Pastor Mike Housholder (00:00)

It's hard not to notice in church that a lot of people will come Christmas and Easter who won't come other times. And so I started to think early on, how do we leverage that for good for the sake of discipleship? If we're going to be a Jesus's life church, then His great commission and His great commandment are going to guide us. And we're going to be people who are striving to make disciples of all nations. And so how can we leverage those times when people are showing up for church?

in order to put them on this discipleship pathway. So what we started doing is we started calling Christmas and Easter garage door events. There's a quirky little thing where we notice suburban life in Iowa, your friends or your, you know, strangers come to your door through the front door. They knock on the door. But if you are in a neighborhood and you have community in that neighborhood, you open the garage door, which kind of signals to the neighbors, we're open.

Let your kids come over, play with our kids. If your garage door is open, our kids are going to wander into your house too. Garage door is open. It's wide open access.

Dwight Zscheile (01:04)

Hello everyone and welcome to the Pivot Podcast, where we explore how the Church can faithfully navigate a changing world.

Terri Elton (01:11)

On the Pivot Podcast, we discuss what we believe are four key pivots that God is calling many churches to make in the 21st century. They are a pivot in posture, from primarily fixing institutional problems to listening and discerning where God is leading. A pivot in focus from membership to discipleship. A pivot in structure from one size fits all models of ministry.

to a mixed ecology of inherited and new forms of ministry, and a pivot in leadership from predominantly clergy-led and lay-supported ministry to lay-led clergy-supported ministry.

Dwight Zscheile (01:51)

Today we're really excited to welcome Mike and Danny Householder from Lutheran Church of Hope in Iowa. Their church has been on an incredible journey of growth and transformation over the past few decades. Lutheran Church of Hope has grown from a single small congregation to a thriving network of campuses across Iowa, including strategic locations near university campuses in Ames and Iowa City. What makes their story particularly compelling

is how they've maintained a consistent focus on discipleship across all age groups while developing contextual approaches to ministry for each community that they serve. Anchored in their Lutheran theological heritage and roots, they've adapted how they do church to reach tens of thousands of people each week through a variety of different expressions. Lutheran Church of Hope is the largest Lutheran congregation in America and one of America's overall fastest growing churches.

So we find their story really hopeful and we think you will too. So welcome Mike and Danny to the pivot podcast.

Pastor Mike Housholder (02:54)

Thanks, Dwight. Thanks, Terri. Really good to be here. Hi, Danny.

Dwight Zscheile (02:57)

Hey guys, it's great to be here.

Terri Elton (02:59)

So let's start with having you share a little bit about the story of Lutheran Church of Hope and how did that journey go from a single congregation to a multiple site. And I'm just gonna say off the bat, Danny, you were younger when it started, so let dad speak, but don't forget your voice in that story as well.

Pastor Mike Housholder (03:21)

Just for a little context, Danny was one year old when my wife Sally and I moved here to West Des Moines to start this church, to restart the church actually. It had started two years before and had a really faithful mission developer pastor that the Lutheran Church, the LCA Division for Outreach had called to be here. He did everything he possibly could, but the circumstances were against him for a whole

bunch of reasons that were completely outside His control. It just didn't go. And so that's when the bishop of our synod called me and said, we want to restart. We want to give it another go. We think the circumstances are better now. And they were a little bit. There were maybe a dozen or so people that were hanging on from the first start. And so when my wife and I and our two boys at the time, our daughter hadn't been born yet, showed up

for the first Sunday because they were continuing to worship. We, think attendance grew by 50 % just with the four of us. And that was a pretty exciting time. But we started the traditional way. I was trained by the Division for Outreach of the ELCA to knock on doors and to hand out pamphlets and to try to get people to receive a weekly newsletter and get on our mailing list.

Pastor Danny Housholder (04:24)

No.

No.

Pastor Mike Housholder (04:49)

more importantly, as we started to do that, we started to establish, I think right from the beginning, some foundational principles that continue to bless us. We called it a congregational meeting, which wasn't real big because there were only about 15 of us. And we broke into small groups and dove into mission and what scripture says about these things, came up with a mission statement, and then talked about some kind of

key values for us as a church and how we would move forward. I'm probably at the heart of that, and this isn't something that happened right away, but Over the first few months, through a series of events, we started to realize we weren't very interested in a couple of things. One was that people would just come to church and observe it, and that pretty much church life would consist of people showing up and having committee meetings and talking about church.

