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You can find previous episodes of “The Stone Chapel Podcast” at Lanier Theological Library.
“The Stone Chapel Podcast” is part of the ChurchLeaders Podcast Network.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Mike Woodruff
My name is Mike Woodruff. I am the lead pastor at Christ Church, which has campuses north of Chicago, Lake Forest, Highland Park, Grays Lake and Vernon Hills. And I chair both the Renew Communities board and the Lakelight Institute board. Sherry and I have three grown boys. We have a couple grandchildren.
I grew up doing college ministry. Was a management consultant and had ongoing work. I’ve done a lot of writing, been involved with Scholar Leaders, and then David, you and I met through Veritas Forum Young Leaders. Other than that, I’m the increasingly old, boring guy who is on sabbatical at the moment, which is great. One of the interns said that they really missed me. And I said, look, I’m under no illusions that anybody misses me, certainly not the staff. I’m the old gas bag. Good, he’s still gone for a few weeks. We don’t have to put up with him!
David Capes
Mike, welcome to our podcast today. This is “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” Thanks for being part of this.
Mike Woodruff
Thank you. And I love the name in part, because I’ve seen the Stone Chapel. I sat there one afternoon early in my sabbatical, trying to decompress, listening to the Lord and being a little bit more in a timeless space. So yes, I appreciate the Stone Chapel and all the work that the Lanier enterprise is doing.
David Capes
We’re here today to talk about a ministry that you’re a part of and that you’re working with, and you’re raising money for. It’s a ministry called Lakelight Institute. Tell us a little bit about that and how it’s connected with your church.
Mike Woodruff
Lakelight is a ministry that we started a couple years ago with the idea that what is missing in the modern world is the timeless wisdom that should come to Christ’s followers, from Scripture. The modern world moves very fast, and there’s a lot of upsides to life today. There’s a lot of benefits, for sure. But a lot of people are moving too fast. There’s information, but information is not the same thing as knowledge, and knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom. And so, we’re trying to provide timeless wisdom for modern life.
We arrange this through a variety of venues. Fellows Program is the most intensive thing that we do. It’s a 40-week commitment, and we do require people to pay some money. They’re going to be reading long books and be in long discussions every week with seminary professors, pastors, and others. We have talks, we have classes, we have tours. I led a tour last summer to Oxford and Cambridge on C.S. Lewis. I’ve got one coming up to Istanbul, more specifically, to Nicaea. It’s the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, and so we’re going there and thinking about truth and Western Civilization. We’ve designed Lakelight with the idea that there needs to be a venue for people who want to slow down, be a little bit more reflective, do a little bit more work to round out their understanding of life and faith and the intersection of life and faith, faith and work, personal and cultural, transformation and formation. All of those pieces.
David Capes
Life is very busy now, and we do find ourselves neglecting the weightier parts of it in so many ways. Who is this for? Are these people from your church? Are these people from the community?
Mike Woodruff
We started Lakelight because we saw the need at Christ Church, but we saw the need beyond Christ Church too. It’s located at Christ Church, but it’s a separate 501c3 [organization], and we have people who take our classes from all over the place, other churches nearby, but also people in Hawaii and people in Florida and people in Colorado. I do some Lakelight lectures. We call them Lakelight live. And I have been doing some of those in Nashville and in Austin, Texas and Seattle, Washington. So, some of it is for Christ Church folks, and it’s very Christ Church centric. But a lot of other things are resources
we’ve been trying to make available to Christians at other churches. It overlaps.
The other way I could answer that question, David, is one way or the other for most of the last 35 years as I’ve been a pastor, tragically, the bar keeps getting lower. When I started as a college pastor, I inherited a ministry, and we had all these students that were trained in inductive Bible study methods, and they were leading inductive Bible studies. And I watched this for a year and a half, and I’m thinking we need a little bit more policing of the borders here. Not everything that everybody is doing is good. Plus, I’m having a hard time trying to imagine training some of these people, because they just don’t know. There’s a lot that they don’t know. It’s a little scary for them to be leading a Bible study. And over the course of the next eight years, we just kept making it simpler and simpler.
When I lamented this, one of the big publishing houses said, oh, you’re idiot-proofing the material. Yes, we’re doing it to all our Bible studies. Because you get into these discussions where you realize that people don’t really know who Abraham is, and they don’t know who Paul is. The past was not as great as today. Some people want to say it wasn’t, but we’re seeing people who just are much less Biblically literate. So, there’s a sense in which, as a pastor, I have had to lower the bar. Some people have been a Christian for 35 years, and the frustration is, you’ve been a Christian for 25 years, but you’ve done year 1, 25 years in a row. You haven’t gone year 2 or year 3. You’re not growing in the way other people have. Some are very frustrated that the church is “light”. I’m not getting the meat that I need,
and I want to go deeper.
And I’m like, Yeah, I get that. But do we suggest that you go deeper by having a headier, more intellectually rigorous classroom experience? That’s one aspect of growing in formation, but it’s only one aspect. So, we’ve tried to figure out how to create venues in which people have an opportunity to interact at a more mature level and get pushed into and invited into deeper conversations and deeper experiences. That led us to say, let’s create a venue in which we are going to do that and advertise it that way. Let’s take on topics that you are not ever going to take on, on Sunday morning or even necessarily in a small group Bible study.
David Capes
Are these event-driven, or is this web-driven, publication-driven?
