Faith and Work (Part 2) - Lauren Gill

00:02 - Speaker 1 How many Christians are surprised by the idea that work is not part of the fall. We don't work because the world has fallen like work was in the garden. God called Adam and Eve to cultivate the garden right To name the animals to do all of these things, and then sin came in and impacted that process, that system. We know because of some of the passages that we see in Isaiah and Revelation that the work that we're doing build towards the new heavens and the new earth. 00:31 - Speaker 2 Welcome to Faithly Stories, the podcast that brings you inspiring tales from conversations with church leaders as they navigate the peaks and valleys of their faith journeys through their ministry work and everyday life. Join us as we delve into their challenges, moments of encouragement and answered prayers. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Learn more at faithlyco. Get ready to be uplifted and inspired as we unveil the heart of faith through stories from the front lines of ministry. On the Faithly Stories podcast. 01:12 - Speaker 3 Lauren Gill, welcome to Faithly Stories. Thank you, thanks for having me. I am really excited about this conversation as someone who worked on Wall Street for 20 years, served as a lay leader at my church for 10 years and now I'm running Faithly, which is serving ministry leaders. The topic of faith and work has been on my mind for a long time, so I'm super excited for insights from you today. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Yeah, great. So you came to New York over 20 years ago. You came to study drama and journalism at NYU and now you are one of the leading voices on Faith and Work and you, along with your co-author, have published a book on Faith and Work and it's not your first. So take me through the journey. How did you go from being a young woman moving to New York thinking about becoming an actress? You know, being a young woman moving to New York thinking about becoming an actress to what you're doing today. 02:07 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's a great faith and work story actually, because it sort of shows you can make your plans and God just is going to do with your life what he wants to do with your life. Like you said, I moved to New York City to study acting and while I was in college I went to hear Tim Keller, who was the pastor at Redeemer Church at the time and wrote a great faith and workbook later, every Good Endeavor. He gave a talk to actors and he talked about you know why story is powerful, how art changes things, how you know as an artist you're cultivating God's creation. And I was astounded because the unconscious message of the church all my life had been you work to give money to the church or you know, you do missions when you can and that's what really serves the Lord. 03:00 And I had had it in me from a young age to want to be in the arts and I very much felt like art is important and there was just something intrinsic about it that was in me and I wanted to do it and I never felt like the church gave a satisfying response for that. So after hearing Tim give that talk, I joined something called the Gotham Fellowship at Redeemer, and it was a nine-month intensive where they talked about how to integrate your faith and work, and this gentleman led it at the time, david Kim, and that really shaped my thinking around how important this was. So then I went and worked for David at the Center for Faith and Work and then eventually moved over to the Global Faith and Work Initiative at City to City. But initially the entry point was, you know, the arts, and that what I learned about faith and work impacted me in the way I thought about my work as an artist, and so then I wanted to be part of that. 04:00 - Speaker 3 Wow, yeah, that's really cool. So you did a few other things along the way in that journey. So after you graduated from NYU and had some of your first work experiences, you actually went back to school. You went to Columbia to study counseling psychology. What made you decide to do that? 04:19 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so I actually, you know, I was working at a hedge fund and I was an admin. I was for three years. I was making backup copies of backup copies for like a storage system, and at some point they said, you know, I think we don't need this job anymore and they got rid of me, and so then I was like, ok, well, what am I? You know, the arts only makes a certain amount of money. I have to, like, figure out a way to have some sustainability here. 04:46 So I decided to go back to school for counseling and then I worked at the Center for Faith and Work and at Redeemer Counseling Services simultaneously, and they really went hand in hand, because at the time CFW was a lot about how can we get people in New York City to think about what it means to change culture, to create culture at sort of a macro level, right. 05:08 And then at the Counseling Center, I was spending time one-on-one with people hearing about how work was painful, right, and what was broken about work, and how the dynamics at work, the relationships, the stress, the lack of work maybe for a lot of artists that I was counseling was impacting their faith, how their faith. There was this disconnect where they felt like their faith wasn't informing those experiences. And I felt like those two experiences, having them at the same time, were really formative, because then I was able to say, okay, this is really something that I think you see in the book we talk about, like there has to be heart change around this as well as city change, and so that was really kind of how I fell into that. 06:02 - Speaker 3 It was because I lost a job and I said, well, let me go back to school for counseling and then try to do that for a little while, yeah, it'd be easy to think that doing counseling and doing the work you're doing now in faith and work, it'd be easy to think that those things are unrelated, but hearing you talk about the kinds of conversations that you've had with people, it's so easy to see the through line and how the Lord used that work to inform the work you're doing now to train pastors. 