'm always curious what parishioners ask their pastor. Can you remember any really impactful questions that you ever got, or really tough, maybe biblical questions that you got as a pastor? That just intrigued you Sure?
Speaker 2:There are a number of them. One that sort of stunned me and remembers. So I grew up. Catholic Abortion was a big issue. One of the first weeks I was pastor at Memorial, after church a woman poked her head in my office and said can you just pray for my daughter? She's just having an abortion this week because she needs a lot of support. And I said, oh sure, of course, but that would not have happened in oh sure, casually, that similar thing.
Speaker 2:There was a couple who were concerned that their child to be was going to be a down syndrome baby and could be fairly severely down syndrome. And they were not sure yet. But they were wrestling with do we go through with the pregnancy or do we abort it at this point? We had a long talk about it. It turned out everything was fine, great baby, great life, but they're having to. I was honored that they would wrestle with that with me, another person who was at the earliest stages of dementia and saying at some point I may not want to go on living, what should I do about that? Those are really gut level questions, yeah, and they're intertwined with faith, with their understanding of God, with their sense of can I still be part of this community. What does that all mean? Yeah, yeah, and I think that's part of the richness of being in pastoral ministry is you get to walk with people on those kinds of journeys?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool For you, though you're still a human right. You still have the same questions. I'm assuming that everybody has. I think I asked this question to my dad as well. But how do you maintain faith when times are really hard for you personally as a pastor, when you're outwardly having to say all these things? But maybe you're like, do I, what do I believe, do you?
Speaker 2:have a situation. I think everyone of these encounters makes me have to go back and think through what I believe.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I think one of the I'm sure your dad dealt with this. I think most people, when they encounter ideas of God, deal with this If God is good, how come they're suffering in the world? If God is good, how come there's evil? If God is good, how come my baby just died? And there's not an easy answer to that.
Speaker 2:Some of it, I think for me it goes to what my conception of God is, which is, for some people, god controls everything. The irreverent way of saying it is God is the puppet master and God pulls the strings. And God doesn't like you, so you die. Too bad, sorry. And that's not how I think of God. I think of God as a creative force that shapes the universe, a force of love that connects us all, not as some arbitrary figure making good and bad things happen, and that's not a universally held concept of God. And so it's tricky when someone does hold a concept of God. I must have done something wrong, so God is making me suffer. It's tricky not to say, oh, your concept of God is all wrong, because that's not what they really need to hear at that moment, and I'm not sure my concept of God is right, but it's just that's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I struggle with this concept of God and like the different facets and different ways that people view this entity. Why do you think it's a loaded question I want to ask you, and I fully recognize that but why do you think there are so many different versions of God, whatever that means?
Speaker 2:Because there's so many different people and we all bring to our thinking about God. We talked earlier about our experiences, about our psychology. Some people are clearly more comfortable with living with complexity and others really need certainty in their lives for a whole variety of reasons. Maybe it was experiences growing up, maybe it's just their psychological makeup, one of the things I like to think about when I look through particularly the books in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Speaker 2:There's an awful lot of different views of God in the Hebrew Scriptures and it's not like it was one person sat down and wrote all those books. It's different books woven out of stories that people told over many centuries and gathered together, and it seems to be part of it in Scripture is an evolution in a community's understanding of who God is as well. I think we all, as human beings, struggle with the simple versions I have found. I think this is a quote from Annie Lamont but if you find that your God hates all the same people you do, you probably don't understand God correctly, because we all have to wrestle with who is God, who am I?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as a pastor, my dad would always say that you have to have faith in this thing, and if you don't have faith, that's something that you have to wrestle with and it just comes or it doesn't through work. You have to work to want to know a God. No, how does that relate to other religions who might have a different view of what God is? How do you think about that from a pastoral point of view, when we feel like everybody should be equal? We want to do service bound stuff, but we disagree on what the Scripture might say and, as a result, disagree on what might be true or untrue from a spiritual perspective?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you asked that question because I have a great answer for it. Love it. So when I was at Memorial UCC in Fitchburg, someone was looking at I wonder what ways the churches collectively conserved the community. So we started having conversations with one another and ultimately we decided that something that was doable and needed was to create a personal essentials pantry where people go get diapers and personal purging and tampons and all that kind of stuff you need that you can't get at most food pantries. So several churches came together to do this now and then out of that the pastors or other leaders in the community would get together about once a month just to pray together and talk together.
Speaker 2:Now listen to the array of churches. So we got the United Church of Christ pretty far in the progressive end of Christianity. We've got the evangelical Lutheran Church all saints Lutheran which is your sort of mainstream Lutheran. We've got the Church of Christ Memorial, which is Missouri Synod Lutheran. Often Missouri Synod Lutheran and ELCA don't play together well. We've got evangelical free church with I'm blanking on Blackhawk, and then another Redeemer City, which was another E free church.
