This is Ben, and this is Keith.

And this is Main Street Lutherans. And this week we are exploring a podcast about podcasts. Because we're Lutherans and we want to know about Lutherans.

We're very self reflective folks, aren't we?

Yeah. Well, and this came from a Reddit conversation, didn't it, Ben?

Absolutely. Periodically, maybe every couple months or so, someone on Reddit will ask, what is a good Lutheran podcast to listen to? And, well, really, ever since about January, the answer is usually just main street Lutherans, which is us and not much more. I'm not sure that's absolutely true.

Yeah. If their question was, what's a good Lutheran podcast to listen to, the answer is definitely not us.

Well, it depends. There are some people that like us quite a bit. We have a lot of fans on Facebook, I should say. Yeah, Reddit thinks we could do better, and I appreciate that. We're going to tease Reddit a little bit in this episode. I think it's just the way Reddit is. Right. Let's start into this with what kind of podcasts do you listen to, Keith?

Oh, geez. So in answering this question, I'm always afraid that I'm going to be branded as a flaming liberal. Not that that's not true, just that I hate being branded. So I don't listen to very many podcasts, but I do really like the Bible for normal people, which we're going to talk about a little bit more in this episode. And then I listen to two podcasts off and on that are both put out by NPR. One of them is the hidden brain and the other is on the media. What about you?

Oh, I listen to way too many. I might have 50 or 60 hours in my active queue right now. Things that I've got lined up to listen to, and I listen at at least two times speed, and we'll listen for hours on my commute and sometimes when there's nobody around at work. But. So my podcasts, I've got some religious ones, as everyone would imagine you all know that I listen to homebrewed Christianity quite a bit. Of course, Bible for normal people is there. I listen to the holy post because I feel that they give me a look on evangelical, the goings on in the evangelical church without having to get right into it. They make me facepalm quite a bit. I think it's tolerable in my case. And they actually turned me on to the straight white american Jesus podcast, which is more social but has some good ways of dealing with modern life with that mostly with the evangelical nature and particularly with the white christian nationalist movement. I listen to economics podcasts, so I listen to planet money and marketplace and a couple of their offshoots. I listen to a few different types of news and politics podcasts. More news than politics, more legal, actually, than politics, too. And then I listen to sports. I listen to off track with Hinch and Rossi, for all you IndyCar fans out there. And then the ones that don't fit into those categories would be things like 99% invisible, which deals with sort of design things. I listen to Radiolab, which had been an NPR sort of thing. It comes out at WNYC. I listen to code switch, which is an NPR thing. Part of my job is talking about black history, and code switch covers a lot of that history stuff and some other more modern things. And then I listen to TED talks, too. So I get a sort of a diverse thing. I've got some science things in there. Just a variety. I like to mix it up a.

Little bit, but it's really between the two of us, we listen to an above average number of podcasts.

Absolutely. Yeah. I think we could add three or four more people in there that don't listen to any, and we'd pretty much be there. Yeah, I, of course, listen to my own, and that's. I've had co hosts on other shows, and that's a rare thing. I think a lot of folks don't like it, like to listen themselves on the radio, but I have to do it because I'm editing anyway, so if I didn't like it, I wouldn't be doing it.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. We really should point out that Ben does the vast majority of the heavy lifting of creating this actual podcast in terms of the editing, the recording.

Well, according to Reddit, it's our listeners that do the heavy lifting.

Right.

Yeah.

Because they're stuck listening to us, and we appreciate that. And yet they don't change the channel.

No, we actually appreciate everybody who listens. Thank you very much.

We do.

Now, as far as podcasts that are lutheran, you know, none of the podcasts I listen to directly are explicitly Lutheran at all. I do subscribe to a couple. We'll get to those. But, you know, what is it that makes. What do you suppose makes something, or would make something a lutheran or elca Lutheran podcast?

