The Antioch Podcast

Welcome to Episode 32 of the Antioch Podcast, a podcast about learning to lead in the multiethnic church.

Today’s episode is the second in a series of lectures given at Madison Church’s Square Campus in the spring of 2017 based on the book The Next Worship, by Sandra Maria Van Opstal. This talk, called “Is PB&J Ethnic Food?” is drawn from Chapter 2 of her book. If you have not read The Next Worship for yourself yet, we at the Antioch Podcast would strongly encourage you to purchase a copy to augment what you are hearing in this podcast series.

Now about today’s presenter.

Pastor James Lee was born and raised in Temple City, CA. He completed his undergraduate studies in History at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI). While at Calvin, James was fortunate enough to serve in a variety of capacities as a student leader, including being one of Calvin’s Worship Apprentices. Upon graduation, James received a call to serve as a Youth and Young Adults Minister at an RCA congregation in Roslyn Heights, NY. After a few years, James heard God call him to return to Grand Rapids, this time to study at Calvin Theological Seminary where he is slated to graduate with his Masters of Divinity in 2018. Today, James currently serves as the English Ministry pastor at Korean Grace CRC, and also serves as a worship mentor to Calvin College students. James loves to talk about and lead worship, mentor worship leaders, as well as explore innovative ways to bridge gaps between cultures and generations in worship.

James is happily married to his beautiful wife Jin Young. At the time of this recording, James and Jin were expecting their first child, who was born on October 8th of 2017.

Welcome to Episode 31 of the Antioch Podcast!

This is the beginning of a six-part series of talks called “Worshiping Diversely Together” inspired by Sandra Maria Van Opstal’s recent book The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World. Van Opstal was our first guest on the podcast, way back in Episode 4. As we’ve said in earlier episodes, this podcast comes out of Madison Church, a 100+ year-old multiethnic congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We’ve had our share of struggles and success over the past century, and we would be the first to admit that we don’t have all the answers to how to worship well together as a successful multiethnic congregation. In fact, we’ve made some really big mistakes over the years, mistakes that we’ve learned from, and some that we still make. And as host of this podcast and Director of Worship Design at one of our campus locations, I want to personalize this: I’ve made my own share of mistakes in helping my congregational circle worship well together. At Madison Church, we don’t have all the answers, but we are committed to having ongoing conversations about how we can better follow scripture so that we can worship well together.

This is where Van Opstal’s book comes in. Last year, one of our former Worship Directors, Shelli Fynewever, read this book and felt that this book would be very helpful for us at Madison to read together. Many of our worship team members got copies of the book and read it. Over the ministry year, Shelli and her intern Ben Hoekman, put together this six-part lecture series for the Wednesday Night Out mid-week ministry at one of our campus locations. These talks were recorded, and we are releasing them now to you here.

I would encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to purchase a copy of The Next Worship, so you can read some of the material that inspired each talk in the series. This episode, by Rev. Reggie Smith, covers Chapter 1: Tension at the Table.

Rev. Reggie Smith was previously featured on the Antioch Worship Leadership Podcast in Episode 23. Rev. Smith is the former pastor of Roosevelt Park CRC and the present Director of the Office of Race Relations and the Office of Social Justice for the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA). In addition, he works as Program Affiliate for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, is a regular contributing writer to the Grand Rapids Times, and is a husband and father. He and his family attend Madison Church’s Square Campus.

Musical Credits:

Jaou Santos – church during mass

Opinions about the rights of LGBTQ people is rapidly changing both in the US and around the world in the past two decades.

According to recent data collected by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life in June 2017 ( http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/),

“. . . in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57% to 35%.

Since then, support for same-sex marriage has steadily grown. And today, support for same-sex marriage is at its highest point since Pew Research Center began polling on this issue. Based on polling in 2017, a majority of Americans (62%) support same-sex marriage, while 32% oppose it.”

When looking at how religious affiliation affects opinions on same-sex marriage, all religious groups in the United States are seeing an increase in approval rates for same-sex couples to marry. The report states that:

Support for same-sex marriage among black Protestants has now increased to 44% and white evangelical Protestants, while the lowest of all religious groups, even within this group support for same-sex marriage has grown from 27% in 2016 to 35% today.”

