Authority Issues

Episode 54: Church! What's it good for? (The Religion Issue)

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In this Very Special Episode, rachel, Kendall, and Luke talk about:

  • Coming from different evangelical backgrounds
  • The shaping of our respective authority issues as related to religious upbringing
  • Luke's birth /literally/ in a baptismal font :)
  • What we mean when we say "religion"
  • Tech salary as a way to fund a church planting career
  • Leaving the church behind but bringing the leadership lessons along
  • Good and bad authority structures represented by the church
  • Detoxing from evangelicisim, finding a new purpose
  • Choosing between being right or being good

    • Switching to rachel's background:

    • Moving to the US at 11, with no real religious upbringing before that
    • Trying hard to buy into the fundamentalist Baptist faith
    • Leaving for college and never returning
    • Atheism vs agnosticism
    • Whether your beliefs are a choice
    • The value of faith in one's own community and whether humanity deserves the asteroid treatment

      • And on to Kendall's Christian upbringing:

      • Dad fasting and actually praying on his knees for guidance
      • The weird incentives and blame structures of fundamentalism
      • Noticing the tendency to open the Bible more often to curse than to bless
      • Working for a religious organization in China for 10 years
      • Realizing that much of evangelical Christianity as it is practiced in the US is very much culturally a White American thing
      • Not needing to understand how praying works
      • Does it matter if you're wrong about faith? Nah. What matters is being willing to be wrong.
      • Servant leadership and how it works for both sacred and commercial applications if done well

        • Back to Luke:

        • Was the "walk to remember" a kind of psychic break, or prayer?
        • Realizing all you really need is validation
        • Only needing a loose grip on the framework to get the benefit
        • Not wanting to tell people what to do, and all the insecurities that represents
        • Not being able to follow instructions if the goal isn't clear
        • How an aversion to certainty can get in the way of leading
        • What is justice, if not love at scale?

          • You can accost Luke with ideas for scaling love on Twitter at @saintlukas :)

          Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3

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          Authority IssuesBy Rachel Perkins and Kendall Miller
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