Speaker 2:We had a free Methodist church and we're not denominations that often do things together because we differ on a lot of things, but everyone thought it was important to provide personal essentials to people or to look at other issues in the community domestic violence, growing, the poverty disparities within Fitchburg and we, in doing that work together, we also learned how to share our own personal struggles in life. So it was a chance to really make things work and I think you're familiar I think this is how we got connected actually with the collaboration project and John Anderson, and that's a lot of what the collaboration project works on is what can we as congregations do together, Even if we disagree on things? And I think you can take that another step out beyond just Christianity. Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice brings together Jewish folks, Muslim folks, Bahá'í, Sikh, Yuntarian, Wiccan all looking at issues in our community that they can work on together, even though their understanding of God, of theology, of worship and everything differs a lot.
Speaker 2:Where can we find those common places where we can do good together, recognizing that we're not going to agree on everything? Now I think, as you move out to the edges, whether it's left or right, there are people who don't want to play together. We'll do it ourselves. Thank you very much. And well, okay, fine, that's how it goes, but to the degree we can widen those circles, I think I have learned a lot from doing that, just personally, about other faiths and about raising questions about my own and rethinking what I think, but then also made good friends along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really cool. It's almost like you as a religious body. You know what the core principle is, which is to be a force in the community to help those that are in need, and that's a very base level thing. So if you can all meet on the base level and do those things together, some of the stuff that is on the fringes becomes less important and it's all about the mission at hand and helping the community.
Speaker 2:I would quibble with the word fringes there. Sure, Everyone. Their beliefs are really core to who they are. It's just that one of their beliefs is that we ought to make the world a better place and so we can find ways to do that. We're not going to be running a, we're going to. We would have a hard time collectively running an abortion center. Yeah, because there are going to be people who say that is, that's beyond the pale. Feeding the hungry, visiting people in prison, working on prison reform, working that is stuff where we can find common ground. And then within there there are certainly primarily Catholic organizations that work with pregnant women to help them avoid having an abortion and carry their pregnancy through the term. And there's Planned Parenthood, which gets a lot of support from other congregations. That's fine. There are places we can't work together, but there are a lot of places where we can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's more in common than it seems that you wouldn't think about, or maybe it is obvious.
Speaker 2:I just take it as sort of what I would call the big three, so Christianity, Judaism and.
Speaker 1:Islam.
Speaker 2:And within Judaism a central notion is to common-loan heal the earth. Within Islam, one of the five pillars of Islam is taking care of other people. Christianity has something to say about that, so that's a theological core in all three traditions.
Speaker 1:that reinforce what we're trying to do. Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. I think you guys are doing awesome work Moving away from that, for I think a lot of people, a lot of people but I know people that have struggled with faith and have been a part of a church and still go to a church. Maybe it's not aligning with where their values are currently, but they don't really know what to do. Right, they're going to go to someone that wants to try to find a different church or different way to practice, but doesn't even know where to start, because I don't know if I would know the answer to that question.
Speaker 2:So if often in that situation, the pastors or the leaders of your church are probably not going to feel like the right people to talk to about it, in some churches they are, and one of the things I've told people other pastors, I don't say every church isn't going to fit everybody and if this isn't working for you and you want to know about other churches, I know something about other churches and hate to see you go, but I'd be happy to help you find a place that might be a better fit. So that's one place, but it's probably not a place for most people are going to go. Second is one of the wonders of our world. Have you heard of this thing called the internet? It's got an old thing out there, brand new. Yeah, you can be, partly because of the results of the pandemic and churches really upping their game in social media. You can check out churches and you can go to a church service online, either when it's live or on Tuesday night when you have some time, and say what's the message here, what's the style, what does it feel like? Is this pompous? Is this welcoming? You have to narrow the field. There are a lot of churches out there. Where do you want to start, but okay, I am interested in more conservative Christianity or more progressive Christianity, or I'm Catholic, but I don't like the parish I'm at right now. But is there another one? That's better To just Google around a little bit and check them out.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people do that now. Before they ever walk through the door of a church or any other faith community, they want to know what they want, to have some sense of what they're getting into. And then some people are really comfortable going to a place they're not familiar with and some people are terrified of walking in. It's really hard to do to walk into a room full of strangers, but at some point that's probably as good a way to do it. Or get in touch with the pastor or another faith leader or somebody who goes to that place and say I'm looking for a church. Yours looks interesting. Can we talk before you even go there? And again, it can be email conversation, it can be in-person conversation. There are a lot of ways to explore but ultimately, at some point, if you think you found a good place, you need to go through the door and see what it feels like in person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to go and see what it smells like and meet the people and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:And one of the interesting things you're asking how do churches respond all this? One of the things I think churches have learned is you have about 15 seconds to make an impression. When somebody comes through your door, and if there's somebody friendly at the front door and people seem to be talking to each other and they notice you're there, that's going to feel a lot better than if you walk in and look around and nobody talks to you, right?
Speaker 1:What do you think if you look into the future with your magic goggles? What do you think is going to be different about church in 10, 20 years? Or will be the same?