You know, it's interesting. In order to, especially to be a specifically Elca Lutheran podcast, you'd almost say it has to be created by the Elca or at least some organization within it. And there are some of those, but there is not that we have found any podcasts that claim to speak for the denomination.

We did find one that was made by living Lutheran, but it ended in 2019. So it's been five years since they've released an episode.

Yeah, living Lutheran is the now e magazine branch of our publishing denominational publishing house. They don't even have a print mag anymore, but still a really great magazine. It's just that they're facing the same economic issues that so many are at this point. Trey?

Well, it's kind of interesting because 2020 was sort of the burgeoning of the podcast. People started making content at home, and so to have one end before the pandemic strikes me as odd.

Yeah. So I guess to say that this is a lutheran podcast, it would have to be about the work of the church or the operations of the church. You know, certainly we've got lots of congregations out there. Probably the. For a lot of congregations since the pandemic, their first toe in the water of online content, other than perhaps a website, was to begin streaming. Their worship services mostly do that in video, but of course, those could easily be converted to a podcast. There probably are some congregations that do that or perhaps excerpt the sermon from that and turn that into a podcast.

And there are certainly a lot of podcasts produced by the ELCA seminaries in particular. You know, mad props. Go to Luther seminary, their faith lead program. Faith plus lead, their lay ministry program, produces a lot, including for not just lay ministers, but for professional minister ordained ministers as well. We'll have links to, hopefully all the podcasts that we mentioned that we mentioned in the episode here. In the episode notes, working Preacher has three different podcasts that you can listen into in one stream, or you can listen to them individually. They've got a couple others. Enter. The Bible is a Bible based one, and then they have one that's a book with writers of books. And then also, united Lutheran Seminary has a single podcast. Also, we find that there are podcasts that are about the revised common lectionary, and they're intended to be ecumenical. But the revised common lectionary or any of the lectionaries that we use in the LCA, if there's a podcast about it, like the. The narrative lectionary or the women's lectionary, anything revolving around those, I think we could safely say that they're Lutheran in that sense.

Sure. Even if they're not solely Lutheran, they definitely still align and have content and contributors.

Yeah, and that morphs us over to what's ELCA adjacent then, right?

How would you define that, Ben?

I would say that they're resources that we share, actually. I would say, let's take the Bible for normal people as an ELCA adjacent to podcast. Pete Enz and Jared bias are making a podcast that deals with scripture and is approaching it from mostly a historical critical method of interpretation. And so we get that and we get the Bible project to kind of work that way, because that's the method we use in our congregations. That's the way our denomination views the Bible. That kind of makes it, what of our periphery things we share that they're not explicitly? I don't think they're explicitly any denomination right now, but they would certainly be one that you and I at least, would consider to be at least bordering on Lutheran, wouldn't be objectionable. We also have some theologians that are sort of in that it would be nice if they had a strong basis in theology of the cross, or that they proclaim salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. Podcasts that might fit into that a bit is homebrewed Christianity with Tripp Fuller or the new ex evangelicals. Those podcasts, it's not so much the people that run those, but they bring on lots of theologians that are working in the church, and some of those will be explicitly lutheran, some of them not. But we believe that they all sort of have the same grounding, and so they make it convenient to use those as supplements to what our normal lutheran stuff would be.

Yeah. And while it's always hard to summarize theology in sort of a bumper sticker length statement, that notion about theology of the cross, theology that proclaims salvation by grace through faith and grace alone, those would be the things that we would put into that lutheran adjacent category.

And of course, that includes podcasts from other mainline denominations. And we went and searched out some lists. What's nice is that the United Methodist Church and the Episcopalian Church are the two first ones we looked at. They have a nice page on their denominations website of podcasts that are created by the denomination and then also by partners in their ministries.

Yeah. And across a pretty broad set of topics. Some of them about theology, some of them about the church structure, some of them about social justice, you know, just things that, you know, kind of are the very foci of their. Of their denominational work, which is pretty cool. And it makes you wonder, hey, why don't we do that? So why is it hard to find ELCA podcasts?

