The Tim Ahlman Podcast
The Tim Ahlman Podcast is your go-to resource for inspiring conversations that equip leaders to thrive in every vocation, inside and outside the church. With three primary focuses, this podcast dives deep into:
Leadership: Learn from experts across diverse fields as we explore how their insights can shape and sustain a healthy culture in the local church and beyond. Over 60% of listeners expressed a desire for practical discussions on cultivating thriving environments—and that's exactly what these conversations will deliver.
Learn: Engage in deep theological discussions with scholars who illuminate how Christ is revealed on every page of Scripture. Together, we’ll bridge theology to the realities of a post-Christian America, ensuring practical application for today’s world. This segment aligns closely with the themes of the American Reformation Podcast and resonates with the 60% of you who crave more exploration in this area.
Live: Discover healthy habits that empower leaders in all vocations to become holistically healthy. As followers of Jesus, we’re called to lead not only with faith but also with physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Join Tim Ahlman as we navigate leadership, learning, and living with purpose, so you can lead with strength, wisdom, and a Christ-centered vision.
The Tim Ahlman Podcast
The LCMS Isn’t Dying—It’s Sleeping on Its Greatest Asset
What if the greatest untapped mission field in the LCMS isn’t overseas—but in your preschool?
Dr. Douglas Krengel joins Pastor Tim to reveal jaw-dropping findings from his LCMS-wide research on early childhood ministries—and the shocking disconnect between pastors and preschool directors. With over 76,000 kids in LCMS early learning centers and most pastors having zero training in early childhood education, are we missing the Reformation right under our noses?
They dive deep into:
The controversial "homophily effect" that divides our churches
Why many pastors still view early childhood ministry as “women’s work”
How we’re failing to speak the #1 mission language today: Modern Mom
The domino effect a thriving pastor-director relationship can unleash
This episode pulls no punches. It’s time for LCMS leaders to wake up—and start learning from the very people we’ve overlooked.
👉 Like, share, and comment to move the mission forward.
Welcome to the Tim Allman Podcast. It's a beautiful day to be alive, pray, the joy of Jesus is with you, that you're getting your water in, that you're moving your body it is a temple of the Holy Spirit and that you're buckled up. Maybe you're in your car and ready to interact and learn. Today it's a great day to learn. I get to learn today with Dr Douglas Andrew Kringle.
Speaker 1:He is an organizational leadership guru guy. He designed and carried out a mixed methods research project with Dr Shirley Morgenthaler in cooperation with the Texas District in the LCMS. He's served as a guest instructor at Concordia Seminary. He's taught a lot of classes like teaching the faith at Concordia Seminary. He's taught a lot of classes like teaching the faith. He's been a part of the SMP program training pastors and has been an online instructor in a variety of different organizations, but today he's been a manager of a large staff and today I'm just going to let him tell his kind of ministry story. There's a lot for Dr Kringle to share, and so I'm going to let you kind of lead us where we're going today as we get into your research, really, really excited about this. How are you doing, though, dr Kringle?
Speaker 2:Doing very well, pastor Allman. Thank you, tim, for having me on your show. It was a blessing to have you on our show on Engaging Truth earlier in the year and thank you for this opportunity. I believe both of us were at Best Practices Ministry Conference in Phoenix this last year. It was a great conference. It really helped me frame some of my research that I have done Well. I finished the research in 2019. One of the books was this book by Joseph Barron, the Ends of the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod, and he was kind enough to allow me a signed copy and read over the book. I think it's a really helpful book and kind of wakes us up to see where we're at.
Speaker 2:There were a number of things at Best Practices Ministry Conference that were, I would say, a waving of the hand, a signaling that we really need to engage. I would like to think that my research was engaging in that topic six years ago. So the ideas I would put it is how can we thrive? What do we have? What are the resources we do have? I know President David Davis here in the Michigan District of the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate. He just put out a really nice small essay asking the same thing. Let's look at what we do have. So what is that guy's name on TV? Bear Grimm, is it? He's a survivalist. You know this guy, bear Grills. Push him out of an airplane, he parachutes into some desert somewhere, and it's always the same deal. He looks around for water, shelter, so forth. He's looking at the resources he has. He's not saying man, am I in a terrible state? So I would invite us to reframe our conversation today about let's look at what we do have. What are we deeply blessed with?
Speaker 2:And that's what brings me to early childhood education and care in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, because we have thousands, well over a thousand. Let me see what the number is 1,714 early childhood centers across 6,000 congregations, and this is either the largest branch of early Christian education or Lutheran education, both, or it's close to it. The numbers vary year to year. Close to it, the numbers vary year to year. For some reason I can't find the numbers for the year 2022-23. There's a missing set. But the year 2021-22, there were 76,800 early childhood students, and that's in comparison with elementary school, which was 67,977. Both are excellent, wonderful ministries. We're thankful for education and we have a great legacy. So what if this is the case. So here's the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate and here's the rest of the world. Where does this happen? And let's find out where that happens. My educated guess is it happens in early childhood education and care, most in the Lutheran Church Missouri Senate, and that's why we should start there for our conversation.
