CNLP 787 | Emergency Episode | Pastoring Angry People: When to Speak, When to Stay Silent, and Leading Without Losing Everyone
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
Carey Nieuwhof
4.8 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The cultural moment we're in isn't just tense — it's a full convulsion, and it's landing in your church every Sunday. In this emergency panel episode, Ed Stetzer, Adam Mesa, and Sharon Hodde Miller debate when to speak up, when to be silent, how to deal with fallout, and how to pastor people in a deeply divided age.
This is the conversation many pastors are desperate to have but afraid to start.
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Want to take your church's live stream to the next level, especially as you head into Easter?
Switcher lets you grab your iPhones, iPads, and cameras, sync them together, and switch between angles live without complicated gear.
Add scripture, lyrics, and graphics on screen to keep your congregation engaged and stream to your website and all the major social media platforms at once.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Art of Leadership Network. |
| 0:03.1 | Our social media team basically thought, |
| 0:05.8 | hey, this was a great prayer. |
| 0:07.7 | You know, let's clip it because the whole nation is talking about it. |
| 0:11.8 | We posted that prayer and we went viral. |
| 0:14.7 | Within three days, I think it had, you know, |
| 0:17.9 | five to six million views, tens of thousands of comments. |
| 0:22.6 | And we got about 3,000 phone calls that if we didn't denounce the prayer, |
| 0:27.8 | that people would leave the church. |
| 0:34.1 | Welcome to the Kerry Newhoff Leadership Podcast. |
| 0:36.6 | It's Carrie here. |
| 0:37.3 | Hey, this is special, what I'm calling an emergency episode. I got so many DMs from leaders, pastors, listeners to this podcast, just struggling with something we talked about a couple months ago, which was discipleship by algorithm, right? The reason it's so hard for you to win, the reason that you |
| 0:55.8 | have so much difficulty saying anything about any cultural or, you know, bigger issue in your church, |
| 1:03.8 | you just get slaughtered every time you say something is because people are being disciple by an |
| 1:09.6 | algorithm. People are on their phones 49 hours a week on |
| 1:12.3 | average. You get about 30 minutes to an hour and a half a week maybe to disciple people and they're |
| 1:17.7 | all being disciples by the algorithm, right? Ultra right wing this or mega this or left wing |
| 1:22.2 | progressive this or whatever it is, they're all being disciple differently and it means that the average |
| 1:27.4 | pastor can't win. |
| 1:29.2 | So we are doing this emergency episode, and I brought together a panel of people that I think could |
| 1:36.6 | really speak into this issue, and that's who you're going to hear from over the next 90 minutes. |
| 1:41.0 | I had moderate hopes for this podcast. I said to them at the beginning, hey, if all we do is get a little bit of empathy that this is hard right now, pastors, we're in your corner, we see you, you're not alone, hang in there. This will be a successful episode. However, they brought so much wisdom. I think you're going to find a lot more than just empathy. You're going to find some clarity, some guidance, some encouragement, and some guidelines. So you might want to check out the show notes. You can find them at Kuri Newhoff.com slash show notes, and that's where you'll find everything. So who do we have on the podcast? We have Sharon Hottie Miller. She leads Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina with her husband, Ike. |
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