You know, when. When I came up with the idea to do this. So it's probably over a year ago now. We certainly, we talked about it over a year ago, so it's probably been closer to a year and a half. What I found was that if I looked for lutheran podcasts, I will use a, you know, sort of a football term. The zone was flooded by, by the Missouri synod. Lutheran Church, LCMS had stuff, and when I was trying to figure out why, it was because mostly because they had a radio station in St. Louis, and a radio station making content makes podcasts really easy. And so they had a lot of things that way. But the same way, if you go back to our first episode about why we're doing this podcast, we talked about how other denominations of Lutheranism were sort of stealing the name Lutheran and claiming it for themselves. And so when people there, some people in some regions of the country, when they think Lutherans, they don't think of a progressive denomination of Christianity and close communion, dating women and all the things that go along with that.

Yeah. And so, again, this isn't about knocking the lutheran church Missouri Synod or the Wisconsin Senate. It's just saying that we do have a different theological and structural background than they do, and they've got a lot of content. And while it's content that we don't necessarily agree with, it doesn't mean that it's not well done. And they put out a lot of really good material. And so, yeah, that ends up, when you do your Google search, it pushes anything produced by the ELCA, if there is anything way, way down on the page, and makes it really hard to find.

Yeah, a lot of our podcasts that are produced, are produced by seminaries because that's where our people who are used to speaking, that we expect to speak in public. Beyond our congregations, of course, we've got tons and tons of pastors that can speak publicly all the time, but our seminaries sort of have more resources for that sort of thing. A lot of our, I don't have to tell anybody this, that our seminaries, some of them are struggling really, really hard right now to survive, and they don't have enough faculty to be able to do one more thing like this. And then we have seminaries that are producing a lot. Yeah.

And even I think it's perhaps one of the struggles that we have is that the ELCA expects a lot of their seminaries and like anything that's, like, educationally based, we want to put into their hands. And so it's kind of like in your own congregation where, like somebody says, well, we want to do more? You want to do more community outreach? Well, then you need to go to the community outreach committee to do that. We tend to pigeonhole, you know, anything that's of a sort of a deeper educational level, you know, beyond, say, your typical Sunday school or even catechetical materials. We want to expect that to be produced by somebody else, somebody specialized, like a seminary or even a publishing house. We're just finding that that expectation, that model isn't working for us.

Well, but if you get connected into the faith lead resources at Luther, you might see that differently.

Well, right. You'll find that those individual seminaries are doing a fantastic job, but they're speaking from their context of being a seminary, not speaking for the denomination of the evangelical with church in America. Which brings us back to why we're doing this today.

And it takes a lot. We'll talk about that a little bit later here, too. And another reason that I think it's hard to find specifically ELCA podcasts, is that there are a lot of christian podcasts out there that do a really good job. But in order to do that really good job have high production value. To get good guests, to be able to work on a schedule normally requires a professional editor and a publicist and all that. And we don't have any of that stuff, but they do. And the way they pay for it is by getting sponsors. So they have things like the Bible for normal people has. Is it the society of normal people, I believe, which is like a Patreon system where you subscribe and you get access to their special events, and that included in there, you get a little, some extra content and that sort of stuff.

And did you say that homebrewed Christianity has a similar approach?

Yeah. And Tripa's changed that a little bit. They've got a new thing, and they're sort of, it's starting to look a little bit like what faith lead offers as far as classes. And so you'll be able to, you can pay a subscription and have access to past classes and new classes. Well, the people who are teaching those classes are fabulous. If you take classes at seminary, you most likely won't run into those people. And so it's an opportunity. But the other side of that is that because you're funding this other thing, it seems to have a tendency to insulate and isolate so that you become part of that ecosystem?