06:28 - Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah it is. And I think, especially because when I was counseling, I was working a lot with young women and I was working a lot with young women who were artists because I had the arts background and so it was people who were dancers, who were singers, and so it was people who were dancers, who were singers, actresses, models, and, yeah, I just saw how the pressures of their industry were just weighing on their soul and their mental health. A lot of artists, I think, have mental health struggles because the industry, to some degree, I think it just puts so much pressure. All industries in New York City, I think, put pressure on people some degree. I think it just puts so much pressure. All industries in New York City, I think, put pressure on people. But the arts in particular, you know, for dancers and models, there was a lot of eating disorder issues. You know there's a lot of unemployment in all of those industries, so there's a lot of stress around that. 07:20 And I think, too, your identity is very tied to your work in a unique way, because you're the product Right. If you're in finance, you're doing a deal and the deal is the thing, but if you're in a play, you are the thing Right, and so if you get a bad review or you don't get the part or whatever, it's like a very personal hurt. I think that damages your soul in a unique way that you have to wrestle through with the Lord. You know, or it's going to continue to feed you negatively. 07:55 - Speaker 3 I'd never thought about it from an artist's perspective but of course it would make sense in a city like New York that you'd have a lot of those conversations and that'd be where a lot of the pain is Like having a finance background. When I hear someone say like work has become an idol, I say oh yeah, that makes sense because of the overwork and the overambition and all of that. But really like it's all related, it's all very similar. I caught a conversation you had on a podcast I think, a couple of years ago with the Institute of Faith and Work in Denver and you talked about like work being an idol right. 08:31 What are some of the signs of unhealth? For people who may not be in counseling or who you know? It may not be acute yet, but it's not a healthy relationship. 08:43 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I think you'll know if something's an idol when it's threatened. And so sometimes it's sad because we don't know until the thing is threatened, right. You don't know until maybe you're going to lose your job or you're not going to get the title or you get demoted in some way, or you don't get bonus or you know you don't get the credit. Then you know the devastation that it causes you. You're like, wait a minute, that seems out of balance, right. And just to sort of define an idol, you know work is a good thing, right, like work is God wants us to work, it has dignity, it gives us dignity as humans to work. But when we make that good thing an ultimate thing, then it's become an idol. 09:32 And I think a lot of times the way you can tell that is with your emotions. And so if and even in my work, right if something happens at work and I have a disagreement with a colleague, and then I am really angry about it. Anger is fine, but is it an anger that is righteous and based in justice, or is it because I didn't get my way, or because I don't have the power in the situation, or because it was uncomfortable, or because I didn't get the approval I wanted. Like, is it hitting against one of those things? Because then I know I've made the work something that it's not supposed to be. 10:10 I'm not supposed to get my identity from the work right, I'm supposed to get my identity from Jesus, and then the work is an expression of my identity in Jesus. But if the work is my identity, then when it's threatened I'll fall apart, you know, yeah, and that can happen in all sorts of ways. And then on the flip side of that, I think there is an idol of well, I don't want to work, or under work, or not valuing work enough to say, like, well, my job is just to make money for the family or me or to meet my needs, or I don't want to work because I get money elsewhere and so, you know, I don't need to spend my time sort of cultivating God's creation or serving others or adding value in some way. And that can be an idol too, right? Because then that's saying leisure or comfort are more important than cultivating God's creation and serving the people around us in some way. 11:17 - Speaker 3 That's really good. So so far we've been talking about mostly secular work, um, but your job. So your job involves training pastors and you've written this book for a lot, for a wide audience but, like largely with a pastor audience in mind helping pastors to um, uh, equipping pastors to galvanize their churches for faith and work, for integrating faith and work. As you've worked with pastors, have you found that you have conversations with them about their faith and work? Is that something that you get into with pastors? You know their ministry and their work. 11:52 - Speaker 1 Definitely. I think that the easiest way to help pastors to understand work idolatry is to connect it to their own work idolatry even though they may not call it that right, and to say when you get feedback