Journaling for Spiritual Growth, my book that teaches you a sustainable practice for spiritual and emotional growth, comes out this week. This is the 2nd edition, published with Whitaker House. Let’s browse through the book together!

In this episode, Marc discusses his new book, Journaling for Spiritual Growth (2nd ed.), exploring its themes, structure, and the transformative power of journaling. He pages through the book, pointing out key features, so you can sort out if this is the right book for you.

Takeaways

Recommended Resources

Marc Alan Schelske is a happily recovering fundamentalist praying for the restoration of all things. He writes and teaches about spiritual maturity, emotional growth, and the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus. His books, including Walking Otherward, Journaling for Spiritual Growth, and The Wisdom of Your Heart, can be found at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com. Marc serves as the teaching elder at Bridge City Community Church in Milwaukie, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, where we work to keep all things, even Christianity, a bit weird.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey, friends. I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 61: Six weeks to grow? Yes, please!

SPONSOR

Today’s podcast is brought to you by my brand-new hot-off-the-presses book, Journaling for Spiritual Growth. Second Edition. Launch day is always exciting for an author, and this is my sixth launch. I’m starting to feel like I’m actually an author, maybe. The rest of this podcast is going to have to do with this book in some way, what it’s about. So that’s all I’ll say for now.

Marc Schelske 0:32
I spent a lot of time in bookstores when I was a kid. It’s a special kind of joyful piece to sit on the carpeted floor of a bookstore aisle, slowly browsing through books you might want to read. Most of us buy our books online now, so we don’t get to do that much anymore. I thought I would take some time to do that with you today. I recorded this Page Flip video of my new book a week ago, and it’s posted on my website, but I wanted to share it here with you, dear podcast listener, for two reasons.

First, because if you follow this podcast, you’re interested in the kinds of things I’m up to when it comes to spiritual practice, and the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus. So there’s a pretty good chance this book might be up your alley, but unless you know what’s in it, how will you know if it’s a book for you?

Second, I want to share this video with you, because along the way in the video, you’ll learn some interesting tidbits, like the meaning that’s built into the cover art and why journaling is so important to me. I’ll share my favorite endorsement. I’ll also share what I think about AI. I’ll talk about why the book has two introductions and why the appendices might be the most important part. I’ll explain the biggest hurdle to any spiritual practice being effective. I’ll talk about why I use footnotes in a book that’s not academic. I’ll tell you about the only safe environment for spiritual growth and the four crucial elements for a sustainable and impactful drilling practice. I mean, honestly, this video that I made, which is about 20 minutes long, is packed with great stuff.

Now, if you want to see the video version, which you might because it’s full of screenshots and pictures of the pages and everything that I’m describing, you can find that in two places. You can look for this podcast episode on YouTube, on my YouTube channel, or you can go to the book page on my website, for just the video itself. I know this is different than the normal kind of podcast episode that I create, but it’s important stuff to me, and I think it might be interesting to you because you follow me, so that’s why I’m sharing this today.

PAGING THROUGH THE BOOK TOGETHER

Marc Schelske 2:42
Back in the olden times, we bought books in brick-and-mortar bookstores. I know some of you still do, but most people don’t. Most books today are bought online, and in those olden times, when we went to the bookstore, one of the best experiences was being able to pick up a book off the shelf and spend some time flipping through it, reading the cover, looking through the table of contents, browsing through the chapters, reading a paragraph here or there, so that you can get a real sense of what this book was about and if it was the right book for you. Well, that’s what we’re going to do right now together. So if you want to know a little bit more about this book and what’s in it, come along for the journey.

So we pick up the book off the bookshelf, and the first thing that we see, of course, is the cover. So this beautiful cover is actually a riff on the original cover of the first edition by my inspired cover illustrator, Tamara. Whitaker House kept that as the basis for their inspiration for their cover. I’m grateful they were willing to do that, and we ended up with this cover.

So we’ve got the tree of life growing out of the journals, so you get that sense that the journals are this seedbed for growth. We’ve got the iconography of the fish and the grain, which, for me, brings to mind growth and nurturing, and nutrients. We’ve got the iconography of the sun and the doves of the Spirit, so that we’re not alone in this. We are in this process with God becoming who we were meant to be.

And then, of course, on the back, you’ve got this quick marketing blurb, what the book is about. If you only have thirty seconds to figure out if this is the book for you, this is the place to start. And then we’ve got a few blurbs that I’m grateful for from people that I respect. So, the marketing blurb on the back: “Journaling will change you.” That is absolutely my experience. That is not an exaggeration. It’s absolutely true of me.

“Spiritual and personal growth is possible. Over the centuries, journaling has emerged as one of the most consistently transformative practices recommended by leaders across spiritual traditions, therapists, coaches and others. Why then, are so many people intimidated by journaling today while others try it, only to give it up?” Maybe you’re one of those people who’s tried to journal and you’ve bounced off of it? Well, we’re going to talk about that.

“Incorporating both ancient spiritual wisdom and current neurobiology. Journaling For Spiritual Growth teaches you how to be present to your life and hear what the Spirit is doing within you. Over six weeks, you’ll learn why diaries and goal tracking can’t transform us, what expectations undermine journalism effectiveness, what mindsets and questions are most helpful for lasting growth, how structure can be a gentle friend, how to create sustainable habits for your life and temperament.” Does that sound good? That’s what we’re up to.

And then some of the endorsements. You can read those yourself. When we open the book, the very first thing are those endorsements in full as well, and–this is the most important endorsement–a page of endorsements from actual readers who read the first edition, real people who got the book, who read the book, who were impacted by the book, and wrote about it.

So we hear Lani Kent say, “Marc reveals compassionate and beautifully nuanced layers to consider in developing a sustainable practice of journaling.” Thank you so much. Sam Elie: “Journaling for spiritual growth is an accessible guide for building a reliable and deepening self reflective practice.” That’s exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you, Sam. And then this one, which really hit me hard. “I wish this book had been around during a pivotal time in my life, when I was at the start of my deconstructing process, trying to form a new connection to my last shred of spiritual practice. I found this book clear, focused and transparent in all of its intentions.” Oh, this is what I want to give to people

I’ll let you read the endorsements by the well-known people. I will just share one, just because it cracks me up. This is from Wm. Paul Young, the guy who wrote The Shack and other things. I remember getting this endorsement in my email. I read it, and I just burst out laughing. This is what he wrote. “I kept waiting for this book to disappoint.” We’re off to a good start, aren’t we? “I kept waiting for this book to disappoint, for it to turn into something harsh rather than kind rigid, rather than flexible, even more harmful than helpful, it did not and for that, I am grateful.”

I love that so much because it captures this experience so many of us have had, where spiritual writing so often comes from this perspective of legalism or obligation or performance, where you’re being told to accomplish something. This is not what I’m up to. I’m just so thrilled to hear those words that he was expecting it to be rigid, when, in fact, it turned out not to be.

The next interesting thing is that we turn to this boring page that’s in all of your books. It’s the copyright page. It’s got all the legal information, but there’s something on it that I want you to see. This badge right here. If you look closely, it says, “Human Authored, the Authors Guild.” And then there’s a registration number. I’m a member of the Authors Guild. They’ve created a registry for books that are certified human-created. So you’re not allowed to use AI in your ideation. You’re not allowed to use AI in your writing. You can use limited AI and spell check, and grammar check, but that’s it, nowhere else. That’s really important to me. Creating is, I think, when we are the most like God. It’s when we are living out our identity, when we make things. Outsourcing that to an algorithm undermines our humanity. I’m just never going to do it. I’m never going to use AI to write, and I want you to know that. And so I’ve registered this book with the Human Authored Registry with the Authors Guild, and I think you’ll see that in all my books going forward.

The next thing that you’ll find is the table of contents. So you’re going to see the structure of the book. You’ll notice the book is divided into six weeks. Each week has five entries. So, that gives you some margin. If you’re trying to follow the book every day, you can miss a day or take weekends off. The main content of the book is those six weeks. And then you’ll notice there’s a whole selection of appendices. We’re going to talk about those because they’re really important, even though they’re often skipped. Don’t skip these. And if you’re looking at the ebook version, these are going to be linked, of course, so that you can jump right to the sections.

There are two introductions to this book. Crazy. That’s two too many, right? Most people don’t read all this stuff at the beginning of books. We’ve got a word for it in publishing. It’s called the front matter, as if it’s not even the book yet, and many people treat it that way. But here’s something I want you to know: Most writers spend as much time and focus on the introduction as they do on other parts of their book. It matters.

The introduction matters to me because it’s an act of hospitality. You’ve come to my house, you’re walking in the front door, and this is my opportunity to say, “Hey, here’s where you hang your coat. Here’s where the bathroom is, here’s what’s on the menu for dinner tonight. Do you want to stick around? Is there anything I can do to help you feel more comfortable?” That’s what the introduction is for. So that we can be on the same page, and so that you’re not wasting your time–I do not want you to spend your limited time reading this book if it’s not the right book for you. In the introduction, I provide everything you need to know to make that decision.

Why are there two? Well, because this is the second edition. So we’ve got the introduction to the second edition, which talks a little bit about lessons learned since the book was originally published. The second introduction was actually called “How to Use This Book.” Crazy, right? You’re a grown person. You’ve read books before. You don’t need instructions on the technology of book reading. See, that’s the point. This isn’t about reading a book straight through. This book is designed to guide you in establishing a practice. This introduction will guide you through using this book most effectively. It’s going to tell you who I am and where I’m coming from, which ought to be a really important question that you’re asking. If you come to a book that’s purporting to say something about God and the spiritual life, you really ought to wonder, “Who is writing this book? What’s their viewpoint?” Well, I’m going to give you that right up front, so you’re not guessing. You can decide right off the bat if you want to spend time with me. Am I the kind of person you want to learn from? Because if I’m not, I don’t want you to waste your time. So I’m going to give you that information right up front.

Then we shift into the weeks. Each week starts with a one or two-page introduction that sets the theme for that week. Every week has a particular theme. So Week One is “Choosing the Right Perspective.” In my life of journaling since I was a teenager, and in my teaching of journaling as a pastor, I’ve discovered that really the biggest hurdle to a sustainable journaling practice is unrealistic expectations. There are a lot of pictures people have of what journaling ought to be, what it ought to look like, what it ought to feel like, and most of those expectations are completely unhelpful. So we’re going to start talking about the perspectives that will allow your journaling to be long-term term sustainable, and effective.

After that introduction, we get to Day One of that week. Every day is going to have the same format. There’s going to be a short reflection that is going to basically give you one principle that I want you to understand, and then there’s going to be a section called “Practice” where you’re given something to do. You know, by the time we get a couple of weeks into the book, the To Do is journaling. You’ll be journaling, and I’ll guide you through what to journal about and how to do it. But every day will have something you do to help you engage with the idea of that day.

The reading is not going to take long. Most people will read the reflection in five maybe eight minutes. The practice can take as long as you want it to take. I think most people will be able to do most of these things in fifteen or twenty minutes. Obviously, you could go deeper, and it could take longer; that’s up to you. Then, you finish that and move on to the next day.

One thing you’ll also notice is that there are footnotes. Now this is not an academic book. The footnotes are not primarily to connect you to original sources, although I do some of that because there are topics that you might be interested in. I’ll say, “Hey, here’s a great book on that topic.” But I also use the footnotes to do two other things to expand on potential off-ramps. You come to some claim I’m making, and you’re like, “huh, I don’t think that’s true.” Through the course of my own writing, through the process with beta readers and others who helped me with the book, some of those off ramps have surfaced, and I’ve tried to address them in the footnotes where I’ll say something like, “Hey, if you’re concerned about this, or if your experience is different, here’s a way for you to think about that.” And I move those things to the footnotes because they don’t apply to everyone, and they get in the way of the flow of the reading. And so I want them there for you, but I also don’t want them to get in the way. So you can skip the footnotes if you want. You can read them if you want. Some of the footnotes are going to be interesting. Some of them may have snide remarks that don’t feel like they should be in the body text, but I still want to make the comment so that it’s in footnotes.

Each day includes a “Read and Reflect” section for reading and a “Practice” section to start your journaling process. Now. You can take these one day at a time, or if you find that one particular entry is challenging and you want to think about it more, you can take as long as you need before you proceed. That’s up to you and what feels best for you and your process. Don’t move on to the next reading just because it’s the next reading; move on when you’re ready. Move on when you’ve done the work that’s involved.

Week Two addresses your tools, like the physical tools that you use to do the practice. Are you a pen and paper journaler? Are you a keyboard and computer journaler? The pros and cons of both, the lessons I’ve learned that apply to both, and how to make them work for you. We’re also going to talk about things like when you choose to do your journaling during the day and how often you choose to do it. And I’m going to suggest that the most important tool of all for a sustainable long-term journaling practice is actually not a physical tool at all. It’s an attitude, the attitude of gracious flexibility. So here’s the thing: the only safe environment for spiritual growth is the environment of grace. If you feel driven to accomplish something, if you feel like you have to prove yourself or accomplish spirituality, your journal will just become a burden. You will miss days, because that’s how life works. And eventually, you’re going to feel like the journal is just not working for you, and you’re going to set it aside. So if you want this to be a long-term habit that helps you mature as a person, you have to hold the whole thing with this attitude of generous, gracious flexibility. So we’re going to talk about that, what that means, and how it works.

Week Three is about understanding the essential ingredients. There are lots of ways to journal, and I’ve done many of them. There are many books on journaling. There are many processes for journaling. There’s journaling in coaching, there’s journaling in therapy. There’s spiritual journaling, and there’s journaling that goes along with Bible study. There are emotional journals, all different kinds. What I have discovered along the way is that if your journal is going to help you grow, there are really four things that have to be a part of your journaling practice. And so I teach these four things. I call them “The Spine” because they’re what gives structure and stability to your journaling practice. There are lots of different elements you can include in your journaling, but if you don’t have these four elements, if you don’t have the Spine, then your journaling is going to slump, and eventually it’s going to feel less effective. And because of that, eventually you’re going to quit.

So I teach the Spine: these four essential ingredients that hold the whole thing together. First, there’s silence. We need to enter into this process in a state of reflection, rather than a state of being rushed, which is the way most of us live, and silence helps us do that. Second, there’s some kind of focused, inward reflection. Third, there’s Godward reflection. I’m going to talk about what both of those things mean and why we do them in that order. And then the last thing, the fourth thing, is prayer. This isn’t the typical grocery list style of prayers, where you say “God be with…” and name off everyone from your family all the way up to the President or whoever. This is the kind of prayer that is about connection, union, and the intention for your life. If you’re not a particularly religious person, I’ll show you how this can still be a tool for you. These four elements–silence, inward reflection, Godward reflection, prayer–form the structure that you can adjust, that you can add to, but that Spine has to be there for the process to stay ongoing, sustainable, and helping you grow as a person.

In Week Four, I present an idea that, in all the years that I’ve taught journaling, I have found many people resist at first. I suggest that if you want a long-term, sustainable journaling practice, you should stick with a template. By that, I mean that you need to have a predetermined order that defines what you’ll journal about. Now I know that that sounds limiting. Creative people always hate this idea. But here’s the thing: if you pick up your pen or keyboard and open your journal to a blank page, and you have no sense of direction, then what will happen is you will spend all of your reflective energy deciding what to write about. That can certainly be an interesting exercise, but it’s not a sustainable journaling practice for most people. In Week Four, I’ll provide several examples of templates and show you how to select one that works for you.

These templates are adjustable. You can add elements that work for your life, but you need that structure so that your mind is freed from the task of figuring out what to write about. The template provides a set of boundaries, allowing you to enter the process easily. So during Week Four, you’re going to practice four different templates that range from short to long and that have different elements in them, so that you can kind of see what a template is like from the inside. Because ultimately, you’re going to be developing your own template. But I want to give you a starting place so that you can get rolling and have a feeling for what this is like and how it’s helpful.

Then we come to Week Five. Now, by Week Five, you’re journaling, right? We’ve already had conversations about whether you’re going to journal analog, pen and paper, or on a computer. We’ve talked about when and where, and now you’ve started to use a template. You’re journaling at this point. And so in Week Five, I don’t add any new instruction for how to journal. So instead, Week Five focuses on empowering your habit, because that’s the goal. We want journaling to be a long-term, sustainable tool in your life that helps you grow as a person. Well, if it’s going to be long-term and sustainable, it has to become a habit. So how does that work?

We are going to address competing habits and how to notice them in your life. We’re going to talk about how to anchor a chain trigger. This is one of the most powerful tools that I’ve learned in habit building. So, I’m going to teach you how to anchor a chain trigger, which makes keeping a habit much easier. We’re going to talk about the reward process for habits. We’re going to talk about lessons that you can learn from your negative, unhealthy habits and how you can leverage those to keep this habit strong and sustainable.

So, we come to the last week, Week Six. You’re already journaling, so now we’re going to focus on the future. We’re going to talk about how you maintain a long-term practice, how you make adjustments to it as the seasons of your life change, so that it becomes flexible enough to grow with you as you grow. The last day, Week Six, Day Five, is called “Choosing Faithfulness.” Now I grew up in a fairly rigorous fundamentalist religious community. In that community, faithfulness meant really perfection. It meant always doing what you were supposed to do. What I’ve found is that’s a very unhelpful way to think about faithfulness. Faithfulness, in the context of a spiritual discipline, is always coming back. Recognizing that life is what life is–which means it’s unpredictable. It’s largely out of your control. You have obligations to other people that you have to fulfill. This all means any spiritual practice that’s going to last in your life has to be a spiritual practice that is flexible and can accommodate the realities of your life. And so, we end this journey talking about faithfulness, coming back, coming back again, and coming back again.

But, you’ll notice at this point the book’s not done. We’re on page 151 and there’s 60 more pages! So what is in those 60 pages? Ah, my friend, let me tell you the appendices. I know most people skip appendices. They never look at them. This isn’t an academic book, so it doesn’t have tables and charts at the end. Why on earth are there appendices? Well, because there’s other stuff that I want to give you that will be helpful to you. So what are those appendices?

The first appendix is an essay called “What is Spiritual Growth?” That phrase–spiritual growth–is so vague, and so many people use it. Because I’m talking about spiritual growth, I thought maybe you should know what I mean by spiritual growth. So that’s what that essay is. If you are trying to figure out if this is the right book for you, reading that appendix alone will give you a really good sense of whether you want to have this conversation with me.

Then there’s Appendix Two. This is a brand new essay that is in this edition only, and it’s called “Silence for the Children of Noise.” I teach the beginning of the journaling process as sitting in silence. The feedback I’ve received since this book came out two years ago is that it’s the single hardest part of this process. People really struggle with sitting in silence. They don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. They don’t know how to do it. They’re not sure if they’re being successful when they do it. So, I’ve gotten lots of questions about sitting in silence. What is it like? How does it work? So I wrote an essay about that. What are some of the reasons why silence is so hard for us, and what might we do about it?

Then, Appendix Three. Now we’re getting to appendices that are tools to help you in your process as you journal. Appendix Three is all about building and evaluating your template. So when I teach about templates in week four, ultimately, I don’t want you to use my template. I want you to use a template that works best for you, for your temperament, and your life. So, I’m going to show you how to build that, what things to think about, and what questions to ask yourself. And then, when is it time to change your template, because your template should evolve with you as your life changes.

Appendix Four is recommended tools and tips for journaling. This is a lot of really practical stuff. If you journal analog, what are the best kinds of journals to use? What are the best kinds of pens to use? What are concerns that you might have about keeping your journal safe? If you journal digitally, what’s the best software to use? What are the best ways to structure a digital journal so that doesn’t get in the way? How do you deal with all of the notifications? It’s loads of practical stuff that’s come from years and years of experience.

Then, Appendix Five. This is a gold mine. Honestly, if nothing else in this book speaks to you, Appendix Five is probably worth the price of admission. It’s called “Ways to Practice.” In this appendix, I go through each of those four elements–silence, inward focus, Godward focus, and prayer–and I recommend practices and resources for each of those things. I think there are probably 50 or 60 links out to other books and resources that will help you in your journey.

Appendix Six, finally, is literature on habit building. There are some great books that I’ve read on habit building and some academic studies. I’ve shared with you as well if you’re interested in those things.

So that’s the whole book. That’s what you would find if you picked this up on a shelf in a bookstore and browsed through it to decide, “Is this the right book for me?” If it sounds interesting to you, if it sounds like it might be helpful to you, as a person, to begin building a practice where you are reflecting on the experience of being yourself, listening for the voice of the Spirit in the midst of that reflection, so that you can grow and deepen emotionally and spiritually as a person, then I’d like to share that journey with you.

So there you go. That’s the book. The last thing I want to do is waste your time. So this whole podcast is meant to help you decide if this book is the right book for you or perhaps someone that you love. Next month, we’ll come back to our regularly scheduled spiritual life content with a great conversation with somebody that I think is going to benefit you. We’ll see you then.

May you find the right path for your own growth and healing. Thanks for listening.

CLOSING

Notes for today’s episode and any links mentioned, you’ll find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW061

Did you like this? Well, there’s more. Usually it’s better than this. Subscribe to Apprenticeship Notes. That’s my email newsletter. It’s monthly-ish, about eight to ten times a year. It will include an exclusive essay about the spiritual life that you won’t find anywhere else, insider commentary on my podcasts and blog posts, books that I recommend, and more. You’ll also get a free little book when you subscribe. It’s called “The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World.” In it, I teach a spiritual practice that has been so helpful to me as I face the anxiety and uncertainty of our time. So, subscribe to the email newsletter. Get that free book. Find it all at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

My journey from the Traditionalist view to becoming a fully Affirming pastor, with a perspective on a Gospel path to full Inclusion. This is a recorded version of the same presentation I gave at the Open Table Conference School of Theology in Sunriver in June of 2025.

In this episode, Marc Alan Schelske explores the complex relationship between faith and LGBTQ affirmation. Through personal stories, theological reflection, and the teachings of Jesus, he explains his own journey from the Traditionalist position to a position of full welcome, inclusion, and affirmation.

Takeaways

Recommended Resources

Marc Alan Schelske is a happily recovering fundamentalist praying for the restoration of all things. He writes and teaches about spiritual maturity, emotional growth, and the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus. His books, including Walking Otherward, Journaling for Spiritual Growth, and The Wisdom of Your Heart, can be found at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com. Marc serves as the teaching elder at Bridge City Community Church in Milwaukie, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, where we work to keep all things, even Christianity, a bit weird.

Marc Schelske 0:03
Hey, friends. I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth, following the way of Jesus. This is episode 60: Navigating Toward LGBTQ Affirmation (Or How I became an Affirming Pastor.)

SPONSOR

Today’s podcast is brought to you by The Writers Advance. I’m a writer (You probably know that) and I’m a big nerd about the writing process. That’s probably just a function of me being a big nerd about most everything I’m excited about. Part of that nerdery is that I’ve read all the best books about writing. I’ve taken a number of courses, and back in the day, I went to writers’ conferences regularly. In that time, I learned something that I’m going to offer you right now for free.

By far the best way to learn to write is just to write. All those great resources don’t make writing happen. Reading books about writing isn’t writing. Sitting in giant conference centers listening to experts talk about their process isn’t writing. The only thing that really moves the needle is writing a lot of words. That’s why I host three ways for writers to build their skills by spending time writing. Most every Saturday morning, I head down to Slow Pour, a great coffee shop in Sellwood, Oregon, and I write for three or four hours, and I invite anyone in the area to join me. Then, twice a month, I host a virtual co-writing group where other writers and I gather by Zoom. We check in briefly, then we turn off our mics and we write for two hours. If either of those sounds up your alley, let me know, and I can include you on the invite list.

However, the event that I host every year that makes the most difference is The Writers Advance. This is an annual four-day writers’ weekend that I have crafted to be exactly what writers need to push forward on their current project. It’s not about networking, or listening to experts speak, or desperately trying to get an agent or an editor to notice you. Nope. It’s about writing and reconnecting with why writing matters to you. I provide a creative and inspiring venue with great food and comfortable accommodations. We do readings. I bring coaches in who can help writers get over their current hurdles. I teach a couple of sessions about how to build a writing workflow that means you’ll keep writing for the long haul. But none of that is required. The only thing that’s required is that the folks who gather there write.

You get hours and hours of uninterrupted time for just that. I’ve got regular attendees who come to this event, and they will write more over this weekend than they do in two or three months of their normal life. There are presently eight spots left for this year’s writer’s advance. It takes place November 13 to 16th. If you’re a writer longing to give your words your full attention, or if you love a writer and want to give them the most incredible gift ever. Then head over to the website, www.TheWritersAdvance.com, for more details about this event and to reserve a spot.

INTRODUCTION

I had an incredible opportunity in early June. At the very last minute, I was invited to fill an open faculty position at the Open Table Conference Summer School of Theology in Sun River, Oregon. They had a last-minute cancellation, and one very kind and thorough recommendation got me the invite. So, I got to spend the whole week with incredible people, spending each morning hearing great thinkers talk about a more beautiful gospel, and then spending each afternoon in rich conversation while enjoying restful, beautiful central Oregon. It really was a high point for me. I loved it.

I taught two sessions. The first session was a dialogical group Bible study process through the foot washing scene in John 13. When Jesus stood to wash the disciples’ feet, he was doing something that the disciples and their whole culture considered shameful. He was acting beneath his station. That’s why Peter reacted so violently. He didn’t want to participate in Jesus’ shame. But Jesus didn’t consider it shameful. He considered it an example of who God is and how God relates to us. Now, I tell you that because that session is the foundation for what I’m about to share with you. I’m going to refer to that session at the beginning of what I share now, and if you want to dig into that conversation and understand a little bit more, I wrote that up and posted it on my blog. There’ll be a link on the screen, and there’ll be a link in the show notes. You can just go read that blog. Press pause now, go do that, and then come back. All right, so here we go.

THE PRESENTATION

I’d like you to hold in your mind our conversation about the foot washing scene in John 13, Jesus loving to the fullest by subverting the expectations of what it meant for him to be the Messiah, by serving and entering into the place of shame in order to do so, and then inviting us to follow his example. This is an understanding that has a wide, reaching application for our lives, in the way that we relate to the people around us, and now we’re going to talk about one particular application, how this perspective might apply to the church’s relationship to the LGBTQ community.

Now, as I say this, I want to acknowledge that there may be some limbic system noise that starts to clang and gong for some of us. This is a fraught conversation, and I want to acknowledge the possibility of anxiety. Maybe someone listening is part of the LGBTQ community. If that’s you, you surely bear scars caused by Christians, and you aren’t here to have your life talked about like a problem to solve. It would make sense for you to feel anxious about hearing one more Christian pastor talk about this.

Maybe someone else listening is fully resolved on the subject. Maybe you’re already fully affirming. It just seems obvious to you that Christ’s love is fully inclusive. And frankly, you get frustrated with Christians who just don’t agree with you. Certainly, someone else listening is fully committed to a traditional view of gender and sexuality. And it seems obvious to you that this is what Scripture says, and frankly, you get frustrated with Christians who just don’t get that. And so to both of you, so certain in your convictions, perhaps you’re feeling rising anxiety about whether this pastor is going to say the things you think need to be said.

Then, there’s a good chance that someone else listening is unresolved on the question. You want to love like Jesus, and you suspect that includes loving gay and trans people. You also want to honor God, and you don’t want to abandon scripture in order to do that. So you’re feeling caught,

if you’re feeling anxious for these reasons or any other reasons, I want to give you my commitment that I’m going to do my best in this presentation to use my words in a way that is at the very least respectful and hopefully, hopefully even life-giving. My commitment (for me) and my invitation (to you) is to hold this time and this conversation with respect, mutual care, and curiosity. Is that something we can commit to doing together?

Before I jump in, I want to pray.

God who knows us all intimately, Jesus, who walks with us in the complexity of our human nature, Spirit who convicts, comforts and transforms, we ask for the clear fire of your love to burn away in us everything that is the fruit of our self centered ego defending certainty so that we can more easily practice your way. Amen.

I’ll start with two experiences.