what I've discovered is people would rather do church and do ministry than sit around and talk about it. And so We had some people pretty gung-ho. Mission churches that are starting out tend to attract those people, and they particularly want to do ministry. But that's been a principle that's continued on throughout the history of hope. The second thing was we wanted to see what kind of results we might have if instead of doing church for God, we would

set the sails of this church to the wind of God's Spirit, and we would see what God does through this church. It might sound like a subtle, like a splitting of hairs kind of difference, but it's really, I think, huge. And it's a huge difference between us trying to build something for God, and then we're going to go as far as we can take it, versus believing truly believing in the power of God through His Holy Spirit to move. And So, rather than set the sails of this church

to our own wind that we collectively can gather up and try to move the ship if you will, of a congregation forward, we thought it'd be way more fun and way more interesting to say, well, what's God doing? What's God providing? Discerning that, of course, is important and doing that faithfully and humbly. But let's try to set the sails of this church to the wind of God's spirit. And that's what we've tried to do right from the start. So those kind of early on principles have continued to bless us moving forward.

Terri Elton (07:15)

So Denny, help, yeah, you go in. You help start some of these other campuses. Say about how you entered this story and what that's like as you expanded Beyond One Sight.

Dwight Zscheile (07:27)

Well, I I grew up obviously going to Hope being a part of my dad's family and I loved it. I I loved being a part of the church. think a lot of pastors kids maybe don't have a great experience and there are all sorts of reasons for that. But whatever the reason was, I really had an amazing experience at Hope. I also had an amazing experience with churches when I moved away from home for a while through my college years, through my seminary years. So I can't say I've ever really had bad church experiences. So I'm very, very fortunate for that. But I've learned from lot of people who have maybe had

bad church experiences. And maybe I've had conversations with people who have worked in settings where maybe it wasn't the healthiest type of situation. One thing that I just think has been so amazing throughout the years that I've seen at Hope is for whatever reason, and I think that there's a lot that goes into this and partially leadership, but he's my dad so I don't want to give him too much credit, but there have just been really, really healthy people that have worked on this staff. And I don't mean healthy in the ways that, okay, they're psych majors or have their master's degree in counseling or anything.

I just mean that they're really level-headed, grounded in Scripture. They really focus on Jesus and they want to get the love of Jesus to people out to others. And there's a very Jesus first, me second, me third, me fourth, me fifth kind of attitude. One thing that I think that is pretty interesting is when I was probably five or six, I remember sitting in my dad's office in between services one week and I don't remember who it was, but I remember in my brain it was someone that I knew. And I remember that this lady was talking to my siblings and I.

And I don't know where my parents were at the time, but we were just sitting there and this lady's talking to us and she's like, did you know that there were a thousand people here today? And I remember that was the first time where I was like, oh wow, this is big. Like this is kind of unusual. This has grown quite a bit. And so, you know, I think that in my mind growing up, because I saw it at such a young age, like, oh, churches grow and that's just what happens. And people like Jesus and people like faith communities. Well.

little did I know as I would get older, a lot of people maybe have had bad experiences in faith communities. So I've been very, very fortunate to be in this. I was very, very fortunate that I was able to come back to Hope and be a part of starting a campus. And what I was really excited about is what I came back to is exactly what I thought that I would grew up with. I think that a lot of people, have experiences when they're kids and it's like, you know, that's just fantasy land. You know, you're just seeing it through the eyes of a kid. But I came back to a really healthy place. The same thing that I saw when I was growing up.

a place where people were just grounded in scripture, they're level-headed, Jesus first, and if I'm like fifth or sixth or seventh, that's okay, as long as I'm getting the love Jesus out. So then when I showed up and I was a part of launching a campus, I just had a ton of help. I mean, I had volunteers all over the place who just wanted to be invested in this community. I always say like was the most fortunate young pastor in the history of the church. I mean, I had like 100 volunteers who just wanted to help me.

I had staff members at other campuses who just wanted to share their experiences with me. There was no ego. and so what I saw when I was growing up, it's what I came back to. And it really, really helped when I was asked to be a part of leading a new campus. Great. So one of your core values at hope is Jesus's life. The rest is details. If I've got that right. So that sounds to me like an expression of the kind of classic Lutheran.

doctrine of Adiaphora or things indifferent that we can structure the church in all kinds of different ways for the sake of the gospel being proclaimed. So what does that look like at Hope and how has it freed you in ways that maybe some traditional churches haven't quite embraced?

