I'm joined by Paule Patterson and Andy Luiten to discuss the state of the American church, and her relationship to prophetic voices calling her to account. How did the church get here? What factors are at play? Can we learn anything from the counseling professions as we think about whether the church can recover from its challenges?

You can also watch this at https://youtu.be/-cL9POzUh5k

Paule Patterson and I talk about awakening and enlightenment, then the very opposite: the idea of kenosis, of dying to self, of ego death. What does it mean for the Son of Man to experience a mystical awakening? How do we need to die to self, to experience a death of our "ego," to become truly alive? Is this an individual thing, or can it only be experienced in community? Paule and I explore these questions together.

You can also watch this episode at https://youtu.be/7CllsdnY9oc

In my fifth conversation with Paule Patterson about his book "The Coming of the Son of Man and the Mystic Awakening", we discuss ways that the Bible adopted language from the empire around them, but subverted that empire in the very adoption of that language.

You can also watch this as a video at https://youtu.be/HR9cRpFCxQQ

Life and death are impossible to separate. And inevitably, life itself springs from death. It doesn't ease the pain of loss, but we can take comfort in the rebirth inherent in the process of life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXlIvBgsYmY

The MAGA propaganda machine is powerful and dangerous. More than anything I've seen in my lifetime, I've watched it successfully weaponize the human soul, taking the worst primal human emotions and using them to wound and even kill our neighbors and fellow citizens and the most vulnerable among us.

How dangerous a thing it is to claim a mantle of being God's chosen people living on God's promised land, and not scrupulously following God's laws! The land itself will spew them out.And yet, that's exactly what a massive number of American evangelical Christians are doing - even as they celebrate the horrible injustices being carried out by their government, violating the single most emphasized commandment in the Bible.

You can also watch this in video form at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6JCqc63Qwk

Perhaps you've heard of "internal family systems" or IFS. I had encountered that idea about a year ago, and found the concept intriguing. But what is IFS, and can it help us heal? Can it help us reveal the Image of God within us?When I started talking to Andy on BlueSky, and discovered he's a counselor that specializes in IFS, I really wanted to talk to him about it. So we spent some time today exploring the basics of IFS, and how it can help us understand what's going on inside ourselves. And we wrap up with a bit of geeking out about the bands he plays in.

Paule Patterson and I spend some time in Section 5 of his book, talking about two topics. The first is communion, where it came from, how we practice it today, and what we might be missing in our modern practices.

Then we switch gears and spend the second half of our conversation on the integration of consciousness and mysticism. I think I've always held a particular understanding of that word, mysticism, and I'm learning that it can be used quite differently than I had assumed. I grew up thinking of it as the weird old guy in the desert muttering to himself. But I find now that it's actually a core part of religious practice - or at least, it should be, if we evangelicals hadn't been taught to fear it.

So if we understand mysticism as a healthy spiritual practice, what about the less mystical practices? How do we integrate mystic practices with more liturgical, more Western, ways of relating to God and the Holy Spirit?

Have you ever realized you were really, seriously, badly wrong in a way that hurt other people? In 2022 I realized I had been incredibly wrong about gay and queer people and their acceptability to God. So I publicly and clearly repented. This Pride Month, I'd like to spend a few minutes retelling and expanding on some of my history that led to that decision.

It's a provocative question: do we believe that God guaranteed that all the human activity since the time of the writing of scripture has led the Church to a divine, perfect orthodoxy? Is today's definition of "Christian" more accurate today than it was in the early church? And how did we get here, anyway?

I spoke with Paule Patterson, who goes by the online moniker of Drunk Pastor, about Part 3 of the book he's writing about the ongoing formation of the Church, titled "The Coming of the Son of Man and Mystical Awakening," where he explores recent changes in the church and theology. In this episode, my third conversation with Paule, we actually look back in history at the early church, from about the second century up until the end of the Dark Ages, and consider the forces that shaped Christian thinking and led to our modern sense of orthodoxy. I've personally looked into Christian church history quite a bit in the last few years, but Paule brings some new light to the topic, with his background in philosophy, that helped me understand some of the higher-level thinking, and gave me some fresh insight into the forces of human nature that shaped history and drove a lot of the changes. It seems that as humans we either naturally want kings and we want certainty, or we want to be those kings and to be certain that those under us are well-controlled. Those themes show up again and again through history, and it seems to have driven Christian history as well.

And this leads to the question: are those all-too-human tendencies what created orthodoxy - which would imply that it probably isn't quite what God intended? Or did God superintend the process to ensure that we arrived at a truly holy orthodoxy today?

I think that's a very important question, and this discussion begins to shed light on it.

#sonofman #mysticism #christianmysticism #progressivechristianity #orthodoxchurch #orthodoxchristianity #churchhistory