that your sermon was not good last week, or when people are not coming, the numbers are dwindling at your church and or you don't have enough volunteers or whatever it is, and you feel crushed by that. That means your identity is tied to your work. Yeah, Right, Because your identity is about the success or failure of the church. Right, Right, and that is no different Like what you wrestle with, and that with the Lord is no different than what all of the people in your congregation who work in education, healthcare, tech, transit, hospitality those are the things that they wrestle with throughout their week too, right, and so if you can kind of connect the dots from your experience around idolatry and ministry, approval or security or for power, right to what they're experiencing, then you'll be able to reach them in a way that I think is really powerful and significant. 13:09 - Speaker 3 Yeah, wow. So as you talk to these pastors and you help them to understand the relationship between faith and work in their own ministries, and do you find that any of them have this revelation like gosh, things like might be out of balance in my own life and in my own ministry, and what is the next step you offer to them, what is the next step you advise them to take, if that might be the case? 13:35 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean we use a framework and we have it in the book and we call it Heart, community, world. And so, essentially, heart is you know, what is your personal relationship with Jesus like? And then community is how does your faith impact your relationships at work, your customers, your coworkers, your colleagues, your competitors? And then world is how does your faith impact your industry? What does it say about your industry or your city? Right, and so the heart piece, the personal relationship piece, has to be in a good place before there can be a movement outwards, towards people in community or even broader, towards an industry. 14:27 Right, and so I think that I have found, personally, the sonship material to be really helpful for that, for thinking through where are you getting your righteousness right? And are you getting your righteousness from the Lord? Do you get your sense of being okay from the Lord or do you get it from your church success? Get your sense of being okay from the Lord or do you get it from your church success Right? Are you, you know, in balance and all of those things in terms of like, taking care of your family, not idolizing your work, your church, or is it, is it out of whack? And I think you know, anytime we can encourage pastors to deepen that personal relationship with Jesus themselves. And it's difficult, right to say, like I need, to not value productivity so much but instead value this relationship, this prayer life, this time in Scripture, right Not just to get a great sermon, but just for myself. Right, like I think it is a difficult thing for the people who are teaching that to others to do for themselves. 15:27 - Speaker 3 Absolutely, absolutely. I think that what we're getting at here is I think pastors have a responsibility to get this right in their own lives, right and in their own ministries before they can go out to their congregations and really effectively teach them the way, and it's hard. It's hard because the teachers of the way aren't. Doesn't you also have to become a practitioner? 15:52 of the way, and I think it's really powerful that your co-author in the book, missy, says hey, like here I am, I'm leading an initiative in Nashville for faith and work and there was a time when I didn't have the balance right and I think for her to say that hopefully will help pastors to feel like well, you know, this is hard stuff and there's maybe some work I need to do before I can bring faith and work into my church. So this isn't the first book that you've written on faith and work, and there have been other books out there, like Tim Keller wrote a book as well, I think 10 or 15 years ago. How is this book different? How does it build upon the other work that's been done? 16:29 - Speaker 1 So Tim's book was really Every Good Endeavor and it was foundational for me. And he wrote it with Katherine Leary Alsdorf and it was really for the practitioner right why is your work important and how is God using your work? How should you think about it? And we tried to write a book for pastors and say here's why you should build faith and work into your church, and here is a roadmap to do it. Because we know you have too much on your plate already and so we wanted to make it deeply practical. And so we've been leading for many years a faith and work intensive and we teach pastors and ministry leaders how to design a faith and work initiative, how to build it. And that started the Center for Faith and Work with Catherine Leary Alsdorf and David Kim, and now we run it at City to City and we tried to just sort of take everything that we teach in that week and some additional ideas and thoughts and create some new tools and then put it in a book and say now you have everything you need and you don't have to do it all. We don't want you to be overwhelmed, but if you can do even a couple of small things, right, if you can think about how to make connections in your sermon to the workplace. For example, if you're teaching on the prodigal son this weekend, you can ask a couple of people in your church hey, when at work have you felt like a self-righteous elder brother in your work Because someone else got grace right? Someone else was shown grace and you were like but I did it right, I've checked all the boxes why is that person getting grace? Everybody has felt like that at work at some point. I think right, no matter what your industry. Everybody has felt like that at work at some point. I think right, no matter what your industry. 