Speaker 2:Oh, it certainly won't be the same and I think it's going to go, I would guess, in a variety of different directions. There'll be fewer churches, congregations, I think, just because of declining numbers and aging and that sort of thing. I think some churches, not a ton, but some will do the model we were talking about earlier with St John's Lutheran, where they're going to reconfigure themselves and they will still have a church presence, but it'll be within something larger, in this case, low-income housing and social services. There's a long history within Christianity of host churches, of small groups getting together, particularly within the black church, a lot of black churches. I think there's something like 25 black churches in the Madison area and you would only think there are maybe eight or ten if you look at the names that are out there, because a lot of them are small host churches Just gathering together, and that, I think, is another and one of the responses of the large churches, the black hawks of the world, which have several thousand members, is they have a lot of small groups and that's where the action really happens is in the small groups. So I think all different kinds of configurations will happen.
Speaker 2:I think there's also clearly a move among people who are active in faith. You create a small community that somehow attaches to an issue within your neighborhood, within your community, and you bind together that way. So I think all of those things are going to keep happening. And will we still have some large churches? Sure, because there's some folks who want that big collective group experience. I think there'll be a lot of smaller entities. The money is an interesting piece of that question. How do you sustain any of those communities In the desert? God sent manna. I don't think that's likely to happen so much right now. I think there'll have to be other ways to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm super interested in money in churches. I don't know much about it, but it just seems fascinating the way it all works, especially with some of these really large megachurches. Just the cash they're bringing in. It's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then how are those churches held accountable for that? In some cases it was interesting. You mentioned that I was at Black Hawk on Sunday this past Sunday. Chris Doltzen, who's the pastor of Miradis there are still preachers sometimes was preaching about, among other things, accountability churches need to have for their finances and noted that they have.
Speaker 2:Other stuff is audited every year. But he told a story about when he was growing up. His dad was chair of the Board of Trustees of this church they were part of and discovered that the pastor was stealing money out of the church funds. Oh wow. So he strengthened him and as a result of that, the dad and family were banished from the church and his dad said I will never trust the pastor again. So Chris said you can imagine how thrilled he was when I told him I'm going to be a pastor now. But I think Chris learned something about accountability out of that experience. Yeah, so yeah, I think that's really important, particularly for large entities like that. But people keep an eye on how the money is used.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, especially when there's all those eyes Like I don't know how you steal money from a church. It's wild, that's crazy. So my wife always says to ask this question at the end of interviews what didn't I ask that maybe we wanted to talk about today or that was on your mind.
Speaker 2:I think we touched a little bit on the multi-faith dimensions of the world we're in now, and that's something.
Speaker 2:I've never really had in and I think one of the cool things about being engaged in conversations with a lot of other traditions and, I suspect, because you do this sort of thing, so I think you're probably experiencing it. When I started talking to Muslims about God and what we believe in, they believe in one God and Christians believe in three gods and so why do we call ourselves monotheists? I said no way. It made me rethink what is this Trinity thing that I say I believe in and I like the Trinity. I think it's a cool thing, but it forced me to go back and rethink what I believe and I think that's a really good thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, again, I think, places that encourage you to ask questions and to raise questions about your faith and then realize your answers might not match their answers. And what do we do with that then it's really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I could not agree more. I think the I've done a lot of how do I say? Research. I watched so many documentaries on cults and it's always the wanting to push away information, pushing away questioning. This is what you're doing. I'm taking over every aspect of your life. If that's a situation that you're in, that's not religion. What you should have is what you just described, where you can have a conversation with somebody else that doesn't believe what you believe wholeheartedly, but you can talk about what you believe and then be able to digest it, internalize it, think about it for later. That's healthy.
Speaker 2:One of the cool things it's a small commercial here for Christ's Respiratory and System. We just went through a whole visioning process and have a set of values. One of the values is doubt plus faith, which I think is a really good value for a church to have, and there was some discussion. Should it be faith plus doubt? And so no doubt plus faith. People who have doubts can. One of the things I like to say about my living in the world of journalism and religion is I love being in a position where I can straddle skepticism and belief, because I think that's where we ought to be.
Speaker 1:That's really cool. That rings very true to me. I love that. That's a really cool turn of phrase too. This has been awesome, phil. I really just appreciate the time. I know that you're a busy guy. I was also learning about your background and just a little bit more about the Madison community. There's a lot of really awesome things going on just to help the people, and it's cool to see the good parts of church. I think a lot of times people hear the salacious bad stuff, but this is the good stuff. This is why churches should exist.
Speaker 2:Miles, I'm so glad you're doing these podcasts because I think this helps that conversation keep growing.
Speaker 1:For sure, for sure. Yeah, it's been an honor to talk with people like yourself. Just that people want to do it, which is the other cool thing. You never know People are going to react when you talk about. I have this religious podcast Exactly. Yeah, my eyes are on fire, no, but I really appreciate it. And, yeah, all the best to you in retirement. You got to go full retirement, though, someday. Man, you got to hang it up. I feel like I cut off at the end there, but again, thanks to Phil for coming on. I learned so much and I really hope he's able to take advantage of his retirement. Thanks again for listening to Finding my Religion. Make sure to follow us on Instagram, facebook, the Tik Tok, youtube, wherever you're doing the socials, and we'll see you next week.
