“I basically understand people to be, no matter how they’re presenting themselves, existing under a weight of enormous pressure and demand,” explains David Zahl, founder and director of Mockingbird Ministries. “And if Christianity is a religion of grace, or if we’re trying to talk about a God who relates to us in gracious ways, then that is of urgent importance.”
In a recent conversation on the Pivot Podcast, David shared profound insights about how church leaders can pivot from a posture of fixing problems to one of listening, discerning, and embodying grace in a world desperate for relief.
David, who serves on staff at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, has authored several books including “Seculosity,” “Low Anthropology,” and most recently “The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World.” His work explores how classic theological concepts can transform ministry in our high-pressure cultural moment.
The Exhaustion of Modern Life and the Need for Relief
David describes our current cultural moment as a “pressure cooker” where demands continually increase. From raising children in the competitive travel sports world to professional responsibilities, social media pressures, and political tensions, people exist under enormous strain. This exhaustion creates a spiritual hunger that churches are uniquely positioned to address – if they can resist adding to the burden.
“For most people, it feels like the demand is getting larger, stronger, harder,” David observes. Too often, churches unintentionally become another source of pressure rather than relief. They add spiritual homework, expectations, and implicit rankings to already overloaded lives.
The Freedom of Low Anthropology
One of the most liberating concepts David explores is what he calls “low anthropology” – a realistic view of human nature that acknowledges our limitations and imperfections. Far from being pessimistic, this view actually creates space for genuine compassion and connection.
“If you have too high expectations of other people, you will bang your head against the wall when they don’t act in the way you think they should act,” David explains. “Why don’t these people give more? Why don’t they show up more? Why don’t they read their Bible more? If you see people as completely free agents who just need to be told what to do and then they’ll do it, you are going to ultimately not just find them frustrating, you’re ultimately going to resent them.”
This resentment creates toxic ministry environments. But a lower view of human capacity – one that acknowledges we’re all “tied in knots, not all of our own making” – opens the door to compassion.
The irony is striking: lowering expectations of human performance actually increases our capacity to love and serve each other authentically. As David puts it, “This is the great irony of a low anthropology. It sounds limiting or insulting, but it actually is the doorway, the key, to loving other people and finding energy, surprise, and play.”
From Fixing to Listening
Low anthropology naturally shifts our ministerial posture from fixing problems to listening for where God is already at work. Instead of clergy feeling the pressure to save struggling institutions or fix broken people, they can embrace a different calling.
“When you view your role as clergy as something where you are there to straighten people out or to fix an institution that’s breaking, that just translates into enormous pressure, also self-condemnation as well,” David notes.
The alternative is both more sustainable and more aligned with God’s work: “We get to have a front row seat to what God’s doing, and that’s exciting stuff.” This shift from fixing to listening requires humility and openness – what recovery communities call “HOW: humility, openness, and willingness.”
Creating Communities of Grace
What does a church shaped by these principles look like in practice? According to David, such communities are characterized by refreshment, honesty, and play – qualities increasingly rare in our achievement-oriented culture.
“A community of grace is usually one in which people feel refreshed, they feel excited to go. It’s not a place where they’re going to receive homework or to police one another or to monitor or measure people,” he explains. “A community of grace is one in which people can laugh at themselves, in which we can be honest about what’s really happening in our lives without fear.”
This kind of community fosters greater freedom and creativity. As David puts it, “The word of grace that says God loves you as you are right this moment, in spite of the fact that in your least lovable moments you are loved by God – I believe that fosters a sort of freedom in which the stakes of everyday life have been softened.”
Practical Ministry Implications
David’s church has experienced unexpected growth by putting these principles into practice. He shares how they’ve embraced a different approach:
- Make Grace Central: “We feel very strongly that if someone doesn’t walk out feeling lighter than when they came in, we have somehow not been faithful.”
- Give Permission for Low Engagement: In their welcome video, they include a radical statement: “We’re a thriving church. There’s all sorts of ways to get involved, but if you just like to come on Christmas and Easter or sit in the back, that’s okay too.” David notes, “The amount of clergy I’ve heard from who have told me that they can’t believe we put that in our welcome video… And yet, our church has never been bigger.”
- Wait for Lay-Led Initiatives: “What we try to do is we never almost never introduce fresh programming. We wait, we pray that God would just activate the gifts of our congregations and the interests and that when the time comes, we can be ready to support whatever it is they want to do.”
- Meet Real Needs: By listening instead of prescribing, they’ve developed support groups for people dealing with infertility, caregiving for those with cognitive decline, and family estrangement – all initiated by congregation members, not clergy.
The result has been transformative. “The consistent refrain we hear from people is that they feel relief. They feel seen, they feel welcomed, but they also feel relief that they’re hearing something there on Sunday morning that they’re not hearing anywhere else.”
A Time for Relief
In a world overwhelmed by expectations and demands, churches have an opportunity to offer something increasingly rare: relief. By embracing a posture of listening rather than fixing, acknowledging human limitations rather than demanding perfection, and prioritizing grace over achievement, communities of faith can become spaces of genuine refreshment.
For church leaders feeling the weight of institutional decline or the pressure to reverse negative trends, this conversation offers its own relief – a reminder that the work of ministry ultimately belongs to God, and that acknowledging our limitations opens us to greater joy, deeper relationships, and unexpected flourishing.