Pastor Mike Housholder (11:05)

It does free us, Dwight. By keeping the focus on Jesus, and we've to be careful what we mean. I think it's important to interpret what we mean by that. Keeping the focus on Jesus means the Jesus who surprises us, the Jesus who challenges us, the Jesus who comforts us, yes, but the one who afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. It's the one who calls us to service, the one who calls us to mission, the one who calls us to outreach, the one who

commissions us to make disciples. Those things are just kind of baked into the DNA of this congregation and have been for decades. So when we came up with that core value, again, it was early on, it was in the first few years, the developing years of hope. And Pastor John Klein, who was a pastor here at the time, and I sat down and said, you know, we've got a mission, which is what we believe God's calling us to do.

We've got a vision, what we believe we're going to see and realize if we carry out this mission faithfully, but these core values will help keep us on track and keep us from derailing along the way. And they've really truly served us in a very productive and helpful way. They get repeated a lot. We talk about them a lot amongst the staff, amongst leaders at church council meetings.

We share them with the congregation frequently at new member orientations. We go through all this and say this is these are the values of hope. These are the written ones. And then we talk about some unwritten ones too. But that Jesus is life. The rest is details came from a phrase back in the 90s when hope was starting where, you know, kids would show up with shirts that said soccer is life. The rest is details. Basketball's life. Gardening's life. You know, pick your hobby, whatever it is is life and the rest is details. And, you know,

I it. I understand you're passionate about those things. So for us as a church, we just wanted to name it. We wanted to say this is who we are. What that ultimately pushes us forward to do though is to say if Jesus' life and if we preach Christ in Him crucified and if we are a church after God's own heart in that way, then it is going to be something that pushes us to say we have to do this in a Christ-like way. And as Lutherans, you talk about

the Lutheran doctrine of Adi-Aphra, there's also the Lutheran understanding of the long gospel, which is underneath that, that really grounds us along the way, that we would... We've always been a church that is... Right from the beginning, the summer of 1993, when we started, floods hit Iowa in a massive way. President Clinton came out to Des Moines. This is like three weeks into Hope being restarted. And so, the 15 of us who were there at the time, we said, well, let's...

let's go to, let's after worship today, let's just go out and do sandbagging and fill up bags of sand and try to help do our little small part to help this community and to serve those who are hurting because of these floods. That has persisted. That spirit of outreach and mission has persisted. So, if Jesus is life, that's necessarily going to be who we are. We are not going to be called to sit back and passively

be a church that just wants to control things and do things the way we want. But if Christ is really the center and the Lord of this church, we have to follow His lead. One more quick thing on that, and that's just that if Jesus is life for us, and we are going to pour into following Him as faithfully as we can and as humbly as we can, that means we're going to seek justice. But we're also going to love mercy, and we're going to walk humbly with our God. There's a lot

of loud voices these days, and necessarily so, who say, first part of Micah 6.8, we're all in for this, we're here to seek justice. But I think a Christ-centered church is also going to realize by far the most effective way to seek justice means that we can't leave behind mercy and we can't leave behind humility. Those three come together. It isn't seek justice period, that's it. It's seek justice. And the most effective way to do that is to

have mercy for those with whom we disagree, to see them the way God sees them, and to walk humbly with our God, which allows us to do that. To say Jesus is life to me means all of those things. It means to have that kind of law gospel approach. So there is the call to serve and to do mission and to stand against injustice and say this is wrong, but to do so with a sense of humility and to do so with a sense of grace and mercy and to see people the way God sees us.

Dwight Zscheile (15:55)

I'm going to borrow from what I've heard you preach many times, Dad, here is, you know, as a church, you have many options on what you'd like to be and what you'd like to be about. And among them, you get to either be a mission-based church, mission-based church, or an issues-based church. And if you're an issues-based church, your mission is going to change depending on which issue you're addressing. If you're a mission-based church, you get to go into the issues with faithfulness.

And I've always appreciated that at Hope. It's why when I was a kid growing up at Hope, it looked very, very different. And if you were to look at a photograph of Hope 30 years ago and a photograph of Hope today, you would say there's no way that's the same church unless you were in the room. And if you were in the room, you can see it and you could feel it and you know, that's my home. You know, that's where I've gotten to know Jesus. That's where I've grown in community. That's where I've shared the love of Jesus.

That's where I prayed with people together. That's where I've embraced the Holy Spirit together. That's where my life has been transformed among other believers. The way that sometimes I think about it is like, you know, sometimes you feel betrayed by your favorite band because they're still that band, but they're just totally different from anything they ever were. Their foundation is completely gone. You know, and maybe they just went with a new trend or they went with a new style or something. And I don't know, maybe just to sell more records or something. But as a church, if our foundation remains as Jesus, we will certainly adapt.

