LeQuita Porter:

To all those who believe their local church can be a vital sign of God's presence in their community, and to those who believe in a right here, right now, in-this-place ministry that seeks to truly meet the needs in your neighborhood, join us as we discuss incarnational mission with the co-authors of the book, Neighborhood Church: Transforming Your Congregation into a Powerhouse for Mission.

Krin Van Tatenhove is a writer, visual artist and spiritual adventurer. He was a Presbyterian pastor for 34 years, serving in a variety of settings, but always an advocate for ministries of justice. He has also been an organizer for Habitat for Humanity, a substance abuse counselor, a hospice chaplain, an Army chaplain, and a director of a nonprofit. His 40 years of professional writing experience have led to countless articles and 17 books. Krin holds a doctoral degree in ministry from McCormick Theological Seminary, and his dissertation plumbed the meaning and power of spiritual gifts. He lives and serves with his wife and adult disabled son in San Antonio, Texas.

Rob Mueller is the godly proud pastor of Divine Redeemer Presbyterian Church in San Antonio, Texas. Divine Redeemer Church is a 100-year-old urban Hispanic congregation, and Rob has served as pastor for 30 years, and he credits this congregation with teaching him how to be a pastor. Rob began his ministry working ecumenically with the Christian-based community model for church redevelopment that was developed in Latin American poor Christian communities.

Together, Krin and Rob, with over 60 years of combined pastoral ministry experience, have written this informative and compassionate book on how local congregations can transform their congregations into powerhouses for mission, embodying the values of love, grace, and justice. Let's dive into the discussion.

One of the first things I wanted to ask you is, I am particularly interested in dedications that are made within books, and I noticed yours because oftentimes they have specific names and they're focused toward family members, but yours were very interesting. In the case of you, Krin, you said that you're dedicating the book to, "All who believe their local church can be a vital sign of God's presence in their community." And Rob, you said, "To the members of the Divine Redeemer Presbyterian Church and neighbors in that same ZIP Code, who taught you how to be a pastor." Each of you, share with me just what your thinking was when you wrote those.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Sure.

Rob Mueller:

Well, this is Rob. LeQuita, thank you for the opportunity to be on this podcast with you. And I really have experienced a partnership with my congregation over the 30 years that I've been there. And I came in thinking I knew how to be a pastor, but needing to learn a lot of things that seminary does not teach you. And it was really important for me to allow them to shape me in the same way that I hoped to be a shaping influence on them. And as we opened our lives to each other in that kind of mutually affecting way, I found myself turned into a pastor who could really love better, who could serve better, who could lead better because of the lessons that I learned from my community. So that's why I dedicated this to them.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. And how long?

Rob Mueller:

30 years.

LeQuita Porter:

30 years of pastoring...

Rob Mueller:

30 years this past March. Yeah, and I'm scheduled to retire at the end of this year from full-time ministry. Not completely, but it'll be a little over 30 years. So, a long time.

LeQuita Porter:

Wonderful, wonderful. Krin?

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Well, again, I thank you also, LeQuita for this opportunity. Anyone who has been involved in church leadership knows how many people in our communities, especially people who are unchurched, view congregations as self-serving, too interested in paying their staff, maintaining their buildings, and soliciting membership. It happens all the time. And when a church transforms itself into a community of faith that is giving itself away, is concerned with the well-being of all people in their community, it's a really wonderful thing. And Rob and I have been a part of this. He's experienced it at his congregation. I have across the country. We've seen it. We know what it feels like. I heard one woman, a good friend of mine say that when this type of conversion starts to happen in a church and in a community, feels like Jesus is in the front of a tandem bike, pedaling and you're in the back trying to keep up.

Rob Mueller:

I like that.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

And so my dedication is meant for all those who are making this reality happen wherever God has planted them, whether it's in an urban setting, suburban, a country setting, I have friends pastoring in all of those kinds of locales. So when it's happening, when this type of renewal is happening and the people in the community look at that church as a source of renewal and hope, it's just beautiful. So that's why I dedicated mine the way I did.

LeQuita Porter:

Love that. Love that. And it seems like that sort of opens up the next question I had for you, and that was the motivation for writing the book. What prompted the two of you to write this book, and then to write it together?

Rob Mueller:

Krin, why don't you take the first run on that one?

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Sure, sure. For me, the basic thing is my love for people, both those I've worked with in churches for 34 years, and those I encountered in the communities where we serve, those I encountered overseas working in partnership. And that love affair, it bore such a great fruit in terms of bonding people together, that I wanted to write about it. So when I encountered the principles of asset-based community development, which are key to this entire book, I saw a framework that gave a tangible structure to this passion that I've had for mission my whole life, and it was perfect.

I encountered it during a seminar put on by Partners for Sacred Spaces. I did some writing with them for a while and they did a seminar in Fort Worth and laid out what asset-based community development is. When we go out in the community without a preconceived notion that we're the ones who are right, we have the correct agenda, we see the "needs" of our community, but instead allow ourselves to listen and encounter what God's already doing there and then form partnerships that are born out of the spirit and not out of our willfulness, it's incredible.

