Cultivating Christian community can feel really hard today, but the reasons run deeper than most church leaders realize. In part one of this two-part conversation, Luther Seminary professor Dwight Zscheile sits down with church historian Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski to trace the roots of today’s loneliness epidemic and discipleship crisis from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into our present moment. Along the way, they explore how thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Nietzsche quietly reshaped the West’s story about what it means to be human, and how that story is now shaping the people sitting in your pews.
This conversation won’t offer a quick fix for church community building, but it will give you something more valuable: clarity about the cultural forces you’re actually working against, and a renewed sense of why the church’s vision of human life together is more countercultural and more needed than ever. Part two will pick up with the 20th century and explore what all of this means for faithful church leadership today.