Again, that's why you look at a picture from 30 years ago, it doesn't look like it looks like today. And it's why today in the West Des Moines Chapel on Sunday mornings, you can get a traditional service, whereas you just walk down the hall, you'll get a service that will truly inspire you with modern music, which is really cool. It's why on Wednesday nights in this room that I'm in right now, we'll have 400 college students and the service looks different than what you will experience on a Sunday morning here in Ames. But the neat thing is those college students, come on Wednesday night.

And then they also come on Sunday morning, not all of them, but many of them will come on Wednesday night and then they'll come on Sunday morning. It's a different experience, but it's the same Jesus. it's the foundation. This might look different, but it's the same mission. It's the same foundation. And it's kept us, I hope, I hope that it's kept us faithful.

Terri Elton (18:08)

I love that. And that leads right into the next question that I was gonna ask. I've had the privilege of being at Hope many different times, different campuses. And one of the things I so appreciate is a real focus on what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? Not only does Jesus be the center and grounding and animate everything that you do as a community, but it also, you're inviting people into a journey, right? And you give people a pathway.

So I'd love to start with you, Dani, explain how you think about discipleship. And especially I'm thinking about maybe some of those young people or older folks that aren't familiar with church, right? That Jesus is kind of new to them. You can't assume they know the Bible stories, right?

Dwight Zscheile (18:58)

Yes. Okay. So let me just kind of give you like a very common example that we see here in our college ministry. Our college ministry is called Kairos. We meet right here. We're in a university city in Ames, Iowa. Iowa State is three quarters of the mile down the road for me right now. There's over 30,000 students there. So there's a lot of young people and they're in a very impressionable time of life. They're asking a lot of questions. They're willing to learn. And that's very, very exciting. A lot of our college students come from contexts where they haven't been baptized.

And a lot of them come from a context where they weren't baptized because they were taught, well, you don't belong in the Christian faith yet until you've checked off some boxes. So once you've been discipled, and then we can call you a disciple, then you get to be baptized. And our college ministry, something that we've seen over and over and over again is there are students who are like blown away. It was like, wait, you mean I get to be a part of the family of God before I'm acting like the family of God?

It's like, yes, because if you are part of the family of God, if you're called God's child, it's not a change in behavior, it's just a change in status, it's just a change in your label. And then let's let you grow through that. So we always tell the students, know, baptism isn't the finish line, it's a start line. But There are students where you just see their life completely change. There's a student who was sitting 10 feet from where I am right now last night. He was probably in the third row. Came from a background that maybe I had had described, Fell out of church his first couple of years of college,

and then now he's just like fully dove into this. And the cool thing is, is he didn't want to get baptized at our college service. He wanted to get baptized on the Sunday morning with the rest of the congregation around him. Cause he's like, that's my family. These are the people who love me. Even though they haven't seen me accomplish anything as a Christian yet, they haven't seen me disciple anybody else. They haven't seen me finish a class. They haven't heard my testimony. All they know is that's a child of God. He belongs in this family.

and let's disciple them after that. And it completely patterns the example of discipleship that we see in the book of Acts. It's you don't check off boxes and then you become a Christian. It's baptism is the entry into the family. Like, hey, you're here. And now let's go ahead and see you walk with Jesus. And so we have classes. We have lots of strategic things that we do, which is really fun. But at the core of it is just telling somebody from the very beginning, you belong here. You absolutely belong here. And that is...

That's just changed so many students' lives. It's changed the lives of people of other generations, Well, I want to just kind of explore that a little more, Danny, just thinking about how many particularly mainline campus ministries are really struggling right now to connect with college students. And you also seem to have learned how to do that at scale. And I'm curious. So tell us a little more about how do people find out about what you're doing? How do they connect in?

What are some of the messages that you are speaking into their lives that are resonating with what they're struggling with right now? Well, how do they hear about it? It's word of mouth. At Hope, it's always kind of been a word of mouth kind of thing. I remember when I was a kid, I would always be pushing my dad. like, hey, you should go on TV. I think a lot of people listen. And he'd always be like, nope, nope, I'm a parish pastor. That's always what he said. He's like, I'm a parish pastor. Dad, why don't you write a book? I'm a parish pastor.