So when I saw that framework, that made me want to write a book, and I contacted Rob, and he's been doing that kind of work for all these years at Divine Redeemer, and he was right on board with it. We had a great partnership. I feel like the book came forth in a really spirit-filled way because we had an idea and then we started working together, and the way we jibed was just incredible.

Rob Mueller:

It was a lot of fun. Writing the book was a lot of fun. Often, we would take one of the concepts and then we would just sit and brainstorm stories that we know, experiences that we've had, things that we've read, influences that have shaped us in that particular arena. And I would say, if I were to answer that question about what prompted me to write the book, certainly a big piece of it was Krin saying, "Hey, you want to write a book?" And I will be very honest, that if Krin had not been the whip-cracker behind this, it might never have gotten across the finish line because of my particular propensity to keep things in the back burner and fail to bring them to-

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Thank you, brother. I'll receive that. Thank you.

Rob Mueller:

But also, I had been talking, I've been a part of small pastor support groups or some kind of support group, a small group Bible study, some kind of small group experience since I was 16 years old, every single year of my life since I was 16 years old. And I believe deeply in the value of those kinds of conversations in a non-judgmental, loving environment. And one of the things that came up for me repeatedly when I was sharing experiences with folks in a couple of the groups that I had, is they said, "You need to write this down. You need to share this with more people." And I was like, "Yeah, that'd be a good idea. Sometime, maybe that would be nice. I'd like to." And I thought about, a lot of the different things that we put in this book are not things that I picked up in seminary. And Krin, I don't know if you would echo that or not, but it was not part of my seminary education, and things that I needed to learn in order to be effective in ministry in that very local neighborhood kind of way.

And as I've learned these lessons, I've just thought to myself, "Man, I wish I could share this with new seminarians coming out, or people who are attempting to engage in ministry at the local level like this." And when Krin suggested writing the book, I was like, "Okay, this is a way that that can happen without having to become a seminary faculty member or something else, or take myself away from the ministry that I really enjoy." And so I was excited about writing this because I thought it would be a way to share broadly with people I will never meet, some of the lessons that have become really vital and important to me in being a pastor of significance in a local neighborhood.

LeQuita Porter:

And your local neighborhood is in San Antonio, Texas?

Rob Mueller:

That's correct. That's correct. So I work in the 78207 ZIP Code, which in San Antonio competes with another ZIP Code on the opposite side of downtown. So my ZIP Code is in the barrio Hispanic side of town, predominantly Latino. And the other ZIP Code is on the east side of San Antonio, which is the African American side of town. And we compete for the lowest per capita income and the highest things like crime rates and teen pregnancy rates and poverty rates. So they're ZIP Codes that are very challenging. And this congregation was planted in the spot where we are right now in 1929. It was started in 1915 as a church that was initiated by refugees who were fleeing the Mexican Civil War. And the pastor who fled the Mexican Civil War requested permission to work with those refugees.

In many ways, that experience kind of defined the DNA of Divine Redeemer as a church that was going to be a church that served, and served people in need. And we're in a very unique situation because we've got, in addition to the congregation, the House of Neighborly Service, which was a settlement house, also started in the early 1900s. And we have been living in the same facility since 1929. And so our congregation has essentially lived as a partner, in partnership with a community ministry project for almost 100 years.

LeQuita Porter:

Wow. Krin, have you and Rob collaborated on other projects in the past?

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Yes, actually, we wrote a couple other books. One I donated the time to help him put together a history of their congregation, which he just put into beautifully and succinctly. It's really rich. Then we also wrote a book about the value of Christian conference centers. It centers around John Knox Ranch as the main example. That was our most recent project. Plus Rob has contributed to a couple anthologies that I've done. So yeah, we've had a lot of... We also did a devotional book.

Rob Mueller:

Yeah, I was just going to say, we also did a mission diary that shares stories and invites. We utilize some of the same concepts that are part of Neighborhood Church and it's a mission diary for folks who are going on a mission trip out of the country, in particular. It could be anywhere at all. But I actually just used it with a solar panel installation group that went down to Guatemala this past summer. And people have really appreciated the quality of the reflections that we put in there and the questions that we're inviting folks to reflect upon.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

That was born out of need. Rob and I have both led multiple mission trips over the years, and we like to gather with people in the morning and the evening, and having something you could hold and use as a devotional guide, the questions and a place to write. That's why that came out.

LeQuita Porter:

All right, that sounds wonderful. I'm thinking about Neighborhood Church, and it sounds like you've already been engaging for several years in what you talk about as incarnational mission. And so I want you to say a little bit more about that. You talk about it a lot throughout this book, the paradox of incarnation. Can you just say more for our listeners?

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Yeah, I'll go with that.

Rob Mueller:

Fire away.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Okay. I was thinking about how many books have probably been written, scholarly books about the Incarnation of Christ. And what's most important to me is that that's happening in our lives as well. It's an ongoing process for each of us. And to put it in the context of this book, I would use a simpler expression probably called, “show me, don't tell me.” Especially now, in America in 2024, there's a cultic form of Christianity in our country that says they follow a God of love, mercy, and acceptance, but continue to show just the opposite to immigrants, people of other nationalities or races or those whose sexuality is different from theirs, and worst of all, they wrap all of that intolerance and hatred in the American flag. And so I have friends who are agnostic, atheist, they follow a spiritual path. They can't be codified in any religion, and they love to complain to me all the time about the dominant face of American Christianity, all the outrageous judgment and prejudice they see. They know that I agree with them, and honestly, I get a bit tired.

