Preaching Through Tragedy: Mark Feldmeier on Ministry, Healing, and Community

Philip Amerson [00:00:02]:

Hello, everyone. This is Phil Amerson again with the To Be and Do podcast. And this particular podcast, we're going to begin with one of two conversations with my friend Mark Feldmeier. Mark is the lead pastor at St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. Highlands ranch is about 12 miles south of Denver, as some of you may know it. And that congregation, I think, is one of the most important congregations now in our entire denomination in the United States. And that's in part because of the excellent leadership Mark provides there.

Philip Amerson [00:00:49]:

He's widely known for his preaching and speaking and service on the adjunct faculty at Claremont School of Theology. Author of five books. Life After Finding Faith, when youn Can't Believe Anymore, is recently out from John Knox Press. And so I encourage you to look for that. And I'm just going to now turn to our friend Mark Feldmeier and, and say, greetings, Mark. It's great to have you with us.

Mark Feldmeier [00:01:22]:

Well, it's great to see your face, Phil, and to hear your voice. Good to reconnect with you over your podcast, and thanks for having me on the episode today.

Philip Amerson [00:01:34]:

I think you and I, even though we're different generations, carry a similar concern. And that is, what does the faith look like in the next decades? We're finishing the first quarter of the 21st century, believe it or not.

Mark Feldmeier [00:01:51]:

Yeah.

Philip Amerson [00:01:52]:

And I know you've thought a lot about faith, deconstruction, reconstruction. How do. How does one. How does one find one's way in this time? Any. Any preliminary thoughts, and then we'll poke around at that a bit.

Mark Feldmeier [00:02:14]:

Yeah. Well, the word deconstruction has become sort of a dirty little word in certain circles and certainly a pushback among more evangelical Christians who see deconstruction as a sort of a liberal project or a humanist project. But I think it's an important project. And the way I would describe deconstruction is simply looking at the construct of our faith and determining what it is that we literally can no longer live with that's no longer functional in a world where some of the assumptions that we make about God and about faith and about the church no longer seem to. To work. And for me, the sort of beginning point of that is trying to understand how we conceive of God or what our images of God are. And we've certainly inherited some pretty heavy and enduring images of God from classical theology, primarily one of omnipotence and this sort of predeterministic nature of God that already knows the outcome of all things, but also a God that is distant or removed. That sort of fosters a dualism in our faith and in our way of life as Christians in which we think of God as some sort of up on a cloud somewhere and, and not engaging with the rest of the world until maybe when we pray the right way or believe the right things, God will be motivated to intervene.

Mark Feldmeier [00:04:08]:

And often that is an understanding of a unilateral intervention. And so where I begin is this idea that I think it was St. Catherine of Siena who said, we become what we love, and who we love shapes our becoming.

Philip Amerson [00:04:30]:

Wow.

Mark Feldmeier [00:04:31]:

Richard. Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest, says, you know, our images of God create us, which is another way of sort of riffing off of Catherine of Siena's comment. But how we conceive of God shapes who we are in the world and how we relate to the world and our actions in the world. The, the great. Alfred North Whitehead, his famous critique of Christendom was, was that we, that, that we, we took from. We took the attributes of Caesar and applied them to our understanding of God. And so, yeah, a God that's, that's sort of this cosmic Caesar. And of course, these, these, these understandings and images of God create a host of problems for us, not the least of which is Christian nationalism.

Mark Feldmeier [00:05:33]:

But, you know, I was just this last week, I, I had somebody come to church here for the first time in 26 years. She stepped into church and it happened to be Saint Andrew. She was a survivor of, of Columbine and saw many of her fellow students perish that day. And on that day, she sort of gave up on God and has never been. She's at our. I think she's 40 or 41 years old now. And, and she didn't. She said, you know, I read your book and I, I wish I had read it years ago because it helped me understand God in a different light.

Mark Feldmeier [00:06:10]:

And a God that's. That maybe he's works in the world in different ways. Non coercively, more persuasively. So that's kind of where I begin the conversation around deconstruction and the importance of it.

Philip Amerson [00:06:25]:

So those of you that have not had the privilege of hearing Mark preach, I want to encourage you to go on the St Andrew website. You can get to past sermons there, Mark, Week in and week out. You challenge me. I don't always agree with you, but. Well, as one of my homiletics professors said, you should shoot for 75% on a sermon. And if you can get that, yeah, but, but you, you generally are in the high 90s. And you had a certain, well, so what's the future of preaching? Is that something that's going to pass from our, Our way of worship? Will other, will other media take the place? Are we just in one of those axial times when we don't, we don't see yet what the future is going, what the horizon will provide?

Mark Feldmeier [00:07:41]:

My quick answer would be yes, I think all of those things. On the one hand, there, there is a real space and a need for preaching that as it's traditionally conceived in the church. And I try to, to fill that more traditional role as a preacher. But I think preaching, certainly the construct of preaching is evolving and a lot of my colleagues are finding different, shorter, more creative ways to use media to speak into the conversation. But even there are times where I'm thinking that the day of preaching on a Sunday morning from a pulpit or from a platform, those days maybe are fading. Then I'm reminded almost weekly that people are showing up to hear the word preached. And there's something about the incarnational nature of being present in the moment with people that we can accomplish, often through other forms of media. So the.

Mark Feldmeier [00:08:57]:

What feels often like a monologue becomes in the preaching moment, a true dialogue. When you know the stories, you know, the real lived stories of people in the pews and that sacred trust of holding their stories in one's heart and mind as we preach, it's. It's an unbelievable privilege and a gift that I cherish.