Speaker 1:Hey, I love it. Well, we're going to get there. What did you like about the ends of the LCMS by Joe Barron? He was a vicar of mine. He was at Christ Greenfield way back in the day about a decade ago or so. So any two or three points that Joe kind of brought out before we get into your research.
Speaker 2:First of all, he's an economist. He loves his statistics. He's showing mathematically where we're at. I think that objective perspective was very helpful. I was hoping to do the same in my research in my own way. But also, the end of the book is not at all about the end of the LCMS. It's all about thriving, it's all about revitalization. And while the title was catchy, it might be maybe there should have been two books, one for the first half and one for the second, because he certainly does engage in what can we do as we with the resources we have. So that's, and his presentation, his live presentation, was excellent.
Speaker 1:He's a great dude. I love Joe. He's like a third cousin of mine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, he used the example of having. He shares it in the book, so I guess it's okay to talk about. He has arthritis. This was how do I cope with what I have? And he used that as a model for us as a church body and maybe it could apply to other denominations too. But our church body, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, may have some arthritis. And how should we go about still serving the Lord even though we have these limitations?
Speaker 1:Well, let's be honest here, Doug. I mean, our greatest asset are our people. It's not the buildings, it's the people and the people sent on mission to reach more people with the gospel. This is our ultimate call and, I agree with you, one of the best.
Speaker 1:And there may have been a pastor now 17 years and maybe there was a season where I was less than intentional about engaging the families who don't have a church home connected to our early learning centers. We know there's well over 50% of the families in our school. We're serving about 150 students in our early learning center, coupled with about 300, over 300 in our K-8. But the mission field is exponential there and we're seeing with the power of invitation for these young families. They would love a wider community and if they're entrusting their kids to you, maybe they would entrust themselves to you through word and sacrament coming to worship. So we're seeing a lot of young families now with a lot of intention and invitation. We're not a weird group of people. We just gather consistently to hear the goodness of God, his love for us, receive His body and blood. If you've not been baptized, please be baptized.
Speaker 1:And so partnering why would pastors not want to partner with the early learning it makes so much sense. It is the lowest hanging fruit, I would say, for our missional opportunities in the LCMS, to be sure. So what did you find in terms of pastor and preschool director relationship? What was your hypothesis? What did you find? Let's go into that, okay.
Speaker 2:So, we have what's called a dyad relationship between two people in many circumstances and, using the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod theological categories of minister, ordained, ministered, commission, many times the pastor has some oversight of the overall ministry. Now this would put him in somewhat of a hierarchical position. I'm not saying that's the best, I'm just saying that it's often the case. So we used a research tool from organizational leadership called Leader Member Exchange Theory. Leader Member Exchange Theory is not new. You can find the Oxford book on leader-member exchange theory. The Academy of Management is a big purveyor of that in our country. So, applying that, we would have the pastor as kind of the leader and he has a member with a preschool director. Now this, what we would call a vertical relationship or hierarchical, is one of the descriptors for this diet, but it's also most often mixed gendered and it's also often what's called asymmetrical. So we were studying non-random pairings. I did not create these pairings in the lab. These are found in their natural environment, if you will. These were in Texas. We surveyed all the pastors that had a preschool director and surveyed all the matching preschool directors and then also interviewed pastor-preschool director pairs independent of each other. That's where this information is coming from.
Speaker 2:There's a huge lack of research. There's a paucity of research in anything to do with church and preschool, even though it's this great connectivity. So what did we find? We found that pastors really don't understand the early childhood ministry. There's very, very, extremely little pastoral education when it comes to what I call foundational education or educare, a combination of education and care, and then this is reciprocally. The early childhood directors rarely have a master's degree in theology from Concordia Seminary or something like that.
Speaker 2:So because of this, what we call personal demography, they miss each other. They're not like each other. So the technical term for this is the homophily effect. The homophily effect says people who are like each other, like each other. Let me repeat it People who are like each other, like each other. If I here I'm going to be 60 here in May I was with another gentleman my age, my ethnicity, with my educational background, if you were a betting man, more than likely I would form a high quality relationship with that individual than someone who's very disliked me when it comes to personal demography.
Speaker 2:So the research shows from corporate world this can be overcome. People who are extremely different can overcome if we stop focusing on the surface level similarity and we get into what's called deep level similarity. For me, deep level similarity is we're here to save souls with the gospel of Jesus Christ, that everyone might enjoy heaven eternally by grace through faith in Jesus. That's our deep level similarity. If we can focus on that, then we can overcome this homophily effect. So when it comes to a director and a preschool director and a pastor, they have very different surface level demography. They're not like each other and this, I believe, is a holding back, kind of like a beaver dam, if you will. It's stopping up but God means for us to have as a great blessing. So if we could engage with leader-member exchange and do this very purposefully, we can overcome the homophily effect. We can have high-quality professional relationships which in turn will engage the churches and the preschools, which in turn will have a domino effect through the Senate and preferably for many people to hear the gospel.