So it's always just kind of depended on word of mouth and that's kind of been ingrained into the culture of the church. We do have students who come in from our other campuses. They grew up at Hope West Des Moines. They grew up at Hope Grimes, Hope Waukee, fill in the blank. But well over half of our, I mean, probably 75 % of our college students, whether here in Ames, at our Iowa City campus, they are students who didn't grow up at Hope. So it really just depends on word of mouth. If a friend is all in on it, likely one of their friends is gonna wanna come with them. So it totally depends on.

pretty much just word of mouth. When it comes to the topics that we talk to them about, the nice thing is, is I do have some younger people on my staff who are very wise, but also can still speak the language of college students. So I depend on them. You know, I asked them, hey, what are the questions that college students are asking? We started this semester with a series called Authentic Faith, and we were kind of exploring some of the counterfeit approaches to maybe some of the aspects of faith. So we talked about like, hey, Romans 12 verse two, when it says, not conform to the behaviors of this world.

What does that mean? Does that mean that as a Christian I should just resist all my friends and I need to block out anybody who doesn't reflect Christ because, know, resist them? And we told them, well, Jesus embraced the world. So if you're going to follow Jesus, you're not escaping from the world. You're actually going into the world. But you're like Jesus and you get to transform people around you because you have this peace, you have this overflowing love. And so we like to just tell them like, as kindly, as compassionately as we can, maybe you've heard this about Christianity.

We would like you to see what Jesus said about this thing that he was starting, about everything he was fulfilling and what that really means. So it's just fun when we get to do that. We just opened up a series last night on the book of Ruth. So we also sometimes go really deep on some of the difficult books in the Bible. Last year we did a series on the book of Joshua. That was tough, walking students through like, hey, why is there a bunch of violence in the Old Testament? But man, they're receptive. I mean, they're pretty used to learning and reading.

in listening. So in some ways they're easier to reach than the rest of our church sometimes.

Terri Elton (24:15)

I love it. I love how serious you take questions, but also you don't shy away from deep learning. Mike, what are other ways that you really help people do a journey of faith? I know Alpha's big. I know there's a variety of ministries, especially at like your West Des Moines campus or when they're bigger. How do people find their way into those learning opportunities?

Pastor Mike Housholder (24:39)

Yeah, here in West Des Moines, the campus where I spend most of my time and our original one, we set up a pattern just kind of calendar based. It's hard not to notice in church that a lot of people will come Christmas and Easter who won't come other times. And so I started to think early on, how do we leverage that for good for the sake of discipleship? If we're going to be a Jesus's life church, then His Great Commission

and His great commandment are going to guide us. And we're going to be people who are striving to make disciples of all nations. And so how can we leverage those times when people are showing up for church in order to put them on this discipleship pathway? So what we started doing is we started calling Christmas and Easter garage door events. There's a quirky little thing where we notice suburban life in Iowa, your friends or your strangers come to your door through the front door, they knock on the door.

But if you are in a neighborhood and you have community in that neighborhood, you open the garage door, which kind of signals to the neighbors, we're open. Let your kids come over, play with our kids. If your garage door is open, our kids are gonna wander into your house too. Garage door's open, it's wide open access. So we called those garage door events, because in the context of our culture, people understood that. We're lifting the garage door of our church at Christmas and at Easter. And instead of just doing...

We do the traditional things, but instead of just doing the traditional things at Christmas and Easter, let's build services for people who don't know Jesus yet. Let's build services for people who are away from God. And then we added Vacation Bible School in the summer because there's a pretty good lull between Easter and Christmas most years. So then we added a third garage door event. And what we did is after those garage door events, we'd immediately schedule a new member class. After the new member class, we'd immediately schedule the start of Alpha.

which is, of course, I would strongly encourage anybody to look into who hasn't already. It is arguably the greatest move of God on planet Earth in the last generation, and it's done in such a humble way. And you can modify it, you can adapt it, you can adjust it. Roman Catholics are using alpha. Anglicans, obviously, are using alpha where it came from. Evangelicals are using alpha. Mainliners are using alpha. There's ways to apply it. And it's not perfect, but it's an

bridge between people who are showing up and get intrigued by what happens at one of those garage door events, Christmas, Easter, Vacation Bible School. Vacation Bible School at Hope is a thing where we have, you know, what, two or three thousand kids in our church, but eight thousand show up for Vacation Bible School. It's just overwhelming. And so we're going to leverage that, hopefully for the sake of the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.

people will come and will say, take Alpha. Once you take Alpha, what you learn is the basics of Christianity or relearn. And sometimes it awakens a hibernated faith. Secondarily, discover by experience the advantages of group life, of doing church and community instead of just individualizing it and saying, well, I'm going to Google that and try to figure out what that means. But doing it in community, which people are just starving for, just hungry for.