I was a 22-year-old theology major at a conservative Christian university when I met Brian. I was a guitarist. Brian was a singer–one of the best I’d ever met. He was one of the first call vocalists for worship on campus or any special event with music. He was in all kinds of ensembles. We did a lot of music together, and we became friends. Then, he came out, and I watched the campus that had embraced him turn on him. Lost opportunities. Articles in the school newspaper about him that were so cruel. Violent threats. Vandalized property. And all at a Christian university.

I didn’t know what to make of the situation. I grew up in Ohio in the 80s, in a world that was conservative and a religion that was fundamentalist. Being gay in that world was a dangerous social stigma. It was considered shameful in the highest degree, it was a terrible, unforgivable sin. I cannot explain to you how much emotional energy was spent by my male peers trying to constantly prove that we weren’t gay. That was my default state.

But I knew Brian’s heart. He loved Jesus so much. He was more faithful with his spiritual practices than almost anyone I knew–and I was a theology major, a God Squad guy. He was generous and gentle, compassionate. He was a servant-hearted minister. As I learned more about his experience, it was hard to get my head around. He’d known that he was gay since childhood. He’d been forced into conversion therapy. He’d been abused by people who were supposed to be helping him. He’d been praying since childhood for God to fix him or change him or kill him. Then he came out in this conservative Christian environment, because the only way that he could live–literally avoid killing himself–was just to choose to believe that God loved him as he was, and to start living as if that were true, regardless of what all the Christians around him thought.

Now, at that point in my life, I was pretty sure being gay was a sin, but I also remember thinking I had never met anyone so brave. The question that emerged as I processed this was if God considered Brian’s orientation a sin, and Brian had prayed in good faith for healing or deliverance for so long, and God hadn’t healed or delivered, and maybe God didn’t intend to heal or deliver. That was when I began to suspect that maybe God wasn’t as concerned about Brian’s orientation as my faith community was – which is honestly a dangerous thought for a theology major preparing to be a conservative pastor.

Fast forward about 20 years. I was the newly appointed senior pastor of a vibrant church in Portland. We were a church that prided ourselves on our openness and our welcome to anyone. We were a church that really understood the gospel of grace (not like those legalists). Dan and Julio had been attending most weeks for about three months. They were attentive during the sermon. They were engaged during worship. I noticed several times that Julio would cry during the singing.

Dan had asked to meet with me. So, we were sitting in my brand-new senior pastor’s office that had been nicely remodeled. I was sitting at my shiny new senior pastor’s desk. Dan told me, “We love this church. It feels like home. We want to get more involved.” (Great, I thought, the system’s working!) But there’s just one thing… and that’s when he came out to me. He and Julio were partners. They had been for years. He’d heard us say that anyone was welcome, and he wanted to know what that meant. Could they attend now that I knew that they were gay? Yes. Could they volunteer? Um, of course. Could they lead? I was getting uncomfortable. If gay marriage became legal, which was a conversation happening in Oregon at the time, could they get married in our sanctuary, if this was their home church? Would I officiate? Now, I was really uncomfortable.

During this conversation. I had what I can only think of as an out-of-body experience. I could see the whole scene like I was above it. I could hear the words we were saying to each other. I could see the tension in my body. There was this side of me that already cared for these guys, who wanted them to feel safe and at home, and who believed that regardless of what I thought about them being gay, God was big enough to welcome, to include, to forgive (if that was necessary), to heal (If that was necessary). I didn’t know.

But then there was the side of me that only had one script. This isn’t God’s will for you. You’re welcome and loved. Of course, we just trust that God, in God’s timing, is going to lead you to something that is more in alignment with God’s will, something that’s more life-giving. Well, yes, you can participate, of course. Yes, you can volunteer… just not with the kids. You can’t lead or speak, and I can’t marry you, but we love you, and we want you to feel at home. I could feel the incongruity in my words. I could see myself saying things that were half-truths, trying to bridge this tension. And before the conversation was over, I knew that we would never see Dan and Julio again. The question that emerged for me was this: If what I was saying was right and true and biblical, why did I feel in my gut that I had violated the work of the Spirit in the lives of these two men?

That prompted me to do some thinking. You see, when I preached or taught, I took great pride in having done all my own homework. I didn’t just preach the party line. I didn’t crib my notes from the approved commentaries. I studied for myself. I tried to read original sources wherever I could. I prayed. This was really important to me as a pastor, and I realized that I had never given this level of attention to this topic. I’d only repeated what I’d been told was right. Why? I wasn’t like that about any other topic.

That initiated a process of studying that ended up becoming far more wide-reaching than I intended. See, this is how it works. You start with the seven passages of Scripture that have any connection at all to this conversation. To responsibly make sense of those verses, you have to study the history of their interpretation, the hermeneutics surrounding them, and the historical context. As soon as you begin to contemplate alternative translations, you have to think about your understanding of inspiration and biblical authority. And once the door is open to the possibility of minority-view readings, you have to start asking questions about church tradition and the impact of cultural influences on the church, cultural influences like patriarchy and misogyny, and Western colonial empire.

Now, let me just relieve a little stress by saying that we are not going to cover all of that in this hour. It’s just too much. But you are in luck. I’m going to give you a resource that you can walk yourself through that talks about all of these things. This resource is an eleven-page PDF. It’s got the best books you can read that will help you on all of these subjects – books that have been chosen for accuracy and the way that they handle the topic with respect; videos and documentaries you can watch that will help you understand the experience of LGBTQ people in the church; as well as a few other key resources that I’ve discovered are very helpful in this conversation, like the history of the translation of the word “homosexual” in Scripture. And (this one is big), how the prohibition on male same-sex behavior in the first century is self-evidently rooted in the shame of being a woman. When you read first-century sources on this, it’s plain as day. This resource will also give you a list of questions for you to work through yourself so that you can locate yourself in the conversation. There’s lots of good stuff in here. It’s practically a whole college course on the subject for free for you. But that also means that I’m going to skip all of that and take you right to the point.

Not that those things don’t matter. They do. And some of you listening need that part of the conversation. Some of you are in relationships with people who will ask you those questions. Some of you are pastors, and your people are going to say, “Well, have you read this verse in First Corinthians? Have you read this verse in Leviticus?” You need to know how to respond to that intelligently. Those lines of thought matter, and that’s why I put this resource guide together. But as I did this work over the course of several years, I came to see that there was something much more fundamental. That’s what I want to sketch out for you in the rest of our time.

So take a deep breath, relax, just be, notice what you notice. The next part I’m going to share with you is going to sound like it has nothing to do with how Christians relate to LGBTQ people, but I assure you, it does. Keep your hands and arms inside the ride until the ride comes to a complete stop, okay?

The heart of my understanding of the incarnation is simple. Jesus came to show us the Father. That’s John 14:8-9, right? “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” This revelation of the Father was necessary because the greatest human sin is idolatry. Now I know that may sound like a strange claim. How could worshiping a golden statue be worse than, say, the Holocaust? Well, we feel that way because we’ve trivialized what idolatry means. Idolatry is not worshiping a golden statue. Idolatry is projecting unworthy, unholy, ungodly ways onto our image of God. Baxter Kruger says that we tar the father’s face with the brush of our own angst and alienation.

You see, what we do–what idolatry is–is that we project onto God human things that are alien to God’s nature. These false ideas that we project onto God separate us from our source, they corrupt our worship, and they serve to justify every other sin. Idolatry gives divine sanction to our self-centered, ego-defending ways. So, back to that Holocaust question. How can idolatry be worse than the Holocaust? Well, because we project onto God the hatred of our enemies, we find (conveniently) that we have sacred justification for our prejudices and violence. You see, the Holocaust could only happen because it was compatible with the vision of God held by a whole lot of Christians around the world.

So, given that idolatry changes the way that we see God, it was necessary for God to reveal God’s character to us in a tangible way. Our image of God was so tarred with sin and alienation that we needed the love of God to infiltrate our spiritual imagination so that we could see the truth we were otherwise incapable of seeing. So, if that’s the case, then what specifically did Jesus reveal about the nature of God?

Well, this is the question of the gospel. Why is the gospel good news? Now, ask almost any modern Christian what the gospel is, and you are almost certain to be told one or another atonement theory. The gospel is this particular formula for how God deals with sin and how you can gain the benefit of that now and in eternity. How to get saved. But that is not what the earliest Christians meant when they used the word the gospel. That way of talking about the gospel–that the gospel is an atonement theory, a plan that demonstrates how God deals with sin and saves people–that way of talking about the gospel is a development that largely came into being during the medieval church period, particularly after Anselm.

So what did the early Christians mean? The early Christians, from the post-apostolic era into the patristic era. What did they mean when they used the word gospel? Well, when those Christians used that word, what they meant was the things Jesus did and taught. Literally, the stuff in the books that we call gospels. That’s the gospel. The stories of the witnesses that have been handed down. Jesus’ life, acts, teaching, death, and resurrection. That’s the gospel, and it’s good news, because it reveals the character of God.

So if that’s the gospel, what does the gospel show? If we look at the life, the acts, the teaching, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. What do we see revealed about the nature of God? Well, what I’d really like to do is just read all four gospels to you in their entirety, but we don’t have time for that, so I’m just going to remind you of some key events in a whirlwind tour and ask you to consider what they mean, if these events are a revelation of the nature of God. Once again, all this may seem to you like it has nothing to do with how Christians relate to the LGBTQ community, but I assure you, it does.

Mark 5:25-34. Jesus heals and affirms the woman with the flow of blood. Treats her with dignity. He calls her daughter despite the social taboos that exclude her because of a medical condition. Matthew 8 and Luke 17. Jesus touches and heals lepers, violating the religious and cultural boundaries that kept them excluded from the community, keeping them untouchable because of fear around their disease. Matthew 8 (the Centurion) and John 4 (the Samaritan woman). Jesus affirms the dignity and the spiritual journey of folks who were on the outside. They were the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion, the wrong kind of person. And yet Jesus engages them like they have a real relationship with God. Matthew 9 and Luke 5. Jesus offers table fellowship (with everything that meant in the ancient Near East) to tax collectors (enemies) and sinners (people judged unworthy and on the outside). And he did this even though it directly caused the people around him to question his judgment and reputation.

Jesus told stories that explicitly challenge the normal human tendency to draw hard lines on who is in and who is out, on who is acceptable to God. Luke 10. The Good Samaritan, where Jesus takes the enemy and turns the enemy into the faithful hero. Luke 14. The great banquet, where those who ultimately got to attend were all the excluded and the cast off. Luke 15. Lost coin, lost sheep, lost son–showing God’s intent to find and reconcile all outsiders. And then John 13, in the upper room, the conversation we had around washing feet. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. He modeled humble boundary-breaking service, even when that service was considered shameful by the people around him.

There are so many other examples: the Syrophoenician woman, Zacchaeus, Matthew the tax collector, healing the man born blind, restoring the demoniac, welcoming the children, and protecting the woman who washed his feet with her hair. Listen, friends, listen! If Jesus intended to reveal to us that God’s nature is to police hard lines of inclusion and exclusion based on holiness, then Jesus went about his life and ministry entirely the wrong way.

How about this? Instead of us defining what we think the Incarnation reveals, let’s just ask Jesus. He tells us directly. It’s in the last line of his high priestly prayer in the upper room. John 17:25-26. “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made Your name known to them, and I will make it known now…” (Remember, in Hebrew thinking someone’s name is an expression of their character, right? It’s not, “This is Paul,” but, “This is Paul who’s really good at being fully present with you, and the moment that you experience His presence, you’re going to feel seen and loved.” That’s the difference. That’s what revealing the name is. It’s not just saying, “Oh, here’s God’s name, and you need to believe it.” It’s saying, “This is who God is.” That’s what that phrase means in Semitic thinking. And then we get to the reason. This is what Jesus says that he’s been revealing. Are you ready? “…So I made Your name known to them, and I will make it known so that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them and I in them.”

See, Jesus is revealing the true nature of the Father, and that nature is imminent love. This is what Jesus came to make known, because this is the thing we did not know already. You see, human history shows that we can imagine a god with expectations of holiness. We can imagine a god who knows the heart and can discern righteousness and unrighteousness. We can imagine a god who has a holy law and imposes consequences on the people who break that law. Further, we can imagine a god who favors those people who obey and excludes those people who don’t. Jesus did not need to reveal any of that because that was how humanity already envisioned its gods. Jesus came to reveal what we could not see on our own: that God’s love is exceedingly greater than anything our human minds will tolerate.

In fact, that’s the very point of the often misquoted line in Isaiah 55 about God’s ways and thoughts being higher than our ways and thoughts. That verse is not saying that God is exceedingly smarter than humans. That’s obvious. That verse explicitly tells us what it is about God that is higher than our ways. Go read it. The verse right before tells you. It’s God’s mercy and pardon. God’s mercy and pardon are so generous that it goes beyond human comprehension. That is what is higher than our ways and thoughts. That’s what Jesus reveals in the Gospel through his acts, his teaching, his life, his death, and his resurrection.

This is what the Apostle Paul is summarizing in Philippians 2: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness and being found in appearance as a human. He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Now, you probably know that this passage is where we get the word kenosis, the pouring out, the self-emptying, or in the words of Simone Weil, the voiding of self. But this is not a self-emptying for its own sake. No, no, no.

The whole point is that this is what God’s love is. This is what God’s love is like. This is the thing about God that is higher than your thoughts. In this hymn, Paul tells us that this is the pattern of the Incarnation: Releasing privilege, not grasping for glory, emptying the ego, entering fully into the plight of those in trouble, even though the cost is shame and death. Further, Paul’s language makes it clear that he’s not telling us this in order to define some abstract theological thing that happened in eternity somewhere. Paul is giving this picture explicitly as an ethical injunction. That’s the introduction of the hymn. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility, regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let this same mind be in you…” and then we get the Christ hymn.

Okay, deep breath. So, how does this relate to gay people? When I was processing all that information about the seven texts against homosexuality and the biblical model of marriage and the history of the translation of the text – all that stuff – what I saw was that those questions are, at best, secondary to the Gospel itself.

Jesus came to reveal God’s nature. God’s nature is other-centered, co-suffering, love. So when Jesus explained his express purpose–”…so that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them and I in them.” – that also applies to gay and trans people. That means that when Jesus’ followers wonder how it is that they ought to relate to gay and trans people – when Jesus followers get all tangled up trying to sort out, “Why are people gay?” and is it a choice, or is it biological? And if it’s a choice, then there’s a moral aspect to it. If it’s biological, maybe there’s not, and can gay marriage really count as marriage, especially since they can’t make children and all the other brain-twisting shenanigans that we get up to when we get into those deep weeds–we forget that we have very clear guidance about how to relate to other people. “Let this mind be in you…” “Regard others as better than yourselves.” “Look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” This is our ethical injunction.

So, how then are we to relate to the queer community? The same way we’re called to relate to everyone in the world, through other-centered, self-poured-out, co-suffering love. Wash their feet. Invite them to the table. Seek them out like lost coins and lost sheep. Run to them like the lost son. Let them worship like the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her hair. Let them use their gifts in the body, like Matthew, the tax collector, and every other sinner who’s part of the church. Bless them when they want to enter into loving covenant relationships, because that’s one way we experience and practice the love of God, even though every single marriage falls short of that.

See, we get so preoccupied trying to parse whether being gay or trans is a willful choice or a matter of DNA and what that might mean for salvation. I know! I’ve done that homework. What I found at the end of the project was Jesus standing on the temple steps, thundering these words to me, “Woe to you, you hypocrite, for you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who want to enter to go in.”

“Wait,” you say, “Marc, you’re saying that Jesus came to show us God’s love. (Yeah) but the Bible also tells us to avoid sin. (Yes, it does,) and it seems to explicitly call homosexuality a sin. So aren’t you compromising what real Godly love is? “Great question. Thanks for asking. My answer is no, here’s why.

Let’s assume, for the sake of the next sixty seconds, that being gay or trans is a violation of God’s will and a grievous sin. Now, if you work through the resources that I provide to you, I think you will see that there are solid, credible biblical arguments why being gay is not sinful. That’s my current position. But for right now, for the sake of the question you asked, for the next 60 seconds, let’s assume that being gay or trans is a sin in the eyes of God.

Okay, Jesus shows us exactly how to relate to sinners, because Jesus shows us exactly how God related to sinners. What do the Gospels show? Jesus touches sinners even when his own religion says they’re untouchable. Jesus invites sinners to his table, even when this makes religious people accuse him of being immoral. Jesus tells us that the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to go and find the one. Oh, and also, Jesus dies on the cross for sinners, so that they can know about their union with the Father.

“But wait,” you say, “but wait, (because you’re good at interrupting) Are you saying that gay people can just go on being gay and God doesn’t care? Are you saying that everyone who is gay or trans is gay or trans by God’s design?” No, I’m saying that question is above my pay grade, and it’s also above yours. I’m not an expert on human sexuality. I am only a passionate and well-read amateur, but what I know is that the stew of human sexuality and gender is way more complicated than anyone wants to admit. The reasons that people experience same-sex attraction (or any attraction), the reasons that people experience gender dysphoria, are a complex weave of tangled threads that we may never be able to fully understand.

Maybe there are some people that God wants to heal, and in healing them, they will no longer experience those things. Maybe? I’m not ruling it out; I’ve just never seen it in real life. But I will tell you this: if that’s something God wants to do, God will do it in a way that is loving, which means it will not be coercive. It will not be manipulative. And, it will not be abusive. What I am saying is that my role, and I think the church’s role, is not to be the healer, if healing is even necessary, but to be the ones who hold open the seat at the table. We who follow Jesus are called to follow his example of other-centered, co-suffering love, to enfold people, to welcome them, to include them, to walk with them as they seek God, and to trust that the Spirit will do whatever the Spirit wants to do. As the Spirit works to help them align their way of being with the truth of their being, it is our job to love like Jesus and to join Jesus in his work, revealing the true face of the Father.

One final story from my journey. In January 2015, I was deeply in the middle of this course of study, this transition in my thinking. I was already sure that some of the views I had held were not only unbiblical, but they were actively counter to the way of Jesus. But I was still unresolved, and I was very conscious of the costs ahead of me as a pastor in a church that, while loving and kind, largely held the traditional view. Then I got an email from a pastor friend.

An organization called the Gay Christian Network was hosting a worship conference in Portland at the convention center, and word had gotten out that the Westboro Baptist Church was planning to come to that event and protest. Now, I don’t know if you remember Westboro, but for several years, they made it a point to show up at gay events and actively broadcast hate. They picketed the funerals of men who died from AIDS. They engineered social media campaigns against inclusive churches and pastors. They would show up at these events with signs and speakers and a crowd, and they would shout and sing the most horrific kinds of things at the people who were there. So this email that I received was organizing a counter-protest. They called it a “Love Wall.” This pastor was inviting Christians in the Portland area to come to the convention center and provide a barrier between the Westboro Baptist people and the folks entering the convention center who were just trying to gather to worship.

Well, as soon as I read this email, I knew that I needed to go. That morning, I was gearing up because it was a chilly, drizzly day, and my daughter asked where I was going. She was eight at the time. So, trying to explain things in a way that might make sense to her, I said that some folks were coming to Portland because they wanted to worship God with their friends (which she understood. That was something she did) and some other folks were coming to Portland to get in the way and keep them from worshiping God and to bully them. And I was going to go try to stop the bullies. Immediately, she asked if she could come along.

So, that’s how my daughter, Emerson, and I found ourselves standing as part of a crowd of about a hundred and fifty people lining the sidewalk between the light rail station and the convention center. The Westboro Baptist people showed up, and they started doing their thing. Shouting, singing songs that had familiar hymn tunes that you’d recognize at first, but when you actually keyed into the words, they were just filled with violent and threatening imagery. They were shouting condemnation. They were screaming Scriptures with rage. These people, the Westboro Baptist people, proudly Christian, were explicitly proclaiming not only eternal damnation on the conference goers in the next life, but every form of heinous pain and death in this one.

As the Westboro Baptist people rained down this condemnation, the folks in the Love Wall spoke their blessings. “Welcome to Portland. We’re glad you’re here. You’re loved. You’re not alone.” Then the Westboro Baptist people pushed toward the entry to try and get closer, and the Love Wall gently moved and blocked their way. Then the Westboro people turned up their speakers, and the Love Wall started singing to drown out the sounds of this sanctified hate.

Standing there in the rain, holding my daughter’s hand, singing worship songs so that hate could not be heard, I started crying. The words of Amazing Grace seemed to form a protective shield against the condemning invective that was raining down. In that moment, the tectonic plates of my past experience, my upbringing, my own homophobia, my study, and my desire to follow Jesus all ground together, and what was forced to the surface were the words of scripture that I had memorized as a child.

“What does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

“Learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed.”

“Truly, I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

By that point, I’d been part of… I don’t know, maybe 3000 church services in my life, and I had never experienced something that felt as sacred as that morning in the cold rain, standing between vile Christian hate and vulnerable people who just wanted to worship in a place they felt safe.

I know there are many layers to this conversation. There are questions about what a faithful queer Christian life would look like, questions about monogamy, questions about the impact of trauma and healing, questions about the shadow side. All of these things that become obstacles when the stark fact is this: If we believe that God loves all and that the work of the Spirit is reconciliation, and if we believe that God will ultimately be all in all, then all those other questions fade into secondary status, and only one thing remains. Jesus came to show us the true face of God, that this God, who is a mutuality of other-centered, co-suffering love, is our source, and that the closer we come to this God, the more our lives reflect this path. That’s why I finally accepted the full gospel that applies to everyone and became affirming, because it is not my job to condemn.

There’s one last challenge I often hear. “Marc, Marc, I hear you. Those are powerful experiences. But Mark, what if you’re wrong? What if you’re reading scripture wrong?” Well, I might be, but I’m challenged by the witness of two heroes of our faith, Moses and Paul, both of whom prayed what I think is the most completely kenotic prayer in all of Scripture. Moses, in Exodus 32, after the chaos of the golden calf incident, begs God in prayer, “But now, O Lord, please forgive their sin. But if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.” Paul echoes that prayer in Romans 9:3, when he says, “For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people.”

Both Paul and Moses were willing to give up their own eternal salvation as they understood it, if only that meant that the people they loved could be in the presence of God. I think those two prayers are perhaps the closest that people in Scripture have ever gotten to living out Philippians Two kenosis. Moses and Paul were doing what I think Jesus was doing. They were saying, “I will bear the shame, if that means they can be saved. I will bear the alienation, if that means they can be included.”

So maybe I am wrong. I’m certain that I’m wrong about a lot of my theology, but I have come to rest in my conviction that I’m willing to bear the shame of being wrong if that means my queer siblings can find sanctuary and know that they are fully loved, and perhaps in being loved will come to know the light of Christ, which will work its way in them in exactly the same way that I trust it to work in me.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Well, that’s the presentation I did at the School of Theology, and now you’ve got it. If you’d like to dig into this on your own, the reference guide that I mentioned is going to be available on my website. You can get it from that link on the screen or from the show notes.

Now, if you’d like to go through this material, not by yourself, with some guidance, I’m going to be teaching a 10-week course this fall that will offer a thoughtful, in-depth exploration of a Jesus-centered path to respectful and loving inclusion of LGBTQ people, as well as biblically-aligned support for full affirmation. We’ll tackle all the aspects of this: our own expectations and personal stories, and how to handle this conversation with empathy and respect. We’ll look at the key arguments for the traditionalist perspective, including an in-depth study of the Scriptures used to justify exclusion, including the historical, linguistic, and cultural context of those scriptures. And the course will conclude with a gospel-centered argument for full inclusion and affirmation.

I’m going to be teaching this class at my church in hybrid mode, so we’ll be in person here in Milwaukie, Oregon (South Portland) with Zoom access for people who want to be remote. The class is going to be on Thursdays from 7 – 8:30 pm. That’s Pacific time. It’s going to last ten weeks, starting September 4 and going through November 5. Now, to make sure that there’s space for discussion, space for this class is limited.

You can learn more, you can register at the link that’s on the screen, or that’s in the show notes. You can find more information there, but you don’t need me for any of this. All the books, all the resources that can help guide you through this process, are in the resource document that I mentioned earlier. The link will be on the screen, and in the show notes, you can download that for free. I’m just making that available to you so that you can go through this conversation on your own time when you’re ready to work through it.

Thanks for listening.

May you say no to the demands of ego. May you comfort those in mourning. May you stand with the meek. May you hunger more for right and just living. May you be merciful, even as your Father in heaven is merciful. May you grow in purity and have the courage to be a peacemaker. May you bear up under persecution and be willing to do what is right even when it costs you. May you be salt and light. Amen.

Notes for today’s episode, including that download and all other links that I mentioned, can be found at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW060.

Well, this is an episode that’s a little bit out of the ordinary, but it’s also my last episode for the summer. The next episode will be in August or September. But in the meantime, if you like this, there’s more stuff. Subscribe to Apprenticeship Notes, my email newsletter. It comes out monthly-ish (about 8 to 10 times a year). That newsletter includes an exclusive essay about the spiritual life that you won’t find anywhere else, insider commentary on my podcast and blog posts, books I recommend and more, and when you subscribe, you’ll get a free little book that I wrote called, The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. In that little book, I teach a spiritual practice that has been so helpful to me as I face the anxiety and uncertainty of our time, and I want to offer it to you. So subscribe to my email list; Get that book. You can get all that at www.MarcOptIn.com

Until next time, remember: in this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

An offhand comment by Dr. Jersak prompted this conversation. “We’re pushing back against the construction of a Christianity that’s the opposite of the Beatitudes. For those who don’t want to be susceptible to the lure of power-over Christianity, I recommend praying the Beatitudes every day . . . it is a furnace of discernment like none other.” Woah…

In a world where Christian leaders and many of their followers are increasingly espousing structures of power-over, saying empathy is a sin, and even co-opting the language of “Godly Hate,”2 For instance, “Christians must recover the lost virtue of Hatred. If not, Christianity will survive, but the West will be finished.” – Pastor Joel Webbon, Twitter message, May 19, 2025. there is a real urgency to re-center our practice on Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes.

In this conversation, Dr. Bradley Jersak and I explore the urgent need for Christians to re-center themselves in the Beatitudes as a guide for spiritual growth, ethical living, and community engagement. The need for this has only increased with the rise of Power-over ideologies such as Christian Nationalism, and forms of Christianity that are denying the way of Jesus in their actions.

Takeaways

Recommended Resources

Bradley is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, BC. He currently serves as the Principal of St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick, where he continues as the Dean and faculty member of SSU’s School of Theology & Culture. He also teaches peace studies courses with the Jim Forrest Institute. Through his books and seminars, Brad shares the good news that God is Love, perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, and that God’s love heals wounded hearts and empowers us to heal this broken world.

Marc Schelske 0:05
Hey, friends. I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth, following the way of Jesus. This is episode 59: “How the Beatitudes Could Save Us and The World.”

SPONSOR

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INTRODUCTION

The last podcast episode, about two months ago, was a panel discussion that I hosted as part of launching my new book, Walking Otherward. I wanted to have a discussion about how Jesus’ way of Other-centered, Co-suffering love might serve us in the current climate of division, antagonism, and lust for power. And so I invited three friends that I respect to discuss this question with me, Pastor Brian Zahnd, Dr Bradley Jersak, and Susan Carson. I titled that discussion “Following Jesus in the Face of Political Panic, Christian Supremacy and Creeping Fascism.” Now, if you haven’t listened to it yet, I recommend it to you. It seems like the conversation becomes more urgent and more relevant every passing day.

But about halfway through that conversation, Bradley, my friend and conversation partner today, made this comment. He said, “It seems to me that the thing we’re pushing back against is the construction of a Christianity that’s the opposite of the Beatitudes. For those who don’t want to be susceptible to the lure of Power-over Christianity, a Christianity built out of the desire to have power over others, I recommend praying the Beatitudes every day. It is a furnace of discernment like none other. There is no power-over theology or prophecy that can get through those first three Beatitudes. They will be fried before you get there. It is such an amazing shield of faith.” Well, we just moved right on from that and went on to discuss other things, but Bradley’s words rang like a tuning fork in my spirit.