Philip Amerson [00:09:27]:

Yeah, it's about, at least when I hear you preach, it's about relationship and never forgetting that. And I know there was a fad. Well, it's more than a fad because it's how I preached. There was a lot of narrative work that went on in my generation, and you're not exactly there. But I will often say to Elaine, as we're watching on Sunday morning, as you've laid the groundwork, I say, here comes the story.

Mark Feldmeier [00:10:00]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a. There's a plot to a sermon. And especially for me, and I, I will confess, I. I follow mostly a fairly predictable plot. While I may mix up the movements, you know, I typically follow what Paul Scott Wilson out of, I think he was out of. Perkins wrote a book called the Four Pages of the Sermon. And I don't follow that strictly in any way.

Mark Feldmeier [00:10:34]:

However he talks about these four sort of pages, or as I would define them, movements and where we. We identify the problem of the text, and then we identify the grace of the text, and then we identify the problem. Of our world and the grace in our world. And so I'm almost every Sunday playing with those pages, if you will. Not in that order always. Sometimes I'll begin with grace in our world and then go to the problem. But those are sort of the movements that you can almost every week find in my preaching.

Philip Amerson [00:11:12]:

So let me put you on the spot. I know that you have been a pastor through some horrific times there in your community, through school shooting, through other tragedies. How do you preach after those moments or in those moments?

Mark Feldmeier [00:11:41]:

Yeah, well, I have the unique distinction of being a pastor of a school shooter who took his life in that incident, the pastor of a survivor who was shot in a separate school shooting, and a colleague of a pastor on my team whose son, just a couple months ago, was fleeing Evergreen High School in the middle of a school shooting. On that same day was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Like, literally within, I think an hour of those two events occurred. And I knew that happened on a Wednesday, and I was actually working on my sermon. That's my writing day. And I knew that it was going to be a different sermon by the time I got to Sunday. I know a couple things. One, that there's this growing movement, and I see it often in social media, where somebody will post a meme or something that will say, if your preacher doesn't talk about this event on Sunday, you should find the church.

Mark Feldmeier [00:12:50]:

Right. And. And then I also know I have people in my church who will say, if that preacher preaches on that issue this Sunday, I'm going to find another church. And so it is an impossible situation. And in those cases, I just know that a. I have something to speak into this moment, and it needs to be something that our people, our listeners aren't hearing through traditional forms of media, whether it's cable news or social media. And to try as best I can to offer the gospel alternative to understanding these issues and to speak toward healing and wholeness and to name the fracture and the pain that everybody's bringing with them. And so I.

Mark Feldmeier [00:13:46]:

I haven't always been.

Philip Amerson [00:13:47]:

That.

Mark Feldmeier [00:13:50]:

Courageous isn't really the right word, but I think present to those moments maybe a little less, maybe more tentative in some. In earlier parts of my career. But it sort of began, you know, before I came to San Andrew at my church in San Diego, where I kind of leaned into issues of inclusion and. And how different ways to understand the issue of human sexuality and homosexuality in particular. And then I think that sort of became a. Through the. Through that process became validation that when I Show up to those moments and preach into those questions. People find deep meaning.

Mark Feldmeier [00:14:36]:

And I grow trust with people. And so it's a progressive sort of.

Philip Amerson [00:14:39]:

Evolving.

Mark Feldmeier [00:14:42]:

Dynamic where the more I do it and do it with deep sensitivity to all perspectives, the more trust I build, and. And that buys me even more space.

Philip Amerson [00:14:54]:

Yeah. So you do more than that. I, I see it. I, I, Years ago, I. Sociologists of religion say that faith deals with meaning, belonging, and empowerment. And I've watched you, after these school shootings and other instances, do something beyond the sermon in terms of reaching into community, in terms of building networks of care. Would you share a bit about that and what you learned?

Mark Feldmeier [00:15:36]:

Well, for example, the STEM school shooting, which happened in 2019, just before COVID hit. We had done enough work in our community in a response to the previous school shooting and deepening relationships with law enforcement here and EMS and especially the school district, that St Andrew, the campus itself, became the community response center. And the five days after that particular event, we had between 2 and 3,000 people every day, filling every square inch of this building, doing counseling, doing intakes with law enforcement, doing investigative work, working with teachers who were traumatized. Even my own office. I came in one day, and there were, I think, 15 people huddled in my little office, all from the school district. And I had to leave, you know, and what a, What a privilege that. That felt, you know, that that night of the school shooting, we had probably 22, 2500 people here for a prayer vigil. And frankly, at that time, I had been reaching out to one of our students that I knew was at STEM school, that reaching all to out, all to all my families.

Mark Feldmeier [00:16:57]:

But this one student I hadn't heard back from, and he kept me. It just kept me up all night. And the next day, I realized and learned that he was one of the two victims. He was fortunately, the one that survived, but. So I think it's a function of being present. But it's also, when I return to the space of preaching, to bring their stories with me and to represent the pain and trauma they're going through. And I'll be honest, that's not always easy. And there are times where it feels like a lot to carry, but at the same time, it's an honor.

Mark Feldmeier [00:17:41]:

And I do know that people expect now, after 11 years of being at St Andrew, people expect me to have something to say, and they expect that it will be a appropriate. And. And so. What a gift. Yeah.

Philip Amerson [00:17:58]:

Yeah. Well, what a gift. You are Mark Feldmeier, and we've been pretty serious. In the next next episode, we're going to laugh more and and talk a bit about joy, perhaps, and how one proceeds at the beginning of 2026, when this will be podcasts will be shared. So I want to thank all our listeners for joining us. And remember, Mark's book is available. You can go online at St. Andrews United Methodist and see good preaching, and it wouldn't hurt to make a little contribution to that good ministry there.

Philip Amerson [00:18:40]:

Thanks, Mark Feldmeier, for being with us for this episode be and to do.