18:27 No-transcript. When you preach it, it will connect the dots for people that this is not just something that they are supposed to think about on Sunday, but that when they go throughout their week they have to think about where am I being self-righteous this week, right at work? Where am I not getting my sense of righteousness from Jesus? And so I think that's like one small example that we give in the book of. This is something easy that you can start doing, you know, next week, or you can build out something major, and here's all the tools to do that. Here's the assessments, here's the resources. You know, here's the evaluations that you can use, but you can also start very small, and here's some ideas to do that. 19:08 - Speaker 3 That's great and I know that's going to be really helpful for pastors, because we all know pastors are stretched very thin. I think over the years what is expected of a pastor has grown and grown and grown. So I imagine that when you have conversations with pastors and you talk about a couple examples in the book where they kind of put their hands up and they say, hey, I'm at capacity, right, and I think what some of those pastors are envisioning is that a faith and work integration means a new ministry with new volunteers and new books and like a lot to manage. 19:41 But I think it's really powerful that in your book you say, hey, if you could do one thing, work an illustration into your sermon, like blend it into your teaching a little bit, I think that makes it, I think, more approachable. 19:53 - Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think one of the things we try to do with the book also is say a lot of the stress and weight that you carry, I think, can be solved by faith and work. 20:03 Because if you feel like it is on me to fix it and do cultural renewal and change the community, that I'm in right, and whatever the problems are in the school system or the homelessness problem in the area or whatever I'm supposed to take care of, that's way too much right. 20:24 But if you say, okay, I can equip my congregants to look for areas of brokenness in our community and give them tools to think theologically about how to push against that brokenness, that takes a lot of pressure off, I think. I mean, I've sat in some of the church planting, pastoral training, and I've walked away after a week and thought walked away after a week and thought that's the amount that we just told them to do is way too overwhelming. Right, because we've given them this sense that they're moving into a community and they have to, you know, bring people into their church, manage their staff, evangelize to all of these people right in the community and also, you know, try to work with these city and community agencies to fix problems. You know it's just, it's an overwhelming amount. So I think you want to build a stronger laity. So there's a sense of we're gathering people together on Sunday, right where the church gathered on Sunday, to send Christians out as the church scattered throughout the week to work for renewal in the city. Right, yeah, because work is their context. 21:38 - Speaker 3 Because work is their context and you say that many times in the book, and what I think is so interesting about calling out that work is their context is because pastors use this word a lot context. I hear pastors say a lot well, I minister in the urban context or in the rural context or in this ethnic context. I think using that word is really helpful to help pastors understand like well, this is your people's context and this is how you help them to operate and live out their faith in it. 22:06 So I think let's talk about the theology for a second. You touched on it a little bit in what you just said. I think every pastor knows that work is important. Work gives them purpose and they can give you the basics. But you in your book you spend an entire chapter laying it out for pastors Like here's from the Bible, like from creation to restoration here is work from God's point of view. Can you give us the CliffsNotes version of that Sure? 22:36 - Speaker 1 I think you know it never ceases to amaze me when we teach this material, how many Christians are surprised by the idea that work is not part of the fall. We don't work because the world has fallen Like. Work was in the garden before things fell. And so, you know, god called Adam and Eve to cultivate the garden right, to name the animals, to do all of these things. And then sin came in and impacted that process, that system, right. But our hope is that the work we do now we know, because of some of the passages that we see in Isaiah and Revelation, that the work that we're doing build towards the new heavens and the new earth, right. And so there's this incredible chapter and we quote it in a book by Richard Mao and it talks about how you will see that there are glimpses of the work that you're doing in the new heavens and new earth and you don't know how it's all going to come together for renewal in a new city, in a new creation. But it is building towards that. 23:48 And I remember when I learned that in the Gotham Fellowship years ago, that was so astounding to me Because back then I was working at that hedge fund making backup copies of backup copies and I was like this is something. I don't know what it is. It feels very menial in the day to day, but God is using it to build towards something and someday I will see what that is Right and I think, you know, sometimes we get glimpses of it that are more obvious to us than in those really menial tasks, but I just I found that so provocative at the time. You know that there would be a physical creation and our work would be part of building it. 24:33 - Speaker 3 Wow, that's really beautiful and really powerful. Yeah, so let's go back to like pastor objections, like the reasons why pastors may not think this is right for them and for their church. You know, being stretched too thin and being at capacity is a big one, but do you have pastors who ask you questions like, hey, is this only going to work for my mature Christians? Because that's like this small segment of my church. My church is really a lot of people who aren't all the way bought in yet, or they might not even be believers yet. Can faith and work be helpful in strengthening faith? 