I committed right then in that conversation to start praying the Beatitudes regularly. I wrote a responsive prayer based on the Beatitudes that our little church prayed at the close of every gathering through this entire season of Lent. I’ve included the Beatitudes in my own daily prayer liturgy. In the confusion and uncertainty of the moment we find ourselves in, Bradley’s suggestion felt to me like a needed anchor, and so I asked if he would come back to the podcast and have a conversation with me about the Beatitudes as a practice to anchor us in this present moment.

Dr. Bradley Jersak is the principal of St Stephen’s University, Director of St Stephen’s University School of Theology and Culture, and professor of religious studies with the Jim Forest Institute. He lives in Abbotsford, British Columbia, with his wife, Eden, who co-pastors the Bridge Church. He’s written over 20 books, including academic works, theology, and philosophy, and his must-read More Christlike trilogy, which I highly recommend to you.

Bradley’s a smart guy, and some of the vocabulary terms that pop up in this conversation are $64 words. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, here are some definitions to keep in mind. You’ll hear the idea of kenosis or kenotic theology mentioned. So these words come from a Greek word that Paul uses in Philippians 2 to describe Jesus’ Incarnation–kenao. That word means “to pour out” or “to empty.” So, kenosis is the kind of love that is pouring-out love, the self-sacrificial love. Kenotic theology is the theological framework that sees self-sacrificial love as the decisive quality of God. Just a side note. This is the big theological word that is used for the same thing I’m talking about when you hear me use the phrase, other-centered, co-suffering love. Bradley will also use the term kenarchy. This word derives from kenosis, and it refers to a form of government or a form of human organization that is governed by relationship and love. We’ll also talk about hegemony, but Bradley stops and defines it quite well, so I’ll just flag that and make sure you pay attention to the definition when it comes. All right. I started our conversation by asking Bradley how the Beatitudes have come to be so important to him.

THE CONVERSATION

Dr. Bradley Jersak 11:59
Well, thanks, Marc. I appreciate the question, How did these become so important to me? I do suppose that some of that was when I married into a Mennonite Church. They had a very gospel-centered theology, in a way that contrasted with the more Pauline emphasis when I was growing up. And I don’t mean that to say that they’re in competition. However, what I learned in the first twenty years about the Sermon on the Mount was that it was to lead us to almost despair, so that we would not actually obey it, but cast ourselves on Grace. Luther, or one of his disciples, had said that they were not really expected or invited to obey the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, to do so is sort of a denial of grace. This was Bonhoeffer’s critique as a Lutheran of a certain way of setting aside the practice of the Sermon on the Mount.

When I joined the Mennonites, and I was a pastor there for ten years, I saw how week after week after week, this was the ethical center of what they regarded following Jesus looks like. Within the Sermon on the Mount itself, we have what some would call the constitution of the kingdom of God. From Jesus’ own words: Who’s the wise person who builds their house on the rock? It’s the one who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice. That is not an invitation to cast myself onto grace because they’re impracticable. It is a call to follow Jesus, and that will look like these three chapters.

Now, I began to have that permeate my heart and life in a way that actually transformed me into, for example, someone who who had justified militarism and had my own kind of Just War Theory, into seeing that this was incompatible with what Jesus had called us to in the Sermon on the Mount. Then I began going on mountain hikes with Ron Dart. He’s a mentor of mine. He was the fellow who taught me mountain climbing. He also ended up supervising my PhD dissertation. A huge center of his teaching is the mountain and valleys of the Beatitudes that begin the Sermon on the Mount. He talked about going up hills and down hills and also used the analogy of respiration. There’s an inhale and an exhale to this. There’s a rhythm in these words of Jesus that, if we pay attention to them, will be transformed into blessed peacemakers who hunger and thirst for justice, who exude the mercy of God. And it just hooked my heart.

Then I discovered that in the Eastern Orthodox Church, it’s supposed to be a part of our daily prayer practice. So I’m like, well… then I’ll do that. I do think it’s the most important part of my prayer life. Actually, may I just cite them to you?

Marc Schelske 14:59
Yeah.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 14:59
I want to do it how I would do it when I pray, which is I introduce them from the perspective of the thief on the cross, who says to Jesus, when He has nothing to offer, “Jesus Christ, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And then, I begin to pray the Beatitudes, but the first one then is like Jesus’ answer to me. “Remember me when You come into Your come into your kingdom,” and he looks at me, that good thief, and he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek. They will inherit the land or the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice or righteousness (same word in Greek), they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy.” Not just get it back, but it will become part of their character. Blessed are the pure in heart. They will see God, and it’s only when you’ve had your heart cleansed then you can actually go into “Blessed are the peacemakers,” otherwise you’re a red-eyed, angry activist. The peacemakers will be called children of God. Not the Christians! Peacemakers will be called children of God.

And of course, once you do that, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness or justice. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And then he kind of departs from the rhythm. But we’ll add it because it’s another blessed there. “Blessed are those–you–who are persecuted, maligned, those who speak lies about you and evil about you for my sake. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for so they treated the prophets who came before you.” Then he goes into, and I pray this part too, “You’re the salt of the world, and you’re the light of the world, and let your light so shine.” Well, what would that look like? Oh, he’s just told us, right? The Beatitudes. This is what salt looks like. This is what light looks like. This is what Jesus’ version of the Fruit of the Spirit looks like. I commend that for daily prayer. It’s not so hard to add it to your phone as a daily reminder, and to take the one minute of your day to fill your hearts with something that actually looks like Jesus.

Marc Schelske 17:08
It seems such a different place to root your prayer. I wasn’t in a liturgical tradition, if you don’t count childhood liturgy, you know, “Now I lay me down to sleep” sorts of things. I didn’t have any liturgical prayers in my repertoire. I think my dad preached a sermon on the ACTS model of prayer. So Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and then at the end, once you’ve done that, then you can have your grocery list of prayer requests. Or, if you’re more elevated than that, it’s all the different people you’re praying for. You know, families and the pastor and missionaries and the president. God be with all those folks. All of those prayers are really, with the exception of “Jesus, forgive me for my sins,” all those prayers are really about a desire for God to make a change in the world, to change circumstances for somebody that I love, or to change circumstances in my life, or to change circumstances in the world. There wasn’t very much in the way I was taught to pray that had to do with formation. The formation was that you should pray. Christians should pray. This is what you should do. But praying the Beatitudes is pretty explicitly a formational process. You’re asking for the change in you.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 18:23
Yeah, it’s strange because you’re using Jesus’ words, but the way you’re doing this, you’re taking his words and you’re praying them into the soil of your own heart. “Oh, he said this. Plant that there. He said this. Plant that there.” So it’s an interesting kind of praying. It’s not the only praying I do, but there’s this real sense that I’m installing something.

So we’ve talked about a furnace. I love your analogy of the tuning fork. That’s just brilliant to me. It’s like, “Ding!” What has the resonance of truth to it? What harmonizes with the life of Christ? One thing I’ll say about it is that when Ron took me up the mountain, he really wanted me to know that the first half of each Beatitude–Blessed are the, you know, poor in spirit, mourning, meek… He went further than people like Dallas Willard, who sort of treated the first half as “Blessed are the losers.” Dallas Willard was in touch with this idea that these Beatitudes are for the outcasts, are for the outsiders, are for those outside the threshold of the In Crowd. But what Ron wanted to say is that there’s something deeper going on here besides being marginalized.

We do get pushback. There will be people who say, “Well, these aren’t virtues or something. This is like your need.” Well, that’s one level of reading it. But as you climb the mountain of the Beatitudes, you realize these are aspects of the life of Christ. So Benedict XVI called it “A veiled Autobiography of the life of Christ.” He’s telling you in words, and then will fulfill it with his life every day, and then ultimately. In His death and resurrection, what the Blessed One looks like. The Blessed One dies and rises again. But it’s not just the day of my actual death or martyrdom. What Pope Benedict said was that the Beatitudes transpose the death and resurrection of Jesus into the daily life of a Christian disciple. So he would say the first half of each Beatitude, Jesus fulfilled this in his way of living, which was dying, and his way of dying, which is his passion. He fulfilled the first half of each of those as his death, and then the second half of each Beatitude is the resurrection life of Jesus.

So, yours is the kingdom of heaven, right? You lay down your life and you receive the Kingdom, but then Benedict is saying, “What would that look like for someone who’s dying daily?” What would someone look like who is living in the resurrection power of Christ daily? So it’s the daily deaths and resurrections. It’s all there in the first one. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” those kenotic…

Marc Schelske 20:50
Right? Yeah!

Dr. Bradley Jersak 20:51
Emptying oneself–the way Ron Dart would put it is learning to say no to the demands of the ego, or even bankrupting the ego. So when Simone Weil talks about the first Beatitude, she compares it to Philippians 2. She says, in the first Beatitude, “Blessed are those (in French, she goes) who voided themselves—voided themselves! Then Philippians 2, she said, be like Jesus. Instead of grasping at privilege, he voided himself. So she makes a direct connection to that self-emptying.

Marc Schelske 21:51
Right, Okay.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 21:52
Self-will is just emptied in Jesus, and especially, you see it in the Garden of Gethsemane. And so she says, “This is what Jesus means by ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,'” Bankrupted egos, saying no to the demands of my cravings.

Marc Schelske 22:07
That’s so good. So I have never, before this moment, thought of the Beatitudes applying to Jesus, which is sort of weird to me. I had a very, very significant theophany moment with First Corinthians 13, going, “Hey, what if this is describing how God loves?” And, even the Fruit of the Spirit. What if this is describing the nature that we see in Christ? The faith of my childhood implicitly said that there is a way of being that Jesus was, which is special and holy, and elevated. He’s the sinless one, and like your narration earlier on, we can’t even aspire to that. That’s not for us. Jesus did what we couldn’t do, and therefore our only avenue is resting in the grace that God offers us, and our access to that is through what happens with Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and aren’t you glad?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 23:01
Imputed righteousness, instead of walking in it.

Marc Schelske 23:04
Right, exactly. So the Beatitudes have always been this sort of annoying enigma. You read them and you’re like, “This is really hard. It doesn’t seem practical. The only people who could really do this have to be retired saintly grandmas and monks, because they live in an environment where other people deal with all the hard stuff.” Kind of dismissed, really. Obviously, they’re words of Jesus; We can’t dismiss them, but dismissed in the sense that there is any direct sort of application. And yet, my heritage also has a very strong move toward the Imitation of Christ. We want to grow up to be like Jesus. We take on Paul’s language of maturing in the image. That is something we should be attempting, aspiring to, in grace, through the power of the Spirit.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 23:53
In grace, through the power of the Spirit, yeah. There can be a sense in which these are just another set of new laws. I mean, they should be what we’re fighting to have in the schools as over against the Ten Commandments. But no one ever does that. Why is that?

But I also want to say it is fruit. You know, it’s the Jesus version of the Fruit of the Spirit. “If you walk with me, these things will wear off on you. My character is going to transform you. You just walk with me.” And so it’s not an imitation apart from transformation; it’s from an inside-out living with Jesus. These things are going to begin to emerge.

Marc Schelske 24:33
Right.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 24:33
And I also like to normalize them. They can be for the super-spiritual, hyper monk or something, but then you just start thinking about each one, right? The poor in spirit, the one who puts others ahead of their own interests, the mother who will rock the baby when she just wants to sleep. That’s saying no to ego, right? And then, you know, mourning, Anyone can do that, but maybe, we could sit and mourn with others. It’s not just mourning for my sins. How about sitting with those who are mourning and learn to co-suffer with them. That’s not rocket science. There’s a hospice down the road where you can go to practice this. Meekness, that’s just gentleness, right? How can I be gentle with people? Well, that is hard. It takes transformation, takes grace, but it’s ultra practical, and it’s super normalized in real life.

Marc Schelske 24:34
Well, to even think of Jesus’ life through this sequence, right? You can just go down and go, “yes, of course, of course.” These are things he did, of course. And even the meek one, people react. Certainly, Americans react badly to the idea, thinking of it as sort of being a sacred call to being a doormat. Yet, Jesus is a great example of someone that we would not consider weak, but who is meek in his interactions with folks.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 25:59
Yeah, in fact, there’s this miscalculation where modern Christians and scholars have sometimes treated Greek as a very abstracted philosophical language as over against Hebrew. And it’s just simply not true. The Greek words used in this, regardless of what language Jesus spoke initially, are very pictorial. So the idea of meekness goes back to this: You take a wild horse with all of its rippling power in those giant muscles. It’s ready for war, but you domesticate it so beautifully that a child can feed it a sugar cube without being bitten or trampled. That’s meekness. What does that look like in the real world?

Well, in the real world, it looked like this. At Fresh Wind Church, when we were leading it, there was an ex-con there who was probably a participant in murder. He was a violent man, including violence against women. He’d been through prison, and he’d come out, and was overcoming his addictions. Eventually, a meekness had come over him that was only explainable by grace. Women would bring their crying children for him to hold. Okay, this is not doormat stuff. This is a powerful, violent man being transformed by the love of Jesus Christ into someone who wouldn’t harm a baby. He might still harm another gang member, but you know, that’s a start, right?

Marc Schelske 27:26
You have this experience of having this prayer be a daily, ongoing part of your life. You use the idea of sort of planting seeds in your own soul for this kind of transformation. So let’s talk about how this might be a resource for Christians today. A lot of folks are finding themselves in this place that feels very unmoored. Expectations that we have been used to having about what it means to be Christian are being toppled. We’re seeing Christian leaders who are making a shift in their language in a direction that feels very much like a pursuit of a kind of Christian hegemony, a pursuit of Christian authority in the political or social environment. For many of us, this feels antithetical to the way of Jesus. It feels like somehow this way of seeing Christianity, or this blending of Christian language and Christian practice with national patriotism, blending those things in a way where there’s this motive for a certain kind of Christianity to become dominant and in power in the country. Certainly, we know that it has been a temptation across church history. This is not new to us, but some of us are waking up to the fact that it feels present right now in a way that we have not been used to experiencing. Okay, so given that context, how might the practice of praying the Beatitudes be an anchor in that moment?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 28:59
I think we should start with a word you used, because the answer is right inside the word, and it’s a word not everyone recognizes, perhaps. You use the word hegemony. For those who don’t know that word, I want to give a basic definition. A hegemony is a kind of empire that accumulates resources to its center to increase its power over those on the outside. So this is what would happen. The British Empire, they would travel the seven seas. They would colonize these other nations, and they would take their resources back to England. Those resources then made England even more powerful. So, it is pulling resources into yourself to increase your power over the other. That’s a hegemony. What Jesus is describing as God’s kingdom and the character of those who practice Beatitude living, is the very opposite of that. Self-giving, kenosis, is a self-emptying of resources into the world, sowing what we have out there. And who knew? The kingdom of God advances and grows in the power of love, not through power-over but through service and foot washing and kissing the leper.

So when you use hegemony, that’s exactly the problem, anywhere a church has reverted from the kenarchy of Jesus, his self-giving kingdom, other-centered love, and become a hegemony. You’re not understating it. It is antithetical to Christ and His way. It is in direct opposition to God’s kingdom. And at that stage, I don’t know what the red line is for lamps being removed from the lampstand…

Marc Schelske 30:45
Right, right! Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 30:47
But we used to think about it in terms of a hypothetical. Now I think we’re probably seeing it in real time. That’s really dangerous. And so I’m just going to back up. This has now permeated the land to the point where it’s harder and harder to identify with the Christian brand, because it’s antithetical to Christ in great ways. But where I first ran into it would have been in the prophetic movement. I really believe that God speaks today. I believe and practice hearing his voice, and I believe that’s a ministry that our churches can participate in. What happened, and I can locate it in time, especially through the renewal movement. There was a lot of good stuff happening, but it inherited a kind of prophetic ministry that was grandiose. And it would say encouraging things, but like grandiose things like this, “Marc, the Lord would say to you, go get your passport, because he’s going to make you an apostle to the nations. And he’s going to make you a history maker. And he’s going to make you great, blah, blah, blah.” It was all very much around flattering your ego.

Marc Schelske 32:06
Yeah, bigness, big things, big accomplishments.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 32:08
I see big things for you, very big things. Marc, so I learned a few things the hard way. After resentment, grandiosity is the number two cause of relapse among addicts, because grandiosity makes you think you’re above the rules, so you feel a sense of entitlement to use and abuse. Well, guess what the prophets did? They entitled us to use and abuse. They were just describing how to have a hegemony.

We were also really into fire. Lord, come with your fire, the fire of the spirit, the fire. They love that stuff. I love that stuff. But then I read in Proverbs, “The word of the Lord is pure, like silver refined in the fire seven times.” So I’m like, “What is the fire that will refine the word of the Lord?” And I thought, if I install the beatitudes in my heart as a furnace, and I pass every one of these charismatic or renewal-based prophetic words through the fire of the Beatitudes, almost nothing gets through. Poverty of spirit, Mourning, and Meekness? Grandiosity will be ashes by the time it gets there, and therefore, that is not the pure word of the Lord.

So, I would go into renewal churches, and I’d say, “Oh, we really want to engage the prophetic this weekend, and we want to be accurate prophets, and we don’t want tobe deceived. I don’t want to be deceived. Come back Sunday, and I’ll give you the Seventh Fire.” And then I would just teach them the beatitudes. Then I realized, as I’m doing this, it was not only necessary for a reformation of that one little stream of prophetic movement, but now in our world, this is a problem everywhere. It’s so broad that every Christian in the world should be praying the Beatitudes every day. This may be the antidote to Christian nationalism, because Christian Nationalism is a hegemony.

Marc Schelske 34:04
There are certainly folks who haven’t spent time with the academic language. You know, they hear “Christian nationalism,” and they’re like, “Oh, I’m not allowed to love my country. Is that what you’re saying?” No, no, no, that’s not it. But then, instead of being vague, the Beatitudes would actually say, “here’s a practical vision.” What would it look like to love your country as a person who is poor in spirit? What would it look like to love your country in a way that is peacemaking? In a way that hungers and thirsts for righteous and just behavior? Right? That, right there, reveals the problem of Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism does not ultimately care about right and just behavior. It only cares about behavior that elevates itself, right?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 34:41
Yep.

Marc Schelske 34:41
So, if the Beatitudes call me to be a person who hungers for right and just behavior, then my loving my country is going to begin to look different. Maybe I’m going to become the kind of person who wants to hold my country accountable when my country behaves in ways that are neither right nor just. Maybe I will become the kind of person who wants to see my country invest its resources more in peace-making rather than in war-making. I may identify that I have a deep love of my country. I might use the word patriot, but the tone of what that means is gonna be different having passed through, in your language, this furnace.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 35:18
Totally. Just to help people with some definitions here, then. A patriot is somebody who loves their country. Even if you consider yourself a citizen of heaven in exile, we’re still called to bless the country we’re in all the ways we can. This is Jeremiah. He says, “The Lord says, you’re in exile. Go ahead. Buy Houses, marry wives, have businesses, and just make sure that you are a blessing to the land that I planted you.” And that’s not a problem. You could say I’m a patriot of Canada, in that sense. I care about what happens here, and I want to speak into it, because I want it to thrive, right?

But Christian Nationalism is another thing. First of all, it’s an -ism. An -ism is an ideology, and it’s not just Nationalism, but let’s start there. Nationalism is about the dominance of a people group. So German Nationalism is not patriotism of Germany. It is that the Germanic peoples would dominate all of the countries where they’re planted. So that’s why Germany needed to take over Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Poland. And it was a hegemony because it needed the resources to feed the German nationals, so they’re pulling in these resources. So Nationalism is about people groups. Christian nationalism, then, is about the dominance of a Christian nation, usually white, but it’s about dominance. It’s about power-over. Like Christians should have power over America or Canada. They should have power over the government. They should be in charge, to the exclusion of others. That’s not exactly patriotism in any way. It’s dominance versus kenosis.

Marc Schelske 36:57
That connection to kenosis is such a good one because it contextualizes the invitation of the Beatitudes in a way that makes kenosis–the pouring out from Philippians 2–so much more tangible. What does it mean for me to be a person living out this kind of kenotic love? What does that really look like?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 37:18
Yeah,

Marc Schelske 37:19
I’m presently not being invited to be crucified. So, what does that look like for me? And then the Beatitudes say, well, it might look like not being driven by ego. It might look like intentionally looking for ways to make peace. It might look like desiring, craving, coveting right and just behavior in your community and being part of that. Those are much more tangible. And then I think of ways we can begin in our own circumstances, thinking about how I make a difference where I find myself? Well, these are some very practical ways. Your offhand comment earlier was sort of mind-breaking. What would it be like if every Christian were praying this prayer every day? Because it seems like a lot would have to change about the nature of our way of engaging the world,

Dr. Bradley Jersak 38:05
Yeah, and even just to pray it mindlessly, because you never know what’ll grow down there, right? I do have people ask, “Are you saying then that there’s no place for participation in government?” Oh, no, but it’s a participation of civil servanthood. So my father was a civil servant in the government for 40 years, helping farmers who were going bankrupt not to hang themselves, helping small businesses with some funding so they could hire summer students who couldn’t find jobs otherwise, and helping little communities apply for grants so they could have their museum or their library or their smallest bridge in town upgraded. I mean, that’s quite practical. It’s not non-engagement. It’s just service-focused rather than power-focused.

Marc Schelske 38:51
It seems like even just the one Beatitude, you know, hungering and thirsting for righteousness–if we understand that dikaiosynē encompasses both what we think of as holy living and just living, equitable living towards those around you. Wouldn’t that open up a pretty constructive path if someone were like, “I want to be on city council.” Okay, great. Go be on the city council as a person who hungers and thirsts for righteousness. Yeah. I would love my school board, my city council, the guy who runs the water district, I would love all those to be people who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Seems like that would be a benefit to all of us.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 39:27
Yeah. So, for example, the mayor of my city right now really cares about homeless people. He ran a service station, and he just saw two blocks away the homeless camps, and then he got on the city council. He said “I don’t know what to do, but let’s talk about, let’s have a conversation.” And now we elected a mayor, and he’s making tangible efforts to care for the most vulnerable people in our community right now, and I love it. He’s using his space in self-giving service, rather than power-over dominance.

Marc Schelske 40:02
This is so intriguing to me. I think that in the formation of the kind of Christianity I grew up in, we certainly cared about people’s behavior. I mean, sometimes way too much, in ways that seem unhealthy now. But that formation was really more about becoming skilled in certain Christian practices, right? Like becoming good at studying the Bible in a certain way, becoming good at retaining Bible verses in your memory, and becoming good at participating in certain kinds of church events. And even then, when you had gifts–you know, I’m a musician, so what’s one of the best things you can do as a Christian musician? Well, you use it to help the church service. So, you become part of the church service. Even to the point that, I think, folks whose gifts weren’t the kind of gifts that show up on stage very well could sometimes feel like there really wasn’t a place for them to be Christian, to enact their gifts for the body. The Beatitudes present a formation that’s really not about any of that. The point here is not to become more skilled at your Christian practices. The point is, I mean, is this crazy to say–to become more like Jesus?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 41:22
Yeah, II Corinthians 3, towards the end, it says, anyone who turns to the Lord, they’re going to behold Him. And as they behold Him, the end of beholding is that they’ll be transformed, transfigured into the image of Christ. So, I behold Him, and that’s what changes me. Well, anybody can either read or hear the Jesus of the gospel. That’s a way to behold Him. It is about saying, “I’m gonna follow Jesus. I’m gonna watch how he did it. I’m going to let that rub off on me. I’m going to let him–his words and his actions–change how I see people.” What’ll happen is that you won’t read very far into the Sermon on the Mount until you’re like, “Well, wait a minute. But what about this? And I don’t know about that?”

So, one of the great griefs I have about our culture right now is how I can spout the very words of Jesus without commentary in a conversation, and the percentage of Christians who who reject what he says is assaulting So, for example… oh, I always try to quote the fellow who who did this study because it’s good to give credit, but his name has slipped my mind. He’s a Church Health Consultant who goes to churches all over. Hundreds of churches, and they range from conservative to progressive, and he always likes to put those words in front of them. He’ll say, you know, how do you feel about these words? Your enemies, bless them, pray for them, forgive them. The percentages, after thousands of surveys in churches where the people doing them were active. These are the people who show up for a Church Health Conference, not the Sunday or even Christmas Christians. 74% of conservatives said that it is compromising with unrighteousness, and 72% of progressives said that it is complicity with injustice. So these are active Christians across the spectrum, at almost three-quarters, who don’t like these words. Well, neither do I, but just stay there then and undergo them, and let them press on you. Argue with Jesus about it. Ask your whatabouts. But then let these words talk. This is the amazing thing. If we sit with the things that discomfort us rather than evade them or interpret them away, it might help us to change.

Marc Schelske 43:23
That feels really wise and helpful in this moment. I think that most of us would say, if I’m going to pray a passage from scripture, it would be a lot more comforting to pray the 23rd Psalm. There are passages like that that soothe my limbic system and help me visualize a better future, and I want to pray those because they feel more comforting. But the Beatitudes are inviting us to be part of the process of bringing comfort to the world.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 44:33
Yeah.

Marc Schelske 44:35
There’s a lot about the way the world is that’s uncomfortable. It’s a uniquely modern problem of people who look a lot like me, socially, economically, and ethnically, that we’ve been able to build lives where not a lot challenges our sense of comfort. And so then we’ve built churches like that. Don’t challenge our sense of comfort. We get bugged when the pastor preaches something that is pointed.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 45:06
Let’s use that as a segue for a moment, moving from an individualistic reading of the Beatitudes into a corporate reading. So this is not just what the Christian could look like if they imitate Christ, but it is what Jesus’ alternative society will look like. When Gandhi was reading this daily and putting it into practice, he said that if people took the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount seriously and really put them into practice, it would not only solve the problems of Christianity or of India, but of the whole world. It is a prophecy par excellence, if practiced. And I think that’s the proof of it.

So often we’re like, “Yeah, but what about this?” And we make a hypothetical that we don’t have to obey. But Jesus says it’s, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” That’s the children of God. And he says, (This is from Chapter 7) “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will unto the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” That’s a challenging thing, but it also smears the boundaries really badly. And it tells you that someone who may name the name of Jesus may not be following Jesus at all. It could just be an incantation they use. And then there is someone who would not think to claim the name of Jesus, and is unlikely to darken the door of a church, and yet they’re living this way. It’s very possible that they might have entered that sort of Kingdom reality.

That makes me ask this: if you have Christians who aren’t following Jesus, and if you have people who have other faiths or no faith, who aren’t claiming the Christian brand, how do you know which ones are following Jesus? Oh, I know! The Beatitudes. Turning to Christ will probably look like this at some point. From the perspective of the thief on the cross who has nothing left to offer, they can pray this and see what Jesus does by way of death and resurrection in them.

CLOSING REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 47:16
Bradley quoted the words of Pope Benedict the 16th: “The Beatitudes transpose the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ into the daily life of a Christian disciple.” I don’t know about you, but this is what I need. I grew up in a church with a very strict list of behaviors that were acceptable for Christians, and I inherited the legalistic heart to go along with it, but what Bradley is suggesting with the Beatitudes is something completely different. Rather than a new list of rules to obey, this scripture becomes a furnace of discernment. I love that.

As I face the struggles of my life or the struggles in my church, as I think about how to participate in the conversation and politics of my country. I need guidance. When I take my concerns, my questions, and I run them through the Beatitudes, I submit myself to the Beatitudes, I can start discerning more clearly where self-centered, ego-defending ambition is poisoning my perspective.

Ever since that book launch live-stream, when Bradley made his off-handed comment, I’ve been praying the Beatitudes. I try to pray them every day, and already, in just that short time, I’ve seen myself become more aware of my ego in my transactions, my interactions with others, more aware of the marginalized around me, and even have begun feeling more courage to stand with those that our society weighs down with unnecessary burdens. There have been a handful of situations where I wasn’t sure what to do, and by actually taking my concern through the furnace, I had clarity about what was the right next step. So, following Bradley, I just want to recommend this practice to you. We’re facing enormous difficulties in our world right now, so much division, so much pain, and even deep disagreements about what is true. In a moment like that, we need an anchor that is deeper than our own thoughts, and I think the Beatitudes offer us exactly that.