It gets tedious to have to remind them that I labored for 34 years amongst Christians of a totally different stripe, progressives who worked tirelessly for civil rights, humane immigration policies, protection of the environment. And so that is why people who are incarnating this kind of love, these core values of Jesus, it's just so damn important. So that's why this idea of incarnational mission is always powerful to me, but especially now at this juncture in our country.

Rob Mueller:

I would ditto every single thing that Krin just articulated. Incarnation for me is about embodying Jesus in my life, and then embodying Jesus in our life together. And it is about giving people a visual example of what love incarnate, what an inclusive, affirming, supportive care for the folks who are struggling on the margins love actually looks like, and not preaching, not beating people over the head, but inviting them into a community that opens itself up in love, just the way Jesus did. That's exactly why.

Krin Van Tatenhove

Show me, not tell me.

LeQuita Porter:

Sermons we see. Yeah. And the paradox of incarnation. Say more about that. Why is there a paradox?

Rob Mueller:

I'm not sure exactly how Krin would work that himself, but paradox is always about two things that seemingly don't go together but then actually do. And the reality is that our humanity oftentimes gets in the way of our ability to embody the Spirit of God that dwells within us. And so there is that tension in incarnation of spirit and matter that we often put in opposition to one another. But what we really need to understand is that the only way that spirit ever is made visible is when it becomes incarnate. And so our lives, the tangible reality of our life experience, the tangible reality of the struggles that we engage in, the tangible realities of our family, those are the only place that spirit can manifest because it is the only way spirit has ever manifested, is in the middle of life. And so while they've often been placed in juxtaposition, our life in Christ, our experience of the life of Christ within us is only able to be made visible through the way that we live our lives. That is the way in which it comes forward.

If we are not intentional about seeing that incarnation being not something that happened one time with Jesus 2,024 years ago, but something that happens continuously every moment, every day, in every life because it's the only way spirit has ever been made visible, then we miss the importance of the gospel message. The incarnation was not supposed to be one event in one time. Incarnation is the way God works all the time, everywhere.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

I really want to agree with that, Rob. And it's like the old Gnostic heresy of separating spirit and matter. I believe both are present all the time, even when people don't recognize it. And all we need to do is turn around and embrace it and find out that the miracle is closer than we ever realized. And I think a lot of my personal experience with that has been born of the rough years of my recovery process.

I can think of times when I would be traveling nationally and would hook up with some 12-steppers in a grungy basement of a public building or maybe a church. And there were all these broken-down people, and I felt the Spirit as powerfully in their words and in the presence of their lives as I did during communion at any church service. So that's just how I am. And I've also had probably a little bit of an ax to grind, that too often churches keep themselves insulated from the roughest/dirtiest and hardest to deal with elements of their community, not recognizing that the Spirit is just as present there as in the confines of their sanctuary.

Rob Mueller:

Two thoughts on that Krin, just to kind of riff off of that a little bit. One is a story I share in the book about Father José Marins, who was a Brazilian priest and educator in the Christian-based community movement across the world, but especially in Latin America. And Marins went to Los Angeles and was doing a conference there, and he noticed churches on every street corner, and yet that community was experiencing one of the highest levels of violence in the entire area. And his question to the churches was, "How can there be churches on every corner and nobody be doing anything about the violence?"

Krin Van Tatenhove:

From now on.

Rob Mueller:

That's that insulation of the church that pulls itself into itself and then ignores the messiness and the painfulness of the community. The other thing I would share is that as I converse with the people in my congregation, almost without exception, when I ask them a question, "When have you felt God's presence most powerfully in your life?" And almost without exception, it is at the hardest, most difficult, most messy moments of their lives when God spoke, when God moved, when God became present in a very tangible, very meaningful way. And just as that is true in our individual lives, I think that is true in our corporate lives as a church, if we will allow ourselves to step into the mess.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

"My power is made great in weakness."

Rob Mueller:

Exactly. Exactly.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. Amen. God's strength is made perfect. Amen. Amen. Krin, I'm thinking when you mentioned earlier about those AA meetings or NA meetings, and how it was always said that there was more grace in the basement of the church and those meetings than it was in the sanctuary.

Rob Mueller:

Than in the sanctuary.

LeQuita Porter:

That's real. That is real.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Oh, it's real. Let me put it this way, it's real in my life. I'm sure there are many churches where that grace is just as apparent when you sit down to a stranger.

Rob Mueller:

There's a story that happened after we wrote the book, in my congregation that made me so proud of our church. There's a woman who was a drug addict on the street in our neighborhood, and her name was Isabel. And she oftentimes would come by the church and speak with me. On a number of occasions, she would also proposition me because that was how she made her money. And I would say, "Thanks, Isabel. I'm fine. No worries." But one day Isabel came to worship. She came to worship with us.

