patheological: The Podcast for the Pastor Theologian

One day we will decide. Until then we withhold final judgement. Even those who already voted in a primary caucus or election. Maybe there is merit in a system that illustrates why we do not make final judgments when candidates sprint out of the gate. Already several stumbled and now find themselves watching, sidelined.

With the primary season moving into the Southern states I thought it might be good  to reprise this podcast interview with Greg Horton. Religion still plays an important role in the process. All sorts of fallacies abound in defense of this candidate or that. The conversation I have with Greg is helpful, if not insightful.

If you listened the first time, let me encourage you to listen again, this time consider the implications for the Pastor-Theologian or those interested in the intersection of pastoral work, pastoring with theology. Think through how you lead those in your congregation to think better about the issues of life and faith and that dangerous subject, politics.

What Is Religion?

In the podcast Greg reminds us religion may describe the practice of a faith where a person sells all she has for the poor. And the same word may point to a group who believes it proper to throw the female spouse on the burning funeral pyre of her dead husband.

Greg suggests the word religion hardly bears up under the weight of its expectations. For the Pastor-Theologian one must work to understand Religion, religion, and religions.

Should We All Be Skeptics?

If elections prove anything it is there is a rush to judgment. Everyone wants to get out in front touting his or her candidate. The system demands it. Unless your candidate wins the nomination it requires an adjustment, a re-evaluation, a different choice.

Could it be a willingness to withhold final judgment is not a weakness but a move that underscores our finitude. Pastor-Theologians live in the tension between confidence and the certainty required by the role. Some will choose the latter when the former is more faithful.

Make Better Arguments

Maybe we avoid formal fallacies, we Pastor types. But we often get mired in many an informal fallacy. My friend Greg recently noted in a phone conversation the informal fallacy, No True Scotsman, tends to show up among the religious early and often. When faced with the realities of the differences within a given group the temptation is to suggest others within the group are not really part of the group. Greg is doing a series of guest posts on common fallacies. Here is his first in the series.

The religious are not alone employing this fallacy. Here in our State it is not uncommon for some to believe that only true fans are those that may lay claim to his or her preferred team as alma mater. All others are not true fans.

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Conversation is an art. Many experience serial monologues masquerading as conversation. One of the distinctions may be discovered in the preposition. Rarely does a person walk away satisfied they have been heard if the conversation is described as having talked to or at.

The monological malady appears even in purported conversations had by pastors, by ministers.

Making Friends

Relational posture shifts with a better preposition. Equipped with his laptop and books, Dr. Rick Davis frequents his favorite coffee shop. His habit derives from a longstanding  interest in what it means to be with people, even for people. Conversations over time develop an authenticity and sincerity not achieved when the reflection includes only, “and I talked to a millennial today.”

Declaring a generation what they are before we have had time to see what they will be seems misguided, at least to Rick. Maybe he has in mind the way certain designations, labels, shut down possibility and become more about controlling the conversation. The risk is that we do not speak . . .

Intelligibly and Intelligently

Like learning a different language, Dr. Davis contends talking with affords a person the occasion to become conversant. The lack of familiarity with how a new generation views the world presents problems. Rick contends the great need is for intelligibility and intelligence. Here he sounds the same note Jason Micheli recently played when he pointed to the loss of the intellectual history of the Church.

Rick tells the story behind his insistence that young pastors, if not everyone, would be helped with a course in logic. He once called and asked with exasperation, “Why do Christian colleges and seminaries not require a course in logic before graduation?” A recent column suggests learning philosophy would help even those much younger.

Mentoring Still

Today’s podcast guest is Dr. Rick Davis. Nearly 30 years ago I began my first vocational position in ministry. Dr. Davis was the pastor. Our first encounter outside of a morning and evening service was over lunch at Chili’s. He talked with us. We began attending the church he pastored and later were invited to serve as Associate Pastor/Youth Minister.

Dr. Davis served Baptist churches for forty years before being taken in by Methodists in Texas. He and Joan are the parents of four grown children. They just celebrated the addition of their eighth, a granddaughter. No matter where he has served he has made it a point to encourage and mentor younger folks in a variety of arenas, not just in ministry.