May you say no to the demands of ego, may you comfort those in mourning, may you stand with the meek, may you hunger more for right and just living. May you be merciful, even as your Father in heaven is merciful. May you grow in purity and have the courage to be a peacemaker. May you bear up under persecution and be willing to do what is right even when it costs you. May you be salt and light.

Thanks for listening.

The notes for today’s episode, and any links mentioned, can be found at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW059. Also, I mentioned that I wrote a responsive prayer version of the Beatitudes that our little church prayed at the close of every service during Lent. Well, I put that together for you in a nice PDF that you can get from my website. That’ll be linked in the show notes too.

Did you like this? Did you find this conversation helpful? Well, there’s more where that came from. I already gave you my whole pitch to subscribe at the beginning of the podcast today, so I don’t need to say anything more about that now. You can opt in if you want, at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, remember in this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

We stand in a dire historical moment, and one of the questions that is swirling for many of us is about what it means to be a Christian right now. There are folks wearing the label Christian, many in good faith, who are endorsing things that seem so plainly unlike Christ. The chaos is swirling and it is all coming at us so fast that we are being overwhelmed. Because this is so important, I invited some friends to talk about this crisis, and how Other-centered, Co-suffering love can lead us.

In this conversation, motivated by the launch of my new book, Walking Otherward: Forty Meditations on Following Jesus’ Path of Other-centered, Co-suffering Love, Susan Carson, Dr. Bradley Jersak, and Brian Zahnd discuss how this path might help us face the moment.

Takeaways

Recommended Resources

Susan is an author, speaker, podcaster, pray-er, and lifelong unlearner. She’s the founder and director of Roots&Branches Network, a listening and healing prayer ministry in Cincinnati, Ohio. With her team, she helps people encounter God in ways that transform and restore.

Bradley is an author and teacher based in Abbotsford, BC. He currently serves as the Principal of St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick, where he continues as the Dean and faculty member of SSU’s School of Theology & Culture. He also teaches peace studies courses with JFI.SSU.ca and is a regular Open Table Conference crew lecturer. Through his books and seminars, Brad shares the good news that God is Love, perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, and that God’s love heals wounded hearts and empowers us to heal this broken world.

Brian is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He is also a pastor-theologian who has authored many books. Brian is enthusiastic about music, literature, mountains, and long-distance pilgrimages.

Marc Schelske 0:05
Hey, friends. I’m Marc Alan Schelske. This is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth, following the way of Jesus. This is episode 58: How Can Other-Centered, Co-suffering Love Provide a Way Forward in the Face of Political Panic, Christian Supremacy, and Creeping fascism. Okay, that is way too long of a title for a podcast episode. I’m gonna have to figure something else out. But anyway, that’s what we’re talking about.

SPONSOR

Today’s podcast is made possible by Walking Otherward. That is my new book, and it’s out. It’s in the wild. It can be ordered at bookstores. You can get it in all the book places, and it’s such a sigh of relief to finally see this thing out there living its own life. Today’s podcast is a conversation motivated by this book that was part of my online book launch party, so it seemed only right to name Walking Otherward as the sponsor for the podcast.

So, who’s this book for? It’s for folks who suspect that there’s more to the way of Jesus than what most current versions of Western Christianity are offering. It’s for folks who have had enough of control and manipulation and self-righteous pontification. Jeff Mears, a friend of mine, called it a devotional for the deconstructing. He’s right, even though I would never have put it in those terms. But the deconstruction here is away from forms of faith that are about using power-over or using the Bible to exclude others and justify exploitation.

Walking Otherward is a collection of forty-one short essays structured as a daily devotional that follows the gospel passages, narrating the final weeks of Jesus’ life as he heads toward the cross. With these scriptures, I’m asking the reader to reflect on our own attitude, how we see God, ourselves, and others. I’m inviting us to make a shift, to move away from self-centered, ego-defending ambition, toward Jesus’ way of other-centered, co-suffering love. I wrote this because I’ve seen a glimpse of a better way, and I want to invite you outside the gates managed by stingy religious gatekeepers, driven by fear. My friend, theologian Bradley Jerzak, calls this way a more beautiful gospel.

Intrigued? Well, now you can get Walking Otherward: Forty Meditations on Following Jesus’ Path of Other-Centered Co-suffering Love in all the normal book places. You can learn a bit more about it, see endorsements, reviews, and even read a sample chapter at this website: www.walkingotherword.com.

INTRODUCTION

Today’s podcast episode is out of the normal pattern in several ways. First, what I’m about to share with you is an edited excerpt of a live online event I did a couple of weeks ago. This event was the online launch party for my new book, Walking Otherward. Now, book launch parties are supposed to be celebrations of the book, but I’d felt for some time that sort of party wasn’t right for this book.

The world around us is a mess. Much of the church seems caught up in this fever dream of power, playing chaplain to a regime in my country that every day acts more and more autocratic. The most painful revelation has been the shocking number of my fellow Americans who seem excited about this shift. In this historic moment, the question of what it means to be Christian and how Christians can resist this shift is top of mind. So, instead of having a traditional rah-rah book launch, I invited some friends to have a conversation with me about this subject.

So first, let me introduce you to the friends you will hear in this recording. Susan Carson is a friend of mine who served as the Launch Manager for this book. She and I met in our graduate program at St. Stephen’s University and connected over our hopes for a more life-giving way of being Christian. Susan is also an author, she’s a spiritual director, she leads a prayer and healing ministry in Cincinnati, Ohio called the Roots&Branches Network.

The second friend you’ll hear is Pastor Brian Zahn. He’s been a long-time mentor of mine and is now a new friend. He’s the pastor of Word of Life Church in St Joseph, Missouri, and a public theologian. His writing has been deeply influential to me in the past few years and even formed the background to why I got started writing the book Walking Otherward. As luck or circumstances or God would have it, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks with him last spring on a study tour of Türkiye and Greece.

The third voice you’ll hear is my friend, Dr Bradley Jersak. He’s a theologian, a teacher, a Reader in the Orthodox Church. Bradley’s writing is another deep influence of mine, and I had the distinct pleasure of having him be the supervisor for my master’s thesis.

So, the question I asked my friends to discuss with me was this: How can other-centered, co-suffering love provide a way forward in the face of political panic, Christian supremacy, and creeping fascism?

Now, before I turn you over to the recording, I have to mention this event was done via Zoom, and apparently, I did not understand how Zoom recording works. The audio throughout is excellent, but Zoom itself made many weird and unexpected decisions about who to focus on during the event, so I’ve done my best to edit the video so that it’s watchable. Learned a lot. So sorry for the less-than-ideal video footage, but I hope that the wisdom found in this conversation is much greater than the irritation of Zoom’s annoying behavior. Here we go.

THE CONVERSATION

I am really excited to have a chat with this crew here tonight for a number of reasons, but I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the impact that Brian and Bradley have had on me, personally, and on the book that you all have. I think that it’s not an exaggeration to say that the book wouldn’t exist without them, and it’s definitely not an exaggeration to say that the thought behind it wouldn’t be what it is without their influence.

I’ve been following Brian since 2017, I think. I think maybe Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God was my first experience of Brian, and I was sort of taken aback to hear this guy who sounded like a charismatic preacher who was saying things that were so in line with intuitions I’d been having that I didn’t stereotypically place into the mouth of a pastor on the stage of a big church. And yet, following that path and since having read all of his books, I’ve just been challenged so deeply to keep the gospel picture of who Jesus is central, not just as my picture of Jesus, but as the way that I imagine God entirely.

Because of that, Brian’s been kind of a mentor at a distance–you know, one of those folks that you’ve got the books on the shelf and you’ve read them some multiple times, and you listen to what they say on the internet and consider them a mentor. And then last year, thanks to Bradley, I had the opportunity to do a study tour in Greece and Türkiye, which Brian was on. We talked about early church fathers, and we walked through ancient Greek cities that Paul was in. We talked about what it must have been like to be there and how the dots connect from those places to our own ministries today. I got to see Brian as a real human being, not just a voice on a stage somewhere. I really loved that experience and came to trust him at a deeper level. And so, when he was willing to write the foreword to this book, it was just an incredible joy and honor for me.

My connection to Brian is wrapped up in my connection to Bradley. I was thinking back. I honestly can’t remember when I first ran across Bradley. I suspect it might be through the Open Table circle. The Open Table conferences started here in Portland, so that might be where I originally ran into you, Bradley. I’m not really sure. Very much like Brian, some of Bradley’s books just really stunned and cracked open my brain. His Beautiful Gospel series put pieces together that I had been wrestling with from Scripture and the footnotes of other books I’d been reading and spiritual intuition that I’ve been having, and and gave me permission to name some things that I hadn’t been brave enough to name. And then COVID came along and Bradley suckered me into a master’s degree program… that’s not true. It’s not his fault. But I ended up in a master’s degree program, which has been one of the highlights of my adult life. There, I got to meet the human being, Bradley, and we became friends.

So, the thought process and theology behind this book are deeply shaped by both of these guys. I’m just so deeply indebted, and I’m thrilled and honored to be able to have even a short conversation tonight about what this way might mean for us as followers of Jesus. So, thanks, guys.

Brian Zahnd 9:04
You’re welcome.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 9:06
Thanks, happy to be here. The only correction I’d make is that we’re dear friends. Dear friends.

Marc Schelske 9:12
Oh, that’s lovely. Thank you. We’re dear friends. I feel that way. Alright, so here’s the big question. It’s way too big of a question for us to solve, but I think it will give us a space to talk about some things that are important. So we find ourselves, as Susan mentioned, in a dire historical moment. The political disagreement that’s always been present in society has metastasized into dogmatic polarization. Certain leaders, some of them Christian leaders, seem to be aggressively pushing toward a kind of supremacist regime where certain kinds of Christianity are the official religion of at least the country that I’m part of. (I know we have folks in the Zoom tonight from multiple countries.) and there’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of perspective that the people who disagree with me are my enemy, and they want bad things for me, and so we must fight. There’s a lot of this in the air right now, and that is leaving a lot of us worried and wondering what to do.

I think Christians, in particular–as I’ve had many conversations in the last few weeks–are wondering what to do. What is the Christlike thing to do at this moment? And so I wanted to start by just asking your thoughts on why it seems like in so many places, the church–and I’m using that language to refer broadly to all of our siblings around the world–why does the church seem to fall so easily into the temptation to collude with this mess, or, on the other hand, seem to be standing so passively watching it all unfold. What do you think about that?

Brian Zahnd 10:53
I think it’s very easy right now to be overwhelmed, but I’m not despairing in any way. I think it’s important to understand that when the New Testament talks about our citizenship being in heaven, that’s to be taken actually quite seriously. Paul writes that as a Roman citizen. It’s valuable to him. It gets him out of a few scrapes here and there. Eventually, the Empire is going to cut his head off, but I mean, he’s able to use that citizenship to his advantage on multiple occasions.

But when Paul says our citizenship is of heaven, he really means that, and he really thinks that way. The empires of this world are always going to be, to some degree or another, Antichrist. That’s the nature of the beast. That’s kind of a double entendre, the idiom and then just the nature of the beast. I think we’re maybe surprised when we shouldn’t be. I’ll speak frankly here for a moment. I think that whereas maybe a lot of people who might be joining us tonight would be comfortable with speaking of America as an empire (I’ve been doing that for 20 years, and I think people get that) but I think maybe we thought it was like a maybe a little better than it really is.

Marc Schelske 12:23
Right..

Brian Zahnd 12:23
What concerns me most is to see my brothers and sisters sometimes, as you already alluded to, colluding with the powers that be. That’s been a mistake the church has made repeatedly for the past seventeen centuries. I wish we could get beyond that, but that’s where my real concern lies. I’m not a politician. I don’t belong to a party. I do live in America, and so I’m affected by various things, but when the day is done, I’m really a citizen of the kingdom of the heavens.

And so my response, as a pastor, has been to lean into the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let Jesus do the heavy lifting. Jesus shines through. And if we can just draw people’s attention to the living Christ, then we don’t have to do all the work and change all the minds. Let Jesus shine. That’s what I like about your book.

So, this is a book we’re launching at the beginning of Lent because it’s a book to be read during Lent. I’m old enough to remember when Lent was an exclusive Catholic thing. Maybe a high Anglican here and there would talk about Lent, but for the most part, outside of the Catholic world, nobody was talking about Lent. That has changed, and it’s been changed dramatically, increasingly, year by year. I think it indicates that we long for rhythm and roots. So, we’re drawn to the church calendar with its rhythms and its rootedness in the Gospel story of Jesus Christ. Just inviting people to really engage with Jesus by seriously considering the gospel texts–that’s super important pastoral work.

This coming Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday. I was reading some church fathers on this today. Origen says, Do you want to see the transfiguration? You can’t climb up on that mountain that they were on, but what you can do is go to the Gospels, pay attention, and you will see Jesus being transfigured before your eyes. And in his Transfiguration, we find our transfigurations.

Marc Schelske 14:51
I do want to hear from Brad and Susan, but I will just connect the dot, because as you talked about the value of Lent and focusing on Christ, one of the questions that we’re going to have next I think you answered, which is, what are our resources as we face this time of chaos and uncertainty? That’s a perfect example. We’ve got to go deeper into a real and nuanced and careful reflection on who Jesus is.

Brian Zahnd 15:17
I mean, you do this in your book, Marc. We’re engaging with Jesus. Each reading is about what Jesus is doing. What we’re doing is we’re actually on the road with Jesus, headed towards Jerusalem. You set it up perfectly. We’re to take up our cross and follow Jesus. There is a resistance to that because that sounds like loss and pain and death and suffering. Sometimes it does involve that, but we know that on the other side of that is resurrection. And so I don’t think we have to feel like we have to change everybody’s mind. And if you do feel that way, well, good luck, you know.

Marc Schelske 15:55
Right?

Brian Zahnd 15:55
That’ll drive you insane. Rather, our work is more modest. It’s to gently but persistently point people to Jesus and then trust that Jesus, because he actually is the living Christ, can be the one to bring about change that we can’t bring about.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 16:16
One thing that Brian didn’t address in your original question is what made the church so susceptible to this. Maybe we can just nod to it on our way to these other things that I think are more important because it’s speculative. You’ve mentioned chaos, you’ve mentioned confusion, and I think we’re in that period on a grand scale. So, there’s a temptation that comes when you feel like things are slipping, and the temptation is to power and specifically to power-over.

Marc Schelske 16:45
Yes, right?

Dr. Bradley Jersak 16:46
And when you can get a little whiff that maybe we could have that if we get in bed with partisan politics! Maybe we could have some certitude. Maybe it’s better just to be told what to do than to wonder what to do. Those are some of the temptations I think make people susceptible. But I think Brian’s exactly right that the solution, then, isn’t, “Well, it’s our job to go fix that.”

He mentioned despair. I’ve been having this thought that we are both tempted to despair and invited to despair. And so the temptation to despair is to see all this and just go quiet on it, right? It’s just all hopeless. I’m tempted to paralysis, despondency, and resentment because I’m despairing good things. But I think Jesus is inviting us to despair, too. To despair of fixing things the way the world fixes things. To try to push back at partisan politics with partisan politics, to choose our emperor instead of the other one. Despair of that! The subtitle of your book really matters to this. So can you read it?

Marc Schelske 17:58
Yeah. 40 Meditations on Following Jesus’ Path of Other-Centered, Co-Suffering Love.

Bradley Jersak 17:59
So, following Jesus. And it’s a path that I identify specifically with the Sermon on the Mount. That path is infused with a way of being that is other-centered and co-suffering. Those are words all of us have really embraced. While we preach the gospel, we also enter into a kind of allyship, which is absorbing the violence of others in order to put a stick in the spokes of the wheel of the cycle of violence. But (and I’m getting this from my colleague, Andrew Klegger), we can’t impose that calling on others, especially the victims of oppression.

Marc Schelske 18:46
Right.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 18:47
So, I don’t say to, let’s say, a Gazan, “You need to practice co-suffering love and radical blah, blah, blah.” No, no, that’s for me to do.

Brian Zahnd 18:54
Yeah.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 18:55
And the other thing that Andrew says is that we cannot change the world quickly. But we also know we’re dripping in privilege to say, “Take the slow route” when there are urgent needs. But it’s also true that the kind of exercises we do as we’re journaling, using your book, and deliberately, slowly following the path of Jesus–that’s required. I’m not out to fix the world. I am out to participate in an alternative society that looks like the way of Jesus.

Brian Zahnd 19:23
When you forsake patience and think, “I have to speed this up. I have to speed Jesus up,” That’s how you become Judas. We all know that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Why? Why a kiss? Why does Judas come up and greet him? Why, if he’s just doing it for the money? Go on, take the money and run! He just stands in the shadows and points and says, “That guy right there. Yeah, alright, see ya. I’m out of here. I got my 30 pieces of silver.” I think that’s not what’s going on. Judas wants to be a disciple. He wants to force Jesus to fight, to back Jesus into a corner, and then Jesus will use the miraculous power that Judas knows that he has to launch this war against the occupying Romans. He’s tempting Jesus to do what the devil tempted Jesus to do in the third temptation in the wilderness.

I think we have to resist that. I’m thinking about Alan Kreider’s book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. The early church grew up under nothing but despotic, oppressive regimes, but they were just patient. They believed that Jesus was Lord and that the world would be saved, but they just didn’t see it necessarily as their job to force it to happen. What they were more interested in was creating alternative communities within the Roman Empire that lived by a completely different ethic, a completely different vision of how humans could share life together. And so their own communities were this alternative society that Jesus called the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God.

I’m always struck by Origen’s debate with Celsus, the pagan philosopher and polemicist against Christianity. Oregin’s ultimate apologetic is, “You don’t believe that our communities are really different and that they actually do function through love, through actual altruistic love? Then come to our churches and see. Just check it out.” I wonder how many of us would dare to say, “Here’s my ultimate argument that the kingdom of Christ is real. You can see it lived out day by day in our local churches.” I think some would be nervous to do that, but I think that’s the hope, to actually become communities of Christlike co-suffering, other-oriented love that actually plays out. Not in perfection, but in an actual, real experience that people can see with their own two eyes,

Marc Schelske 22:02
Rght! It’s organic; it’s not mechanized. This is Bradley’s language–it’s rooted in consent and participation rather than hierarchical control. It’s vulnerable. Maybe this is the tying point back to when Bradley said that the struggle that causes the church to fall into this is that fear that comes up, that uncertainty, the struggle with the way of Jesus–this other-centered, co-suffering way–is that it is also a call to vulnerability. That’s not the thing I most want when I’m feeling at loose ends. I want a guarantee. I want to feel secure. I want to know that my investment is going to pay off. The call of the cross is the opposite. It’s vulnerability. It requires trust that God is actually at work in the larger picture. It isn’t up to me to make the outcome be the outcome. I’m participating in what God is doing. And that’s a very vulnerable position to take.

Brian Zahnd 23:00
That’s what your book’s about, Marc!

Marc Schelske 23:06
Susan, is there anything in your thoughts that this is sparking?

Susan Carson 23:09
Well, fear, I think, is at the heart of it. The thing that keeps coming to mind for me is a quote I heard, I think initially, from John Philip Newell, who’s a Celtic theologian. He said If you see turmoil and travail in the world, move towards it, because something is trying to be born. And so it seems to me that in this, there’s something revelatory. The things we sort of smelled and knew were there but didn’t think could really happen here are happening here. It’s really clear. It’s out in the open. And now we have the chance to decide who we’re going to be as people of Jesus.

The whole idea of co-suffering love, as Americans, maybe as Western Christians… we don’t really have a great place in our theology for suffering at all. So, to learn the way of co-suffering love, I think you learn it through suffering. And I don’t know what that means, and that’s not happy news. But it just seems to me that some things can be born and shaped in us through this that might not be born and shaped in any other way. It’s horribly uncomfortable, and the fear would drive us in not great directions, and yet, other-centered, moving towards the other, moving towards Jesus? In this moving towards one another, think something is being born.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 24:41
Yeah, that word “co-suffering,” I mean, it’s the literal meaning of compassion, empathy, sympathy. Weirdly, lately, public leaders and teachers and preachers have actually pronounced that empathy is a sin. And I’m like, what happened? And it seems to me that the thing we’re pushing back against is the construction of a Christianity that’s the opposite of the Beatitudes.

For those who don’t want to be susceptible to the lure of power-over Christianity, I recommend praying the Beatitudes every day. You just set an alarm on your clock or your phone and pray them every day. And I’m telling you, it is a furnace of discernment like none other. There is no power-over theology or prophecy that can get through the first three Beatitudes. They will be fried before you get there. It’s such an amazing shield of faith from the the three temptations of the Grand Inquisitor, who said the church needs to say yes to what Jesus said no to. And we say, “No, we won’t, because we have this shield that’s been given, this furnace of discernment in these words.”

Brian Zahnd 25:51
We get going on Dostoevsky, and we’re just going to go! So, in the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is trying to destroy his brother Alyosha’s faith. And he comes up with this parable, “The Grand Inquisitor and Jesus.” And, of course, Jesus never says anything. At one point, Alyosha breaks in and says, “You’re praising Christ, you’re not reviling him,” and Ivan doesn’t disagree. Then you have that dramatic episode at the end where Christ simply kisses the Inquisitor, and the kiss burns in his heart. He’s still clinging to his old idea, but the kiss burns in his heart.

My point from that is we can just keep driving the conversation toward Jesus, quoting Jesus, quoting the Beatitudes, quoting the Sermon on the Mount, without necessarily trying to make people see the point, but just, let Jesus be Jesus. I would say the vast majority of non-Christian people who are witnessing what’s occurring in the present moment under the flag of Christian nationalism know that Jesus has nothing to do with that.

Marc Schelske 25:51
Yes.

Brian Zahnd 25:51
What it really does is it reviles the church. It gives the church a terrible reputation, but Jesus somehow stays above that. They’ll say things like, “I don’t I don’t know much about religion. I don’t know much about Christianity, but I know Jesus isn’t like that.” And how do they know? But they’re right. They do know, and they’re accurate. I just refuse to hand over Jesus to those who want to use him for an imperial theology. I just want to bring everything back to Marc’s book. You’ve got these forty meditations where Jesus gets to be Jesus, and then Marc helps us consider what the implications of that are. But the best part is that the light of Christ just shines.

Marc Schelske 27:47
I just want to back up a second on two things. One is that you kind of blitzed through the Grand Inquisitor scene. I want to give a very brief Wikipedia version because I don’t know everyone’s familiar. I feel like The Grand Inquisitor is maybe one of the most important pieces of prophetic literature in the modern age. It’s just one scene from the larger book, The Brothers Karamazov. There’s a version of it on YouTube. The story, very simply, is that Jesus shows up in a Spanish city. It’s the 15th century, or something like that, and he begins doing the things that Jesus does in the Gospels. As a result of that, he gets arrested. The entire scene takes place in the dungeon where he is being confronted by the Grand Inquisitor. Jesus is sitting in the room, and the Grand Inquisitor is talking to him. Jesus never says anything in the entire scene. In short, the Grand Inquisitor basically says, “The temptations that you faced in the wilderness–the three temptations–you made the wrong choice. What people actually need from you would have been for you to make the other choice, but you didn’t do that. You failed. Now, we are entrusted with the responsibility of doing what you couldn’t do. So, we will give the people certainty. We will give the people rules so that they don’t have to think for themselves. We will make sure that they know they are taken care of. That’s what they want; that’s what they need, and you didn’t give that to them. Does that feel like a fair summary?

Brian Zahnd 29:21
Exactly. He argues that Christ has too high an opinion of humanity. Christ tries to give them freedom, but people don’t want freedom. The Cardinal, representing more or less atheistic religious leaders who are just a religious arm of imperial power, or at least, in league with imperial power, have tried to undo what Jesus was trying to do.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 29:52
Hence, timely.

Marc Schelske 29:53
It’s a pragmatic picture, right? That we’re using faith, we’re using the way of Jesus, and we’re giving the people what they want, and that’s the right thing. What’s prophetic about this scene, and matters for the moment we find ourselves in, is that the temptation in the wilderness–the three temptations–are really, I think, what the church is facing now…

Brian Zahnd 30:14
Yes, exactly.

Marc Schelske 30:15
We are being asked what kind of people we will be in the world. Will we be people who use power? Will we be people who compel agreement through overwhelming people’s perspectives and experience? Will we be people who depend on spectacle to overwhelm people’s thoughts and compel them to do what we want? Or will we do something different? The gospels say that Jesus bested the devil in this temptation. And how did Jesus do it? By not going down that path.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 30:48
It is tempting, right? That’s the temptation of the hour. It is so easy to see the Them in our US/Them dynamic and then just mirror them.

Marc Schelske 30:57
Yeah, right.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 30:57
They’re using power-over, so now I will. They’re using attack and accusation and condemnation, so now I will. It’s very subtle, and it feels right and righteous, and it feels honest. There is a place for praying the Imprecatory Psalms, but you only do that in the presence of Jesus as a way to confess the malice in your heart and have it expunged so that you don’t do violence to the Other. Again, I don’t want to say that as a privileged person to others who are being oppressed, but it is for me to avoid becoming the thing I hate.

Marc Schelske 31:31
The other place I want us to back up to–and then I’m going to hand this back to you, Bradley–you said that maybe the best way to envision what this other-centered, co-suffering path looks like is the Beatitudes. So you offered that as a resource. I’d like us to talk a little bit about that more, and maybe the general question of the resources we have as followers of Jesus to stick to the other-centered, co-suffering path when the temptation to the ways of power and coercion are so dominant for us right now.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 32:00
Of course, the Beatitudes, or the first section of the Sermon on the Mount–I would say that as Jesus’ fundamental foundational sermon as he launches the kingdom in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters five to seven), it behooves us to know that sermon inside and out. And there are those who can help us do so. Unfortunately, there came a time in the church where people actually were teaching, probably since Luther, that we need to read the sermon on the mount as something we can’t obey and, in fact, shouldn’t obey. It’s meant only to cause us to despair, so we’ll cast ourselves on Grace. So you don’t live the Sermon on the Mount. You’re not even invited to. In fact, if you try to, you’re probably forsaking grace. But what is the sermon?

Brian Zahnd 32:46
That’s Bonhoeffer’s Cheap Grace. Bonhoeffer was attacking that. He knew that they’d gone there. What Bonhoeffer is saying was, the reason you can go to a Nazi rally on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday morning and feel no contradiction, is because of cheap grace. The gospel is no longer something you live. It’s just a means by which the grace of God exonerates whatever you do.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 33:10
Yep, and what does the sermon actually say, though? Well, “Many will say, Lord, Lord, and I’ll say, I’ve never knew him because you didn’t do the things I told you to do.” The wise man who builds his house on the rock at the end of that sermon is the one who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice. So I start with the Beatitudes because they set up an orientation of the soul of surrender to God, of lowliness of heart, of meekness, of renunciation of ego. Our friend, Ron Dart, actually translates the first Beatitude this way: “The divine life is for those who have learned to say no to the demands of the ego.” Poverty of spirit is a bankrupting of self-will. And so that’s the thing. Is it going to be self-giving love, or is it going to be power-over and domination? You can’t do both. So if we can just keep cleansing our own hearts with the Beatitudes, that’d be great.

And on that note, I would say some good resources: Jim Forest has a book called Ladder of the Beatitudes that’s magnificent. Ron Dart has a book called Beatitudes: Where Mountain Meets Valley. There’s a good book by a Quaker named Matthew Legge, called, Are We Done Fighting? It’s a pushback against the whole power-over thing in that temptation. So, I’m a Beatitudes guy. I’ve tried to pray it daily for now fifteen years. I feel like it’s a way to guard your heart, not only from the ways of the Empire, but also the ways of pushing back at the empire through self-will that just end up… you’re hooked anyway. That’s kenosis, right? Self-emptying. But self-emptying what? Well, that urge to grab the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead come to the Tree of Life.