Pastor Danny Housholder (27:38)

you

Pastor Mike Housholder (27:54)

You discover some things about God that maybe you didn't know along the way. It emphasizes who is the Holy Spirit. There's a whole retreat on that. Coming out of that then, a lot of people are hungry and a lot of people just keep the groups that they started in Alpha going. And then those become the buses, we say, that you can travel in order to continue your discipleship journey with classes, with continued group studies, with missions, with outreach-based events and ministries, whatever it might be. once we

If we can get people moving in that direction, then we're going to close the back door for all the people who are coming to those garage door events. And they're going to want to be a part of this community. They're going to want to be a part of this mission. So making disciples isn't just, hey, how do I get you to come to this class? Making disciples is developing a rhythm, I think. It's been really helpful for us. And then along the way,

you know, doing a whole bunch of other things we probably don't have time to get into, but I've got a zillion things I could talk about just in terms of details. But those are the big things.

Dwight Zscheile (28:59)

So one of the things I've noticed of Visiting Hope is you have a lot of wonderful lay leaders that you have empowered and set free and set loose to use their gifts. So how do you identify and develop leaders in your congregation?

Pastor Mike Housholder (29:16)

Sometimes it's just impossible not to see it in people. And so you tap them on the shoulder and you say, hey, have you ever thought of that kind of thing? You might want to consider leading a group. You might want to consider serving as a leader in some way. You might want to consider for some who are called to it seminary and answering God's call if God's giving you one and to full-time ministry. That said, most of the leaders at Hope identify

themselves and come to us. They get excited, they get hungry, they get passionate, or their passion is awakened that they've always had, but maybe weren't tapped into. They get excited about what they see God doing in this community. They want to be a part of it. It really is a spiritual momentum thing. It is the Holy Spirit-empowered momentum that God brings into a community that is far from perfect, but is

attempting to be faithful in a way that allows it to be healthy overall. Again, not perfect, but healthy. We're not going to try to become something nobody can be, but we're going to be healthy enough to admit we aren't perfect. We're going to be healthy enough to acknowledge that we really are interested in seeing what God can do here instead of what we can do for God and what God could do through us instead. So as those young leaders or older leaders identify themselves,

Pastor Danny Housholder (30:43)

We

Pastor Mike Housholder (30:44)

We try to do everything we possibly can to develop and equip those leaders for ministry from formal to informal things. Informally, we have a lot of staff who just serve as ad hoc mentors for younger staff. More formally, we have a program here that you guys are aware of where we take young adult leaders on our staff and we put them through a 10-week or 12-week program to try to strengthen their leadership capabilities.

and encourage them on the pathway to continue to seek whatever God's call is for them. We're wide open to partnering with seminaries and colleges and others, and we've had great conversations about that over the years. And we're excited about the future there, too. The future of the Church depends on faithful leadership. Nobody knows that better than the two of you. And we believe congregations

Pastor Danny Housholder (31:31)

Beep.

Pastor Mike Housholder (31:42)

I have a responsibility to play a vital role in developing those leaders, identifying those leaders, but also being good stewards of those who come to us. Just last night, I taught our confirmation classes, and then I led an open Q &A with our high school students at our high school youth group. And one young man from the high school group came up to me afterwards and says, I think I'm supposed to go to seminary, but I'm not sure what that's all about.

You know, this is music to a pastor's ears. You're like, okay, well, let's talk about this. And so we started a conversation. We'll follow up with more. This is not a rare thing here at Hope. We have a lot of pastors that have grown up in our church, pastors and ministers and other staff that are now on Hope staff, but we have at least four times more who've grown up at Hope, who've gone to college or seminary and are serving as pastors, youth directors.

other vocations within the church across the country, around the world. And so we want to be a sending church too.

Terri Elton (32:49)

Yeah, I love that. We have some of your students here, some of your people here as our students, and it's been really fun over the years to learn from them.

Dwight Zscheile (32:57)

I think it's just very relational. you know, like you were saying there, Dad, it's seeing who shows up, seeing who's excited to be there because sometimes it's, you know, there's someone who shows up, but it's really just because I'm almost dragging them every time. And I'm glad that they're there, but maybe that's not the person I should be investing all my time into to develop a leader. I remember a few years ago, there was a student who I was like, man, this guy would be a great leader for this ministry. You know, I was really excited about him and just...