Speaker 1:Doug, this is great man. I'm so excited you got my mind going in so many different directions. Let's go in the Jesus direction. I mean, this is what Jesus did. He came and moved past surface level similarities based on the law. I'm thinking of Jesus' interaction with the Pharisees. And why aren't your disciples washing hands? You know, like everyone else.
Speaker 1:Well, we have this oral tradition. We've developed a surface level, but Jesus is going deep. Jesus is always going to the heart level. He knows the heart and he was able to because he knows the heart that our hearts are filled with sin, our hearts are hard, our hearts are filled with unbelief. We need a brand new heart. We need faith in something that is higher, or you could say even more foundational for all of sin and falling short of the glory of God. And I'm coming for not just Jew. This was the big Jewish problem in the Old Testament. They forgot their ultimate mission. They were sent to the nations. They were not just to find people who are just like them. They were to go after the pagan, the least, the lost, the lonely, the outsider, and bring them near. And we see that modeled so beautifully in the life story of Jesus. Why are you chatting with that woman at that. Well, man, that's what the disciples say in John 4.
Speaker 2:His father wasn't traveling Aramean, right? Yeah, that way back. Abraham wasn't from Judea, that's it. He was from Ur, the Chaldees. Right, he was the pagan, exactly. Could it be? This is a dunkringalism, a theory that the reason why Israel is where Israel is is because it's the only place on the face of the earth that connects three continents?
Speaker 1:Oh yes, I think that's why, If that's the case, then it's an illustration.
Speaker 2:The geography is an illustration of God's desire, his heart for all people everywhere, of God's desire, his heart for all people everywhere. He does not want the homophily effect to stop up the church to back us up and I believe if we could activate this one professional relationship, the pastor-director relationship, we would engage. The number one thing that's blocking us, which is not outside statistics For us research types, we call that exogenous data. Exogenous data is data outside of our organization, For example, birth rate. We've heard about birth rate. The birth rate in our current church as it stands today is lower than it was Now. This is what disturbs me about that is that it stops there and no one says there's an exogenous statistic, an endogenous, which is inside the organization. There are things inside the organization that are in our care that we can address that would also affect this, despite the fact that some of this outside statistics are the way they are. So this very much disturbs me because it sounds like victim mentality to me Sounds like oh, earth rates down, throw up our hands, you know, just can't serve the Lord anymore. This is not what I think people mean to say. It's certainly not the case because we can address these endogenous issues. The number one endogenous issue internal to our organization that's stopping up, this being multiplied, is pastors relating to preschool directors. If this could be addressed and we can form high quality professional relationships, then I do think we would free up a domino effect.
Speaker 2:You noted that we have a lot of children in our care. We also have a lot of workers in our care. I know in my past we've had 36, 40 employees, not everyone a committed follower of Christ. I'm afraid Some needed people on our payroll. Now, if you have 1,714 of these places, I bet you there's at least 1,714 souls who are being paid by our church to be an early childhood teacher aid and they need to know Christ. So why isn't there some sociological things? You mentioned earlier, of course, the theological, the sin. Now, if you're coming to the conversation, you're not a big believer in sin. You don't know that reality from the Bible, because the biblical reality is very different than our world's reality, right? So we believe. There's a God, there's temptation, there's sin, there's a conscience, there's repentance, there's forgiveness, there's salvation. Christ died on the cross, Christ rose, he ascends and reigns. This reality is not shared with the world in which we live.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:So that's a large thing to overcome, but if we can have high quality professional relationships especially think of a Russian doll and Russian doll, remember those dolls. You have the teeny bitty doll, then another one, another, one, another one, so that certainly our relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ is at the core of the core of the church. Now, as far as sociologically or organizational management type of thing, what two professionals could we affect in a positive manner to energize the church? And this is this professional relationship between the pastor and the director. They're both paid professionals, and if that relationship, though, gets stuck or isn't maturing or they just ignore each other, then I'm afraid the organizations they represent, the sub parts of the church, the preschool, they don't work as well as they could. So this has been brought out by other researchers that when we were at our, we were well over 2000 early childhood centers just in our church body. We were well over 2,000 early childhood centers just in our church body, and now it's declined by 500. Different centers have closed since its peak. This should not be able to continue. We need to engage very purposefully.
Speaker 2:The larger context, if I may, is a church, is a world that has been affected by something called the rights of the child. This came out from the United Nations back in 89, and it says that all children in the world have the right to education, including early learners. We're talking about the kind of kids in our preschools. And all the nations of the world at the United Nations, I think have received this, but America America has not United States of America. So the places that took that seriously, like England, australia, the Czech Republic they redid their entire educational system, the way they educated educators in order to highly esteem early childhood. Now we're seeing a little bit of this in North Carolina and Oklahoma esteem early childhood. Now we're seeing a little bit of this in North Carolina and Oklahoma. They're having where all children of younger age have early childhood available. President Obama he had a heart for this had billions of dollars he wanted to set aside. I don't think it actually ever happened, but it was intended.