Marc Schelske 35:08
As I was writing this, we had a text exchange fairly early in the manuscript process of this book, where I was trying to get my head around how to make the contrast clear. If the direction we’re going is the other-centered, co-suffering path of Jesus, what is the thing that we tend toward instead? The language that came out of that text interaction was “self-centered, ego-defending ambition. This is the natural human state. I make decisions based on how they serve me. I do all kinds of different things to defend my ego–my sense of self. I want to feel strong. I want to feel right. I want to feel secure. I want to feel loved. And so I do all of these things to defend my ego. Ambition is that I want everything to be getting better and growing. I want to make a big change. All of that stuff is very natural to us as humans. And so in the contrast to that… maybe, I don’t know if it’s too arrogant to say, maybe that’s a little bit of what Paul was getting at when he would use the word “the flesh.”

In contrast to that, the way of Jesus is other-centered. I will consider how my actions and words in the world impact others. I’m even going to consider that there are others, right? Other people exist; the world is not solely here for me. Then, I’m going to think about how my words and actions and the things I participate in impact them. Then there’s co-suffering–which doesn’t necessarily mean that every one of these decisions will be actual suffering. It means burden-bearing. I’m coming along beside you. If this decision or circumstance is putting a load on you, I will come alongside to help bear that burden with you. Maybe that’s a way of understanding what the church ought to be up to in this moment We ought to be a community of bearing one another’s burdens, not just our burdens in the community, but the burdens of those around us that are being hard pressed in the culture that we find ourselves in.

My friend, Tara, has jumped in with a question: “This is all great and feels right on a normal Tuesday, but that ain’t now. So what is our role on the other centered, co-suffering path for us when wrongs are being perpetrated. What do we do?”

There’s a way that we as Christians–particularly those of us who are majority culture Christians, middle class. We have our difficulties. We have our struggles. But we haven’t sat in the place of war. We haven’t sat in the place of persecution–There’s a way of holding Christianity that is still very self-centered. And I think the journey of other-centered, co-suffering love is always going to do what the title of this book says. That is why I picked this weird phrase as the title. It is always going to take us toward the Other. So, to Tara’s question, what do we do right now?

I think that some of the immediate pastoral things I can say are we don’t isolate. We don’t turn inward. We look for ways to move toward the Other. And it might be that there are people in your circle that are being directly injured. Someone that comes up, as I think about that, is that some of us have friends, family, folks in our circle that are queer or trans. Those folks, with the shift that has happened in terms of policy in our country in the last month, are honestly feeling existential fear. Regardless of what you think about the issue, they are feeling existential fear. So what would it look like to move toward those people in your life, to hear them, to be present to them, to walk with them? Maybe it’s in a practical way, like they’re saying, “I need to run an errand in this part of town, and I’m afraid to go there,” and you say, “Okay, let me go with you.” Or, maybe you create space for them to say what they need to say, where they can be heard. You could apply that same template to whoever must bear the burden that our society is generating right now. Don’t isolate. Don’t move inward to only safe spaces. Move toward the Other and invite Jesus to guide you in who those others are and how you would do that.

Tara’s follow-up question is, “But do we speak truth to power? Do we fight the wrongs being perpetrated? What do we do?” Alright, so which of you is ready to jump in on that?

Brian Zahnd 39:48
I don’t know what you do, necessarily. I do know that the practical expression of the kingdom of God is what the church is. Because of its practical nature, it’s imperfect, but it is also visible, tangible, and real. I think we get in trouble when we think it is our task to change the world. When the church tries to change the world, the church becomes the world. Because with that very language, we tend to reach for the political, coercive means of power. We can call it Caesar’s sword. We can call it the Ring of Power if you want to go all Lord of the Rings. Our task is more modest. Our task is not to change the world. Our task is to be that part of the world already transformed by Christ.

So what do we do? We work on creating that radical alternative society where love flourishes, where it’s “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed those who mourn for they shall be comforted. The meek shall inherit the earth, etc.” We focus on creating those communities. Jesus calls them the ecclesia, the church, the called-out ones, the ones called out of their own little private life into some public expression, but it’s the public expression called the church, and that is practical. If you want to go beyond that, that’s fine, but that’s beyond my scope as a pastor. I speak as a pastor-theologian, and I limit it to that because I don’t have much more to say. I’m not a political activist. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for that. I’m just saying I’m not the guy to talk to about that because that’s not what I do.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 41:25
It’s a great question: “Do we speak truth to power?” Well, what do we mean by that? First of all, I learned from Brian to ask, “Who is we?” But when I do, what do I think that is? Like writing Instagram memes? That’s not actually speaking truth to power. It’s performative usually, and it’s cathartic. That’s why I do it a little bit–a little bit. But it has such little impact. I’ve marched with one million people against the second war in Iraq, and it did nothing. I vote in elections, and I will keep doing that, but I’m aware that’s like buying a lottery ticket.

But the person in front of me today who’s suffering, the trans person that I know in my family who’s afraid, my black friend, who has to check every doorway he enters to see if it’s a safe place–I can say “I’m with you, no matter what.” That has a massive impact. That seems to be a more fruitful way to be Christian in the world. Yeah, sure, sign a petition. I will. But I also am aware of the relative power. For example, I wrote a letter to the passport office today for an ex-convict who needed an advocate. Okay, that could have a big impact on him, his wife, and his children. So I measure my time out in those kind of ways and my energy. Because when I see the fruit of that, I’m energized. When I see the fruitlessness of the other and my frustrations around it… But what about big things like Gaza? Well, give $20 to Mercy Aiken. She’ll get food to people. That’s actually going to do something. The cruciform way is a narrow way that takes one step at a time in co-suffering love with those you can actually walk with and accompany.

Marc Schelske 43:15
Let me take a stab at maybe weaving these two together. Brian encourages us to gather in the local expression of the community of followers of Jesus who are living this new kingdom life. Bradley says the practical hands-on service and care and advocacy that we do in a one-on-one way is where we can really make a difference. Okay, so maybe the way to weave these together is this: What if the church is a place where we come together to talk about this very thing, so that we each have courage and spiritual imagination for engaging in that one-on-one advocacy and care? What if church is a place where we come together and do a little bit of that Acts 2 pooling of our resources? Maybe those resources are our best ideas, the links to articles that we have, or some money?

In my own church situation recently, some people were able to come together and help a person who desperately needed a vehicle to get to work get a vehicle. That was Acts 2. Somebody else brings the little immigration Red Cards that say what exactly you should say to immigration official when they are acting beyond their constitutional authority and to say nothing else. Those little cards can be easily distributed to people. That’s sharing resources. The fact that that we could come together in community and share our questions and our fears, and someone else could say, “Yes. What about this? I can walk with you in that. Or have you tried this?” That’s Acts 2. Then maybe the gathering in the local community embodies Jesus’ desire for us to walk the other-centered, co-suffering path. Then we can do more of that individual, one-on-one care, love, and advocacy because we are empowered and encouraged, and our spiritual imagination has sparked because we are part of a community that’s committed to that.

Dr. Bradley Jersak 45:10
Josh had a contrarian question, which I don’t think is really contrarian. “How do you think about or act on this kind of love when when the Other we’re talking about is a fundamentalist or MAGA right winger?” A couple of thoughts on that. One is that we’re dealing with two different things when it’s people versus ideologies. And so, if we provide a gospel that is far more beautiful and embracing than the ideologies at work, I think there’s a market for that, and those who are hungry for it will come first.

Meanwhile, I’ve found it easier to deal with the left/right spectrum. I can kind of transcend that and build bridges. But when you’re moving between dealing with authoritarian things that appear to you like a cult or something, remember that this is a spectrum too. There are those who just honestly believed we needed a bit of a course correction, and there are others who would like to drive people of other color out of the nation. That’s a big, big spectrum.

So if we can ask questions that invite, that act like seeds–and I would pray about that. “Lord, would you give me questions that act like seeds?” I don’t know when the sprouts will poke through the hard ground. I don’t know, but I think we can waste a lot of time arguing with people when there’s already a market for those who are so sick of the conflict that they’re ready to talk about Jesus. If we can maintain a few friendships, and just say, “We see it so differently, I’m going to do my best not to alienate you, if you want that.” We’ll play this the patient route, but in the meantime, there are those who are who are really hungry for the Jesus way now, and that does transcend left and right.

Marc Schelske 47:00
That’s why this book! That’s why we’re having this conversation tonight. That’s why I wanted, quite frankly… It’s kind of weird to have a conversation like this for a book launch. A book launch party is supposed to be celebrating the book, making it lots of fun. And here, instead of that, I opened up this difficult conversation, which doesn’t feel very much like a party. But it this feels essential to me because of the moment that we’re in and because of the complexity and nuance of how to follow the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus, when the fact is that there are a lot of folks wearing the label Christian, many of whom are wearing it in good faith, who see these things differently, and that is creating some of this additional stress and pressure.

I want you to know that if you’re thinking these kinds of thoughts and you’re wanting to know how we as followers of Jesus can live in a path that is more generative in the world, you’re not alone in that. You may feel alone. You may be in a geographical region where you feel like everyone is thinking differently than you, but it’s not true. You are not alone. We can connect here. There are other people we can get connected to. Seek that out because as the intentional chaos that is designed to trigger our limbic systems and push us into fear unfolds, what we need is community. That is one of the things Jesus calls us into. So that’s my last word.

I want to thank Brian so much for being here tonight, especially with the time zone changes and all of the many, many busy things that you do. It means a lot that you’d be here. Bradley, my friend, thank you so much for being here. I hope that you have a big bottle of NyQuil at hand and you can immediately go knock yourself out. It’s a real gift that you would be here tonight, even when you feel so horrible. Everybody else: Thanks so much for being here, for being part of my extended community. Let’s maybe try this other-centered, co-suffering thing for a while and see if it makes a difference. All right?

Brian Zahnd 49:08
Amen.

CLOSING REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 49:12
As this conversation unfolded, I saw two distinct themes surface.

Brian Zahn, speaking as a pastor, suggested that the way forward at this moment was to double down on the life of this alternative community we call the church. He meant more, I think, than just to go to church every week. He invited us to make our churches more than clubs of like-minded folks, challenging us to have our churches actually be communities that pursue the other-centered, co-suffering way. Brian was suggesting that this alone–the witness of the presence of Jesus in functional, compassionate, loving communities–is our best response to a world absolutely enamored of power.

Bradley Jersak, speaking as a theologian who has some experience in communities of advocacy, suggested that our best investment is the kind of care and mutual support that can be offered to real people. In the context of real relationships, when we serve and give and advocate, when we stand with folks in the world around us–because of the gospel, not as an act of evangelism, but simply as our response to other-centered, co-suffering, love–this is when we will make the most difference in the world.

Now, neither Brian nor Bradley are suggesting we bury our heads in the sand. Neither is suggesting that we can entirely opt out of participating in the politics of our culture. Both remind us, though, that power is always gonna power. Capitalism is always going to seek maximum profits at the expense of people. Oligarchs are always going to seek to increase their control. Self-centered, ego-defending ambition will always be self-centered, ego-defending ambition until it’s transformed from the inside out. It always seeks whatever justifications it can find, even good Christian justifications. To assume different is to be naive about the nature of the human heart. However, Jesus’ life, teaching, death, and resurrection open up a new way of imagining the universe and break the chains of ego, death, and sin. So, even though we must live in the cultures we find ourselves in, we don’t have to accept the ways of the culture or buy into their promises.

The wisdom that I took from this conversation is that we need both sides of this coin. We need vibrant, healthy communities, communities not built on hierarchical power or self-protection or ego-driven, theological self-defensiveness. We need these communities of mutual care, the church, both to encourage us and to help us bear up under the pressure of the moment. We need a lab to practice other-centered, co-suffering love, which is what the church is when it’s at its best.

However, we also need the personal conviction that moves us into those one-on-one interactions of care and support. Empowered by the support of a healthy church, we can love and share, advocate, protest, and stand with those most burdened by the structure of society and those most at risk by the plans of the current regime. We need to follow Jesus toward each other. If that all seems a big ask, you’re right, but we live in a moment that I think is asking more of us than any I’ve seen in my lifetime.

This historical moment echoes that interaction between Frodo and Gandalf in Tolkien’s famous story. Frodo says, “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened”. And Gandalf replies, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that has given us.” That’s where we are, friends. Who will we be? This moment is the time that’s been given to us. For me, the other-centered, co-suffering path is the only way through.

May you have the courage to walk the coming path of discomfort, trusting that the gentle way of love will accomplish the deep reconciliation our world needs.

Thanks for listening.

Notes for today’s episode and any links mentioned can be found at MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW058.

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Until next time, remember:

In this one present moment, you are known. You are loved, and you are not alone.

Once again, influential Christian leaders are declaring empathy a sin. One influential Reformed theologian calls empathy “Counterfeit compassion” and names it “the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century.” For people whose central ethic is to love the neighbor as we love ourselves, this seems an odd hill to die on. Why is this happening? Well, when you look behind the scenes, the answer is pretty obvious. Empathy has the power to blow up hierarchical power dynamics.

In this conversation, we explore empathy, its significance in spiritual growth, and why certain Christian leaders (from a very particular theological perspective) are warning Christians away from empathy.

Note: We had significant technical difficulties recording this, but the conversation was so good that I wanted to do my best to share it with you. The audio has been cleaned up as much as I can, and I have provided carefully edited captions on the video and a full transcription for you.

Takeaways

Mentioned Resources

Felicia Murrell is a spiritual companion, speaker, certified master life coach, and former ordained pastor with over twenty years of church leadership experience. She’s an author and serves the publishing industry as a freelance copy editor. With a deep understanding of what it means to be human, Felicia is dedicated to empowering individuals to embrace who they already are and who Love is inviting them to be.

Marc Schelske 0:05
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 57. Empathy is Not a Sin; It’s Holy Dynamite.

SPONSOR

Today’s podcast is made possible by Walking Otherward. This is my new book. It’s due out in a couple of weeks. It’s landing on February 18. That means I’m up to my ears in Book Launch season. Look, I’m gonna keep this short. I want you to pre-order my book right now. Is this the right book for you? Well, here’s my pitch.

You already know it’s possible to be a Christian and not be very much like Jesus. Whether through your own study or your spiritual intuition, you sense that following the way of Jesus ought to be transformational for you and for your world. The urgent drive of our time to always be moving upward and forward has taken its toll on you. You suspect an inward focus is necessary for personal healing and growth but wonder if that makes any real difference for others in the world around you. And you definitely don’t want to go backward, whether to past ways of thinking that were destructive or back to a world that is more hierarchical, violent, and exploitative. Perhaps you feel homeless spiritually and wonder which way you should go. The Gospel narrative of Jesus’ life suggests a path rather than the climb upward, or retreating backward, or withdrawing inward. Jesus’ path invites us to walk otherward.

Walking Otherward is a 40-day devotional that follows Jesus in the final weeks leading to his crucifixion. Each reflection invites you to take on Jesus’ attitude, exchanging self-centered ego-defending ambition for other-centered, co-suffering love. So that’s the pitch. If it sounds like a good fit for you, then please pre-order the book today. It’s available in ebook and paperback in all the book places. You can find all the links to those places at www.WalkingOtherward.com.

INTRODUCTION

if you’re on social media and you pay attention to the religious discourse there, in the past couple of months, you may have seen a surge in posts and memes arguing over an odd controversy. The controversy? The accusation that many Christians–apparently deceived by the radical left or someone– are falling into the sin of empathy. Now, if that sounds strange to you, that probably means you are consuming an appropriate and healthy amount of social media. But what’s even more strange than this accusation is that it’s not new. In 2019, it first gained momentum when Joe Rigney, a prominent reformed pastor and theologian, wrote an article on the Desiring God website called, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion.”

He was making the point that empathy is really the emotional fusion between your emotions and someone else’s emotions, which will keep you from living in accordance with the truth. Even worse, Rigney posed that empathy was a tool for emotional manipulation. He wrote, “Rightly used, empathy is a power tool in the hands of the weak and suffering. By it, we can so weaponize victims that they (or those who hide behind them) are indulged to every turn, without regard for whether such indulgence is wise or prudent or good for them.” The topic came up again in 2021 when a well-known fundamentalist pastor, James White, wrote a scathing blog about the problem of empathy for Christians. These are his words. “So what is the problem with empathy today? We are, in fact, told to weep with those who weep, but that assumes those who weep have a reason for weeping that is in line with God’s revelation.” So I guess we’re gatekeeping grief?!

The topic resurfaced this year as Christians, in response to the elections and government policy discussions, have been debating the best way to relate to immigrants and the poor and trans people. So Joe Rigney comes back onto the scene, adding fuel to the fire with a brand new book that came out this year called The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits, where he claims that empathy is the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century, and suggests that empathy is a satanic counterfeit to holy, Godly love.

Okay, I’ll be upfront here. I think this claim is not only absurd, I think it’s dangerous for the church and for society at large. I wanted to talk with somebody about it, and it seemed to me that a good conversation partner would be Felicia Murrell. Felicia is a former pastor, current spiritual director, author, and speaker. I wanted to talk with Felicia specifically because I recently read her book, AND: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World. This book is stunningly good. It weaves comfortably between memoir, essay, poetry, and prophetic challenge. The principle at the heart of the book is that the only thing that can carry us through the chaos of the moment we find ourselves in is love. So I asked Felicia to chat with me about this controversy; I started by asking her to define empathy and then to reflect on why it seems that this word is becoming a scare word for some folks,

Felicia Murrell 5:34
Empathy is staying present to pain, that of my own and that of others, without being overwhelmed by it. Empathy is actively bearing witness to the emotional experience of other people without taking it on. It’s not delving into despair or pity or anguish. It literally is what I would call mirroring. A question that I ask myself often is, “Can I reach back into my own memory bank and connect to something in my lived experience?” If that answer is no, because maybe I don’t have a similar experience, empathy listens and it believes the experience of other people, even when our experiences don’t match.

An example would be, say, someone is talking to me and they’re expressing about being lonely. Can I remember a time in my own life when I experienced this? Only not to center myself in the conversation and take over and start talking about when I was lonely and I can relate, but just to have that feeling, to know inside, to remember what it felt like to be lonely, and to allow that feeling to be a place of connection and understanding. Renee Brown offers us this really powerful question to consider. She says, “How can I touch within myself something that helps me identify and connect with what this person might be feeling?”

Marc Schelske 7:27
I like how you pointed out that we’re reaching into that resource of our own experience, not to generate relating words, like that common thing where you have this motivation to tell a similar story, right? “I know exactly what you’re feeling. This is what happened to me,” and now you’re off and running on three or five minutes of your own story, but instead to reach into the resource of your own experience as a way to get closer to knowing within yourself what that other person is experiencing and articulating to you.

Felicia Murrell 8:00
If it’s an experience that, you know, that you’ve not experienced, “I can’t relate to that,” then what I do is I take on a listening posture of believing this person’s experience and connecting to it as part of the universal body of humanity. What I’m reaching into is that shared humanity. That’s empathy.

Marc Schelske 8:27
That feels really essential to all human relationships. If I’m going to have a constructive relationship with anybody, it requires my capacity to think about the state that you’re in and why you’re in that state and to hone my ability to listen and all of that. So that feels like, you know… for partner partnerships, marriage, good parenting, leadership in organizations, it feels really essential, right? So if that’s such an essential core human function of healthy relationships, how do we get into this mess where it sounds scary to people?

The Anglican Archbishop in DC had an opportunity to preach a sermon in front of the new president and in the course of that sermon, actually made a call for empathy. That call was reacted to by a lot of people online as being inappropriate, which is crazy to me, given that empathy is such an essential part of human connectedness. Why is it a scare word for some people? What do you think about that?

Felicia Murrell 9:31
One thing that I want to get into that is so key with empathy is that we’re relating to people as equals in the partnership of our humanity, right? It’s not a savior kind of thing, where I’m reaching down to help the less-than or those who are pitied, or those who are inferior, or something like that. This is about how I relate to our shared humanity on an equal basis. That equity is important to establish with empathy.

When we think about people using empathy as kind of a “scare word,” first, I’m going to go to one of my own heroes, which is Brene Brown, and her book, Atlas of the Heart, which really goes into language around emotions. She says that, for some people, being a contrarian is seductive, and much of what we know about American Christianity is formed on ideas of protest. Right? Protestants.

Marc Schelske 9:34
Sure, right.

Felicia Murrell 9:35
So I think there’s some of that, but also, I think perhaps this idea of empathy feels scary because of our own fear. Our own fear of pain that mirrors someone else’s suffering hits too close to home. It hits too close to the things that we numb, the things that we repress, and if we have not sat in our own darkness, we will never be able to have empathy for someone else in theirs. And so I think perhaps this constant unconscious participation in comparison and competition has reduced empathy to a “scare word.” What I mean by that is in a caste system of Haves and Have-nots, when someone is higher or lower, we have this whole system of capitalism that works because we’re conditioned–really, from school age–where we don’t need to be the one on the bottom. And so perhaps then there’s a story that I’m unconsciously participating in, where to express care or to express empathy would require something of me that would force me to abnegate my position or my wins. I say “unconsciously” because not many people would admit aloud, not even to themselves, that this is something that they’re weighing or measuring. But whatever is unconscious owns us, right?

Marc Schelske 11:40
Right.

Felicia Murrell 11:41
So I think moving from that idea of contrarianism being productive to this idea of us not sitting with our own feelings and really running away from that just to have our wins, this leads us to “Us Versus Them.” When we have “Us Versus Them,” it creates Others. And anytime we have Others, that creates disconnection, and whatever there’s disconnection, there’s an unraveling of our shared humanity. So back again to the idea that if we’re not equal, then what are we? I see you as an opposition, or I see you as someone to pity or someone I can dominate or control, but definitely not someone I relate to, right? And so I think some of these interior places where love is beckoning to heal are reasons that keep us, you know, from being able to relate to someone empathically.

Marc Schelske 13:36
That’s really helpful to me. What I’m hearing as you’re talking about this is the intersection between two domains. So there’s this interior personal domain, right? And maybe empathy is challenging me to face things that I haven’t faced, that I haven’t healed from–you know, my own trauma story, or places in my life where I was treated unjustly, or perhaps places in my life where I exploited people, but don’t want to think about that, don’t want to carry the burden of that feeling. So anything that calls me to that opening of heart towards somebody else, that’s fearful for me individually, as a person. And the way out of that is going to be some kind of inner healing, maybe a spiritual process, maybe a therapeutic process, some way of coming honestly to face myself, right? So that’s one domain.

But what you explained suggests this isn’t a go-into-your-quiet-room-and-solve-this-problem kind of problem. There’s this system out there that we all live within. And what you said… I don’t think it’s even ever occurred to me before… was that maybe one of the reasons why empathy is scary is because empathy automatically challenges hierarchy.

Felicia Murrell 15:01
Yes, right.

Marc Schelske 15:02
So whatever hierarchy I’m in–whether that is a patriarchal marriage where I’m the man and I’m in charge, or whether I’m in an organization that’s very, very controlling from the top down, and I see what the organization is doing, and it kind of feels unjust or unfair to me, and I want to speak up, or whether we’re talking about a larger system like the country, or even, as you mentioned, an economic system like capitalism–empathy, because it’s connecting to that other human at a peer level, is inviting me to see them in a way that is outside of whatever hierarchy I’m a part of. And that’s then where it becomes dangerous, right? This would suggest that it’s not coincidental that all the people saying that empathy is a sin are within extremely hierarchical systems.

Felicia Murrell 15:01
Absolutely.

Marc Schelske 15:02
When they say it’s dangerous for you to feel empathy, the subtext behind that is, “Empathy might lead You to question the power system we’re in, and I don’t want you to do that. I have good biblical reason or or good whatever reason to not want you to do that. So we’re just, we’re not going to think about that.” Am I on track with that?

Felicia Murrell 16:14
Yea. You’re on track. Yeah, absolutely. As a matter of fact, Heather Richardson, who is a historian. I heard her go on a podcast where she gave this analogy. She said imagine ten people in the room. Eight of them just want to get by, but two people want to control everybody else. The way that they get that power is to get six people to turn against the two at the bottom. And they do that through stories. She calls it the Two-Six-Two rule. We have two people that want power, six people in the middle, and the two people at the top that want power. They get the six in the middle to turn against the two at the bottom through the stories that they tell. She said that the reason why this is so significant is because the stories we tell about who we are and the communities we are are the ways we understand power.

Personally, when I think about this, I lived so much of my life as a Catfish Christian. Coming from the south, the catfish in the river just suck up everything, whatever is there. They are bottom feeders, and they eat it all. And that was me as a Christian for a long time. I swallowed everything that came from the pulpit, and then I regurgitated it. And I did that without any critical analysis, without any self-examination. I just simply trusted with abandon and cult-like fanaticism. And now, I feel like I’m more apt to pause and I’m more apt to look for the thread of love. If I don’t hear the resonance of love and the story you’re telling, I’m much more likely to swim away from that, no matter how bright and shiny it is.

But we’re also talking about the system, right? And so, within the context of class, empire, capitalism, patriarchy. Another one of my heroes, bell hooks, talks about this system of domination as imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. That’s how she names the system of domination. And so I think as Christians, you have to really travel back in the biblical narrative to the Garden of Eden for this discussion and to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And thus, this whole idea about sin. Now, for me, where I am in life, when I hear “sin,” I immediately think “missing the mark.” I think behavior or action, not identity, right? But I also know that I haven’t always thought that way.

Marc Schelske 20:00
Yes.

Felicia Murrell 20:01
For a long time, sin was not an indication of misalignment. It was a stain. It was something to be ashamed of, something to hide, something to cover with fig leaves, like a dirty word. And so I’m thinking about sin in terms of purity culture as being everything that we don’t want to be. It becomes something that we have to root out of our lives, root out of our bodies, root out of our hearts and our cultures. In a sense, sin has to be annihilated, has to be conquered. And so anyone that’s position in this kind of cult-like thinking, when they hear the word “sin,” they immediately think–like from the tree of the knowledge–“oh, this is evil. This is bad.” And so now I have this label, “the sin of empathy.” And if your leader, who holds this external authority and power over your agency, when that leader, that pastor, said it’s bad, then you just fall in line. You disavow your support. You root out whatever this is. You annihilate it. And I think when you have leaders with that much power, have people doing the thinking for you, deciding for you what’s good, what’s bad, those people can name anything as sin. So, the conjecture, on my part, is that when we start with a system that says that to have faith is to never to doubt, to never to question, you see how easy it is for the two powerful people at the top to convince the six people in the middle to hand over their belief or worship and fall into fanaticism. So you can kind of see how someone in that position can throw this phrase out, and then it takes a life of its own.

Marc Schelske 21:53
That’s so clarifying. In that illustration of the 10 people, what tool exists to help the six in the middle see through the machinations of the two? Well, it’s your essential humanity. Those six in the middle look at the two that have been put in the under position and say, “Wait a minute. That seems odd. They’re not really that different from us. We need to make a change.” Then the empathy that connects human to human, that peer connection, is actually the dynamite that blows up that system. We can see that in any of those categories that you mentioned that you brought from bell hooks, right?

If we’re talking about patriarchy, anyone who feels empathy for the burden that a woman is forced to carry in society, that empathy is the open doorway to begin questioning patriarchy. What about White supremacy? Many folks who are of my complexion don’t consider themselves white supremacists because they’ve been programmed that that phrase means a certain kind of violent, hood-wearing, hatred-spitting person, and that’s not them. Authentically, it’s not them. But they haven’t been able to see how–or perhaps the fear around identity is so strong they’re not willing to see how–they have had certain advantages (even in the context of many disadvantages that they might have because of class or other things) they’ve had certain advantages that other people that aren’t white don’t have, and empathy is the key, right?

For instance, I’ve never had the experience of getting pulled over “While White,” right? Like every time I’ve been pulled over in my life, there’s been a good reason for it, and not only that, but I haven’t authentically felt fear for my life in those moments. And so that moment when I have a conversation with somebody who has had the experience of being pulled over for “Driving While Black,” and sat in the car with their hands on the steering wheel, terrified, wondering, “Is this going to go wrong?” I hear that story, and the empathy in me says traffic stops shouldn’t feel life-threatening. What the hell is going on?! And so now, that empathy is the key opening the doorway to questioning that white supremacist system, or the system of how we use policing or whatever. And there are people “in the room” that don’t want me questioning those things.

