Living into Purpose

The Rev. William Goettler is Associate Dean for Ministerial and Social Leadership at Yale Divinity School, where he has been an innovative administrator and a valued adviser to YDS students for nearly 30 years. A Presbyterian pastor by background, he has applied his great affection for congregational life by leading initiatives at the School that prepare students for the broader world of church and ministerial leadership. These include the Transformational Leadership Program as well as Reimagining Church, a five-year Lilly-funded project that was completed last year. Bill Goettler will retire from the School in June 2026, with plans to pursue further his love of painting and give more time to one of his earliest vocational passions, community activism. He spoke earlier this year with Reflections editor Ray Waddle. Here is an edited version of the interview.

Reflections: How would you describe the connection (or disconnection) between church life and American life these days? Do you see signs of health?

Bill Goettler: Plenty of studies are going around analyzing the numbers, but it really just takes walking into a congregation on a Sunday morning to see what’s happening: if you hadn’t gone to church in the last 10 years, you would notice how remarkably empty the pews can be. That’s not universally true. There are some churches where the pews are pretty full.  And it’s also a regional issue, the North compared to the South, and to some degree it’s a denominational issue as well.

“There were people who would get mad at what I preached, but we were in relationship. They knew my heart, and I knew theirs. I would spend a lot of time in people’s living rooms in the afternoon on Sundays after they told me my sermon was full of it!”

At the same time, bubbling up in the midst of all that is the realization that the future of a healthy church doesn’t need to look like the church of the 20th century. The church doesn’t need to look like it once looked.

In my experience, people are looking for a way to offer a faithful witness in their lives and in the world. Inasmuch as the church is about nurturing that faithful witness, then I think it is living into its purpose.

This will likely mean fewer church buildings. It will likely result in fewer little churches open and thriving on a Sunday morning. And for another generation or so, there’s going to be some sadness about that, and then we’ll move on from it.

Reflections: Should readers feel troubled by that idea, or hopeful?

Goettler: I don’t think it’s the worst news ever. I think the church has always changed dramatically, generation after generation. We pretend that that’s not so, but I think it’s truer than not. There’s no one singular model of church that’s more faithful or more Christian or truer to the gospel than another. If the spirit moves among us, the spirit moves also in the midst of that kind of transition, of rebirth, of emerging possibility.

Reflections: As you nicely just described it, the church “is living into its purpose” when it nurtures faithful witness. What does that look like to you?

Goettler: I see churches with remarkably open doors where communities feel welcome. And not welcome just to be tourists in a space, but to learn about and practice at faith, at faithfulness, and to lift their voices together and feel the spirit’s presence. That’s an experience that changes who they are in their day-to-day lives. They go home with more courage. So yes I think that there are a good number of churches where that’s real—places that are generous in spirit. They are welcoming the stranger. They are compassionate for the weak. They are not warmongers.

Reflections: Does the lingering image of strong postwar churchgoing in the 1950s and ’60s—that model of numerical success—haunt today’s institutional faith? Are we burdened by it?

Goettler: I don’t think so. I mean, the cultural critic in me looks at that church of the ’50s and ’60s and recognizes everything it was not—all that it was not in terms of the basics of Christian faith. Ordained leadership was mostly offered by apparently straight men. Few churches reflected the racial diversity of society. And few pulpits offered words of prophetic faith.  Church was certainly a popular place to go in those days, but I’m not going to say it was more Christian or that we were a more Christian society then than we are now.

Reflections: You recently finished conducting a five-year Lilly-sponsored study that gathered notable religious leaders, local churchgoers, and YDS students together to reimagine church for the future. What did you learn?

Goettler: We had a lot of good folks participating, people who’ve spent their lives in these creative kinds of conversations. They were always willing to be pushed. It was great for YDS students in their third year to work actively with the dreamer part of congregations.

But as we also discovered, the churches of today are burdened by their old brick palaces, these huge physical structures, which were created for that older model of what it meant to be church. Very few of them today make full use of the buildings that they’re in. This puts a limit on reimagining ministry. If they could all just sell their buildings and start afresh with who they actually are now, that would offer many faith communities the resources and space to envision and live into a very different future. But they can’t do that. Their denominations wouldn’t let them. Their own memories wouldn’t let them.

Reflections: For years you’ve also organized conversations around that elusive thing called congregational leadership. What should leadership look like in this era?

Goettler: I think effective leadership is an exercise in deep conversation with the community that is being served. That’s where it begins.

I don’t think leadership is about pleasing the majority. It requires some nerve, a fearlessness in speaking out on the things that matter to faithfulness. There has to be some willingness to connect the ethic of the gospel to the crises of the moment, and face what God is asking of this community, this society, in our time, using all the gifts we have.

I was a pastor for a long time. It allowed me a deep connection with people in their own life stories. The pastoral relationship means knowing them when babies are born and baptized, and having a role in the raising of children and teaching them the gospel and confirming them. It’s about being present when spouses die. It involves really walking close to people. 

And that gives license to a leader in a church context to proclaim the gospel, to proclaim the truth as they hear it, even if some people don’t like hearing it. I lost very few members who were mad at me, very few in 30 years of ministry, fewer than a dozen, I think. There were people who would get mad at what I preached, but we were in relationship. They knew my heart, and I knew theirs. I would spend a lot of time in people’s living rooms in the afternoon on Sundays after they told me my sermon was full of it! So I think leadership requires that kind of relationality: committing to relationships, knowing people’s stories, and holding on to a clear sense of radical faith.

Reflections: Last year, YDS revised its Master of Divinity program for the first time in decades, prompted by shifts in society, congregational life, and the vocational goals of students. How has the world of ministerial training changed?

Goettler: More and more students come in with a yearning to do theology, to think theologically and to consider the possibilities of ministry in the world, even if they don’t use the word ministry. Many have some modest experiences of church, but fewer today bring profound faith experiences with them when they arrive. Many were never confirmed in church. That’s a difference from the past: there was a time when nearly all of our students would have at least been confirmed.

Younger people are looking for ways of connecting. Certainly some are going into parish ministry. Others are pursuing eco-theology or justice-related work—tenant organizing, immigrant rights, the kinds of things that are still supported by people of faith and largely staffed by people of faith but are not owned by people of faith, not owned by denominations. 

Such students are starting to think about ritualizing community, how it is that they might really live vocationally into the things that are most important to them. Wise church communities and wise divinity schools are paying attention to that and making room for those kinds of questions and for that sort of struggle, without trying to box them in, without trying to insist that they sign on to a team.

The work of theological education includes thinking more deeply through the possibilities of Christian faith, as well as other faiths. In many cases students come with an openness and an expectation that they are going to be surprised and learn a language of faith and discover there’s room for them to struggle and figure it out. And that’s pretty delightful. Students are wonderfully open to what might happen.