Speaker 2:Here in the church, though, while we do want good things for all children, we want literacy, we want numeracy for everybody, we would like them to know our Lord and Savior, jesus Christ, and if we continue by allowing the pastor and the director not to get along so well most of the time, many times and we let this huge investment of the church not be fully thriving, then we'll lose this opportunity to share the gospel with the earliest children, the children whose minds are most wide open. That's why here we have the most recent reporter. I have a big article in here about higher education. If you go back to the back page, here's the early childhood. I think the early childhood should be on the front page. It's the highest level of education and it's also the base of the pyramid. Right that we learned. First, we were at one place taking care of children 18 months old, at one place six months old. So the biology of it is the neurological system.
Speaker 2:You can read this man's book. I'm not commending it to you, I'm just noting it. This is his Robert Sapolsky. Did I say it right? This is his word determined. He's a top notch professor at Stanford. What he does for a living is he studies monkey brains.
Speaker 2:Now he has another book called Behave, and between the two books, behave and Determined, we have a whole theory of how people develop. He has nothing to do with the Bible, completely rejects that. It's all predetermined by genes and by environment. But even he will say this, that if you want to know. The number one thing that will affect a child in their development it is mom. Does mom want the child? Does mom, is she happy that that child even exists? So I think that actually undoes some of his theory and is saying there's more to life here than just genes and environment. There is what I would call God. God intervenes, there's something supernatural in the development of human beings. This is how God's made us. So one of the realities is that we have a conscience. We're born with a conscience and we have a soul, and this is very important. What would happen if the world is scrubbed of early childhood development centers who have a connection with the Bible? Not good, and so perhaps I'm over exaggerating, but maybe not helping us move against tribalism in the LCMS.
Speaker 1:I've been talking about this for some time and your homophilies theory is Homophily effect.
Speaker 1:I thought homophily first time I've heard that, but it's so true. Like attracts like. And Jesus came to move us beyond liking to loving the other, the different, the least of the lost, the lonely. Whatever you've done for the littlest and least of these, my brothers, you've done unto me. And women and children in the New Testament had very little to no social status, no social standing, and yet Jesus welcomed them. You couldn't be much other than the pagan, the woman or the small child.
Speaker 1:And today, I think in the LCMS, pastors like to be around, pastors that agree on just about everything, especially the liturgy. And we need to agree there needs to be order. But does that order that has found this is? It's passive faith Like, what do you have that you did not receive? So there's no grounds here.
Speaker 1:The Apostle Paul says for arrogance, for hubris, for pride, that I've found now my appropriate tribe Right. And then I justify my self-righteousness based on the people that I associate with, and that's an ever increasingly small circle of people. And frankly, doug, I find it remarkably boring because I don't want everybody to be exactly like me. So I want to go to the preschool director who sees a little child and helps me understand about mental neurological development in the earliest years as their little bodies are coming together. And I want to go and learn with the professor who studied a discipline for an exceptional amount of time. I want to learn and learn with the professor who studied a discipline for an exceptional amount of time. I want to learn with those that have been in the bureaucratic hierarchies of the synod what's their perspective on the church. Like that is the posture of our podcast here, and what I've found is that there are some in our tribe, the LCMS, that won't talk to one another because we have a nuanced and, I would say, lower level not foundational, but a lower level kind of difference of opinion based on our context, not the confessions and yet it's just fascinating that folks won't talk to one another. Because I may disagree with you. This is my environment, doug, and I want everybody to experience.
Speaker 1:We have robust debate and challenge in our team meetings. Just yesterday I'm in a meeting and our executive staff and I had to say, after a certain conversation had gone on for like 15 minutes, you know I stepped out. I had a little bit of a risk. I was like I'm mildly frustrated about the conversation and the direction it's going right now. That's what leaders do, and then and then I pull, pull back, let people kind of respond to that and let the dust settle and then tell stories. We ended this meeting after kind of a little bit of a. You know, I don't say I'm mildly frustrated at every staff meeting, you know, because we're united, we're together. But let the dust settle and then we closed off with stories in our various pockets of the ministry, our family and ministries, where God is doing amazing things, and it was like the best meeting ever, like our meetings should be like great movies and we're participating in them.
Speaker 1:We're not passive in it, right, we're in it, and so I pray for pastors that have curiosity to first go and learn, rather than teach, from our early learning directors, from our principals, from all of our commission ministers for goodness sake, by all of the laity.