Felicia Murrell 24:22
Right. So my first question is, “Was there ever a time when I have been absolutely afraid for my life? Where I felt that energy surge through my body, and I was scared of going to lose my life if I moved wrong or I said something wrong? If there is I immediately have a sense of connection, right? And if I stand myself to remember, “Have I had this moment?” and I come up with the answer, “No,” I can touch my heart, express gratitude to myself that that’s not my experience, and at the same time express a deep sense of remorse and care that someone else did have to have that experience.

Marc Schelske 25:00
Yeah, right.

Felicia Murrell 25:01
Because part of our shared community is that we hold both triumphs and tragedies. We hold both joy and suffering. And I think the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil wants this to split the poles and divide them into binaries with a chasm in between. Empathy is the thread that we use together, right? We’re holding this together in wholeness, in the circle of life. Most people have done exactly what you were saying in the intro. They try to make empathy about walking in someone else’s shoes, taking on someone else’s feelings, feeling their pain. I just need to remember that we’re both human.

Marc Schelske 26:00
Yes, right, right.

Felicia Murrell 26:01
So, can I connect to a shared humanity? Can I remember what it was like not to have to be worried about, to experience betrayal, to lose a parent, or to have grief about something, and what does that feel like in my body? What was the visceral feeling of that thing? And then from there, I remember, and I can hold space. I don’t have to correct the feeling. I’m not trying to judge it. I’m not trying to analyze it. I’m not trying to fix it. I’m there to bear witness and to be with because, “ohhhh, there by the grace of God go I.”

Marc Schelske 26:43
Something just occurred to me while you were saying that. I want to see what you think about this. At the beginning of our conversation, when you were defining empathy, you talked about it being this mirror function where I’m relying on my own experience as a way to connect with this other person. All right, so if I’m in a system that is telling me that I can’t feel empathy for someone else who is being injured or treated unfairly, and it’s for “good reasons,” right? I shouldn’t feel empathy for them because we’re asking them to do the right, Godly thing, and they’re not doing it, and they should feel sad about that. So, you know, don’t feel empathy for them, right? If I’m in that kind of system and I’ve bought into that, because of this mirror function what also is happening is I’m being trained to ignore my own feelings of injustice perpetrated against me. Do you feel like that’s the right connection?

Felicia Murrell 27:36
Oh, absolutely. And any… particularly women inside of evangelical Christianity, have been trained to ignore. You’ve been trained to be a martyr. You serve your family. You serve your church. You deny what you’re doing to the to the death of you.

Marc Schelske 27:54
Okay, so the premise of this podcast is thinking about how we practice the way of Jesus. So, let’s bring the conversation of empathy into that domain. How does this picture of empathy you’ve talked about–this mirror connection between peers, depending on the resource of your own experience to understand the internal experience of another person, allowing that then to shape the way you relate to them–How do you see that fitting into the calling of what it means to follow Jesus and live that out in the world that we find ourselves in?

Felicia Murrell 28:27
So I think, for me, when I think about the way of Jesus, and I think about empathy, empathy is about emotional attunement. It’s about being moved, right? Understanding either what I’m feeling, what I’m experiencing, or what someone is experiencing, and I’m reflecting back that understanding. I’m not rescuing. I’m not fixing all those things.

And when I think about the way of Jesus, perhaps the most intentional thing that comes to mind is the story of the Good Samaritan. Think of this story from the perspective of what was most helpful to the person who was injured in a moment when they couldn’t necessarily articulate what they needed. So I want you to think about that. Also, think about who chose to pass this injured party by? Why did Jesus include those two examples of who was too busy to care, who was too busy to demonstrate love in action? So a good Samaritan stops… or a Samaritan. We don’t have to say, “good,” but a Samaritan stops. And this person is thinking, “What might I need in this moment?” I can take a beat. I can pause. If I were injured, I would need some rest. Okay, rest is important, so let me go pay the innkeeper the money so the injured party has somewhere to rest and recover. And, oh, they might need some food, and there might be some other things that I haven’t even processed or considered. So let me leave a little extra money with the innkeeper for whatever needs might arise that I haven’t considered. So what can I give in this moment to this injured party? I can give this person the means to recover and get well. By helping to provide a place for them to stay, I can give them aid to help them return to work. That is what empathy does, right?

Empathy is a skill. Compassion is the daily practice, but empathy is the skill. And I don’t think we get to empathy without holding that place within ourselves with Spirit, where we learn to develop the spaciousness to think about what I myself might need. What do I need in the moment when I get triggered, when I get anxious? What do I need for my own well-being? And when I can learn what I need for my own well-being, then I’m able to get out of that overflow, moving from how I tend to myself to someone else. So I think in that regard, this is the way of Jesus. This is mutuality. It’s reciprocity. It’s self-giving, Kenotic love–all these big words that really just explain relational understanding and action, right? How do I take action to demonstrate love and care toward myself? How do I demonstrate love and care toward my neighbor? How do I demonstrate love and care in the world around me? That’s the way of Jesus.

Marc Schelske 32:08
Yeah, yeah. I think that’s right. One of the lines that I underlined, I think, is appropriate right here. You wrote, “This is my Holy Sacrament: to fully and consciously participate with self-emptying love in this present moment.” And I think the connection there is that full participation is that the connection to empathy, right? If I’m engaging with a person who’s right in front of me, for me to fully be present in that moment, I’m reaching into that resource of my experiences to connect with them. If this is self-emptying love, I’m giving of myself. That might be the time to stop and listen. It might be the effort to be involved in a difficult, emotional conversation. It might be resources. It might be all kinds of things. The cost is that I didn’t have to be in this moment with this person. I’m opening myself up to be present to what is happening for that person and to what this moment is going to ask of me. That sounds an awful lot like, you know, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Felicia Murrell 33:12
Yeah. I wrote in AND, “Empathy transcends the imagining of a life we never have to live, making the connection that allows our hearts to break open to the painful, fearful, or even joyous experiences of others. Intimate, empathetic knowing allows for sympathetic resonance, a melding forged in the weaving of stories and lives together until there is only THE story, which is the restoration of all things, as all embrace Divine unity and the encounter of love. Love is infinite, and in the bounty of love, we are held, and we are known.”

And I think when we come to know that knowing ourselves, when we can hear the sound of the genuine within, we have that space to tend to ourselves. Then what happens is that becomes the practice of how we tend to the world. I don’t think the two are separate. I think that word AND is very important. But I also think, as you were saying, I think it’s intentional that all of this is squashed within systems so that you don’t have the space to hear yourself or even really know yourself, right? And I think as we accept love’s invitation to come closer, to tend to these wounds, to know ourselves, to have Spirit heal those wounded places within us, you turn around, and with clear eyes, you see this invitation to participate with love in the world. That goes back to bell hooks. She was very clear that the only thing that could heal the systems of domination was a love ethi. She firmly believed that. She championed love as the remedy to the world’s social problems, and I agree with her.

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 35:29
This conversation with Felicia really was a moment of dot-connecting for me. Certain people want you to be suspicious of empathy because empathy is the key that opens the chains of hierarchical control. The moment you think about and relate to the lived experience of the person on the other end of oppression is the moment you start to question the rightness of that oppression.

I guess that’s why the accusation of empathy as a sin always seems so strange to me. Of course, God wants you to feel empathy. How did Jesus open up his ministry? Luke, chapter four: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed Me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Following a mission like that evokes empathy. It requires empathy. Empathy for the blind, the poor, the captive, empathy for everyone who isn’t experiencing a year of the Lord’s favor but instead is experiencing the weight of another year of confusion or marginalization or exploitation or suffering. Empathy calls us to act. And if God gave us empathy, then God designed empathy to move us to act in ways that bring about God’s purpose of restoration and reconciliation.

So, I guess empathy really is dangerous. If you’re trying to control people, if you’re hoping to manipulate them, if you want to exploit and control others, then empathy must be fought against because empathy is the God-given dynamite that can blow up your carefully crafted system of domination. So, no, I won’t be praying for freedom from the sin of empathy for me or anyone else. I will be praying for the Spirit of God to raise up empathy in the church so that we can be part of God’s good work of liberation now and salvation forever.

May you find the deep connection between your empathy and the Spirit of God’s call to stand with and for those God wants to lift up. Thanks for listening.

END COMMENTS

If this conversation has intrigued you, I recommend Felicia Murrell’s fantastic book, AND. The full title: AND: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World. I very rarely reread books, and I’ve already reread this one twice in one year. It’s just so good. You can find it in all the book places. You can also learn more about Felicia and what she’s up to at her website, www.FeliciaMurrell.com.

Notes for today’s episode, the full transcript, and any links that are relevant will be found at www.Marc AlanSchelske.com/TAW057.

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Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

The person who truly understands “what’s going on” in any room is often not the one in charge. Instead, it’s usually those on the margins—individuals whose lives and survival depend on recognizing the hidden structures of power—who see things most clearly. In her new book, Jenai Auman shares her experiences as a Filipina-American woman in the Evangelical church in the American South and challenges us to adopt a more inclusive way of being.

Jenai Auman is a Filipina-American writer, artist, & storyteller living in Houston, TX with her husband and two boys. Drawing on her years of church ministry experience, education, and trauma-related training, she writes on healing, hope, and the way forward for those who have experienced spiritual abuse and religious trauma. Her work has been featured on Christianity Today’s Better Samaritan Blog, She Reads Truth, and The Fallow House. Her people are those who feel “othered” and unwelcome in traditional Christian spaces. As a trauma recovery-focused spiritual director/companion, she also serves as a story-holder & space-maker.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 56: When the Marginalized Are Our Prophets.

THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR
Today’s podcast is made possible by Not Just One More Thing: Spiritual Growth for Busy People. Is it possible to grow spiritually in the midst of a busy life? You’re a follower of Jesus, but you’re starting to wonder if you’re really following? That’s not a question about belief; it’s a question about trajectory. Are you really going somewhere? And not just to heaven someday, maybe, whatever that means, but now.

You want to grow and mature spiritually, and that’s why you listen to this podcast. But your life is full, and it’s fast-paced. You want to slow down, but you’re not sure how. Life is busy and full of obligations and demands time and energy. And you can’t opt out of most of that stuff.

When you think about spiritual maturity, you think of maybe retired people who have hours to sit around reading their Bibles or volunteering at church and praying, or maybe monks who live in a quiet cloister where they can think big thoughts about God all day long, but that’s not your life. Do you wonder if it’s even possible to grow spiritually in the midst of the busy life you have? Well, it is.

Being spiritual when you’re on vacation or when you have a lot of free time on your hands is easy. That’s when you have all the time in the world for reading and reflecting and journaling, engaging in deep conversations, and worshiping. Anyone can do that. But keeping your spiritual head above water when life is busy is the real test.

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So I wrote this course to fit into a busy life. It’s one short video each week, less than 10 minutes long, and then five simple, doable experiments that you can fit into your real life for that week. Some are activities to try, some are questions to journal on, some are links to other short readings that can help, and you can work through all of this in 10 to 20 minutes a day if you follow along for five days a week. And it’s just 10 bucks. I invite you to invest this time, a few minutes a day, five days a week, for 10 weeks. Stick with this. and you will have the tools that will help you experience a more intentional, connected sense of God’s presence, even in the middle of a very busy life. To see more about what’s included or register at www.Live210.com/busy.

INTRODUCTION

In any room, who’s the person most likely to understand what’s really going on? Who sees the hidden relational dynamics, the power issues, and the emotional triggers first? Is it the person in charge? The one who’s used to getting what they need? Or is it possible that it’s the person whose life depends on seeing these things?

You’ve probably heard me talk about the developing direction of my theology, which I summarize by calling it the way of other-centered co-suffering love. One aspect of this perspective is that it challenges me to listen carefully to the experiences of people who are not like me. Most of my mentors, teachers, pastors, and theologians I was encouraged to read look a lot like I do in one dimension or another. White, male, middle class, many of them American or at least English speaking.

And I’ve come to understand that my experience and what I’ve learned from these voices is not the only experience; it’s not the canonical experience. I’ve lived and I’ve worked inside organizations largely structured for people like me, assuming that our view was the right way. But this created an enormous blind spot where we disregarded people with different experiences, especially when they contradicted or challenged what was comfortable for us.

A book I read recently that helped me in thinking about all of this is called Othered: Finding Belonging with a God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. Janai Auman is a Filipina-American raised in the American South. She initially found welcome in the Evangelical Church. Her passion led her into leadership, but as she was drawn deeper into the ministry machine, she experienced how her value to the community was really based on conformity.

And so when she asked for respect as a biracial Filipino woman when she pointed out issues in the system that were a problem, not just for her, but for others, the response was harsh. She violated the expectation that she would be a quiet worker supporting the male leaders. She was asking folks to stretch in ways that were new and uncomfortable for them. She was challenging a controlling hierarchy that others in the community took for granted.

Ultimately, that system and those in charge had no room for her, and she was forced out. This painful experience and the long recovery work she went through, as a result, led her to focus on how the Church can be more welcoming and can avoid doing harm, partly by listening to those in the margins. There’s this dynamic in Jenai’s story that I’ve seen in many corners of the Church. Here’s a way to think about it.

When a person, especially a child, has to fight for their basic needs, they learn intuitively what they must in order to survive. They become experts in reading the culture of their family or their community. The same dynamic functions in larger groups, communities, churches, and even whole cultures.

Folks in the margins often see things about the majority culture that insiders cannot see as quickly or as easily. You see, for their own survival, folks in the margins have to become PhD students of the majority culture. In this book Othered, Jenai wrote, “When we ask our congregations to read their Bibles and the stories of our spiritual ancestors, it should come as no surprise that many students of scripture become well versed in distinguishing Christlikeness

from the corrupt forms of faith that are often labeled good and right today. And when these students see the schism between the character of Jesus and the character of the church, when they ask questions and speak to the disparity, they become prophets. They are those who have the boldness to say, this is not the way of Jesus.” So I asked Jenai to talk about the ways she sees people on the margins — those who’ve been hurt, women, people of color, LGBTQ people — speaking as prophets to the majority church.

THE INTERVIEW

Jenai Auman (06:51)
Hmm. Yeah. I think prophets are ultimately those who speak the truth of the Word of God and those who point to the corruption happening within God’s people. That’s what we see in the OT prophets and how they were reminding people of the goodness of God and why the things that are the way they are today don’t have to be that way. We’re actually called to something more. And I do think that people on the margins can have that kind of insight.

So, by that, I mean folks who are marginalized in our cultures for any reason. People can be marginalized not only for racial status or ethnicity or the language they speak. They can also be marginalized for not having the right amount of education, quote-unquote, the right amount. They can also be marginalized for having the wrong address, for growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, for being a low-income family, and for not wearing certain things. Think of middle school, you know, like the tables at middle school and how cliques and little things form.

Marc Schelske (07:36)
Mm. Right, right.

Jenai Auman (07:55)
Folks can be marginalized for any reason, and I think that there is wisdom for those who have lived in the margins for a long time, in that they can look from the outside in. They can actually see how a machine is made. So, for instance, I’m familiar with hurricanes in Houston. That’s kind of our MO. If you’ve ever seen a forecast for folks going through a hurricane, there’s the guy at the weather desk who’s giving you facts and information on the hurricane. He’s, you know, however many miles away from the hurricane and safety in a building telling you, “This is the wind speed. This is how fast it’s moving. This is where the eye is.” And then sometimes they throw it to the man or the woman in the field, and they’re, you know what I mean? They are in the middle of the storm, trying to…

Marc Schelske (08:40)
Right. Yeah, Right. Their situation looks a lot different than the dude with the data.

Jenai Auman (08:47)
Yeah, yeah, but the guy who is at a distance, kind of from the outside looking in, can actually name the machine or the mechanisms of the hurricane, the facts and figures. It’s an imperfect metaphor. In a similar way, when you are distant from the machine that’s wreaking havoc on a culture, and that havoc becomes normalized, those who are unable to conform to the machine, to the mold that the machine creates, are able to say, “this is actually what’s fracturing people.” And they say that from a place that says, “This is how it’s fractured me.” As they heal from those fractures, they can see, “It’s actually not only fracturing me, it requires the fracturing of every other person,” but that fracturing has become so normalized and people have been more easily assimilated, other than marginalized folks, people who are disabled, and who don’t fit those molds, have a hard time assimilating and conforming to the mold. And so these folks are better able to see the havoc of what quote-unquote normal behavior in a church does to a community.

Marc Schelske (09:57)
Right. it’s sort of the deal where I wear a certain pair of shoes, for instance, that I really love, and they’re really comfortable for me. And I declare their wonderfulness and recommend them to friends. And then you go buy a pair of those shoes. And because your feet are a different shape than mine, there’s a place in the shoes that rubs on your feet uncomfortably. And every time you walk in them, you’re feeling that pain. I don’t know that pain exists because the shoe fits my foot. And if I’ve been part of helping create the shape of the shoe, or creating the shape of the system that I’m part of, of course, it’s going to fit me because I’ve already done the work to get rid of the rough edges because that’s what we do as humans. We want life to not have discomfort. And so, whether it’s through power or over the course of time through generational practice, we’ve shaped the shoe that we live in in a certain way. And when somebody else is in that, they’re like, “It only ever gives me a blister on this one spot. Can you do something about that?” And then I say to you, “It does not, it doesn’t give a blister. It’s been perfectly designed to not give a blister for me.”

Jenai Auman (11:00)
Yeah, it’s kind of the distinguishing factor between relative truth or experience versus absolute truth being defined by a very, very specific relative experience. And that’s so damaging when other people don’t fit into that sort of narrative.

Marc Schelske (11:14)
Right. In another spot in Othered, you wrote this sentence that caught my attention, and I think it would be good for you to talk about it a little bit. You said, “Marginalization is a form of taking God’s name in vain.” All right, so open up that package for me.

Jenai Auman (11:41)
It’s kind of rooted in the idea of how we’re made in the image of God. So, some folks might see marginalization as part of the gospel because their view of being made in the image of God only includes those who ascribe to their sort of belief, who are quote-unquote saved into a specific denomination. Whereas I believe that at the dawn of creation, God made all of humanity in his image and that every person walking the earth is made in the image of God, in that they can also fulfill the cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and bring goodness to the earth. So If every person is made in the image of god regardless of what they are able to earn or achieve or ascribe to or intellectually ascend to, if every person is made in the image of God, and the systems of our society say some people are worth more than other people and therefore because these people are worth more, the other people have to go to the fringes, then you are actually devaluing the image of God in someone else who could actually bring goodness and cultivate goodness within your community. And you’re saying the nutrients that they bring to our soil are actually toxic, and it’s not actually inherited goodness.

And so I think marginalizing folks and then using God’s name to justify the marginalization, it’s almost like double jeopardy. This is really bad. Marginalization of any kind, ascribing some value to some people and then less value to other people, is just counter to what I see in the person and work of Jesus for sure. And not only that, even in the Old Testament, even in the Deuteronomic laws the instruction is to welcome the stranger, welcome the sojourner to your door. And so, even in the law itself, to welcome people who were on the margins, that was was the story from the beginning. So marginalizing other nations or other nationalities or other ethnicities has never been justifiable. I mean, people certainly found ways to justify it, but it was never, never God-sanctioned and Christ-ordained.

Marc Schelske (14:03)
Right, right. Of course. There’s a really awful betrayal going from “I don’t like you and don’t want you in my group” to “God has said you’re not worth being in my group.” That is such a power move. How are you getting to any kind of transformative understanding of the gospel or a loving picture of God with that starting point?

Jenai Auman (14:34)
It’s a power move and also a lack of ownership. I can’t tell you that I don’t like you, and I’m not ready to own the fact that I don’t like you, so I’m gonna draw on God’s name and scapegoat god…

Marc Schelske (14:44)
Right, right. I get to stay righteous. I get to stay a good person. I’m just doing what God wants.

Jenai Auman (14:47)
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like the thing I do when someone comes to the front door and is trying to solicit whatever they’re trying to sell. And I’m like, I need to talk to my husband about that. You know what I mean? But that’s the funny version. The very unfunny version is saying, “This is what God told me. And God told me that you’ve got to get the hell out of here.” You know, and it just scapegoats God and it enables the person who’s scapegoating to be absolved of personal responsibility. I don’t need to take ownership. I’m just saying this is what God told me to do, and I’m just following orders.

Marc Schelske (15:25)
Right, that opens up another topic in your book because if the person who’s doing what we just talked about, if that person is in leadership where they have stewardship of a community, where they’re part of the group, the committee or the pastors or whoever that get to decide things like, who do we hear from? Who do we see on stage? Who do we serve? Who do we welcome into community? If you’re part of that group, and you’re functioning in the way you’ve just described, where you’re gatekeeping access, that’s not just a rude preference. That’s where we begin to enter into the realm of what can be talked about in terms of spiritual abusiveness. So let’s talk about that.

You gave a definition of spiritual abuse that I thought was really helpful. Abuse is kind of vague and is used in a lot of ways in our culture. Anytime somebody feels like they didn’t get what they wanted or a situation felt uncomfortable, it’s easy to say that situation was abusive or toxic. And so you narrowed the beam, and you said, “My working definition of spiritual abuse is a misuse of power that leverages trust within a spiritual or faith-based context, thus dehumanizing and marginalizing those who bear the image of God.”

Jenai Auman (16:43)
I do draw on the definitions of the folks who wrote The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse and Lisa Oakley, a spiritual abuse researcher in the UK. And I thought how do I condense and distill this information to something that we can digest? I really wanted to empower people. I share bits and pieces of my story of working on a church staff. As many church staffers can attest to, once you start working behind the counter, you see how the sausage is made, and you realize there is a disparity between what we preach on Sunday and how we program what we preach on Sunday. And I hate, I hate that. I hate that programming is a whole thing for the church. It just sounds very mechanical and industrial, you know, and it takes something very garden-oriented. God uses a lot of garden-oriented language and metaphors, and we take the garden and make it a machine. I just feel icky.

Marc Schelske (17:26)
Yeah, sure.

Jenai Auman (17:38)
But seeing spiritual abuse within a staff context was–and I wouldn’t have called it spiritual abuse. because in spiritual abuse, so often you’re disempowered, and not only are you disempowered, but you’re conditioned not to ever have power. You’re constantly asking people for permission. Is this what happened? Is this what happened to me? I know how difficult it is to reach for those words and to say this is what defines my experience.

But on my church staff, I became a good soldier. Until I realized that the soldiering that they wanted me to do, the sort of workload they wanted me to keep up with, actually required my burnout. Our whole program and our whole church schematic was not restful. So no wonder we’re having these questions about how to rest when we don’t have it injected into the life and mission of our church. But the spiritual abuse that I experienced, I would say, had more to do with me being a female in that church. How to be a faithful woman in that church was to be a champion for my own subjugation.

Marc Schelske (18:26)
Yes.

Jenai Auman (18:48)
And women are pitted against one another. So there are some women who are more than happy to be a champion for their own subjugation. They are more than happy to do every single thing that the men in the church tell them to do. Because it’s really nice to have somebody tell you what to do, and you can execute it and you can kind of give yourself a pat on the back. And when I’m measured up against someone like that and I’m more vocal, I have more questions, I will ask you why I’m doing this. And also I did not have the privilege of making this decision. No woman in our church had the privilege of being a part of this decision-making. So please let me understand why you’re asking me to do this and also explain to me why you’re asking me to ask others to do this because if I’m trying to sell this to other people, I need you to tell me. I wanna believe in why this sort of volunteer workload is worth it. So those sorts of questions get you in trouble when you don’t fall in line and there are other people who are falling in line.

Marc Schelske (19:35)
Mm-hmm.

Jenai Auman (19:54)
Ultimately sticking up for myself over and over and over again, as you can imagine, they called me harsh and abrasive. I was harsh and abrasive for asking questions and for advocating for myself, and I wouldn’t quote-unquote learn my lesson, and it had me booted from the church And so I realized they had leveraged their trust and their relationship with me. And these folks that I knew for a very long time. You know that app on your phone that’s like on this day eight years ago, on this day 11 years ago, and you see like birthday photos and photos of folks holding your kids and stuff? Those are the people in my photos. We had a lot of life experiences and loving moments with one another before I went on staff. I was at the church for eleven years and it was only the last three years when I was on staff. So I had a lot of familial connection with them, a connection that I had chosen, I opted in. And so when they leveraged that trust, and they hoped for my silent complicity, I would not relent. And obviously, I wouldn’t give in because I wrote a whole book on it. So I would not go silently.

Marc Schelske (20:45)
Yeah. well, first off, it’s so frustrating to me that that happened, and it’s sad to me that it happened to you. It shouldn’t have happened that way. That’s not the way that I think a church following the way of Jesus would treat people.

You know, there’s this very bizarre mechanical process where those people who come in and experience love and belonging and transformation and demonstrate their passion. They become leaders, and the leadership demands are high, and it burns them out. They end up having to graduate from their church if they’re gonna be healthy because it’s not possible to do the kinds of things that maturing spiritual life requires in a world that’s all about fast-paced content production and community management. And it just sucks because that’s the model that is so popular right now.

Then on top of that, we have this abusive element that you’ve talked about, which what you described–if you were describing a corporate workplace, I think the same exact dynamic we would call toxic hierarchy or toxic patriarchy or even a particular toxic leadership community where a certain group of bros who all guard each other’s back and demand compliance. But then you put that in the church and now those people are doing the same thing, but they’re saying explicitly or implicitly, “This is God’s will,” right? Like it’s God’s will because we’re the ones who’ve been elevated to leadership. So God chose us, and it’s God’s will.

Jenai Auman (22:39)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (22:46)
In complementarian theology, it’s God’s will and your design as a woman. And the accusation of being, you said, and abrasive, right? So if I were to say, okay, you’re accusing someone of being harsh and abrasive. What’s the thing you want them to be? Do you want them to be soft and compliant? Okay?!

Jenai Auman (22:56)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (23:09)
What does that say about you and the system if that’s what you need people to be? I’m so sorry.

Jenai Auman (23:15)
Yeah, well, it was their way of making me the problem. In my advocacy of a better workplace, better systems, and even better work-life balance, I pointed out the problem. These are the problems within the system. This is the group dynamic that we’ve made normal. And I’m saying it shouldn’t be made normal because I wasn’t the first person in my position. They cycled through many people in my position, and they burned people out. And I kept thinking, “This is actually a doable job.” Like this is, I could see how, you know, boundaries and safeguards could be put in place so that this job becomes doable and you stop burning through people. Instead of looking at the problem and helping me address it, they made me the problem; they could pluck me out and then return to homeostasis. Unfortunately, that also wasn’t the case because I kept talking about it. And then I got on social media and started talking about it because they wouldn’t let me talk to members. So, members were following me on social media. So I kept talking about it. I never let them return to homeostasis. And I don’t feel guilty about that. I think Jesus came and he came to bring peace, and he came to be a compassionate presence in the world, and I think he also came to be a good troublemaker, and so I endeavor to be a good troublemaker when places of toxicity hurt people.

Marc Schelske (24:40)
When you talked about this situation, you identified the central marginalization as being a woman in this community that structurally and theologically saw women in a subservient role. They would say a complementarian role, you know, different gifts, but apparently, one of the gifts that they want to see manifested is being quiet and not upsetting our apple cart. I don’t know that that’s a spiritual gift. I don’t see that in there anywhere. Talk briefly about the dynamic for you as a woman in that environment. And maybe, how could women see more clearly what was going on in this community and what this community needed in ways that the leadership just couldn’t see?

Jenai Auman (25:21)
Yeah, well, some of the best foot soldiers for Toxic– it’s just patriarchy, all patriarchy. I believe is toxic and hierarchical and not good for any human being, but –The greatest foot soldier for patriarchy is the woman. So when you can get women on board, they will be the loudest cheerleaders for the whole movement. So, not all women could and were able to speak to it because they were too bought into the belonging that they had opted in for. And I think in this particular regard, not only was I a woman, I was the only person of color on our church staff. I was the only person who had an immigrant for a mother.

Marc Schelske (26:10)
That’s crazy in Texas.

Jenai Auman (26:08)
Yeah, so yeah, especially in Texas. I also grew up… are you familiar with Adverse Childhood Experiences? So, my ACEs score is eight. It’s a high ACEs score. So a lot of childhood trauma, domestic violence, all these sorts of things. And so I had a very particular view on what should be normal. And over time, I think my view of normal was just safety, you know? And I also had a very particular view on what is privileged.