25:12 - Speaker 1 Absolutely. Work be helpful and strengthening for you, absolutely. And I think it's really interesting because, you know, at City to City, we have the privilege of seeing a lot of global faith and work leaders and how they're doing work, and what's interesting is, in a lot of these contexts where Christians are persecuted, work is a great entry point, right, and I think it is in the US also, but it's a very safe way to say. We know everybody here cares about work and everybody here knows work is broken. Right, there is not a person who doesn't experience brokenness at work, and so we can use that as a way to talk about Christianity and what the Bible says about this and how God is using your work, and so I think it's a really great entry point for people because it hits everybody's experience. Whether they were a farmer or a teacher or an entrepreneur or an artist, everybody has had a sense of suffering about their work for one reason or another. 26:26 - Speaker 3 So you said in your book that you've trained a thousand pastors in 40 countries, so all over the world. Where are they the most receptive to this? Where they're like give me more. Like, train more pastors. We need more of your content and resources. 26:35 - Speaker 1 I mean they're really receptive everywhere. It's just different in these different places. I mean there's this group we work with in France called Imago Dei, and they work with people in fashion and artists and the creative spaces that they work in. The work is so innovative, it's so fun, it's so inspirational and it looks totally different than our faith and work leader in Latin America. He's talked a lot about how, a few years ago, when we came out with the book around mercy and justice in work, how that was already very resonant in a lot of pockets in Latin America, south America, because the Catholic influence actually made it so that people already thought a lot about the poor in their community, right, the marginalized in their community. It was a natural way of thinking, whereas, you know, here in the US, I think, a lot of people don't think about connecting their work to that, and so it's interesting to see that there is a lot of receptivity and it looks different in different places. 27:44 We have a faith and work catalyst in Ghana and she works with a handful of countries in Africa and she created a class called Purpose Beyond Paycheck because she really wanted to start getting people to think about that idea that your work is not just to earn money right, and it is about stewardship, cultivating God's creation, and so I think it's just been fascinating to see the different expressions of faith and work In South Asia. They've done a lot of work with entrepreneurs because it's like a very entrepreneurial space, and so they're thinking a lot about like, okay, well, how can you build something or start something but not kill yourself right, not drive yourself into the ground? And so I think there's receptivity everywhere. Honestly, and that's one of the things you know in the book we talk about this Gallup study called what the Whole Wide World is Thinking, where they surveyed people in over 180 countries and found that the most important thing to people in those contexts, as different as they were, was that they all wanted to have a good job. 28:50 - Speaker 3 So throughout your book you make a really compelling case for how a faith and work integration can increase. Faith in the individual can make a church stronger, but then you also make a case that it can make an entire city stronger. Can you talk about that vision a little bit? 29:08 - Speaker 1 Yeah, absolutely. There's this great quote we use in the book and it's from another book by Matt Kamik and Corey B Wilson, and they basically say the city will not be renewed. Five pastors cannot change a community, ten pastors cannot Twenty right. But if you have a hundred people in your pews and you equip them all to go throughout their day and be in these various industries be in education, tech, finance, the criminal justice system, you know whatever it is and love God, love neighbor and push against brokenness in their industry, I mean that's transformative. Now those people are hitting on loving others in all of these different industries, right, and so I think that idea is really incredible. 