To this day Dr. Davis is a mentor and friend.

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Jack Nicholson defiantly responds to Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth.” Honesty is often both difficult to hear and receive. Pastors are not somehow immune to answering the question that sounds like, “Do I look fat in this dress?” 

Honesty and Humanity

From the time I heard Jason Micheli‘s voice on a podcast I determined I needed to hear what he had to say or read what he had to write. Discovering his blog felt like reading Anne Lamott.  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith served for me to be one of the gutsy honest books that one rarely ever read growing up in an extremely conservative Christian enclave. We did not know to call it a subculture back then.

Jason writes with a wit and honesty that opens you up and then stings you. Rarely does a pastor gain the privilege to write, much less speak that way. Received like a sucker punch I read Jason’s news that he was battling Mantle Cell Lymphoma. His recent check-up revealed he was cancer free. The point from then to now is littered with gut wrenching pain without the loss of his penetrating insight.

On this episode of the podcast we discuss the origin of the humor and honesty that springs from this life through his keyboard. Currently he is writing a book with a working title, Cancer is Humorous. The title may change, but the work will be worth you picking up when it drops.

Hatred Toward Suffering

How exactly does a pastor respond when he learned he has stage-serious cancer? He tests his understanding that God does not traffic in suffering. Even more he puts to the test the notion that suffering brings us closer to God but is not a means God to coerce personal pieties.

Since our conversation I was left thinking how those who endure the battle that is cancer, having taken a posture of hatred toward suffering, might inspire us to also take a posture of hatred toward suffering with all people everywhere. Jason reminds us this is the Cross.

Know Enough to Leave?

We explore Jason’s catechesis project, Distilled, and talk about formulating belief birthed out of the questions life disturbs. I would guess many pastors suffer the pangs of a young person making a decision about life and faith with what seems like inadequate tools. Rather than equip with patterned responses to the tough questions, it would be good if we took the time to listen to the questions and consider the doubts that arise from human existence. Once we have paid attention then we might refrain from dismissing those questions and patronizing another person’s doubt. The result might at least be a genuine occasion to explore our own questions and doubts.

Most often we fear others questions and others doubts because they stir our own. What would it mean for a community to embrace difficult questions and not be dismissive of doubt? How would we be able to forge with our communities expressions of faith consistent with our practices that transform our lives from that which is limited to that which is possible?

Thanks to Jason for his time, his wit, his honesty,

Almost four months ago workers removed a Ten Commandments monument from the Capital grounds in Oklahoma City. Maybe it was premature. What if rather than a testimony to pagans the Judeo-Christian God designed a pattern for people to live together in the world, the monument served as a reminder to the State Legislators that the highest ideal to which they could attain would best be expressed in thinking about those unprotected by those in power?

Repeating the Past is a Farce

The recent decline in oil prices, for some reason unforeseen by those in a State where this has occurred in the past, contributed to recent budget cuts. Education received word of a 3% cut to their State funding. DHS reported that the budget cuts they will absorb will mean an end to paying private practice counselors now serving those in Medicare. One of my counselor friends saw this coming and is deeply concerned about the increase to an already beleaguered government sponsored resources.

Our current situation is worsened when we learn the whole affair could have been avoided. Don’t blame the Democrats.

Those fighting for the retention of the Ten Commandments monument may have well known their weakness. If these commandments are out of sight, they will be out of their minds.

Yes, the Poor Will Always Be with Us

Leveling claims that we face a declining morality, that the encroaching secularism and rampant liberalism will ruin us, it was/is conservative values-claiming leaders that chose the wealthy over the poor. Consider who will be hurt by cuts to mental health for those who cannot afford those services. It should be obvious from that sentence. What is not disclosed in that sentence is that this includes children.

What it will mean to education is yet to be known. It is not uncommon before these cuts that parents are either encouraged to participate in a fundraiser or that they will need to pay for something that extends beyond the ad valorem taxes and bond issues intended to fund support for local schools by patrons in addition to State funding.