Well, that same echo chamber effect that we get on other aspects of social media.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. And then they even have in person gatherings or they, they meet up at, you know, festivals and stuff. And, and so it becomes, it ends up having some in person community and that, and I think for a lot of people that go, that go to those, go deep in those, it becomes their church. Yeah. But that part about podcasting isn't easy. I've been, I've been doing this for a while now and lots of shows, and I'll tell you, it's, it's hard to be consistent. You know, when we talk about, go back to that Reddit conversation, you know, one of the, some of the comments sort of hint at, you know, maybe there needs to be another podcast that goes in particular. People are asking for something a little more theological, and I'm going to say preachy, but I don't think that's quite the right word for it, but more mission driven, whereas we are more communicating what the ELCA is to the greater world. The thing about starting a podcast is that it's, it's hard to get on a schedule and be able to produce shows timely and get it out in the quality that you want, mostly because it's hard to get guests just getting started. If you're a seminary, it's a lot easier to get people in because you've got that as a backbone. But even a congregation, unless you're really, really big and already have speakers coming in, it's difficult to get people lined up. It's just difficult. We've been pretty lucky with the people, people we've gotten.

Yeah. And to try to do that, you know, in sync with the schedule of trying to release episodes in a particular pattern, whether that's weekly or monthly or somewhere in between. You know, we've been trying to put out two episodes a month, and you've mostly been able to do that, but we've had to do some fast juggling here and there sometimes to make that happen.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And putting the episodes out more frequently builds your, you know, you have a better chance of building up a listener base if you can go, you know, basically weekly seems to be the sweet spot for a lot of, a lot of growing podcasts.

Absolutely. And it's difficult. It's really difficult. Yeah. And it becomes, you know, I'm, I'm juggling a job a and a, an internship along with all this and teenage boys that need to get run around.

Right.

And you've got, you know, full time gig and family stuff going on. So for us, it's difficult. If you're trying to do this with a full time job singly, it can be, could be a lot of work.

And we had the benefit, too, that you pointed out. You've done podcasts before, which means you have the equipment, you've got the subscriptions to the services, you've got the materials that you need to do the recording and the editing. And that for a startup especially, that costs money. It was a really less for us simply because you'd already done it.

Yeah. Honestly, I learned this in high school. This is what I went to Capitol University for, to do audio engineering. And I forgot about that until I started podcasting. So it's kind of funny that way.

What's that pesky degree I had to get?

That's right. I got a degree in philosophy instead. The other part is that video, even though video, it seems a lot more complicated. The equipment can be a lot more expensive. It is really a lot easier than just doing audio if you have a video channel. So if you set up a YouTube channel, say, for your church, you can set a stationary camera up and you can film a sermon, it might not be great, but it's content and you can get started that way.

And you can do that with minimal editing.

Right. And without really doing much more than just having somebody push record.

Right.

When we do. When. When I do sermons at unity at our church, I will record here in my studio with my face and everything and send that to Pastor Carmen. She'll put it on our Facebook page and her YouTube channel. And it's really that easy. I have to do a couple things because I'm picky, but it's my choice to do it that way. It doesn't have to be real hard. But the thing about video is it gets much more interaction and it's much easier to share. Podcasts are really convenient because the distribution system. The distribution system is varied. We use a company called Pinecast, and they send what's called an RSS feed. Well, they make it available. And places like Apple Podcasts and Spotify will call that periodically to find out if there's a new episode. And then it goes to them. Which means that it's really hard to go to one website and see what all the new podcasts are for us. For instance, unless you've got a Spotify subscription or something like that. Or you go to our website, but.

You have to know that it exists or you have to at least have some sense of what keywords are they going to find it.

Exactly. And if you want to find our videos, you can go on YouTube and you can search for Main Street Lutherans or even just Lutherans. And you might come up with some videos that we posted from, say, the festival of Homiletics, or you might find videos that are our podcast. Google podcasts was shut down and they moved their podcast form into YouTube so that people who use YouTube as a podcast device can listen to our podcast using YouTube, which is interesting, but so you can find our podcast that way there, too.