Speaker 1:We have so much to learn and I think because we are such a learner, we're so focused on degrees and then positional leadership. This could lead us not everyone, but could lead us to a place of pride that very, very robustly damages a united mission church, school, early learning center and then our united mission to make Jesus known that you belong here, you can come here with all of your sin Sinners are welcome in church, All of your stuff, all of your unbelief, and you're going to find a God here and a group of people who are centered in the way of Jesus, who will love you and welcome you and go on the journey of learning more and more, because that journey never ends right, and it won't even end into eternity, for goodness sake, doug right, we're always going to be creature, not creator. And so, yeah, that rant is done. I guess it's just a prayer for our foundational truths to be?
Speaker 2:what orient us? What? Let the rant continue. Because a conflict, according to bruce hartung he's a psychologist good stress is good, that having stress and organization conflict is to be accepted. Remember, jesus had conflict with his own disciples, whom he himself selected. You know he's all knowing god he himself selected. You know he's all-knowing God, he's omniscient. And yet he had a conflict with disciples who were looking for status. They were looking for status. Remember the Sons of Thunder.
Speaker 2:They send in their number one tool to get what they want their mom. They send mom in to talk to Jesus. I want this. I want to be at your right and your left, so send mom in to talk to Jesus. I want this. I want to be at your right and your left, so send mom in. She'll get it done. And I agree, moms are powerful agents. And this is another one of the things I wanted to talk to.
Speaker 2:This is an article by Dr Gieschen, and when you're talking about another resource we have, we have tremendous exegetes, pastor Gieschen, he wrote the Value of Children According to the Gospels. He did this in the October 2013 version of Concordia Theological Quarterly and I want to say thank God for this article. This is fantastic and we should listen to our exegetes. Listen to Horace Hummel, listen to Reed Lessing. All the exegetes in the Concordia Commentary Series all agree that children are valued by the Lord Jesus Christ and are important. There's no one who disagrees when it comes to the exegetes. The Bible is clear. Read about let the little children come unto me and hinder them not, for such is the kingdom of God. Read about it's better if you had a millstone wrapped around your neck and thrown into the heart of the sea. Jesus is saying some of his hardest words. Now, if I understand correctly, professor Gibbs translates that he believes it's a special needs child that Jesus is talking about there, which I think reads terrific. I found that very helpful for my own ministry.
Speaker 2:Now, if we're going to talk to kids, the next thing, the next thing we don't talk about, is who has the kids, and it's not mom and dad all the time anymore. It's not even a coin flip Because of the way divorce is and the divorce rate is, and early in marriages when children are still young, sometimes no marriages at all, sometimes pregnancies on purpose to have a child without a marriage. All these things come together where mom is more likely to have the child in her direct care than dad. So that's the reality. I didn't say this is great, I'm just saying that is the case. Go down to your local family court and ask the judge how many moms versus dads they place the children in custody in a divorce, and it won't be a 50-50, not even close. So because of that, the church has a second thing it needs to learn about is it needs to learn how to speak modern mom as a missional language, because mom has the car keys, mom has the will, mom is.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of tremendous literature out there on motherhood today. Motherhood at Leave it to Beaver back then. How many US senators were women at the time in the 50s? Now today, tremendous number of ladies who are senators, who are congresswomen. That's fantastic, that's great. But we who have early childhood centers I'm talking about the largest Christian churches, people around the Bible that have early childhood centers are the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod. Now what's something that's in common with those three church bodies? They only have male clergy. So the pastors. And I'm not saying we should do something different, I'm just saying we need to learn how to speak modern mom. Preschool is a social way of saying to her we value you so much, you need a partner as you're going to work so hard for your family and we want to partner with you. But it can't stop at preschool. So we as pastors will never be, us male pastors in the Lutheran Church, missouri Senate, will never be native speakers of modern moms.
Speaker 2:So I actually interviewed the moms in my preschool in Houston, actually Cypher, the northwest side of Houston. I was there 13 years and boy, they see things. When mom comes into a space where she's going to let her child be cared for, she becomes hypervigilant. So I am not a hypervigilant person. My wife points that out to me on a regular basis. Last night I forgot to put the garage door down. Doug, did you notice? He didn't even close the garage door, apparently not too vigilant. But when mom comes into early childhood center she sees the security camera.
Speaker 2:One of the moms insisted the thing that was important to her was how it smelled, how the church smells, how the preschool smells, and to her it needed to be a specific kind of this is clean, this is safe, this is. It smells good, wow. So I've tried to give a couple of presentations on learning to speak modern mom, but going to the ladies and saying please teach me, because I don't have that. They taught me a little Greek, a little Hebrew at the seminary, glad for that, maybe a little German every once in a while I could order a bratwurst maybe, but I have no idea about modern mom and that's the number one missional language in our church. So this humility and coming to the preschool director and others saying I need to learn helps a lot and there's a lot to learn.