Maybe we have learned that installing monuments that remind us of the sort of people we should be with and for each other is meaningless if we still cannot meet the needs of the poor. Remember, they will always be with us. They will be with us for the same reason building monuments does not in fact change our behaviors. Seeing and knowing those who are poor among us does not change us, generally, in the least.

Pastor, This is a Theological Issue

One day we will learn that signs and buildings do not reach people. Embarrassed will we be, or should be, when we discover what could have been done with our money. Outsourcing is not an option. It does no good to ridicule the State, any State, for its welfare system only to encourage a budget that is more about a brand than a body, a human body.

Ryan Abernathy, who works at the Oklahoma Regional Food Bank and is pastor at West Metro Community Church, discussed the misconceptions about poverty in America, the Christian lack, and where the Church might be better positioned to live out ...

Knowing what someone says does not always equal knowing what someone means. It may be as silly as whether to use soda or coke. Much of your decision is learned from your context. Do you invite someone for a soda? If so, it may mean you will offer a variety of flavored carbonated beverages. Do you invite someone for a coke? If so, it may mean you will offer only a Coke-a-Cola. Context matters when it comes to communication.

Intersections

Take the word intersection. Generally we may think of the place where two streets intersect. The decision as to who has the right to pass first is governed by either a light or the rule that says it is a matter who comes to stop at the intersection first. If there is a question, you yield to the right.

Intersections means more when we apply the word to context. In this reprised interview, Natalie Burris, helps us think about intersectionality. Think of it as more the convergence of multiple Interstates. If you have ever traveled into Dallas and reached the downtown area, you find yourself at a number of traveling options. Radio traffic personalities refer to the civil engineering marvel a mixmaster, at least they did the we lived there.

Shared live is much like the convergence of any number of influences, a veritable mixmaster. Together the influences help shape and inform our understanding of the world. Everyone’s intersections are different. Communication at that point requires knowing the context of those intersections.

Impatience

Communication is thwarted by impatience with seeking to understand the intersections associated with context. When we tire of learning how intersectionality works in our varied contexts, we may practice derailment. Now we are mixing our metaphors unless the aim to to travel the path of healthy communication.

Pastors are not immune to derailment. No one is. Natalie describes where she first hear the idea of derailment. We may draw some parallels, if not simple inferences, to how we treat others when we tire of listening to the other. Derailment may be a tactic in issues large and small.

Insistence

Today is MLK Day, Martin Luther King Jr commemorations. My friend Marty actually offered a short description of our we may miss intersectionality and practice derailment. He posted:

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January: The month most White Americans can’t stop “remembering” MLK.February: When many of the same White Americans ask, “Why do we need Black History Month?” without the slightest sense of irony.

Posted by Marty Duren on Monday, January 18, 2016

Our future well being as a people who learn to get along may be helped by understanding the themes and insights offered by Natalie in this interview.

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Have you ever stared into a small grave disturbed by the mini-casket laying in the dirt, know nothing about the young, very young, parents, seeing no family or friends . . .

grappling with the pastoral moment and your neatly packaged systematic theology and feeling all your patterned responses from that untried place sounds like a clanging gong?

Oh, and you are only him your late 20’s . . .

One of the driving forces behind the refresh of the podcast and the introduction of /patheological/ is the collection of moments when you feel the unraveling of what you thought were tried and true responses to difficult life experiences. For instance, the opening description is actually a sketch of the first time I faced serving a family I did not know in the aftermath of what may only be described as a tragic loss. The death of an infant child creates more than a tension between a prescribed response and the very real depth of grief associated with the event. Everyone begs for relief.

Unsettled seems like a helpful description.

Monday I listened to an interview with Andrew Sung Park. He described a group often missed when talking about the Good News of God in Jesus, The Sinned Against. Our formulations of the Good News do not fail to address sinners. But, what about those who life experience is more dominated by being sinned against?

How do you connect the sense of being unsettled and The Sinned Against? Take a listen and let’s discuss how the two might help us if we seriously and in a safe place concern ourselves with the intersection of pastoral work and theology.