Marc Schelske (26:37)
Sure, right.

Jenai Auman (26:41)
Entitlement gets conflated with privilege, and I saw a lot of entitlement in our church structure. People were entitled to x, y, and z, and I thought this was not okay. We had a retreat for some leaders, and they wanted a five-star retreat almost like luxurious accommodations, and the only thing we could afford was, you know, church camps in Texas, sort of not Five Star, not the Ritz-Carlton. And you realize then that when the number of arguments internally that are happening within these deacons and leaders and what’s expected of the leadership and the leadership is so worried that we’re not making these folks happy and how they kind of bend to the whims somehow. I realized this is a very, very expensive privilege that only a very affluent church can afford.

Marc Schelske (27:07)
Right.

Jenai Auman (27:32)
Not only were we focused on this, but we were also not focused on feeding or helping the unhoused, or we weren’t actively engaged in other actually merciful ministries. From my perspective, I thought this was a luxury. I never had a vacation as a kid. When I saw that the norms were something that my family could not conform to while growing up, I realized I have a very different perspective than a lot of these people. Now I know that a differing perspective is not bad. It’s actually holistic and good and helps build a more holistic church. At that time, I would just close my mouth and realize I was the outlier. And so I would keep quiet because there was no value to my perspective.

Marc Schelske (28:14)
Right, and at some point, it’s costly, and you have to decide if that cost is worth it. You talked about how there were women who either couldn’t see or wouldn’t speak out about the situation because of the cost to themselves, right? They have a certain amount of power, they have a certain amount of social respect in that community, and to speak out against it is gonna be “Harsh and abrasive,” right? That’s a struggle for any organization.

Even if we picture in our minds some ideal church that’s doing it right, you still have the dynamic that the folks planning are humans, and humans are discomfort averse. And we then tend to plan things that are comfortable for us, even well-intentioned people, right? Like I certainly have planned retreats and been one of the people who was like, “I’m old. I would really like a more comfortable bed. Can we make that happen?” You know? But then, having somebody else in the room who can say that will make the cost inaccessible to people. Is accessibility a value of what we want to accomplish here? And then if I’m in a good space, I’m like, “Of course. Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. You’re absolutely right. What can we do?” But in an environment with no voice to say, “Have you considered this implication of that thing that’s comfortable for you?” If I’ve just constructed a group of advisors who are all sort of in my lane, everyone will nod their head and say, “Yeah, of course, that’s what we all want.”

Jenai Auman (29:47)
Yes Men!

Marc Schelske (30:10)
And, when everyone in the room nods, it doesn’t feel like Yes Men affirming my decision. It feels like common sense, right? Well, common sense is that we all want this, and everybody would like it. And to have someone in that space, whether they’re speaking from sensory issues or gender issues or whatever, for them to say, you know, “I know you like smoke in the sanctuary because it makes the lights look pretty, but this is what it does to my autistic kid,” or “this is what it does to my, sensory overload issues. How might we accommodate that?” And then I’m like, it didn’t even ever occur to me that that would be a problem, you know?

Jenai Auman (30:13)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (30:39)
So then the issue that lies at the heart isn’t the smoke or the comfortable bed. The issue is the power structure; we had a community of people making these decisions in a way that was closed to the input of the lived experience of people that aren’t like that group of leaders, So then that immediately suggests that we should have diverse groups of leaders on purpose so that we avoid that. Is that all tracking?

Jenai Auman (30:54)
Yes, I would say, like when it’s a hive mind, and everybody thinks the same thing is on board with the same thing, dissent is not allowed. The system itself hinges on marginalization. It does marginalize that you have no other dissenting voices.

Marc Schelske (31:14)
Right.

Jenai Auman (31:23)
My undergrad is in behavioral health, and I was writing and studying groupthink as a phenomenon in a group dynamics class. I was also encouraged to research different scenarios in the news that might have been groupthink. There were two scenarios that I studied. One was Enron, and Enron happened in Houston. And I also studied groupthink in terms of the abuse scandal at Penn State. And I realized, yeah, there were a lot of people who could have been dissenting voices to the system, but the system was organized such that dissension was punished. And so no one brought a dissenting opinion. No one was willing to call foul because it would cost them, too. Ultimately, it costs those institutions a lot and the victims so much. And so when you have a system that actively discourages dissent or differing opinions, it will inevitably hurt someone, if not immediately, then somewhere down the line, because the system hinges on marginalization. And marginalization is dehumanizing to someone. I remember studying that and thinking, my gosh, I am living the case study for what I should be writing on, you know, but I can’t write on my church staff for this class. It was so infuriating to be living it. It probably made me seem more harsh and abrasive because I was trying to say, “this is what I’m learning.”

Marc Schelske (32:46)
Right. Right. Right. And this is why women shouldn’t learn, Jenai! Don’t you see?

Jenai Auman (32:48)
I know. There’s that line in Pride and Prejudice that Lady Catherine de Bourgh says of Elizabeth Bennet if anyone’s familiar, “obstinate headstrong girl.” And I got a shirt that says “obstinate headstrong.” I should have worn it for the interview! It is like my favorite shirt to wear to places because I now see that in cases where harm and toxicity and marginalization and dehumanization are normal, I want to seem obstinate and headstrong in those spaces.

Marc Schelske (33:24)
Okay, so that’s funny, but also, it feels like a really important thing to sit on for a minute. I think an awful lot of us are, whether by temperament or perhaps coping mechanisms or residual untreated trauma–I think a lot of us are conflict-averse. And when you put a community together, there will always be differences of opinion. So then, if It feels like sharing my opinion will result in conflict. Then there’s a calculation that people often do intuitively without even thinking it through that expressing that will hurt too much. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be awkward. That’s a word that gets used a lot these days. And awkward just means it’s the tip of the iceberg of discomfort that I don’t want to think about any deeper than that. “It was just awkward.”

Jenai Auman (34:05)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (34:15)
You’re wearing this T-shirt that says what it says, and the reality is that if you’re in a community where the culture is, “We don’t disagree. We’re nice people. We’re good people. We’re kind people,” right? Conflict isn’t a part of what a good church would be because we’re all filled with the fruits of the spirit, and we get along. Isn’t that wonderful? And then we all collude that we will behave that way because we, of course, prefer to be thought of as nice than obstinate, right?

The trouble for me is that people listen to my voice. Because I can walk into the room in any leadership conversation in my community and immediately have some level of respect, I then can say, “it’s important to be nice.”

Jenai Auman (34:56)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (35:06)
But somebody else in my community who doesn’t have that positional or cultural ability, that power, that privilege, somebody else… let’s say the issue is an issue of gender, and a woman wants to say, “Hey, this is my experience,” if our culture is that we all get along and we’re all nice and there isn’t conflict, then the only way that woman is going to be able to be heard is to behave in a way that our community perceives as not nice. And so then we end up with tropes like The Angry Black Woman, where a person has a reasonable complaint to make, but then because we’re conflict-averse, we’re like, “I, yeah, that’s, ew, I don’t want to have this conversation.”

Jenai Auman (35:32)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (35:45)
Why did you make me feel discomfort just now? Stop being the kind of person who makes me feel discomfort, right?

Jenai Auman (35:52)
Yeah, yeah. I think delineating between discomfort and safety is very important, and I think many people don’t know how to distinguish between the two. You can be uncomfortable, but what you really are is unsafe. As a woman who runs on the streets and jogs, I have to take care of my safety, make sure that I’m walking a safe path, that there are other people, that there are ways that–you know, Apple Watch–somebody can track me. And then there is the act of running itself. I’m fairly healthy. It’s uncomfortable running, but it’s a good challenge. So running is uncomfortable. Sometimes, it is unsafe, but most of the time, I’m just doing good training work that helps me grow as a runner. I think there’s a difference between discomfort, which is a lack of safety, and discomfort, which is actually outgrowing the pot you’ve planted in. I don’t think people understand the difference between the two.

Marc Schelske (36:55)
Mmm. That’s a really great distinction. I think, especially speaking as and to folks with a level of privilege in their community, it’s easy for me to say, “This is an uncomfortable conversation,” but it’s not actually threatening my position or anything, right? Whereas someone coming to me in a community where dissent is not allowed, the very act of coming to me is dangerous because it might mean getting excluded or they don’t get the opportunity. So at that moment, there’s discomfort, but because I’m the person with the privileged voice, I’m defining it as just awkward discomfort. “Can’t we all get along? Can’t you be a team player?” That kind of stuff, where that person who is marginalized might actually be addressing something where there’s a real danger to them for their well-being. For me to define that as just an issue of communication, or as a temperament issue, you know, like when they said of you that you’re harsh and abrasive, that’s saying that the problem is entirely in how you are interfacing with a system.

Jenai Auman (37:54)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (38:16)
And the system is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the system and the people in the system, which is me, right? The problem is framed as you being abrasive rather than that leader saying, “Weird. I had hoped that the way we did things wouldn’t be hurtful to people. Tell me more about how the way we’re doing things is hurting you because, gosh, that’s really not what I hope we do around here.”

Jenai Auman (38:30)
Yeah. The church should not only be a sanctuary but also a hospital for sick people. In a hospital, if you have surgery and it becomes infected, you have to open up the wound again to see if there’s something in there that should not be in there. Often, I was the one saying, “Hey, Something is in here that should not be in here. We need to cut this open and extricate the toxin so that we can heal.” We actually have to cause some discomfort to be able to heal the system that we’re in.

Marc Schelske (39:00)
Right. Especially the longer the problem is embedded in the body. If it was a brand new thing like we’re on a leadership team and we’re discussing some new endeavor we’re trying, you might be able to say, “This part seems off,” and there’s not a lot invested in that. But if it’s like, this is how we’ve done things for 20 years, or in the case of Complementarianism, this is how we’ve done things for 250 years. I mean, it’s practically like God gave these words at Mount Sinai!

Jenai Auman (39:17)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (39:40)
At that point, there’s a lot of pain in cutting that open, right? This, I think, is part of what underlies the complexity of the deconstruction conversation for both sides. Because folks who are deconstructing often have to dig deep into stuff that was embedded in their childhood experience of faith, where people that they loved and trusted told them lies about who they were or about who God was. They have to surgically open up to get down to that stuff, and then folks on the other side that are like, “You know, my kid read a book, and all of a sudden they’re asking these hard questions,” So for them, the same thing is happening. Something very deep has to be attended to, and that’s really painful. And we’d just rather it not happen.

Jenai Auman (40:27)
Yeah, and it’s become enmeshed with our identity and our worth. And I think whenever you’re taking a scalpel to a part of someone’s identity, of course, you’re the problem. Don’t cut who I am. So I remember in a meeting a year later, after our family had already left our church, I remember telling my former pastor, “I have a lot of empathy for you because I know your story; I know your childhood also. I know the pain you’ve had to endure and I know that to address that lack within yourself, You found it in quote-unquote Jesus, but you really didn’t find it in Jesus. You found it in the position that Jesus afforded you in the church. You found it in your identity as a pastor.”

Marc Schelske (41:09)
Ooof.

Jenai Auman (41:12)
“If someone comes at you, you immediately make it an us versus them situation. It’s a me-versus-you situation when a shepherd should be protecting the sheep. And you didn’t do that with me. I gave you so many opportunities to do that with me, but you didn’t. And I think it’s because you need to protect something within you. And I was a threat to that system. And so you say that your identity is in Jesus, but it’s really in the things that Jesus has afforded you in your privilege as a man.”

So I invited him into something more, and he didn’t want it. And so I realized I am no longer responsible for this. All I can control and am responsible for is what I do now, moving forward.

Marc Schelske (41:54)
Brutal. Brutal. I bet he thought that was harsh and abrasive.

Jenai Auman (42:02)
I’m sure he did! I’m sure he did.

Marc Schelske (42:04)
It makes me think back to conversations that I had with my therapist where, now 10 years past. Sitting with her, I look back, and I’m so grateful for what she said, but man, in the moment, I was like, “Why are you so mean to me? Why are you saying this hurtful stuff?”

Jenai Auman (42:20)
Yeah. Like, how dare you?!

Marc Schelske (42:26)
So you ended that bit there talking about coming to a place of decision in your heart about how you were going to posture yourself in relationship to both the specific experience you had as a person, but then also this whole question in terms of how we as the people of Jesus behave in these ways. At the end of Othered, you offered a vision that I find quite profound, and this goes way deeper than just being able to personally move on, or it’s even deeper than personal healing. This isn’t about stopping the bleeding. You wrote, “I choose not to collude with a culture that is okay with using Jesus to hurt others.” That is incredibly strong language. Collusion–that’s a legal term for when you participate in making a crime happen. “I choose not to collude with a culture that’s okay with using Jesus to hurt others. Rather, I will continue to turn away and not use God-loaded language to make other people small. Repentance means my gaze is set on Jesus and I walk free knowing that I do not have to seek retribution for my scars.” So let’s talk about that.

Jenai Auman (43:41)
I’ve really not heard a proper apology that took on ownership. It was always, You know, “I tried to do the right thing, and going back now, I wish I could do things differently.” It’s never been, “I treated you poorly. I did not treat you as a sister. And I did do the things that you say I did, and I’m sorry.” I never heard that. I don’t know if I ever will hear that. And I realized that my moving forward could not hinge on me, hoping to hear that one day. So, for my whole personhood, I needed to find healing in some other way. And if they weren’t going to help kind of excavate all of the harm that they had done, I thought I’m going to find another way to do it because again–petty but also stubborn. These men do not get to hold any sort of control of my faith. They don’t get to control my story. And if my life becomes all about what they did, then I start to turn into the decrepit, abrasive, harsh person that they believe me to be. And I thought I’m not doing it. I’m not playing into their game.

Marc Schelske (44:48)
Yeah. Right.

Jenai Auman (45:05)
The biblical idea of repentance, it’s not just an “I’m sorry.” It’s a total transformation into a new sort of human. I will no longer walk in the way of the world. I will walk in the way of Jesus. And so, after a time of significant mourning, that’s exactly what I turned to in the Bible. What is the way of Jesus? What did he actually do? Who did he go to?

I realized that repentance is just listening to people and caring for them. It doesn’t have to be creating a culture where it’s us-versus-them. I can avoid that. I can even avoid that in my own healing and my own pursuit of justice. I can avoid creating an us-versus-them culture. I realized I was not going to fight the machine with another machine. In every way that I can, I want to beat my swords into plowshares. I want to cultivate goodness. What I can do is cultivate goodness through the stories I tell, through the words that I write, and through the hope that I offer in those stories. And so I think practicing repentance is breathing life into the world just as life has been breathed into me by God, by the spirit of God, the breath of God that dwells within me. I want to breathe life into the world so I can heal my wound. My life doesn’t have to be all about my wounds, but in my resurrected life, I can bear the scars of my wounds and say I actually lived. Now, from this place of resurrection, I want to breathe life into others as well. That’s what I tried to do in Othered.

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske (46:44)
What happened for you when you heard Jenai’s words? I choose not to collude with a culture that uses Jesus to hurt others. Don’t let those words float by. Allow them to sink in and do their work in you. Have I colluded in harm the church has done? Maybe I just didn’t want to rock the boat. Maybe I needed the community for my own sense of security more than I needed the community to be equitable for other people. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was part of the sausage-making, and the truth is that in most modern American churches, the pressure to build a great program that’s never more than six days away is unstoppable. Even if I didn’t intend to harm, even if I think of myself as someone who follows Jesus and wants to care for those around me, even then, it’s possible I have colluded with the harm done.

So what now? Well, like Jenai, we have a choice. When and where we see harm being done, we can decide not to contribute to it. We can choose to raise our hand in the committee meeting and say that we’re rushing, and in our rus,h we might be overlooking or inadvertently hurting people. As a respected middle-aged white pastor, I can make sure that when women or people of color speak up in the circles, I’m part of, they’re heard rather than ignored or worse, having their ideas co-opted by other people.

We get to choose where to give our money, and we can choose to not give when it seems like the organizations we’ve been supporting are doing harm. We can speak up and say, doesn’t have to be like this. That’s what I hope I’m doing. I hope that’s what all of us in this odd extended community of Jesus followers who’ve stepped away from fundamentalist ways of holding faith are willing to do, even when it costs us. Toward the end of Othered, Jenai wrote, “Living resurrected means I not only fight for the flourishing of my own community, I seek the flourishing of the nations –of everyone. I turn away from and no longer live a life of control, coercion, colonization, or conquest.” That sounds to me very much like Jesus. And that’s the shape of faith I want to be formed in.

May you have the courage to consider the ways that you’ve participated in othering and to step away from those paths.

Thanks for listening.

If this conversation has intrigued you, I recommend you check out Jenai’s book, Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. You can find it in all the book places. You can also learn more about her and what she’s up to at her website, www.JenaiAuman.com. Notes for today’s episode and any links that were mentioned can find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW056.

Did like this? Well, there’s more. Subscribe to Apprenticeship Notes. That’s my email newsletter. It’s monthly-ish, really about 8 to 10 times a year. It includes an exclusive essay that you won’t find anywhere else, insider commentary on my podcast and blog posts, books I recommend, and more. You’ll get a free little book when you register. It’s called The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. In this little book, I teach a spiritual practice that I’ve been using for several years in this time of anxiety and uncertainty that has really been meaningful to me, so subscribe, and get that little book at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, in this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

What would you learn if you had the opportunity to go back and revisit your spiritual journey of twenty-five years ago? What if that experience happened in community, with folks who were there with you, when it happened? What would you learn? How are you different? What losses and what growth would you notice? The release of Kansas 25, a re-recording of her award-winning album, Kansas, gave singer songwriter, Jennifer Knapp, just that experience.

Jennifer Knapp is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, author, speaker, and advocate whose two-decade career has significantly impacted the music industry. With over one million albums sold from her first three releases—”Kansas” (1998), “Lay It Down” (2000), and “The Way I Am” (2001)—Knapp achieved Gold certification for “Kansas” and earned four Dove Awards along with two Grammy nominations. Originating from Kansas, she has performed globally alongside artists like Jars of Clay and participated in the Lilith Fair Tour in 1999 and 2010. Known for her poignant exploration of human experiences and spirituality, Knapp took a seven-year hiatus in 2002, returning with the album “Letting Go” in 2010, which debuted at No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 200 Chart. Beyond music, she is a pioneer in LGBTQ+ advocacy within Christian communities, being the first major artist to openly discuss her identity, which sparked national dialogue and led to appearances on platforms like Larry King Live and TEDx. In 2012, she founded Inside Out Faith, a non-profit organization advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in faith contexts. Recently, she completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, reinforcing her commitment to social justice through music and advocacy. Jennifer Knapp’s diverse talents and dedication to inclusivity continue to inspire audiences worldwide.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey, friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth, following the way of Jesus. This is episode 55: A Better Place Than Here.

THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR
Today’s podcast is made possible by The Writers Advance. I’m a writer. I love supporting writers. Five years ago, I created The Writer’s Advance. It’s exactly what I needed–A writing weekend that has been crafted to be precisely what writers need to push forward their current project. It’s not about networking or listening to experts speak or trying desperately to get an agent or editor to notice you. Nope. It’s about writing and reconnecting with why writing matters to you.

At the end of every writing weekend, I send all the participants an anonymous survey to get feedback so that I can improve the experience. You can read their words on the event website, but I wanted to just read a couple of their comments to you right now, because they really tell the story. This is an anonymous feedback from the retreat two years ago.

“This was an amazing weekend. The hosting was on target. The venue was peaceful and offered more than I expected. I loved the pacing. Marc is a great host and guide, and provides just the right amount of encouragement and accountability. So looking forward to the next one.”

Here’s another. This is a comment about last year’s event. “This weekend reenergized my commitment to my writing craft. It was an excellent blend of accountability, flexibility, creativity and guidance. I felt supported as a human and a writer the whole time I was there.”

One last one. This is from Tara Rolstad, a professional speaker who has attended The Writer’s Advance multiple times. Now, she won’t be there this November, because she is going to be busy launching her new book, a book that came to life at the writer’s advance! This is what she said. “I’ve come to see The Writer’s Advance as a gift I can’t afford not to give myself. I got more work done this weekend than I have in months, and to do it in a gorgeous, peaceful, comfortable location in the company and support of smart, quality people? Invaluable! I’m deeply grateful.”

Maybe that is the sort of thing you need, or maybe you love a writer and want to give them an incredible gift. Well, the next Writer’s Advance is just around the corner, November 7 – 10, and registration closes on October 5. So I would love to see you there and support you and your project. All your questions are answered on the website. What are the accommodations like? How much does it cost? What’s the food like, and can they handle special dietary needs? Yes, they absolutely can. All that at www.thewritersadvance.com for more details. I hope to see you there.

INTRODUCTION

In the late 90s, I was a fresh-faced youth pastor with a guitar, doing all the things that line of work requires. Youth group events, silly games and small group meetings at Denny’s, and leading energetic songs with hand motions, planning summer camps and passionately preaching the gospel, all with the hope that kids might have an encounter with Jesus. And I remember in 1998, an album came onto the Christian music scene that just captured my mind. It was called Kansas.

It was the debut album of a young singer songwriter named Jennifer Knapp. The tracks are fantastic, but what caught my attention most were the lyrics. Outside maybe two other musicians I had never heard Christian songs that felt this honest to me. There was a yearning I felt in the lyrics. In one song, Whole Again, she said, “If I give my life, if I lay it down / can you turn this life around, around / Can I be made clean by this offering / of my soul? Can I be made whole again?” There was this sense of being drawn by Jesus and at the same time feeling in exile. Another song, Refine Me, says “You’re my God and my father / I’ve accepted your son / but my soul feels so empty now / What have I become?” I’d felt that. I’d done all the things I was supposed to do, and yet many of the things my church promised me weren’t happening. What was going on? Knapp’s songs contained authentic declaration of real struggles. Sometimes those struggles were internal feelings of inadequacy, even sinfulness. Other times, those struggles were with the accepted preconceptions of Christian culture. In her song, In The Name, she wondered honestly, “To each his own / won’t lead you home / and probably never will.” That hit hard. The whole album carried this deep sense of standing on the edge of something bigger, and that something felt like the presence of God too me.

I followed Jennifer’s next few releases, and then in 2010 she just disappeared, at least from the perspective of my small Christian world. What happened? Well, Jennifer came out, and the Christian music industry that had celebrated her, and the Christian community that had commended her thought and bought her concert tickets just didn’t have room for a Christian musician who was openly gay. In the 14 years since, so much has happened. Jennifer found new community. She had to. She found new fans. She had to. She got on with her life. She found a partner. She wrestled with what it means to have faith and have had a real experience with Jesus, and then, at the same time to have been excluded from community by some of Jesus followers. And then a couple of years ago, the idea surfaced for her to re-record her seminal album, Kansas. The support that welled up for this project was, I think, beyond Jenn’s expectations. She did it, and that album is now available.

It’s called Kansas 25 and I’ve been listening to this album over and over since it came out, and it has been such an interesting experience for me. The lyrics of the song are the same, the arrangements are similar, but I’m listening as someone who has spent twenty-five years going deeper in my pursuit of Jesus in the way that some characterize as deconstruction. In the same way, the songs are also being sung by an artist with twenty-five years more life experience, and those years include pain and joy, exclusion, new community, letting go of old and unhelpful theology and embracing new things that are life giving. And so for me, as I was listening to this album, those songs, they just hit so differently with the weight of twenty-five years more lived experience and more theological exploration.

As I realized what was happening in me as a listener, I thought, “Man, I would love to talk with Jennifer about what happened for her as she did this.” What was it like to re-record these songs, what was it like to face who she was as a young singer, a young writer, and what did she learn about her own spiritual development? Well, I reached out and I asked her, and she said, Yes! Jen’s official bio says she’s a Grammy nominated singer songwriter, author, speaker and advocate known for her musical talents and commitment to social causes. With a rich history spanning over two decades, Knapp has left an indelible mark on the music industry. Her career includes the remarkable achievement of selling over a million albums with her first three releases, the Gold Certified Kansas (1998), Lay it Down (2000), and The Way I Am (2001). Alongside this commercial success, Knapp has been honored with four Dove Awards and garnered two Grammy nominations.

I started my conversation with Jen by asking her what it felt like when she discovered that there was this whole community who wanted to revisit the Kansas album with her.

THE INTERVIEW

Jennifer Knapp 7:35
Really, the journey back into Kansas, for me, is a story of coming back to music in 2010 and taking a big, long break away from Christian music. For sure, I knew I was never going back to that place, and I was also simultaneously coming out, and I have to be absolutely honest and say that I was completely ambivalent about, if not resistant to, in any way, engaging in faith conversations with people in public. For sure, private. It’s, you know, private’s another question. Also, in that my own discomfort of playing that older material for a variety of reasons. When I look back, you know, I was hurt by my religious experience. I was at a crossroads deciding how much of that I would engage in public or not, and also just getting new and back to music and really looking forward to doing the music that was ahead of me and not behind me.

All that to say is that show after show after show that I’m playing, even after I came out, were people talking so much, you know, “Please play this song.” And you know, one of the famous stories that I tell is a lesbian bar I was hanging out in Philadelphia. It’s probably the first six months of me getting back out on the road and touring. And I might have come out after that, I can’t remember, but it was inside the first year or so. And here I am on a Sunday night, and it’s packed out, and there had been a few drinks happening about an hour or so into the show. The the gals in the bar were like, “Play Martyrs and Thieves,” which is one of the epic songs off of Kansas. And I didn’t want to play it. I was afraid to play it. I didn’t know if I would perform it well. I didn’t know if I was just going to be mad by the end of it. It’s six minutes long, so it’s a little bit of a commitment to to like have to pretend you care if it turns out I didn’t, but the crowd was just really begging me to play this, to the point that I understood something about the fact that my resistance to it was starting to very much be inhospitable.

That was a very uncomfortable feeling for me. I just remember this moment. I ended up playing it and the whole bar starts singing. And there are these, you know, women holding each other. There are former Youth group group, kids that are now adults that are just standing on top of the bar singing at the top of their lungs. And I looked around this room going, “My gosh. If, if this obvious group of human beings can somehow not give up a song that means something to them, Why am I giving up something that came from me and out of me?” remember that moment kind of opening the door up to my previous catalog.

What was amazing to me, and this is kind of in the vein of what happens when you’re a singer-songwriter. I felt that from my body. I play with my guitar. AndI wrote these songs a long, long time ago in a room just by myself, and I could tell that these songs came for me. So even the parts of me that might have felt, you know, intellectually alienated from them, or spiritually alienated from them, I could tell when I put them on. They were my shoes, you know what I mean?

Marc Schelske 11:11
Interesting. Wow.

Jennifer Knapp 11:12
Yeah. And that, that story… I mean, that’s a story like about… that started about 15 years ago, but throughout the course of that time, like, it was… I feel like it was the people who had had owned and listened to this music. And as so many people have described it to me as this is the soundtrack of their experience, when somebody said that to me, it’s like, I didn’t want to be a person that took that away from them. I didn’t want that because at the heart of what I do as a musician, and the way I go out into a public space, it’s a gift. It’s sharing, it’s community, it’s positive, it’s affirming. So I don’t want my shit to go on everybody else’s table. I mean, that’s mine to work through…

Marc Schelske 11:55
Right!

Jennifer Knapp 11:55
You know? And if I’m going through something or whatever… I mean, I’ve worn my heart on my sleeve from the day that I walked out on stage. And so it’s not that I’ve ever kind of tried to veil that or hide that from my audience, but I don’t necessarily think that sharing something means assuming that the rest of the room will take on, you know, your level of frustration or anger, but to if I ever confess them out loud, it’s a sense of help me release this. And so in a way, like the story of Kansas kind of flips a little bit on its head for about 10 years, because it’s my audience now giving that record back to me.