And she was high, and she came and sat down in the front of the church, and I had a seminary intern who was preaching his first sermon ever in our congregation, preaching that Sunday. And Isabel, in the middle of his sermon decided to disrobe herself completely, not leaving anything else on from the waist up, and sitting in the pew right there in the middle of the church. And I was watching this happen. I was like, "Okay." And as I watched, I noticed one of the doctors in the church who's a psychiatrist, get up and quietly move around from the back of the church, make a comment to one of the other members, who's a retired police officer. He called 911 to get EMS over there.

She went and sat down right next to her and talked to her gently. The seminarian did not skip a beat and completely finished his sermon. Nobody in the church freaked out. Everybody treated her lovingly. And even one of my older female elders at the end of the experience said, "It was hot in there. I felt like taking my shirt off too." And I thought, "Oh my God, I love this church."

LeQuita Porter:

I love that.

Rob Mueller:

"I love the way this church is capable of embracing the absolute most"…

LeQuita Porter:

That's beautiful.

Rob Mueller:

…"scandalous thing that could happen, and do it with such ease and with such generosity."

Krin Van Tatenhove:

That’s great.

LeQuita Porter:

Ease and generosity and love. Amen. Amen. Well, you all, within this book, you get very specific about some practical things that can be done in order to engage in incarnational mission. And if you'd like to share some of those practical tips that you gave.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Sure. The first chapter you asked us about was the conversion from scarcity to abundance and from self-absorption to our neighbors, both of which Rob and I describe as communal conversions. And these begin what I call a Copernican revolution in the life of the church, an essential revolution. The conversion to our neighbor is everywhere in the teachings of Jesus. I don't really need to go on about that. But the conversion from scarcity to abundance has been co-opted in this country by prosperity theologians, that what we mean when we say that is that everything's going to be great. The church's coffers are going to fill up with money that they didn't expect and all these kinds of things that may or may not be true.

But what we're saying is that when you step out in faith, you discover that not only that God is already working abundantly in your community, but that the resources you need to join God in that work are already there. They just need to be uncovered through dialogue, through listening, through partnership. So rather than being stuck in this mindset that, "We've always done it this way, I don't think it'll work." We step out in faith, and what we say that is, when you do that, you'll be mightily surprised. And I also believe in this, I mentioned that I have a case study in there of one woman, that only one or two people on a governing board or in the life of a church can make a huge difference, when they get into this mindset of abundance, it's contagious.

They become cheerleaders for people to move forward. But it's difficult. My doctoral degree from McCormick is in parish revitalization, and I have to go back to something Rob said. I kind of agree that even though it was new ground at that time, it was mostly church-centric in what it taught rather than community-centric. And this book is community-centric. But one thing that I definitely learned with that is the power that two or three or four people within a church's governing structures, the difference that they can make. Because I chose congregations my entire 34 years that were in need of revitalization, not just in my opinion, but in their own. And that's difficult. You encounter deeply entrenched mindsets and resistance and it takes a lot of love, a lot of miracles, but then a lot of contagious positivity about the abundance that God has in front of us.

Rob Mueller:

I would say that piece for me became clear as I was working with, I had seminary friends from Latin America who I went to visit and who I stayed in relationship with for a number of years. And they would describe for me, or I would go down and visit them and I would look at some of the mission initiatives that they were engaging in that they didn't know where the resources financially would come from. But Fernando, my friend, said to me one time, he said, "Rob, if we had to wait for money before we did anything, we would never do anything at all because there's no money here. There's just not money to go around. So we've got to find other resources and trust that God has resources available to us that we can't see and that we don't even know about until we get out and start looking." And when we do that, we can find resources. We discover that God's already been at work and that we don't have to be the ones to bring everything or to find everything.

LeQuita Porter:

So conversion from scarcity to abundance, and from self-absorption to our neighbors, for sure. What about the holy listening, learning to listen?

Rob Mueller:

The biggest and most important piece there is, I don't have the answers. I believe the people who are experiencing the struggle are the ones who hold the answers. They know what their greatest needs are. They also know what their greatest gifts are to bring to those particular situations. And I've watched over the course of my life, time and time again, especially in our neighborhood, because there are a lot of grant initiatives that get funded to "help" the 78207 ZIP Code area because of the number of issues that we have in that community. And over and over again, people come in with grant funding for two or three years and they're like, "We've got the answer to your problem. We're going to fix everything here." And neighbors, for a while they would say, "Okay, well we'll try doing this with you and see what happens."

And then they are telling them what they need to do rather than listening to what their own stories are and what their own agenda is. And they're there, they do something for two years and then they disappear. And the folks in my community are basically fed up with that because it's all about the agenda of those who are coming in as technicians to try and fix a problem that is not their problem. I contrast that with a new initiative that we're engaging in, where the entire purpose is to bring people with the lived experience that we're trying to address onto the team to help solve the problem…

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Again.

LeQuita Porter:

A seat at the table.