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A post about Gun Control would garner more interest than one explaining the reboot of a podcast. But, I will take that risk using a gun analogy. 

We did not grow up hunters, or around guns for that matter, in our house. We did have cap guns. Eventually we even had a BB gun.

When we moved to Southwest Oklahoma to begin our first pastorate my father-in-law gave me a shotgun, a 12-gauge. He knew many hunted turkey and quail and thought it might give me opportunities. It did. One day I may tell of my first turkey hunt. The statute of limitations has surely expired.

The think I liked about a shotgun is that I did not have to be as accurate as with a rifle. I still don’t think I could shoot Bambi.

From the beginning of my first podcast years ago I have felt it was like shooting a shotgun. Inspiration came in rushes and then there were droughts. Over time, after we began using the Revised Common Lectionary at Snow Hill, I would offer a mashup of the Texts. This was before J. Daniel Kirk’s, LectioCast, or the two pastors who offer Pulpit Fiction. How about those for podcast show names?!

Eventually I began listening to Tripp Fuller’s interview podcast show, Homebrewed Christianity. I understood the metaphor for my friends who find the analogy questionable. Listening to theologians interviewed in a way that did not reveal whether or not Tripp agreed with their conclusions or not left the listener to work through the subjects covered and the conclusions asserted. He offered a broad reach – N.T. Wright to John Dominic Crosson. There are many others.

I needed a rifle for my podcast, not a shotgun. After reading, researching, and listening to some of the podcast gurus, I began working on refocusing the podcast. You have likely noticed the website refresh. And, there is a renewed energy to connect a passion that has been growing since the early 1990’s. You will have to listen to the show to hear just what that is.

If you want to stay up with the news and posts related to where /patheological/ will be going, sign-up in the right sidebar. Share the ride. Join the conversations that I hope result. Offer interviewee suggestions. And by all means, share the podcast with your friends who may find the content worthy, if not beneficial.

 

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Discerning statistics does not equal listening to human beings.

Several months ago the phone in the office rang. A group with which I am familiar hired a service to conduct a survey. Maybe you have fielded such a call. After the first couple of questions I realized how either the questions contained certain ambiguities or the possible options failed to accurately capture the response I would have preferred. I imagine the questioner would have preferred me just answer without commentary on the quality of the questions.

The results of surveys built in this particular fashion appear designed for a particular outcome. Statistical surveys provide a quick, if not impulsive, glimpse into a particular subject.

It would be better to have a conversation.

Conversations Are Better

Christian churches began scrambling when statistics came out that more and more people were refusing to identify with a particular religious tradition. Statisticians, if not sociologists, dubbed them the Nones. Further research uncovered a group that once participated in the Christian Tradition. Their stories indicated they were more Done than None.

It would be easy to proof text a passage from 1 John, ‘they went out from us but were not of us.” Maybe it applies.

But, if you take a hard look at John’s circular letter one discovers a particular rule of life, a particular way of living that evidences a peculiarly Jesus-y form. We immediately consider those to have left to let go of Jesus. When I listen to the stories of the Nones and Dones, I find less vitriol about Jesus and more disdain for habits and practices that appear less like Jesus to be the motivation to exit the Building.

Yes, some wind their explanations through lengthy philosophical investigations. But when you listen carefully to how they order their lives, what values they find most compelling to live by, they sound an awful lot like they are driven by an agenda of Jesus and the Kingdom. What appears to have ruptured their relationship with the Church is less a worldly tug than a system that often seems to care more about itself than others.

Real Disconnections

Recently I shared a brief email exchange with someone wondering about how it was they had participated in and with a group that prefer torture to blessing their enemies, cutting aid to the mentally ill to bearing one another’s burdens, and on I could go. The quick retort separates Kingdom from Country. However, what you allow as acceptable for your Country eventually shows up in your vision of Kingdom.

Today on the podcast I share a conversation with my friend Rob Davis. Rob is certainly a None. He may well be Done. It would be a mistake to think his story does not represent hundreds and thousands of others. The easy thing to do is to move on, to chalk these stories up to people easily dissatisfied, people who are simply contrarians, an illustration of some strains of the Last Days.