He grew up in a different church setting, different church tradition. And I just felt like I was just dragging him. just theologically, while he didn't know it theologically, he just had some really fundamental disagreements. And I was like, I can work those out of him. I can get those out. And I spent so much time focusing on this one guy who really just wasn't there. And I was devastated when he was like, hey, I think I'm actually going to be a part of this other ministry because it just probably

makes a little bit more sense. And while that made sense in my brain, I was devastated. I was talking to God about it it was so amazing because as soon as I finally let that go, all of a sudden there were 10 new guy leaders that we were, we're just basically sitting on our doorstep. Here at Kairos and Ames, when we started, we were like 90 % women leaders, 10 % guy leaders. Part of that is just because in our Lutheran setting, like women are empowered and encouraged to lead. And so like we never had a problem getting women coming in and leading. And to this day, like that's still like the most natural, easiest

group of people that are coming in and leading, which is fun. So I felt like I was trying really hard to get guys to be like, come on, come on. But I was focusing so hard on forcing someone who probably just really wasn't that excited to be here. And then God was like, but here are the ones that you're not paying any attention to. Fast forward a few years, those, that small group of guys now has grown into our strongest, not just small group, but network of small groups on the guy side of things.

where there's like 30 to 35 of those guys who meet every single Tuesday night. They get together in a house and they split up into smaller groups after that. And then they come on Wednesday night. And if I just kept on trying to force somebody like, you're the one, you're the one. It's like, but they're just not that excited to be here. Let them go. Like just, it's okay. You don't have to put all your investment into somebody who probably is going to plug in just fine and feel very served and very filled in another church setting. Let them go. And then instead embrace who God is putting in your church.

and who really is excited to be there. So that's been really cool for me. like I said, the women, they just do it. It's easy. But some of the guys we've had to encourage a little more, but part of it is just like, it's just identifying the guys who actually want to be here.

Terri Elton (35:32)

I feel like that's a little bit of the sail that you talked about earlier, Mike. Like, is it about us or is it about getting the sailboat and catching the wind, right, of where the spirit has taken you?

Pastor Mike Housholder (35:44)

Yeah, most definitely. To be good stewards of what God provides is just a way healthier approach than trying to force people to be something that they're not ready to be.

Terri Elton (35:56)

So I have a leadership question that I think is, for me, if I was in your shoes, one of the hardest things that I think from the outside you've had to deal with. How do you keep a consistent vision and values? Like you said, Mike, here's our mission, vision, and values. But now we have these multiple campuses, very different contexts.

And how do you dance between, in Ames, we're gonna do this because it makes sense. And here is what it means to be hope, right? How do you put those two things together?

Pastor Mike Housholder (36:33)

Repetition is a good teacher. You keep bringing the mission back over and over and over again. That said, it gets complicated. I don't know that anybody has written the book yet on how to do multi-site church in a perfect and highly effective way 24-7. I feel like we have learned a lot.

along the way. We started our second campus not because we wanted to be a multi-site church, but because we were painfully out of room. We were spilling over, we were causing traffic issues. The local police came to us and said, you got to do something about this. You're causing major problems with traffic flow in our city. so, you know, we were not making friends with people we want to be friends with. And so it was...

So almost by complete necessity, you know, in Iowa, there's the famous phrase, if you build it, they will come. Yeah, yeah, it's in a movie somewhere. But for us, it's been more like they came, we have to build it. We got to try to keep up with this. So we started a church on the opposite end of town. Then we went into the city of Des Moines and started a church in an urban setting.

Terri Elton (37:36)

I've heard that.

Pastor Mike Housholder (37:57)

And then we started some other churches, including two churches now in, or two campuses now in major university towns, the one Danny's at in Ames and our newest one in Iowa City. All of that really has been out of necessity and a desire to carry out Christ's mission. But how do we maintain a consistent vision and mission with all these campuses? It's complicated. It's difficult.

Danny, you mentioned it earlier. It's relationships, it's trust, it's relational accountability. The campus pastors meet regularly. We connect with staff, different teams on staff from different campuses meet regularly. But then you gotta clarify. Somewhere along the way, you've gotta bring some clarity to it. And so we have something here that we call Hope Choice and Campus Choice.