Rob Mueller:

...rather than having people who don't have that lived experience trying to tell the people with the experience how to fix it. So it's a completely different mindset. It's a mindset that is much more humble and is much more aware of how the window that we bring is not the window that everybody else has, and that we need to listen to one another in order to be able to see with the greatest clarity and then discern with the greatest precision what the right way to respond to a situation is.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Rob and I in the book rejoice and share some examples that this lesson has been learned more and more in what we call international mission or international partnerships. The old style was kind of almost to live in a compound, speak your own language, go out, do ministry, come back on board the ship, and more and more people are realizing, you might be a year or two of learning the language and the customs before you even know what questions are being asked by your new neighbors. And that happens through incarnation again, through listening.

There's another piece of this that it's like story projects that have been popular in the U.S. Everyone's story is sacred to me. I was sharing just yesterday with a friend of mine about serving at a church where the secretary had been trained to turn away people from the street and just tell them, "Go down to the homeless shelter or the soup kitchen," or whatever. And I told her, "No, no, no, I want to listen to every person that comes to the door." Didn't mean I would agree with all their demands. Didn't mean I wouldn't be blunt with them, but with one of those situations, this man who had been sleeping outside in his car all night came in, breathing alcohol. He called me sir. And when he said it with a certain snap, I realized, I said, "Have you been in the military?" Because I was an Army chaplain during the Gulf War.

And he said, "Yes, sir, I was." It turned out he was a part of the mechanized infantry that went into Iraq, and he went into a deep depression afterwards because he'd seen so many of the enemy draped over other tanks that he had personally aimed his tank at. And he got two Bronze Stars. So here's this veteran, in some people's books a hero of a foreign war, sleeping in a car out front. How did I know that? Because I broke down the barriers of that front door policy, sat with him, listened to him and loved him. And I think that when we do that with anyone, we learn what Paul Tillich said: "The first duty of love is to listen."

LeQuita Porter:

Yes. Yes. Yeah. And…

Rob Mueller:

There's a story that is also part of what I carry with me about Pedro Casaldáliga, a church leader in the Catholic church from South America. And Casaldáliga was a radical, progressive reformer in the church down there, and he was hated by the aristocracy, and they actually sent somebody to kill him. And this would-be assassin arrived at the door, knocked on the door and said, "I'm here to speak with the bishop." And so Casaldáliga invited him in and sat him down at the table and said, "Would you like some coffee?" And gave him some coffee. And they talked for about a half an hour or so. And then the guy said, "When are you going to introduce me to the bishop?" And he said, "I am the bishop." And the man's jaw dropped, and he could not believe that he had just experienced this person that he was sent to kill as a human being who took interest in him and listened to him and was completely transformed by that conversation and by that listening.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. So communal conversion from scarcity to abundance and from self-absorption to our neighbors, and then learning to listen, holy listening. What about the transformative partnerships?

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Hey Rob, I'm going to let you take this because this chapter is really your baby. You've done so much of that work.

Rob Mueller:

Yeah. As I was sharing a little bit earlier, Divine Redeemer's history is a history that has been a partnership. The House of Neighborly Service was started in 1917, the church in 1915. And in 1929, the National Board of the former United Presbyterian Church brought those two together on the site where we are right now. And so we have had a partnership that has not been easy. As any partnership, it requires communication. It requires mutual trust. It requires a willingness to listen together. It requires a willingness to, each of you, bring your gifts to the table and your perspective to the table and be willing to do the work to hammer out a common path together.

Over the nearly 100 years now that we've been together, that has had times of strength and times of relative weakness, as well. There were times when the leadership of one organization was stronger than the other. When I began at Divine Redeemer, the House of Neighborly had a pretty vital program. And then they went through a leadership crisis. And in the late 1990s, they were down to a quarter-time director and a part-time supervisor for the basketball court in the afternoon. And that was pretty much all that was going on at the House of Neighborly Service. The church then stepped in at that point and began to initiate some mission engagement with our neighborhood. Some of those mission engagements grew into programs that then we actually handed back to the House of Neighborly Service at another point in time, and the House of Neighborly Service picked up and took on. I'm going to share this example now rather than a little bit later. But the most recent example of partnership that's been incredibly exciting for me is an initiative that we're calling Building Hope Together.

And it began because of partnership. It began because a church in the Austin area had been going down to the border region and building homes with another mission partner. And the border got very, very violent, the area where they were going. And so this was a family mission trip, and the church no longer felt like it would be safe to be bringing children and families into that environment. So they were looking for another option and they reached out to me. And so we were looking at how we could design some kind of mission trip experience for this congregation in Austin, which is only an hour and a half away, but going from the wealthy section of Austin to 78207 San Antonio is just about as wide a gap as it is going to the border in Mexico. And so they came down and the idea was, "What can we do to serve this community?"

Well, House of Neighborly Service had a ministry with the senior citizens in our community. And so I went and talked to the seniors and I said, "Is there anything we can do to help you?" And four or five of the seniors said, "I have things at my house that I don't know how to fix, that need to be fixed, that need to be repaired. Is there any way you could help with that?" And so I went back to the folks at Shepherd of the Hills and I said, "Here's the deal. We've got one person who has a house that desperately needs to be painted. It's starting to really show deterioration because of the lack of paint on it, and it's decreasing the integrity of the home." And another woman who had a front porch that she had paid somebody to rebuild for her because it had rotted through. They did half of the work and they took off with all the money, and she had not had a front porch and been able to use her front door for two years.