Now support for legally-recognized same-sex marriage does not necessarily carry over into church polity. There is considerable debate within the church in the United States, and around the world, about if or how individual people with same-sex attraction, and legally-married same-sex couples, are enfolded within congregations. Issues of scriptural interpretation, church governance, as well as cultural issues come into play with these discussions. Denominations, Bible Scholars, and Theologians continue to wrestle with these issues, often times coming to different conclusions, making it even more difficult for individual Christians to know who to take their cues from when relationships with real people are at stake.

How many relationships are at stake? Recent estimates of the LGBT population in the United States vary between 3.8% (http://news.gallup.com/poll/183383/americans-greatly-overestimate-percent-gay-lesbian.aspx) to 5% to as high as 10% (http://time.com/lgbt-stats/). This is similar to the stats in Europe where on average, 6% of Europeans identified as LGBTQ, with countries reporting numbers as low as 1.5% in Hungary to 7.4% in Germany (https://daliaresearch.com/counting-the-lgbt-population-6-of-europeans-identify-as-lgbt/). Again, even getting an idea of how many people identify as LGBTQ is quite difficult, but what is clear is that more and more people in the church either are LGBTQ themselves, or have a friends or family member who identifies as LGBTQ. The multiethnic church, is no exception. Multiethnic churches often are places where many LGBTQ people who are also people of color go to, in hopes of finding faith communities that affirm both their ethnic and sexual orientation.

Into this “great debate” around how the church responds to its members of the LGBTQ community step Laurie and Matt Krieg of Hole in My Heart Ministries (https://www.himhministries.com). I had an opportunity to visit with Laurie and Matt a week ago at Matt’s other office at Caring Well Counseling where they took a break from moving in furniture and assembling bookcases to talk with me about their ministry. Here is a little about Laurie and Matt from their website:

“Laurie Krieg is

Today’s episode is a recording of a conversation I had with Pastor Brad Knetsch in which he shares his perspective on some of the things he has learned leading a multi-ethnic church as a young, white, male pastor. Pastor Brad serves as the Pastor of Madison Church’s Ford Campus in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Brad loves Jesus, the Gospel, and how the Holy Spirit is at work in his city. His passion is to fan into flame gifts-based, team-based vision, ministry, and evangelism.

Now, before we go any deeper into this episode, a few things need to be acknowledged.

Having their blessing matters to me. One of the values of the Antioch Worship Leadership Podcast is to highlight the perspectives, stories, research, and insights which people of color bring to the multi-ethnic church. Too often, even in multi-ethnic churches, the voices of white people, and especially white men, are given a disproportionate place of privilege. In fact, many church conferences – even multiethnic church conferences – are still dominated by the voices of white men, a fact which should get anyone’s bias radar bleeping like crazy! So. . . if your bias radar is going off right now because two white guys are going to talk about race and leadership in the church, I hope you see this interview in the context of the broader range of interviews and discussion which this podcast has offered, and will continue to offer in the future.

But here is the thing: There are a lot of white men in leadership in multiethnic churches. And we as white guys come with our white male baggage as people who often have a lot of listening and learning to do before we can even be good partners with, let alone lead, people of color. Too often we white men assume that we already have needed skills and knowledge to lead, but overlook the more important, slower work of earning trust through long-term relationships. We don’t know how blind we really are to systemic racism.

Because of our blindness and complicity, we as white men have done the most damage, individually, collectively, and systemically to people of color in the church. This is both true historically and is still true today. We as white men benefit the most from the racism that saturates our culture. And into this sin-saturated mess . . . some of us white men are called to be leaders of multiethnic churches, and we lead imperfectly. Our leadership is continually affected by our sin-nature.

So, as you listen to this interview, I hope you hear Pastor Brad Knetsch as a leader who is learning while he leads. He doesn’t have all the answers. But, even though he is an imperfect leader, if you listen, you might get a glimpse of how white men in leadership in multiethnic churches may want to model their ministry to be more effective leaders in the increasingly browning context of the multiethnic church.

Today on the Antioch Worship Leadership Podcast, we are going to explore the story of the African influences on Martin Luther, the Father of the Protestant Reformation. We will talk with Dr. David Daniels III, the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. For those of you who want to read Dr. Daniel’s articles for yourself, scroll down to the links provided in the show notes for this episode, or head over to Antiochpodcast.org and check out the episode page.

Articles by Dr. Daniels cited in this episode:

http://www.commercialappeal.com/story/opinion/contributors/2017/10/21/honor-reformations-african-roots/783252001/

https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/martin-luther-and-ethiopian-christianity-historical-traces