Speaker 2:Here's a book called the Importance of being Little what Young Children Really Need from Grownups by Erica Christakis. Notice that the concept of that is very similar to this book the most important years, pre-gidenger and the future of our children. So we have something in common as a whole church body with modern moms. We believe what those books say, that these kids are super important. We believe it maybe more because God shares with us. Life is important, life even of the littlest children. We're a church body who baptizes everybody, including infants. This shows that we value intrinsically human life. That's a whole different philosophical way of educating someone if you value them without condition.
Speaker 2:Where you remember I was talking about the right of the child back to the United Nations. That's not how they value kids. It was the economists, the actuaries. They crunched the numbers and they found out that if they invest in early childhood, that will give them reprieve from investing in prisons. I think I saw on the news today down in like Columbia or something we're shipping prisoners out to a foreign country that they can take 40,000 prisoners. That's very expensive.
Speaker 1:It's also sad, hey yeah, no, this is good. Doug, thank you for your passion for this topic. You kind of teased at, we just got you know 10 more minutes or so. Could you give us two or three tips on speaking modern mom? I mean, humility is obviously the number one tip. It's like go in and ask and learn and be curious. But what else? If you want to help us speak, give us a little TED Talk on speaking modern mom there. Doug Glad to do it and, of course.
Speaker 2:First step I'm not a mom, Never been a mom. I know I need this language and I'd like to be some information. So go to your local mom, confess yourself. If you're like me person, and be a learner. Be a learner.
Speaker 2:Then, when we're learning, mom is again hypervigilant. So it's we need to be caring for things like bathrooms and changing centers. Did my husband have a place to change the baby in the bathroom? Is there a place for my children in worship? Do they welcome the presence of children as a blessing in this place? Is our not only our child valued, but is our family valued? Am I valued? So those are some of the things.
Speaker 2:Others is that I asked the ladies do I really, as a church, have to invest in a web page and a Facebook page and an Instagram page? Yes, they almost lost their mind when I asked that question Like what are you talking about? So for some of us who grew up in a pre-social media context, it seems optional. It is not optional Today. The average pastor is me, my age, I'm the average demography. We did not grow up with a computer in our household. Back in the 70s and early 80s, we certainly did not have a cell phone. So churches may be asking do we really need this? And mothers live around their phone because it is this massive tool to help them organize everything. And for some of them they have to organize everything because they're by themselves trying to raise, sometimes multiple children. So also a great amount of empathy, a great amount of value for the calling of motherhood.
Speaker 2:So we had a six Sunday series on motherhood and the story of salvation. And if you listen to the Bible, boy, there's a lot of motherhood stories in there, like Hannah and her story. Her heart was torn because she couldn't have a child. We have so many people who don't want the children they have. It's refreshing to hear from the Bible where ladies were thrilled, almost dying, yes, to have a child.
Speaker 2:This, of course, all the way to the celebration of the Virgin Mother in February, the way to the celebration of the virgin mother In February. There's a celebration of her that was listed this year and that was the conclusion. All that to say, motherhood's important, equally important to fatherhood. If you read Luther and his large catechism, motherhood is a holy vocation. So here are some of the platforms to coming to a mother in a much different posture than hair past door. Hi, I have this special degree from a special university and I'm kind of a source of kind of a big deal. What was that? What was it called the Newsman or something like that? There was a funny movie about an anchorman.
Speaker 2:Anchorman yeah, anchorman, yeah, yeah, and he goes up to the anchor woman and he says you know, I'm kind of a big deal People know me. That's not going to work. So let me refer to a book here. I didn't bring this book with me, but it's called the Trillion Dollar Mom. It's like 25 years old, came out of Northwestern University. It's a marketing book, it's not a theological book. So they were saying that it's a trillion dollar mom because the marketers weren't marketing to women back in the two like 99. So this book was saying there's a trillion dollars out there. If we could just connect and focus on mom as a target market instead of just that. Here's the advertisement. I think it just really sums it up.
Speaker 2:This is, I think, for like Carvana or an alternative car buying system. So the scene starts of a young lady in her 30s comes into a traditional car show floor. She goes up to the most expensive car right in the middle of the show floor and says to these salesmen all men, I want to buy this car. And all the salesmen are like bro culture, they're talking together, they're chatting hey bro, what's going on? And all this and they don't respond. No one responds. She's invisible, invisible, completely invisible. So, being a very quick-witted young lady, she brings out a bro culture puppet. Hey, bro, what's going on? Man, can I buy this car? And now all the guys engage with the puppet, not the lady.
Speaker 2:And then the screen flips to Carvana, or whoever this company was, and it's a young lady who has driven a brand new car to the client's household is handing her the keys, convenient. Another lady helping a lady Totally against bro culture. So what happens if the church, accidentally maybe we look to a young mother like we're bro culture over here, the pastors and the elders all huddled together and she says I'm spending five, six $7,000 a year right down the hallway at your early childhood center and she's completely invisible to us. We never meet her, we never say hi to her. That is off-putting and that would cause someone to go looking for some alternative. I'm afraid that's what's happening.