And so those two projects became the first two projects that we did. And we called our little collaboration... What did we call it? I can't even remember now what we called it initially. Maybe it'll come to me in a second. But they came down and we worked on that. Well, the next year when they came down, there were 10 people who had things they needed done. And the following year there were 25 people that had things that needed done, and we couldn't do them all. And so we're like, "Okay, how can we begin to address this?" And so we started a conversation between the House of Neighborly Service staff, leadership from the church, and a leadership from another nonprofit that shares our little quadrant, our little corner intersection there called San Antonio Time Dollar. And out of that conversation and relationships that different ones of us had in the community, we connected with the healthcare ministries, which was looking for collaborating partners to do a new project.

Well, what happened is, we created a design together with people with this lived experience, seniors with homes that were in desperate need of repair. And we crafted and designed a new outreach that is going to repair and upgrade 100 senior homes over three years. We're halfway into this project right now, but we're doing things like safety and security upgrades for seniors. We're building ramps. We're helping their doors function, their door locks function, we're putting in security lights for them. We're making sure that doorways are widened so that they can get in and out if they have a wheelchair. We're doing tub to shower conversions so that they can get in and out of their bathrooms safely. All of these things to help seniors who live in this community be able to stay in their homes with the neighbors they've known for generations and be supported and able to be self-sufficient in those situations.

And this is all being guided by all women, seven women from our community who are senior citizens themselves, and who are now the ones in charge of identifying the projects, approving the projects, approving the contracts with contractors to do the work, overseeing and evaluating that work when it's done. And it's become a phenomenal partnership for us that's involved many, many, many different people from the neighborhood, from outside the neighborhood, as well as the three different nonprofits: the church, House of Neighborly, and Time Dollar. So partnership for me is about expanding your capacity through relationship. I guess when my wife and I got married, she said, "I've always believed that a good marriage is when each of you brings out the best in one another."

And a good partnership in ministry is similar in that same way, I think. It brings out the very best. It allows us each to bring the gifts and the graces that we uniquely offer and incarnate in the world and place them alongside and in combination with others who bring different gifts and different capacities. And we multiply, we expand what we are able to do by being in partnership and not just trying to do it alone.

LeQuita Porter:

I love that. A partnership with real purpose. For sure, it's more than just leasing space or sharing some resources. It goes a lot deeper, and that sounds wonderful. So there's communal conversion from scarcity to abundance, and from self-absorption to our neighbors, holy listening, learning to listen, transformative partnerships. How about integrating buildings in new ways?

Rob Mueller:

I think that Krin, you've got that one. You had such a great interview with the folks over at Baptist Temple.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Well, in the interest of time, I would just say, people need to read that particular story of what Baptist Temple did here in San Antonio. But the chapter talks about moving from this antiquated sense of ownership over our building to a resurrected sense of stewardship. And I love that because I have a friend who works in the hotel chain, and he said that every room that isn't booked on any given night is like spoiled produce you have to throw away. And so many church facilities, we all know it, are underutilized during the week, active mostly on Sundays. And so I would say that every square foot that is not deployed in the service to our community, is like spoiled produce.

I don't want to go into it in too much depth because I really would encourage your listeners to read the book, and this chapter in particular. I mentioned the story of being a pastor at First Presbyterian Pomona, California, that had this hulking facility that was underutilized. We ended up renting for free, upper rooms to students from InterVarsity Fellowship at the Claremont Colleges, with the only agreement that they would help us reach out to youth in the community. And they did. And suddenly the place was thrumming with activity. They were playing basketball down in the basement. They had a computer lab and all this stuff. But the reason I'm mentioning that is that here's one of those champions of positivity that I mentioned earlier.

The oldest guy in that church had lived in that community when it was surrounded by orange groves before it became one of the most gang-infested communities in East Los Angeles. And when one of the other people on the session, which is our ruling body in the Presbyterian Church, was complaining that all these kids coming in were ruining the carpeting, this man, this other elder said, "John, let me interrupt. I appreciate your protection of our assets, but I have a different perspective. For years, so many of us prayed for the sound of young voices in this congregation. Now they're here, and though they may be of a different class or color than our old guard, it should fill us with gratitude. This church had become like a mausoleum, and now we are seeing signs of resurrection. I can only say, praise God, and I hope the rest of you will join me."

So that's really kind of, to me, the crux, it's part of that communal conversion. And every one of us who's a member of a church knows that we do have the gift of our facilities, of our space, and how can we open that up to the community? And I like something that you said, LeQuita, that it's not just leasing space and having no communication. Again, there are multiple case studies in this book that show how people intentionally took those people who were leasing space, had community lunches and did other things to find what Rob said so beautifully, pregnant possibilities where we can partner together.

LeQuita Porter:

I love that. Well, lastly, in terms of the practical things that folks can do: sustaining the vision, spirit-filled worship, and mentoring new leaders.

