Last week we caught up with Mark Roberts, the Executive Director of Fuller Theological Seminary’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership. His pastoral experience and years working at Laity Lodge formed his heart to see Christians develop an understanding of whole-life discipleship, and for the past five years he has brought that conviction to his work in Pasadena. This week we jump back into our conversation with Mark to gain insight on how the De Pree Center is serving LA, speaking into the antiquated notion of retirement, and how leaders are wrestling with the disruption of COVID-19.
TogetherLA: Mark, last week you helped us understand the traditional separation of the spiritual and the ordinary in the history of the Church. As more organizations are beginning to speak to this faith/work integration, what sets the De Pree Center apart?
Mark Roberts: We are a part of Fuller Seminary so you would expect that we would offer a kind of a theological seriousness and depth, and we try to do that. There are other organizations that do a great job addressing the more practical aspects, like providing ways you can live out your faith in your workplace today, and that's a great thing. That isn’t exactly our thing. Our thing would be providing devotions that are biblically and theologically grounded that then have ways you can practically live this out in your daily work. We are certainly about the practical living. But you might say we want to do that in a way that is theologically and biblically solid and deep. In that way we are very similar, say, to the Theology of Work project.
We have also been asking where can we really make a difference; where are we needed? Here's a good example. There are a number of good books out there, like Tom Nelson's book, which is awesome. In my opinion, we don’t need to write one of those. We can just refer people to them.
So where are we needed? We work very hard to have our community and the voices we feature be diverse - racially, ethnically and in terms of gender. Historically, the faith/work conversation has happened among basically upper middle-class and upper class white men. And that’s not a critique. It had to start somewhere. But we work to have diverse voices teaching one another, listening to one another, learning together. And in particular and especially in terms of women, we've had some real traction. We've focused to a degree on women in the workplace and Christian women in leadership, as that's been an underserved population.
Another niche is helping Christians, the Church and other organizations deal with the changing world of work. We are no longer working for the corporation for 40 years and then retire. So we have done some cohorts we call The Road Ahead to basically pull people together and help them discover again what God is saying to them in terms of their calling and how to live that out.
My colleague Michaela O'Donnell Long is coming out with a book next year from Zondervan called New Rules for Work. Helping Christians work through what you might call vocational clarification and transitions is going to be a big piece of our work.
And then the final thing I would mention is we are just beginning a new initiative called Flourishing in the Third Third of Life. I kept hearing from people more or less my age that would say, “One of these days I'm probably going to retire. But I really don't feel like I'm done making a difference. And I don't even know how to think about retirement. And really, my church isn't helping me. It would be really great if you guys would do something about that.”
TogetherLA: Can you talk about the idea of retirement within the context of this changing world of work? Is retirement really even a thing anymore?
Mark Roberts: You might say the cultural narrative still holds up retirement as the thing. But increasingly, for all kinds of reasons, people are not living into that narrative. But there hasn't really been a replacement narrative. I think of the church - the command to be fruitful and multiply didn't stop when you hit 65. But it might look different.
We want to help people understand that there isn't one dominant narrative, except that God's call continues in your life and God will have ways to use you and bless you. But if it's just grandparents and golf, that may not be enough. And I would say biblically there is generally more to what God has for us.
TogetherLA: Let’s talk about L.A. How is the De Pree Center engaging in its own backyard?
Mark Roberts: We serve and partner with people from everywhere, but we tend to have more opportunities locally to embody things here. An example - I mentioned that I used to work at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. I still attend there. I’m not officially a member of the staff, but I preach there and I teach there and we are engaged there. By virtue of being in L.A. we are able to form strong partnerships with people, and places like the Center for Faith and Work of Los Angeles. Also, because of Fuller, we have influence here as well.
TogetherLA: Do you see hurdles specific to L.A.?
Mark Roberts: You know, the urban sprawl here is just mind blowing. It is a very distinctive and hard challenge. It is really hard to get people from L.A. together because even on a Saturday morning, the traffic is prohibitive. The Christian presence here feels very dispersed. For example, I’m in Pasadena but I go to church in Hollywood. We would almost never go to anything during the week simply because it would take forever to get there and it isn’t feasible.
However, we may have now discovered some of the power of a virtual world, due to the pandemic.
TogetherLA: How can some of the bigger churches come alongside less resourced churches in LA, especially in the age of the coronavirus?
Mark Roberts: I was actually just thinking about this because I have a friend who pastors a small church that doesn'treally have the resources to put anything decent up online. I was thinking to myself, why couldn't they just use what the other church up the street has? Literally use their equipment and space to create content for their own church. It is a different mode of thinking for churches to think about how we can come together.
Wouldn't it be great if we could do more of that kind of thing? Think about what resources we all have, what needs we have and how we can work together.
TogetherLA: You provide a daily devotional through the De Pree Center. Can you tell us about that and how you have used that to address the unique disruptions of COVID-19?
Mark Roberts: We produce a daily devotional called Life for Leaders. We've done that for five years now, which is now over 1,800 devotionals. It is about bringing scripture together with work, daily life and leadership in a prayerful way. It is helping people to grow in wholeness, in their lives and in whole-life discipleship.
So way back in early March, I got this email from one of the leaders who's connected to us. He mentioned the coronavirus and said “We don't know how to think about it, and we wonder how our faith matters for this situation. Have you thought about doing some of your devotions about this crisis?”
So I did a pretty sharp pivot and for the last two months, almost all of my devotions have been directly related in one way or another to the challenges leaders are facing because of the pandemic.
We've been doing a lot of content in response to the needs. This pandemic is going to disrupt things economically and socially in so many ways and it's not going to just go away. I don’t think we’ll be “back to normal.” This is partly because some churches aren't going to make it and other churches are going to discover new ways of reaching people. Even now, quite a few churches are having larger attendance numbers online.
I think that with all the challenges we faced, some things have been really bad and really hard and have caused a lot of damage. At the same time, there has been a lot of learning and new opportunities. Going forward, I think the challenge for leaders is that we are going to have to be way more entrepreneurial, if you want to put it that way.
TogetherLA: We know some churches may not make it out of this crisis. Some may need to consider closing their doors or merging with another organization. From a leadership perspective, how would you advise leaders look at the hardest decisions they may ever have to face?
Mark Roberts: I know it sounds like a Christian poster but we really need to be reminded that God is sovereign and gracious and can work all things together for good. Now, that may not be the way I anticipate good. So, for example, there may very well be churches who are not going to survive due to finances. But if some of those churches came together, they could make it.
But it requires both extraordinary wisdom and maturity and selflessness on behalf of leaders. I think those things are possible, but it requires really trusting that God is able to work in all things for good.
Also, are you familiar with the book Canoeing the Mountains? That book was written five years ago, but it is more relevant now than ever because the basic thesis of that book is that we are leading in uncharted territory. The sort of technical leadership that many of us developed and even became very good at isn't enough right now and we really have to think in terms of adaptive changes. That is to say that the world has changed so dramatically and we need to lead in very different ways. Ways that are uncomfortable, that are stretching because all of the sudden I have to lead in ways in which I don't have expertise. I can be very unsettling.