What if we stopped drawing our own conclusions long enough to listen, to really listen? Scot McKnight wrote a series on his blog before moving to Patheos. In long form blog posts McKnight described the way conversations once worked and believed how much better we would be if we could re-learn how to have those conversations today.

The failure to listen evidences a tone deafness to critique that just might be helpful to all of us who lead Christian churches, and those who really want to continue in a tradition where the Church is always being converted to Jesus.

Take a listen. Think about it. Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Who gets to claim Evangelical as their descriptor? The recent revelation that Donald Trump finds Evangelicals among his strong supporters has created any number of explanations. For example, one recent article dissects the numbers and concludes those who support Trump are not, in fact, Evangelical, and may not even be Christian. 

Fox News pundit and Evangelical, Southern Baptist pastor, Robert Jeffress, recently prayed before the Trump rally in Dallas. Donald Trump took that action, as most of us would, as support. On the other hand, Russell Moore, President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention contends Evangelicals who support Trump have lost their morals. Which is it? Who gets to decide?

What Forms You?

Lance Ford writes from the perspective of an experienced pastor, church planter, and ministry coach/consultant. His new book Revangelical suggests Evangelicals need to be revangelized. He writes,

According to Ford, the state of Evangelicalism calls into question to what Evangelicals have been evangelized. His answer to the current milieu is to be evangelized to Jesus and his vision of living in the Kingdom of God here and now.

The Difference It Makes

Ford tells his own story. It is likely the story of many of you. Riding through town where he and his wife moved to begin ministry he is told where he may eat, with whom he may do business, and other boundary markers that would keep him from real opportunities to evangelize, announce the Good News of the Kingdom of God. Over time he made a good soldier buying into that vision. Then, he tells how he was revangelized to Jesus and the vision of the Kingdom of God. That story alone is worth getting the book.

On the podcast we look at two aspects of this process. One that Ford marks as the beginning and one that points to the consequence of being evangelized. We discuss repent and reposition. Changing our mind and direction will result in a different posture in and toward the world, toward people.

Always Learning What It Looks Like to Follow Jesus

Nothing harms our witness in the world more than arriving at the place where Jesus is no longer disrupting our way in the world. Ford suggests too many have locked into a vision of Jesus that fails to take into account Jesus’ way in this world in favor of a world to come. His point is not that there is no world to come but that living in the Kingdom declares that world has already come, broken into our world here and now.

The vision he casts is one of hope and promise not one of despairing for the future. Take a listen. If after listening you are still unsure, you may download a copy of a sample chapter, view brief video introductions to each chapter,

Only rarely do we identify with villains, except maybe at Halloween. What if we discovered we had more in common with the villains of the Bible than the heroes? Even more, what would it mean if we found in our heroes villainous traits?

This week on the podcast I am glad to host Ed Cyzewski to talk about his most recent book, Unfollowers: Unlikely Lessons on Faith from Those Who Doubted Jesus.

Is Doubt the New Virtue?

Some of us grew up in an era where doubt was taboo? I recall one preacher explicitly stating to a tabernacle full of young people that doubt meant the absence of faith. For many of us who had questions, even doubts, we kept them to ourselves.

Maybe you prefer questions to doubt. However you prefer it, faith requires wrestling and for Ed Cyzewski the Bible is full of stories of people who doubted Jesus. We often find ourselves in these stories. Ed suggests, among other things, we may discover that we have created Jesus in our image, formed theologies that keep Jesus at a distance, and become too familiar with stories such that they no longer scandalize us toward greater faithfulness.

Listen to the End

Ed is a freelance writer who views his vocation as ministry. You will pick this up along the way. Maybe you have an interest in writing. We take a few minutes to talk about writing. You may be looking for someone to coach you in the process of writing and getting published. Check out Ed’s website – www.edcyzewski.com. You may also want to subscribe to his E-Newsletter. Here is a link to Ed’s other books.

Subscribe to the podcast in the right sidebar. Choose iTunes or Stitcher. If you like what you hear, leave a review.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to email alerts at the top of the sidebar. 

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