Rob Mueller:

Well, Krin talks often in some of his examples in the book about just how powerful it is to have the worship of a community be vital and spirit-filled. Worship that energizes, enthuses, opens eyes, breaks hearts open, allows us to repent honestly, of the things that we need to repent of, and give us the chance to be renewed and restored. This kind of work, this kind of neighborhood ministry is hard work. It is work that requires a tremendous amount of commitment, often an enormous amount of time and energy. And if we don't replenish that, we burn out. And in fact, I've had a number of folks look at me serving in a community of great need like this for a long time, and they're like, "Mueller, how have you not burned out in 30 years? How have you not just needed to do something different?"

And I'm like, "Every day is a new opportunity for me here, and I am energized by the people that are here. I am energized by this worshiping community that I love, and that has loved and embraced and helped me learn how to be a better pastor. And I experience our worship to be something that revitalizes me." But it's not just worship. It's relationships that revitalize, and it's relationships that I'm willing to invest in and relationships that are willing to invest in me in return. And that mutual investing is one of the most energizing pieces of ministry, I think, for me. When I am working with people who I am excited to be with, whose vision and whose passion and whose enthusiasm is contagious for me, that helps me sustain my energy. And then when my energy is sustained, I am able to give that back to others so that their energy can be sustained.

And that's the synergy that can develop when a church really begins to engage in ministry that is not just belly button focused, but it's focused instead outwardly. My mentor, José Marins, used to talk about in Spanish la iglesia caracol, the snail shell church, which is spiraling inward. Everything the church does is to try to bring people in to the church. And he said, "What we need is to spin that spiral in the opposite direction. Whatever happens in the church should be in the service of, and in the focus of, going outside of the church, moving beyond the church." And it is for me, the moving into those relationships beyond the church family itself, that revitalizes and energizes and sustains me just as much as the love and the support and the passion that I feel worshiping with the community that I love.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. Amen. And you also mentioned here about the mentoring of new leaders. It's very intentional work, right? It's serious, important work, but it does require an intentionality.

Rob Mueller:

And it's hard. It's hard. I think that's probably one of the areas that has been most difficult for me, to be honest. I have often said to my leaders in church, "Each of us should be holding onto someone's hand who is ahead of us, as it were, in their development as a leader, in their experience as a leader. And we should be holding onto someone else's hand who we are training with what we are learning." And that ideally is the kind of chain that you want to be developing within your leaders within a community, or within the neighborhood itself, because we all need to be learning from someone, and we all need to be sharing what we're learning with someone else.

LeQuita Porter:

Yep. Amen. And learning from someone else isn't always learning from other adults with our same level of experience and all. I'm thinking about our innovation cohorts that we have, where we require that there be some young people involved at the table, intergenerational innovation teams, so that things can move forward for those who will be carrying a lot of things forward.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

LeQuita, just to mention that one of the statistical data points that I was kind of proud of at a church that I served for five years, it had a large session, 22 elders, the average age in the five years had dropped 30 years. I thought, "It's not being ageist. It's not saying that our elderly folks who have been recycled in leadership over and over and over again, don't have a lot to share."

LeQuita Porter:

Absolutely.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

But I was just so excited by that. It's like, "Yes."

LeQuita Porter:

I like that, recycling. That's exactly what's been happening.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

No, I know you want me to run…

LeQuita Porter:

No, it's true. It is true.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Will you run for elder again?

Rob Mueller:

Again?

LeQuita Porter:

Again? Right. 60 years of combined ministry experience with congregations, you all have many stories, and you shared several within this book, and we would just hope that folks will actually read those, and they're very inspiring stories as well. But do you want to share any more about any neighborhood churches who have become, and I love your title, powerhouses for mission. Powerhouses.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Well, the one that is the actual first sentences of the book in the introduction says, "December 2nd in 2016, San Antonio, a federal judge frees hundreds of women and children from two Texas immigration detention facilities. He deemed that the sites weren't suitable for holding minors, so he sent them out into the streets, and it was a wet and frigid winter night." And the members of the San Antonio Mennonite Church, how they responded, will always, until the day I die, be an incredible inspiration. They had a long history of advocating for immigration rights. They had purchased, in addition to their main building, another big home in the King Williams district of our city, and one of the nonprofits operating in it was advocating for immigration, especially with legal issues.

But when that crisis happened, they not only opened up the house, they opened up their kitchen, their fellowship hall, large one, finally they opened up the sanctuary, pushed all the pews back. And when word got out that these women who had no place to go had a sanctuary, they just flocked there and they were sleeping on the floor, everywhere. And the church just opened itself up, just with total abandonment to what God was asking them to do in that crisis. And I just want to quote this out of the book, if it's okay.

LeQuita Porter:

Absolutely.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

John Garland, the pastor there, was there almost every night. He's still the pastor there. And he said, "On the fullest night of that crisis, with the church packed, I tried to sleep in my office. The building was a cacophony of two primary noises. There was the beeping of the ankle monitors each detainee was required to wear, and the coughing! Most of the women had caught a respiratory bug in the detention facilities, and the coughing was nonstop. Between those signs of sickness and the incessant beeping, I thought I was going to lose my mind. And then a beautiful voice rose above the din. It was a mother singing a lullaby to her child.”