30:14 And we have this story. One person in South Asia who we work with gave us where there was a woman and she had a factory in South Asia and she was and it's a factory connected to a major Fortune 500 company and she went through one of their courses and then she said you know, I see now that the people in this factory are my mission field and there were a lot of structural things about the way they were treated that she changed. You know, they needed more bathroom breaks. There were things that made their day hard working in this place, and she made adjustments because she was convicted okay, these people are the ones that I'm meant to serve, and so I really want pastors to catch a vision for that. 31:05 - Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, wow, that's really really powerful. Okay, so earlier we talked a little bit about you know there's a difference between teaching and practicing something and before we started recording, we were sharing. Like gosh, you're a mother of young children, I'm a mother of young children, we're active in our churches and we're working full time, and so where we're called to is so multifaceted and where we have to apply our faith and our work is so multifaceted. What are some of your personal practices or your personal tips that you can offer either to pastors or to lay leaders about how to make all of it work? 31:41 - Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I think I, when I was in college, there was a man named Peter Troutman and he runs the Navigators program here in New York City and he taught me the importance of a solid quiet time. And it feels so simplistic, but I just try to make sure I have that time, even if it's like very short. And so, like I dropped my kids off at school today and then I had to come here and you know I went to a coffee shop for an hour between and was like, OK, I just have to do my quiet time in this coffee shop. This is where it has to happen today. And you know, God met me in the coffee shop. You know he met me in Acts 4 in the coffee shop, you know. So I think that you just have to carve it out, carve out that space. 32:28 And I think the other thing is I've just had to really understand more and more and this is more of a thing lately that I have to be someone who says no to things, and when I do, I have to just kind of let it go. 32:42 I think last week my son, he fell, he had to go to get stitches. He's totally fine, but you know, I looked at my week and we spent a day going around taking care of that and then I was like, OK, I have to cancel three things that are, like, pretty important to me this week. You know, I can't lead, I can't lead my small group. I can't. I can't, you know, do this project that I wanted to work on and I can't have this meeting that someone's asking me for to to do something, and I think I used to be someone who that made me feel a bit like a failure to not be able to do everything before I had children. To say like, okay, I, that really stinks, I feel bad about myself because I didn't check all the boxes today. Um, because my biggest idol is productivity. Um, and I'm getting better. I think about saying like it's okay if that person is disappointed that I didn't get to that, because my identity is in Christ and it's not in how many meetings I take. 33:50 - Speaker 3 Wow, that resonates so much with me. I don't know that I could have ever named productivity as my idol, but like hearing you talk about that sense of failure at not checking every box that, let's face it, you set out for yourself to check that that would make you feel like a failure like that definitely resonates and I have a feeling will resonate with a lot of our listeners. So thank you for sharing that. 34:10 - Speaker 1 If I could share one more thing around, that there is a woman named Tracy Matthews and she has this incredible organization called Attune to Grow and she is really great with working with pastors and ministry leaders and organizations about thinking through, slowing down and attuning yourself to what does God really want you to do, what decisions does he want you to make, what things does he want you to take on? And so if you are someone who feels like you don't have that muscle, I would really recommend her classes, her courses, her organization. 34:48 - Speaker 3 That's awesome. We'll include that in the show notes for sure, all right. Last question for you. So for pastors who may not have thought about faith and work but are intrigued by this conversation, they can pick up your book on Amazon I assume Amazon Barnes, noble, okay, great, and bookshoporg Got it and how can they interact with you? What trainings or teachings like? Where can they find you and get plugged into everything that you guys have to offer? 35:14 - Speaker 1 Yeah, so our website is globalfaithandworkcom. You can sign up for our newsletter and we have training. We have regional trainings, so we have them in Asia Pacific and in Latin America, in Europe, and so if you're someone outside the United States, we can get you connected that way with one of those regional leaders. But we also have online, one to two times a year, our Designing a Faith and Work Initiative cohort, and so happy to have anyone who wants to put more legs to this work in that group. 35:47 - Speaker 3 Yeah, and even though this is Redeemer City to City, this is not just for Redeemer Network churches, it's not just for it's a non-denominational effort? 35:55 - Speaker 1 Absolutely not. Yes, redeemer is non-denominational. We work with anyone who wants to work with us, who wants to learn more about how to build this into their church or ecosystem, that's awesome. 36:05 - Speaker 3 Well, one church can't do it alone. Churches have to band together to really get behind these things that, as you guys say so beautifully in your book, will strengthen churches and will strengthen our cities. Thank you so much, Lauren. I really appreciate your time this morning. This has been really fascinating and I know that for many of our listeners, it will help to encourage and equip them as well. 36:25 - Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. Thank you for tuning in to the Faithly Stories podcast. We pray this episode gave you the encouragement you needed to continue on your journey. The Faithly Stories podcast is brought to you by Faithly, an online community committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. Committed to empowering church leaders, pastors, staff and volunteers. 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