We have seven campuses, we have seven more local sites that are kind of grass-roots, started by volunteers and still led and run by volunteers. which is really fascinating. But the campuses are led by pastors and staff. Of all those 14 different locations of Hope, we say, OK, there are things that you don't get to vote on. Our mission is not up for debate, our vision, our core values, Jesus, Scripture.

the solas of the Reformation, We're not going to debate those things. a law gospel balance, these kinds of things we will hold one another accountable for. and we'll do so from the church council and the board and the leadership staff out. So folks know that there are some of those things that are just not negotiable. Beyond that, everything is up to each campus. Because what we try to do, what we've learned is

We can either try to over control this or just trust the people that God has called to lead in these places and maintain that relational accountability. and make it very clear that there are certain things that are not negotiable. So how that ends up playing out in practical terms is each campus feels somewhat unique. And I think that makes us a way stronger witness for the cause of Jesus Christ in our world.

Instead of just having a cookie cutter like we're going to do franchises of Hope, you know, and you'll get your same thing at each one. people will say it still feels like Hope. it still has the same kind of core, but each campus has its own personality. and I, I like that. I like everything about that. One more thing that I think was huge was we, when we first started these campuses, we thought it'd be better stewardship of our time. If only one person was preaching.

And normally that fell on me as a senior pastor. And so we would do live stream video to the other campuses for the sermon. So it'd be live worship and then live stream video. And that's still kind of a trendy thing to do. But what we discovered, especially during COVID and coming out of COVID, is people learned, well, I can just do that at home. I can watch any sermon in America on YouTube or on their website almost any week I want.

And so if I'm just going to go to church and get something on a screen, if I haven't found community there yet, what's the point and what's the purpose? So we decentralized it and now all of our campuses have live preachers. And the only place I'm preaching is at our original campus. And that's 98 % of the weekends. Once in a while, if we're on a vision topic or something where everybody wants to hear the same sermon, we'll go back to that. But that's maybe once a year at most.

For the most part then what we're doing is we're setting things up so that we maintain this consistent vision, but contextually each campus has its own thumbprint. And that's going to be good for the future too, because this church therefore is not built on just one pastor or one style of preaching or one way of doing church. So my goal is someday when I retire and step away.

My mom might notice, a few other friends might notice, but for the most part, it's rolling and it's functioning and we should be more than okay.

Dwight Zscheile (42:10)

And I think I can speak into a little bit of the way that that's benefited our campuses that aren't West Des Moines, that aren't the original campus ever since we started doing live preaching everywhere. So when I started, I wasn't ready to preach weekly to an intergenerational congregation. I just wasn't. Instead, my focus on preaching was at our college service and learned a lot about preaching through there and then learned a lot about preaching at Hope Ames maybe once every five or six weeks. And that was a really good season. But coming out of the pandemic, one thing that I've

found was I was worried when my dad said, hey, you're going to be taking on some more preaching responsibility. was worried like, okay, well, that's going to take up some more time. What if I don't have as much time to build relationships with the church? Because I know that sometimes the typical model and a multi-site church model is, well, I don't want our campus pastors, you know, wasting time, wasting time writing sermons. So then they can, you know, go build relationships. What I found was my relationships actually got a lot stronger in the church once I started to preach because between Sunday mornings in between Wednesday nights,

You know, I've got to reach a thousand people and I just can't do that. Now, hopefully between my staff and then the leaders that we're leading, we really want to reach all of them. But what I found is while maybe I'm not knowing everything about them, when you preach, there's a certain level of vulnerability that comes with it. It's, here's what I really believe about Jesus. I'm telling like I am opening up the most important part of my life to you, you know, and yes, it's about the vision of our church, but I'm really all in on this and I really believe this. And so.

It's been some of the strongest relationship building when I preach because then if it's hard to find common ground with somebody when we're first starting talking, maybe they might bring up a story from a sermon that I preached or maybe that will open up a piece of relatability that I have with them in their life. So it's still on me to then learn more about their life, but it's definitely welcoming them into mine. And that's just kind of the style of preaching at Hope2. We share stories. We talk about, like, hey, what does this mean to me?

And I hope that this then relates to you in some way, too. So it's really only helped the relationship building by being able to preach live. Well, Mike and Danny, thank you so much for all that you've shared and for sharing the really inspiring story of how God has worked through Lutheran Church of Hope and continues to do so. We will keep learning with you and from you as churches in so many places try to navigate these challenging times.

Terri Elton (44:34)

And to our audience, thank you for joining us for this episode of Pivot. To help spread the word about Pivot, if you're listening on YouTube, please subscribe. Or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts or any of the podcast platform, please like and maybe even leave a comment.

Dwight Zscheile (44:51)

And the best compliment is always to share Pivot with a friend. So until next time, this is Dwight Zscheile and Terri Elton signing off. See you next week.