"That song had a clear message to me. 'Sorry, white boy, if you are struggling this evening, but I'm trying to put my child to sleep.' I realized right then that none of us responding to this crisis were the heroes in this passion play. It was these women who had left everything—their homes, their countries of origin—to protect their children.” And we can't have people have those kinds of epiphanies about the otherness of the human family unless we open up our lives, our hearts, and our churches to them. And so that particular story has always meant a lot to me. And that church to this day, with all of the hubbub about immigration policies is continuing to just work daily with individuals who are caught in the crossfire.

LeQuita Porter:

Yes. Yes, absolutely. That is a beautiful, beautiful story.

Rob Mueller:

One of the other aspects of that story, Krin, that I love, is when they were anxious about how they were going to feed and clothe and provide for the needs of all these folks. And in the middle of this crisis, this giant four-wheeler pulls in.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

I love that.

LeQuita Porter:

Oh, wow.

Rob Mueller:

This giant four-wheeler pulls in with a Confederate flag either flying or in a sticker on the back. And this big, burly, very redneck-looking guy gets out and says, "Where's the pastor?" And he gets to the pastor, he says, "Is this the place where all the illegals are?" And John says, "Well, yes, sir, it is." And he says, "Well, I got a bunch of stuff for them in my truck." And so it was one of those moments, when…

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Can I get an amen?

LeQuita Porter:

That is rich. That is rich.

Rob Mueller:

The very stereotype that you think is going to be injurious to your work becomes a supporter of it.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. Amen.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

That's what happened when love is incarnate, right?

Rob Mueller:

Yep.

LeQuita Porter:

Amen. Amen. Wow, that is wonderful. And that would of course be a wonderful note to end on, but there's more. And I just want you all to share in terms of what your plans are for this book, for this whole notion that you're advancing here that makes such perfect sense. But also, I know you have other resources, online videos, bilingual, they're already available. Just share with me what else you're planning to do, and any updates or anything. We're now post, some would say, pandemic, but has anything changed? Do you see any changes that could be made?

Rob Mueller:

Well, I'll share a little bit about the other resources. In addition to the book, we were invited to put together both a set of study questions. And so there's some questions at the end of each chapter, but there's study resources that have been developed by the Presbyterian Church to go along with this book. There is a chapter synopsis in Korean for each chapter. There's a chapter synopsis in Spanish for each chapter, that are all available through the Presbyterian Church. And we also did a little five-minute introductory video with an interview or a conversation with a community or an individual that gives people some visual connection to some of the stories in our book and some personal first-person testimonies about some of the stories in our book.

And also just kind of a way to jump into the chapter and begin to get into the chapter. And all five of those videos are bilingual. Some of them are mostly in Spanish with English subtitles, and the majority of them are in English with Spanish subtitles. So they're accessible bilingually. And I hope folks who read the book and who want to study the book or use it with their churches would take a look at those resources and take advantage of them because they're free of charge.

LeQuita Porter:

Wonderful.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

I'm probably not allowed to say this, but one of the things on my plate is, I've got a novel coming out in the next month, my debut novel, and it traffics in the lives of people who seem beyond the fringe in terms of their brokenness and find new hope. So I see it as an extension of my ministry. It's called The Bridge at Dawn.

LeQuita Porter:

The Bridge at Dawn. Wonderful.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

But in terms of follow-up for us, I'm starting to pester Rob some ideas.

Rob Mueller:

He's cracking the whip again.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Cracking the old whip again about some other ideas. We'll see what happens. It's all in God's hands.

LeQuita Porter:

Because you do have an appendix in this book that shares some resources on asset mapping and joint use agreements and all of that. Any ideas around workbooks? Are there some that you're already connected to where people can find out just how to work through some of these issues?

Rob Mueller:

We haven't really talked about doing a workbook per se. I personally don't find workbooks to be super helpful. But what I have done, and Krin and I both have been invited by congregations to do little seminars or conversations with them around the concepts of the book. Unfortunately, the book came out just before the pandemic hit and everything shut down. And so I was only able to do one of those in person before the pandemic, but did do a couple of those via video chat with sessions or church boards from a number of different congregations. And I think both of us, I don't want to speak for you Krin, but I suspect both of us are open to doing that with churches if they're interested.

Krin Van Tatenhove:

Yes.

LeQuita Porter:

Well, thank you so very much for your time and for writing this book, and for your service over 60 years and more to come, it sounds like to me.

Rob Mueller:

Indeed.

LeQuita Porter:

For those who are listening to this discussion on the Neighborhood Church: Transforming Your Congregation into a Powerhouse for Mission, you can pick up this book at any of your book outlets, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. It's all over the place. It's worth your time and your read, and we look forward to everything else that will come as a result of this work. Again, thank you Krin and Rob.

Rob Mueller:

LeQuita, thank you so much. It's a joy to be able to share a little bit more, and hope that this will inspire some other congregations to take that leap into their neighborhoods more deeply than they have so far.

LeQuita Porter:

You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, LeQuita Porter, and Shari Oosting. Our producer is Garrett Mostowski. If you like what you're hearing, and we hope you do, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app, and you can hear many other interesting discussions. And while you're at it, leave us a review and let us know how we're doing. The Distillery is a production of the Office of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Find out more at thedistillery.ptsem.edu. Until next time, thanks for listening.