Speaker 1:Hey, the church has a number of opportunities for growth, always and as the world has become more and more secular you could say pre-Christian now I think we have opportunities on the feminine front and the masculine front.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of research and I just wanted to make that statement because I could see getting comments like we need the church needs less feminization and more masculinity because we're losing a lot of our, especially our, young men.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of research going on with our lack of dating in the early years today and a number of women maturing and this kind of speaks to the single mom dilemma, I think in many respects, and the young men for a variety of reasons. I think it's pornography has somewhat of a hold on many young men. You've got, obviously, social media and the gaming culture that are here today and maybe the church not casting vision for a number of our young men to rise up as leaders, not only in the church but obviously in the home and in the marketplace that a lot of our young women today are looking around. Where did all the men, where did all the men go? There's a number of women out there influencing that are wondering where, where are the guys? Where are the leaders. We need them and there's a generation it feels like that are that are missing right now. Any take on that, doug?
Speaker 2:So my father before me went to a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod school outside of Chicago, st John's in Forest Park, and his kindergarten was 50 children in one classroom in kindergarten, taught by a man. My father did not have a female teacher until he was in high school. Now, today that script is completely flipped. I just came back from the Indiana Association for the Education of the Young Child. This is a branch of the National Association for the Education of the Young Child. This is a branch of the National Association for the Education of the Young Child and they do have a breakout group for men in early childhood education A very rare breed.
Speaker 2:I don't mean to be rude but I need to go to the restroom. Went to the restroom Nobody's in the restroom but one other guy. He made a comment Isn't it great to come to these women's only conferences Because the restroom's basically empty for the guys? I was like, oh, I didn't think of it that way. But all to point out that we pastors who have preschools could be the influence.
Speaker 2:I have found myself on several occasions being the man that's in the world of some young boys, because all our teachers we had 36, 40 early childhood teachers, all ladies, and their mom. They live with their mom, only their mom, and so I've had circumstances where I get report from mom. You know, is it okay that my child, my little boy, is pretending to be a pastor? He's at home, he's pretending to give sermons and sing songs and do the prayers like you do in chapel. Is that something we should encourage? Well, thank God that he has that in his life. So I would suggest that what I've been saying and even if the church did speak, modern mom, it is not an invitation to be either male or female. It's an invitation to be the people of God at this time in history, united together and not trying to play a status card of some sort. We've had this challenge.
Speaker 2:This is one other book. This is not a new one either the Introduction of the Foundations of Lutheran Education by William Reichel, and he talks about this. Just a brief quote teachers were almost clergy and almost laypersons. Their theological status remained unclear throughout the history of the Senate. I think there's still a lot of people, male or female, that are struggling with how status plays out within the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. And status is a very challenging, endogenous thing, something inside the church, to having the pastor leave his office and walk down to the Early Childhood Center.
Speaker 2:There is something about working with young children and I don't mean to upset our listeners but some people call it women's work. You take care of young children. There was a pastor Froebel in the German days you're talking about in the 1800s and it was a big debate amongst the men who were going to be teaching the early childhood. Early childhood was a large debate amongst male teachers and pastors back in the 1800s. William Leahy, one of the founding fathers. He wrote some very early work. Some of his earliest pastoral work was about early child education and care.
Speaker 2:But somehow we forget all this and I'm afraid the pastors often choose just to stay. You know the women stay over there and I don't want to put it in anyone's mouth but I'm afraid some people think of it as women's work where historically that is inaccurate and biblically and theologically Luther would not say in his fourth commandment that Dad, you can just excuse yourself from the family. No, the catechism says as the head of the household should teach, and it says that very seriously. But it doesn't go on to say what about when there is no father? And we have a lot of those households with no father, and the word still needs to be celebrated.
Speaker 1:Doug, this has been so much fun. You're a gift to the body of Christ. I'm gonna have to have you back on. There's a lot more that can be said on this topic. I'm praying for unity around the grounding principles of what it means to be first wrapped up in our identity as children of God, baptized in the name of the triune God, and then humility that moves us toward one another rather than further away from one another, that we would recognize. Being with everyone who is just like us is a product of our sin nature, and that is something that Jesus came to eradicate and to show us, not just through the cross, but through his very life and through the life of the early church, that the gospel is meant to cross every known boundary because the days are too short. Jesus is coming back to make all things new, and you're speaking to the culture in our churches. This is the grassroots, this is the foundation of what it means to be ordered. I'm in a present place. I'm looking out at my courtyard. There's a preschool class and one of our teachers and she's walking four little ones to chapel here getting ready to go, and I get to be a part of I'm in that community and that's. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:Some pastors have lamented, you know, school ministry. It's so hard, you know. And some guys are like, ah, I'd love to be in a place where there's no school, or they were in a school and it was messy because there's more staff and more emotion. You know, whatever Like I, just I just need to be in a place. Or the church it's like this is the church on mission, shaping the hearts and minds of Jesus. How did we ever think, like bifurcate, that what goes on Monday through Friday is not like the living manifestation of the body of Christ doing its work to train up the next generation? It's just bonkers to me, you know.