Yeah. Another thing about video, too, is that you can have, you know, there are entire platforms built around short videos. You know, you're talking 30 seconds or at least less than two minutes. Nobody's going to go to the trouble of listening to a podcast that's that short. And so if you're going to have a podcast that's longer, let's just say even 15 minutes, you have to edit it because there's nothing to watch to help you through the painful parts of the dialogue or monologue.

I will say, though, there is a podcast that is about four and a half seconds that's released daily. And if you go to today's been.

Around for several years.

That's right. If you go to today is you can find one of my shortest podcasts, but I have produced the most episodes of that. It's kind of fun. Yeah. So we did talk about the money a little bit. So, yeah, the equipment can cost some money. The software I use is free, but it takes a lot of learning to use it. The more you pay for the software, the easier it is to use. But you can do most of these things for free. I'm lucky that I got microphones and that equipment starting out for my kids. I want them to have a YouTube studio. And then they decided they didn't want to do YouTube anymore. So a lot of it came for, well, sort of free. I bought it for them for Christmas, and then I've used that excuse to.

Get myself things, too. Yeah, this is for my kids, really.

If there are any. If there's anyone out there who wants to start a podcast, there is a desire to have something about theology, about lutheran theology. We'd be happy to help you get started, to tell you the truth. So ring us up, give us a. Shoot us an email or something like that, and we will help you get started, maybe, and let you borrow some equipment if you need to. So, yeah, yeah, we will put the.

Challenge out there to do something better than we are.

Yeah. We won't be ashamed to go back to the Reddit thing. We're open to criticism. We did not go into this thinking that we were going to be the best ever lutheran podcast. We do reflect the way our churches are. Our churches are middle class, suburban, white congregations, and that is who we are. And if we tried to make it look like we were something else, I think we would be. I don't think that would be sincere.

Right. I mean, you know, by and large, I don't want to. We don't want to deny that there are not black ELCA congregations out there, or urban, certainly small town and rural, but, yeah, but that's not who Ben and I are, and it's not the congregations that we're a part of. We are. And I think that most folks, when you think of the ELCA, you're going to find either large ish suburban congregations or small rural ones are the backbone of our denominational footprint, if I can mix metaphors there. And so, yeah, we reflect who we are as individuals, and to some extent, we reflect sort of the more typical ELCA congregations. But again, we don't want to deny that there aren't atypical congregations out there that we would love to hear from, too.

Oh, for sure.

But, yeah, we started this also because, again, we noticed a dearth in content from the ELCA as a body, and so we wanted to address that. But we're quite aware of the lack of material out there. That's why we're doing what we're doing. And again, it's not to say we're doing something fantastic, but we're trying to do something right.

And we're trying to stay within some limits. And one of those primary limits is that what we're trying to do is to explain how our congregations work, what we believe, how we, we operate in society, to folks who have not yet joined a congregation, who want to know. Who want to know more about what this ELCA thing is. What makes the ELCA Lutherans different than other Lutherans or other evangelicals or other, you know, united churches or what have.

You, Christians of whatever flavor.

And we're also targeted toward people who, but haven't had, haven't seen beyond the church, the congregation's walls. Maybe they haven't been involved with the ELCA at a senate or regional or national level, haven't gone to youth gathering. Maybe there are people who joined as adults and didn't go through the confirmation experience or haven't. Haven't really had an interest in that until they found our podcasters started asking questions that drew them to us. So because of that, we are. There are things that we are not. We are not preaching. We are also not making excuses. In fact, we want to have episodes in the future that reflect and explore the ELCA's culpability in things like indigenous schools and slavery. Those are things we want to address, but they're not easy to get information on. So it's going to take us some time to get to the right people and the right information about those, and they're not going to be easy to make guests.