Speaker 1:And our schools are one of the greatest treasures that we have next to our Catholic friends. I mean, the LCMS has a treasure, not just in our universities and seminaries, which are absolutely a treasure, but at these where vision gets to be cast, and we want we can talk about this next time. Vision needs to be cast for young people and this is the shout out to Set Apart to Serve in our synod where young people get to see a normal man or a normal woman engaged in various ministry and say I see I maybe could do that, I maybe could do that. So fan into flame the young preacher right who goes home and is the evangelist many times for parents who are far from the Lord. That's how it works. Mom, dad, you hear about Jesus. Let me tell you about what Jesus has done. And out of the mouths of babes four and five years old, the gospel works, the Holy Spirit works. So yeah, we need more schools. We need more pastors who promote the value of our Lutheran schools. So good.
Speaker 2:Closing comment Doug, the bottom of the pyramid is early childhood education and care. We're going to build up. We're mature and mature and mature. Right now there's a very high matriculation rate. The base of the pyramid, statistically, is early child education and care. We need to engage that. What if? I would just say, don't mean to be making things even worse. I believe the Lord raised up a reformation in World War II that we didn't see and that reformation was an early child education and care and without a pope, without any direction, thousands and thousands of individual congregations around the world invested millions of dollars per church in facilities and staff to take care of young kids. It was not at all centrally organized and God raised us up in the church. In the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, we went from maybe 100 or so to 2,100 churches in a matter of decades. That's a hand of God, miracle. But I'm afraid, because it's women's work or something like that, we didn't see it and didn't give it its due, not as we should. Before that goes away, let's engage, let's see what God, let's celebrate that. So when God works, he doesn't work always through one headquarters or another headquarters. He does what he does right. John 3, jesus tells us. The Holy Spirit's like the wind blows where he will. And he blew.
Speaker 2:On early childhood, rosie the Riveter had to go to work during World War II. The US government paid for fully accredited educators to take care of the child while Rosie worked. And then Rosie, her husband, came home from war, world War II, and she stayed home. But she had learned something she wanted I could do some work outside of the house. And this. Out of this terrible, difficult circumstance, grew this fantastic aspiration to have early child education and care in not just the church, in the corporate world there are some. If you go to Shell Oil's world headquarters you might find an early childhood center there today, because it's a basic necessity.
Speaker 2:So God has raised up a reformation. What if we followed his lead? Even though maybe our personal demography at surface level doesn't line up, if we connect with that deep level meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ? We're all here to share the good news of Jesus Christ and we see where this number one connectivity is. Let's start where we already have, like Bear Grylls or whatever his name is on the TV. Let's start with the resources we have and do that in support of each other. I really do think churches that don't have schools or early childhood centers could support schools and early childhood centers if they chose. We could partner together, reverend.
Speaker 1:Dr Krangel, man, you're the bombcom. You win the award for the most book references in one hour podcast that I've, and I quote books, man, but you put me to shame. I got to get reading. I got to get reading. There's always always more to read. So if people want to connect with you, doug, how can they do so?
Speaker 2:My personal email is K-R-E-N-G-E-L. That's how you spell Kringle KringleD at gmailcom. You certainly can use that. You can find me on LinkedIn. I don't recall the the exact address. Maybe you could put it up on the webpage or something. And then I also have a research gate. If you go to research gate, put in Douglitz Kringle, you can find that. Again, it's K-R-E-N-G-E-L. Glad to share.
Speaker 2:It's been a joy to visit with the Texas District and the Michigan District's Early Child Educators Conference. What I've been finding is that the men, the pastors and others, others, aren't attending. It's really. These topics have been very celebrated by the ladies and mostly it's ladies who pick them up, but the actual purpose was quite the opposite that we would have men and women. So let's mention the Pacific Southwest District. You can't find me find them. That's the Pacific Southwest District of the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod. Mary Wolfenbarger there has put together training specifically for pastors and preschool directors not just Mary, but those people, jen Marmaduke and Pastor John Corollas at Shepherd of the Desert. There they're just doing this in a great way. So please reach out to them. They actually have a workshop you can physically attend and they have online resources. I don't know of anything like it other than in the Pacific Southwest Well it's a great district, doug.
Speaker 1:That's my district. So, yeah, shout out to Mary and everyone. So so exciting. This is the Tim Allman podcast. Please like, subscribe, comment wherever it is you take in our Unite Leadership Collective Podcast. Comments really help move the conversation forward in the Jesus direction. He is coming back to make all things new. We're recording this the week before Holy Week and there's a resurrection reality. We hope for that and we want as many young and old people to bend the knee to Jesus, be baptized in his name and experience eternal life solely that comes through through him and him alone. Jesus loves you. It's a good day. Go make it a great day, doug. Thank you so much, brother.
Speaker 2:Thank you, tim, appreciate it, god bless.