Right. We're also not trying to convince people that the ELCA is the best denomination, even if we happen to think that ourselves. That's not our role here. And we're trying to not take your time as listeners for granted. Again, we appreciate everyone who does take the time to listen to an episode or more.

Yeah, and this show's probably getting a little long, but. But it's an important one to talk about this stuff, too. So how our show's doing, I keep track of the stats. I look at stats most days to see how we're doing, and I'll tell you, we're doing fine. It takes a really long time to build an audience. We've just crossed 2000 listeners with the. The 17th episode.

That's amazing.

It is, but that works out to just over 100 listens per episode isn't a terrible amount, but it's pretty consistent. And the more important part is it's growing. This is, we're in the middle, maybe toward the end of the summer slowdown, where all podcasts have reduced listenership because people are going on vacation, so they're not listening to things they listen to on commutes. There too many, you know, activities going on at home, so they're not listening at times when they normally would. It also makes it hard to get guests and so the listening is down overall. And that keeps you from getting guests too, because they're not listening and they don't have time for us during the summer. A future topics that we've got lined up or in the works. We have lined up right now an interview with pastor Keats Miles Wallace from Technicolor ministries in central Texas. That'll be really exciting. We're going to talk about how that church operates as an online community. It's a function of the synod. They have partnerships with congregations in the area. They do some face to face stuff in addition to some online things. We're going to tackle the theology of the cross and with that, some atonement theories. That's been a pretty common topic lately, but it's a deep one, it's a difficult one. And I'm going to come at it with something that a lot of people haven't heard about before that comes from a professor that was at LSTC for a good long time. We also have communications with the youth gathering leadership. They didn't want to do it right before the gathering, of course. So we're gonna, we're gonna try to get them here in the next few, next few weeks and line something up for that. We're also gonna try to talk about some lay ministry forms and opportunities, both with the faith lead folks at Luther, which seem to be the one of our leading organizations on lay ministry, but then also with some synods that are talking to about it and maybe some bishops. And then our big thing that we've had lined up from the beginning, and we keep trying to find people for it, is church history. We've got, we want to talk about reformation history, but we also want to talk about the history of the 20th century. The Lutherans put off some of the things that other denominations had tackled in the 1920s, particularly the divide between fundamentalism and modernism, and we didn't do that until 1974. And we're still suffering through some of those pieces, but. So we're going to try to tackle those things. So I guess next, as we tackle a catechism question. Woo hoo.

Last episode's question was, what are the two swords that we refer to in church history? And the options for those answers were the swords of Richard the Lionheart and Peter the Hermit, which were lost to history in the crusades. The sword of the government and the sword of the church. The two swords held by the disciples in Luke, chapter 22, verse 38. Or metaphorically, the crosses, the thieves that hung to Jesus's right and left. And if you have not yet figured it out, we can tell you that the answer is the sword of the government and the sword of the church.

Yeah, I'm really proud of the other answers we had for that.

Oh, those were good. Yeah, very good options. How about the options that we have for this week's question?

So this week's question is. So this is going to refer to, you know, podcasting is a new technology for the church. And so what technology made Martin Luther's writing spread farther and faster than prior critics of the Roman Catholic Church? Because, of course, Martin Luther wasn't the first person to try to reform the Roman catholic church. But the technology, was it the Gutenberg press? Was it the Washington Post? Was it the Xavier Onassis quantum chair? Or was it Wikipedia?

And how are they going to respond if they have the answer.

Well, you can reach us at email by [email protected]. you can visit our website and get some, some links to some things [email protected]. or on the socials as main street Lutherans on Facebook, Instagram threads and YouTube. Of course, you can call to leave us a message at 734-250-9554 Main Street Lutherans is hosted by Keith Fair and Ben Fot. The show is produced by Fot Media Productions. Until next time, go in peace. Serve the Lord.

Thanks be to God.