I’ll fast forward 25 years ahead, by the time we get to this celebration, I realize that, you know, there are a couple of things that have happened in the lifetime of this record, and not the least of which is a narrative for LGBTQ community inside of faith circles, right where we come out and we have been forcibly exiled or marginalized, or even completely erased from narratives. And that is one of the things, not all the things, but one of the things that’s kind of tempted to have happen with this particular record, to act like it didn’t exist, or that it wasn’t a significant record in the history of contemporary Christian music. And it’s not that I felt like I needed to do that for myself, but it was literally over the last fifteen years hearing people talk about how critical these particular songs had been to them in their journey, and even when I wasn’t there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but it’s a part of our spirituality, a part of our community, a part of the fabric of who we are, and we collectively share what now exists out there, and no one can take that away. I know that people know the songs. I don’t have any need to sell more copies of this record, but what I really wanted to do was give that gift to say, “Thank you. I heard you. I know that this song has journeyed with you, and I bet that we have all changed a little bit in that 25 years, you know, we’re the same people, but the experience has changed, the filter with which we see the world.”

And I thought, wouldn’t it be an interesting artistic experience to go back and record this record and see what that sounds like, to see if we can actually get… if this record has been doing what it’s been doing, will it do a new thing and reflect the journey of all of us that have kind of been through that space? It’s an acknowledgement, at the very least, that we’re all willing to understand our own evolution, our own journey, within our faith tradition, within our theology, within our community, and all the things good and bad that come with it. And yet somehow, you know, even when we’re frustrated with where maybe our particular faith community may or may not be, or whatever the church in air quote is or isn’t, we’re somehow persisting in some way. And, not, you know… for me, that’s kind of the strange thing. I didn’t really want to make another Christian record, but it’s also part of my story, and it’s a part of our story, and so no matter where we kind of end up with it, it’s still reflective. I think when you, when I meet the audience of people that I hang out with all the time, I mean, I’m struck by how genuinely affirming human beings they are, how amazingly integrated into their communities they are in terms of, you know, positive influences inside of their inside of their worlds. And not everyone is still persisting in practicing Christianity, but they’re all extraordinary human beings who have lived examined lives and challenge themselves to be still pursuing the hopefulness of their best selves. This happens to be where I started, and to be able to celebrate that a lot of us took a lot of positive things out of that was something that I thought was really important to not necessarily erase, but to actually celebrate.

Marc Schelske 16:01
That’s really interesting on so many fronts. One front is just, you know, most creative people that I know kind of have this drive to keep moving forward, and the idea of going back and revisiting creative work of yours from a previous era of your life–I would say most creative people I know are not really excited about that. They want to move forward to the next thing. They’re not the same person that they were when they made that previous thing. When I go back and look at a sermon that I wrote 25 years ago, I’m like, ugh.. I’m so sorry that I did this to people…

Jennifer Knapp 16:31
Yeah, we don’t really want to reread it or…

Marc Schelske 16:33
Right!?

Jennifer Knapp 16:34
It kind of falls short. I would say that that’s true. I mean, I think for… in coming up to the twenty-five year anniversary of the record, I’d had, a lot of close friends going, “We ought to do something. We ought to do something.” I’m like, I don’t know. it took me a while to kind of get enthusiastic about it. It wasn’t a given that I was going to re-record this record. I’ll put it that way. And it wasn’t until like, that narrative that I’ve just kind of come across had kind of illuminated itself and started to realize is like, I don’t need to do it. I have no personal stake in going back to it. But fueled with making a gift? That was a project I’d never really done before. Because if you think about an artist, most of the time, we’re creating new stuff all the time, right? And then you go into the studio and you go and record it, and you’re, you know, you’re going out, and it’s always a new thing. You make it and then you wait to see what life extends out from it. There’s very few opportunities that I get to know what you like…

Marc Schelske 17:42
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Knapp 17:43
…how it will touch your heart, how it has touched your heart. And that I can give you a gift that I know will hit you like, right in the center. I mean, I haven’t talked about any of these… like, before we released this project out to the masses, I hadn’t given a lot of lip service to what was happening with the re-recording. So it was just, “Hey, it’s twenty-five years. We’re going to re-record it. It’s going to be really great.” It wasn’t till after it released that everybody starts chatting, you’re listening to it, right, sharing your stories about listening to this record, that I was like, my gosh, it actually happened like, the gift of this, the reminiscing, the the ability that people had to see themselves and and even rescue some of their own soundtrack in ways that they’d never imagined, was such an honor to witness. To hope that a project can do that. I mean, I’ve never… that’s so weird. I mean, it’s a strange kind of ministry. It’s not really recording project. And in a weird way, I can’t use believe, I just used the “M word…”

But in a lot of ways, right? Like the first record, the first time I recorded this record, I’m a new kid. I’m a new kid on the block. I know nothing about contemporary Christian music. We’re sitting down. These are songs that you never heard. So in some way, every performance is trying to woo you into liking me, liking the song. You know, hoping that it just hits some deeply spiritual mark. And it’s all bullshit, because at the end of the day, all we can really do is live authentically and hope that it arrives at the spot. You know, that who we are or what we offer as a gift. You don’t know that the first time through. And I think that’s the same way with other projects now like this. Will this experience turned out to be a completely unique experience for me, because then it opened me up to like, I don’t have to woo somebody with this recording. I just had to sit down and live with it. I had to live with what I’d written. I had to write with the body that I had now. I had to build a new relationship with these songs. Like, people are going, “Oh, when are you going to rerecord, you know, “Taylor Swift” your other records?” And I’m like, I don’t I know that I’ll do that. This was a different mission. It wasn’t just re-recording a project.

Marc Schelske 19:58
Seems like there’s this completely unexpected thing that happened, right? So you had this moment in time where, because of coming out, that era of your music career, and the community and the audience that existed at that point in time was brought to a close. You didn’t do it, but it was kind of done. And then you go on in your own journey, and you do the things that you do as a musician, as an artist, you take time off. Now, you’re on that train. This album still exists separately from you, having interactions with people, and something that you planted in that album grew separately from you. You were not watering…

Jennifer Knapp 20:39
Absolutely.

Marc Schelske 20:40
…You were off doing other things,

Jennifer Knapp 20:42
I would have told you that I would have really loved it if it died. There were points in my experience where I was so frustrated by where conservative Christian culture was going, that if I could have taken my name out of it and taken any role that I had in… I would have loved to have had that happen. As you were kind of speaking, I was like, This is what happens when we accept the truth of our journey, when we acknowledge where we’ve been and what we’ve done. That’s what this project really is. And, you know, I can’t take away the fact that I’ve had a significant experience inside of my faith community. Yeah, now, where I go from here and what my future looks like is anybody’s guess. You know, I’m I’m still on a journey forward as much as I’ve ever been. But there’s a part of us, especially when we’ve been harmed or we’ve been frustrated, or we find a level of disagreement or a conflict… the idea that exorcism works, or excising something is the way that we will find healing and hope. I’m not saying like… you know, some things are bad. Take them out. You know, cancer is not a good thing to leave around. But at the same time, like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as I say… you do that, you get a wet, critically injured baby.

Marc Schelske 22:05
Right, right! Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 22:06
You throw a portion of yourself out. Is that really what you want to do? Whether one chooses to do that or not, my point has been, don’t just do that, but think first. Really examine it, be able to live in those things. And sometimes you will find that the some of the pain and suffering that we experience through those types of journeys, is about leaving things behind that are actually uniquely ours, a fabric that’s interwoven into who we are. When I talk about these songs, like when I talk about playing them, and I feel that I know they came from my body and my person. Every time I play them, I cannot deny it. When I play them again, I am reconnecting, in a weird way, with something that is of me, that is honest. And I think in that I realized in feeling that physical sensation and playing that music, I realized that faith for me was a really important thing that I didn’t want to have lost in the conflict, that I was actually willing to fight for that and through that.

Or maybe, not fight, but to be at peace. Like to “be still and know that I am God.” I use that so much to myself, going, Why am I fighting a battle that… you know… Am I worried about what everybody else thinks about my faith? Am I doing my faith the right way so I’ll be qualified to be called Christian or not Christian? Frankly, I don’t care what you call me anymore. I really, genuinely don’t. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have a discipline. The more secure that you get in an understanding of who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s amazing how quickly the external voices and critiques and judgment become disempowered to have influence. Like, to kind of knock you off your your mission and where you want to go, like, the confidence you have to choose your path.

Marc Schelske 24:08
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 24:09
Most of the time, like, when we’re uncertain, It’s really easy to knock us off when we’re not as certain as what we want to accomplish or where we want to head. So, yeah, it’s, one of those things that it just amazed me that by just being able to accept, like, yeah, that’s where I was at, these are the things that I did, and you know what? Darn it, that really changed my life in some really remarkable and profound ways that I don’t want to lose. I don’t want to lose my ability to reach back and touch that memory, to be connected to that memory, because I realize that no matter what I do, I’m really actually not going to be able to disentangle myself from it. It is a part of me. It is part of my journey.

Marc Schelske 24:52
Yeah, so this is the weird gift/torture, then, that your audience handed you, right? They like said…

Jennifer Knapp 24:58
It was a weird torture!

Marc Schelske 25:00
“Jennifer, we would like you to go back into a room with your younger self, half your age, and just hang out together and see what what happens. What do you learn? What threads remain important? What needs to be set aside? What happens when you go back into that room with your younger self and face who she was and what her hopes were?”

Jennifer Knapp 25:24
Well, I’ll tell you, one thing I didn’t do is I didn’t go back and listen to the original recording. That I put on to Steve Hindalong’s shoulders. Steve is the producer of this record. I put this on Steve to listen to the old the old stuff, because I didn’t want to have it in my head. I wanted my voice of today to be able to carry it. I neither wanted to copy it, nor did I want to be intimidated by it. I wanted the song as it sat with me today. I knew things had changed a lot. I’m a different guitar player now. I sing differently now. And, on a weird note, like there’s some like archeological differences… archeological? I don’t know. There are, like, some actual tangible material differences in the record. This record is six minutes longer than the original…

Marc Schelske 25:29
And you cut a song?

Jennifer Knapp 25:51
Well, on the on the vinyl, I had to drop one because vinyl is like a finite… right? It’s a finite space. So because of the length of recording, I had to drop Refine Me, so it’s only on the digital versions. But I also changed… and I was adamant to have the acapella piece, the song called Faithful To Me, I was adamant that I wanted it intact. So the way that I sing it live has always been a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus. It’s just those two sections and on there’s no recorded version of it in that form. So those were really the only things that I had. But yeah, between tempos and the way that we just played these songs, and even strangely, I cut some… I did some arrangement where I did cut, like, some bars from songs in an attempt to make them shorter, just because of form, just an artistic decision that I just had. But even with those cuts, it’s strange, yeah, we ended up having a materially longer record than we did. Sort of like age does? It kind of gets us all sagging…

Marc Schelske 27:26
Yeah, right!

Jennifer Knapp 27:27
It gets us longer, in a lot of ways. A little grayer. I need a little bit more time to do the record. Like, the idea of going a hundred and eighty beats a minute was not really on for me at this point. It was intriguing that, you know? It would have been fascinating to see. It was kind of a weird science experiment in that way. You know, we just play these songs, will they be the same as the other one? And clearly they weren’t. And it was fun to see that kind of show itself.

Marc Schelske 27:58
When you went, metaphorically, back into that room with your younger self, what are you noticing? Spiritually and personally? You talk about how these songs feel like they came from your body, and they feel deeply connected to you, but you’re also in many ways different. Or I should say, you’ve been through a lot since then that has shaped who you are. So when you’re in this dialog–who you are now, in the journey that you’ve had, in the spiritual journey that you’ve had, with your younger self, who’s right at the beginning of the career, who’s a fairly new Christian, who’s in this brand new, burgeoning industry, CCM, with all kinds of new pressures–when you’re in dialog with that person, what did you notice?

Jennifer Knapp 28:45
Well, it’s interesting that you say the younger self, because… Singing is such a physical thing, like singing and playing. And it was really in the performances of these that… I mean, it began in the physically aware spaces. Like when I’m holding my breath for a really long phrase, I’m like, “What was she doing?” I would literally be talking out loud, going, “That young whipper snapper.” Or, if I was frustrated with a turn of phrase or a chord or arrangement… I mean things that I wouldn’t do now, for better, for worse, right? It was amazing that physically performing the songs made a connection to realizing I am not in the same body that I was, you know, 25 years ago. And, to start talking about myself, I would like, literally, yeah… “that girl, young Jen, is so full of herself. What was she thinking?” But, that physical connection really gave me pause to think back, in connecting and seeing her in that way. This was going to sound weird and so dissociative. But being able to see and watch yourself, kind of in your imagination, be able to look back, look at her, see what she was doing, bewildered, enthusiastic, in no way deceitful. It was lovely to be able to look in on her and in a weird way, and go, “Wow, she was really just genuinely doing her thing.” And at times that I was critical, even in the process, in the present day, kind of going back and recording something, I would go, “You know what? You gotta hand it to that kid. Don’t take anything away from her.” I don’t think I had given myself a level of grace in this time of my life, not as an apology, but to not be embarrassed about my my sold-out-Kool-Aid-drinking-years of Christianity. I think that was a part of it.

Marc Schelske 30:52
It was earnest!

Jennifer Knapp 30:54
It was earnest. It really was. Now, I think that same spirit of that young person still lives in me today. I love being earnest about my work. I’ve never regretted being honest and authentic and wearing my heart on my sleeve. I’ve regretted when I knew I went against that. I’m more than happy to take responsibility for who and what I’ve been and what I’ve done throughout my life. I prefer that to denial or to trying to twist myself into something that’s not seeking what my heart really, truly longs for. Which is a weird thing to say in a Christian environment, and still a hard thing for me to say now, because I think oftentimes, particularly with Christianity, there’s a lot of conversation in and around the denial of self…

Marc Schelske 31:48
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 31:49
…and a mistrust of our inner voice. To seek something from our own hearts [is seen as] as genuinely corrupt, as opposed to replacing our inner heart and our inner voice with the voice of God, right?

Marc Schelske 32:03
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Knapp 32:04
I don’t know how we know the difference of that. To be honest, to me, I know when I’m lying to myself and I know when I’m not. I mean, I sometimes find out later. But, you know, I think it’s been a really easy thing for the church to take away our trust of our own self and an autonomy away from us, and which–I would put in a theological position as the temple of the Holy Spirit being in our hearts. If the sanctuary that is within us isn’t trustworthy, and we don’t trust that sanctuary, then where do we begin? Because that is the temple. If anyone’s concerned that that is some way of a denial or an opening to a dark space, I would say quite the opposite. I think it raises the ante for our responsibility to know that we have a discipline and a practice and a care and an awareness and a will to create in ourselves a holy sanctuary…

Marc Schelske 33:14
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 33:15
…to be responsible for the care of that. That’s not accidental. That’s not just simply trying to set everything on fire, but to actually build something mindfully, you know, with purpose. That, to me, has done exactly the opposite. It wasn’t setting the foxes loose at all. For me to be able to go, “No, this is my voice, and this is my heart.” And that included days where I was like, “Screw you God. This is where I’m at.” Seriously. Like, this is what everybody else says, or this is what my church says, or this is what you know, this is maybe where I feel like God might, may or may not want me to go. And I have said, “No, I’m not willing,” you know, and just being honest with myself about, like, whether I’m resistant. I’m more Jonah than anything. I have sat under a withering vine for more hours than I cared to confess.

Marc Schelske 34:07
Yeah!

Jennifer Knapp 34:08
But at the end of the day, none of us change, none of us do work, none of us go down a road at some point, unless we get the full enjoyment of that journey, unless we, at some point, have acknowledged our choice and our free will to go down that road. Yeah, so, it’s not that I want to be in contest with that, but the joy and the raised responsibility of saying I will be responsible for my heart and I will do the work to know what is the voice of my heart and to do the work, because what I want is to be an affirming human being. I want to live a life that when other people around me, they experience a sense of affirmation, that they know that I will love them, that they know that I’m a person who is interested in the liberation, that I’m interested in life over death.

Marc Schelske 34:58
Yes.

Jennifer Knapp 34:59
I’m less interested in religion. What I’ve found through music in this process of creativity is it being able to go, No, that is in me. It really is in me. I really do want to sing. I really do want to sing this song. I really am angry–whatever it is. That earnestness of that young girl, I think, is something that I’m so grateful to see still lives in me. Yes, even though sometimes she embarrasses me.

Marc Schelske 35:26
That’s so wonderful. There’s a line in in Visions that has stayed in my brain ever since hearing the first album, and it is this line that I think speaks to that continuity you just mentioned, which is” They say that I am much too demanding to want a better place than here.” There’s so much in that, because there’s the “they,” whoever they are…

Jennifer Knapp 35:55
Right.

Marc Schelske 35:56
There’s all these voices that are telling you, you know, “Don’t feel how you feel. Don’t want something different. What we tell you is right is what’s right. Just buy the line that we’re giving you.” So, you’ve got the whole “they” and and you’ve got this heart, this little heart that’s saying, “No, there’s gotta be more than this. Don’t you see how this is not enough? Don’t you see how this is leaving something important out. Don’t you see how we’re not loving in the way that Jesus taught us to love?” That heart is crying out, “There’s gotta be something better than this, isn’t there? Come on guys.” And that tension between the voice of the “they” who’s saying, “No, no, this is really all there is. How we are telling you it needs to be, you just need to get it. You’ve got to get on board.” right? That yearning heart, to me, that’s not demanding. That, I feel, is the Spirit of God at work in us, wanting to see the life, wanting to see the fulfillment of liberation, wanting to see grace really be grace, instead of just a branding on another set of standards for who gets to be in and out of a community, right? That’s there, and I feel like, as I hear you talk today, I hear that same continuity to that earnest kid on stage.

Jennifer Knapp 37:17
Yeah, I think for me, it definitely channels the direction of keeping hope. It’s more about the foolishness that I have in persistently hoping and persistently challenging myself to do better and to seek better, and to have an imagination. You know, I don’t want to get into the weeds or stress anybody out, but heaven, heaven for me, is a very hard thing for me to imagine in the ways that it’s typically been described to me.

Marc Schelske 37:49
Sure.

Jennifer Knapp 37:50
That’s the thing I’m working for, right? I’m going to be rewarded by choices that I make in this life, by living in some, to me, imaginary space in the future, that’s just grand up in the sky somewhere. That’s not what I mean by the better place.

Marc Schelske 38:10
Right!

Jennifer Knapp 38:11
I’m demanding of myself the imagination. I’m demanding of myself the courage to maintain hope. It’s not a pass or fail. But it’s completely saying, “don’t give up.” Every single day that I am going to drive to be heading in the direction. That isn’t trying to attain… You know, I’m not trying to attain or get or be rewarded. It’s a different type of thing that hope does. It is our aspiration to live into and unto the heights of what love and grace and liberation can be. And I don’t even fully know what all of those things are yet, but as I’ve continued to be demanding of that…I mean, at the time that I wrote that I was single, celibate, and had no hopes or prospects for love in the future. In fact, a lot of this record, I was just beginning the journey of figuring out how to love myself, because if we’re to love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, your soul and your neighbor as yourself? Well, I was like, I can’t love my neighbor because I don’t know anything about how to love myself.

Marc Schelske 39:20
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 39:21
That’s where I started, and if a lot of my early work seems narcissistic, it’s because I didn’t know how to love myself. I was trying to figure out and work out what God saw in me that was loving. As I started to piece that together–fast forward ten years into the future, until when I met my partner–I was starting to understand something about love enough to then now come in contact with my neighbor or somebody else, like somebody I wanted to love, and somebody whose love I wanted in return. That like another way out from my narcissistic center, going out and stretching further and further and further you, and to see how much–to be demanding of that.

Marc Schelske 40:02
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 40:03
I don’t need to prove anything, not in that sense. But to be open and aware and and continually willing to learn something about and a new area of which I may find to love that I didn’t before, to let go of something or to discover something, just constantly kind of looking for an opportunity to grow. I see it in there. I’m like, “Oh, that kid. She probably didn’t know what the hell she was talking about!”

Marc Schelske 40:29
Of course! Of course, yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 40:30
But it’s still in me. That is the root, and that’s when I look at her and go back to the baby in the bathwater, or even the grace, going if I just shut her down, then that theology wouldn’t have grown from a seed of what that was to what it is today. I can think of twenty more examples of where that is a root of something that I can see connected to its growth in me today, and I’m so grateful for her enthusiasm and her earnestness, like I said, even though sometimes she embarrasses me.

Marc Schelske 41:02
That’s so rich, I feel like maybe that’s part of the thread in this conversation of deconstruction. For some people, deconstruction is about tearing down, or needing to tear down structures that have been unhelpful. But my experience has been that there’s been a continuous unfolding that has taken me deeper in ways that the community that raised me didn’t expect or prepare me for, and that yearning that you talk about–that maybe the young Jennifer with that yearning, maybe she’s naive, maybe she’s a little bit narcissistic. I mean, we all are at 25, right? Maybe her vision is limited–but that yearning for what I believe is the fullness of life that we were made for, that yearning is the thread that has taken me into the places that I’ve gone that look externally to some folks like deconstruction. When I listened to Kansas 25 the first time, I felt that same thing. Some part of this, obviously, is my own projection. I have no idea what’s going on inside of you, your life and experience…

Jennifer Knapp 42:14
You can have it. You have your own life and experience. I want to take it away from you.

Marc Schelske 42:17
Thank you so much. But I hear you [singing Kansas 25] and it just felt like a richer, deeper experience that had spaciousness for the painful, the uncertain. It seems like the longing is for something that’s bigger than that, a life that has space for all of that, even when it doesn’t fit on a stage or inside someone’s preconceived expectation of what you need to be.

Jennifer Knapp 42:47
It’s interesting, because when I go back to that time, one of the one of the details of my experience at the time that I was writing that was very much attached to my coming into Christianity and having an experiencing a profound culture shock with the church community. So unlike a lot of a lot of my peers and my friends who had essentially evangelistically witnessed to me and I converte. I accepted Jesus Christ, and I… That’s so weird every time I say that, because it’s not, you know… I remember… I can’t believe I did that, even to this day. I can’t believe that I actually did that. At the same time, it profoundly changed my life! So, how do I make sense of that?

Marc Schelske 42:58
Right?

Jennifer Knapp 42:58
I was so earnest, like I genuinely wanted to be a new creation. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I wanted, and I understood something needed to do an about face in my world. I wasn’t wooed necessarily by religion. I was even rolling my eyes at the time, going, “What am I doing here in this space with these folks?” But, there was something there that had sparked in my heart, a hope that I hadn’t yet seen in a possibility of loving and caring for and being connected to something greater than myself. That’s the best way I know how to describe it. And so here I am, like basically, a hot mess, not having any tradition or experience inside of the faith community at all. I was walking into church on a Sunday morning, smoking, putting my cigarette butts out right on the church steps, walking into church, dropping a few F bombs, coming right back out and lighting back up. And was pretty rough for the Baptist contingency around me, and they were so excited that I was there. But, you know, a few months into it, they’re like, “Okay, we need to talk about your becoming that new creation. Now, you need to start putting things away.” It was conversations about not cussing anymore, conversations about not having sex, conversations about not smoking. What was I going to do on the outside to start looking like what God wanted my heart to be on the inside?

In some ways, I think that that landed with me okay. I was starting… I was definitely reading my Bible. Like, I read that sucker. I mean, I was diving into it. I was taking my discipleship seriously. I was going to Bible study groups and learning, mostly in a Baptist feel but I’d had other groups as well. =I was definitely trying to become a Christian, because, again, in earnestness, I made this decision, and I meant my decision. So when everyone around me is saying, “This is what a good Christian looks like,” then this is a good heart of mine that wants to make good on the discovery of this profound joy and free new grace that I’m experiencing my life. I wanted that to be evident. So of course, that was helpful in some ways, to have my community go “This is the way. If you look and act and conform in this way, you will be celebrated.”

But the side of that–and even though I was going into discipleship and Bible studies, one of the critiques I have in this is part of that thing is this idea that we’re not necessarily… where the rubber hits the road sometimes is what we are imagining is that we’re shaping ourselves into a conformity to look like something that looks like Christianity. And a lot of the deconstruction space where we’re calling upon what many people are telling us in good ways and bad. There’s some positive to that. I mean, there are people who’ve been living this journey long before I have or long before we find it and we get into it. So we always begin to a certain degree–and this is where I say we can be a little bit graceful–we are relying on the stories that are told to us.

Marc Schelske 46:56
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 46:56
…and the flame that we as moths were drawn to. But the difference in this, at some point, is our level of autonomy and engagement, our development of our own–and I would again, go back to that kind of sacred temple in ourselves–of the part where we begin to be part of living out that faith, to be able to have a… You know, quiet times were a thing. I don’t know if that’s still around. It was like, “Oh, you have to have a quiet time every day,”

Marc Schelske 47:25
Right.

Jennifer Knapp 47:26
And so what that was… I’ll say it was told to me as a discipline that it was my obligation as a good Christian to spend an hour a day reading my Bible, praying, and I would journal. So I did those things “religiously.” I was glad I did that discipline. I enjoy that time. I enjoy reflection. But I also hated that somebody would ask me, “Did you do your quiet time?”

Marc Schelske 47:57
Right?! Yeah, for sure.

Jennifer Knapp 47:58
it’s this box or this thing that we’re doing, rather than… So on one hand, I had a discipline that gave me an opportunity to practice and began to engage in the care and the awareness and my own practice of of developing my spiritual life. But weirdly, no one actually taught me how to develop my spiritual life. They told me to have a quiet time and if I didn’t check off with my accountability partner, and said that I’d only had three quiet times in seven days. And you know, there was a judgment about whether or not that was fruitful. That wasn’t helpful,

Marc Schelske 48:33
Right.

Jennifer Knapp 48:34
But, what was more helpful is that I actually didn’t have time for quiet time because I had three other hours of completely obsessing about this other issue that I’ve been thinking about. I didn’t want a quiet time that was an hour. I wanted a life that was contemplative. The whole life.

Marc Schelske 48:49
Right? Yeah, yes!

Jennifer Knapp 48:53
I didn’t want to do what Christianity told me; I wanted to live my faith.

Marc Schelske 48:59
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 49:00
I don’t want to knock the community, because we do need that, and we do need the witnesses, and we do need to be connected to one another to help and share and tell these stories. But it’s a difference between sharing a story and witnessing that information and then telling somebody that this is what you should conform to. You should look like us, instead of having collaborators that are seen with you as you live your life. And so for me, discipleship taught me what conformity looked like in a lot of ways. You know, these are the things that Christians do, say and act, and if you come out the other side, you will be a good Christian. But, nobody actually told me that if I have a contemplative life I engage, I will ask at least this one question, “What does it mean to live in the Spirit of Christ?” That is a question that I’ve been working on for thirty-five years.

Marc Schelske 49:53
Right, yes.

Jennifer Knapp 49:54
What is the Spirit of Christ? If I say, what’s the spirit of Marc? What’s the spirit of Jenn? I have to spend time, you know… you have to spend time with somebody else. You have to look at what they’ve done and what they do and stop talking and start watching. You know, live with and be around. It’s not just spirit as in fantasy. I think we know what we mean. You can write a song in the spirit of Jenn Knapp. There’s people out there who do it. My spirit isn’t doing it. So far as I know, I don’t have my own unique Holy Spirit that’s going out and doing that. But I wanted to understand that question. And as I read the whole text, as I looked around my community, as I looked around the world in what this meant, I began to say, “These are the things I want to be propelling me to the future.”

So, the idea of being told what to do so quickly felt like I was supposed to be conforming to something, and that’s not what drew me in there. It was a spirit and longing to know what the Spirit of Jesus was. I’m like, “Well, okay, great. I said the F bomb three times today in church. I’m sorry. Here’s a dollar for the the jar.” But I wasn’t cruel to anyone today, and I genuinely become a lot more hospitable to myself and to other people. I’m becoming more compassionate as a human being in my life in ways that I never even thought was possible. I don’t care what I get credit for or don’t, but my life has changed because of that, and the people around me’s life has changed. And that’s the true test of it. So that kind of “undoing,” I was already starting there and I think that’s that’s held up in kind of trying to go, I know, I mean, told these things, but there’s also a Spirit of to this that seems more, it seems wider. It seems not conforming. It seems rebellious in its nature.

Marc Schelske 51:49
Yes.

Jennifer Knapp 51:50
People will be confused. People will say that you’re going out on a limb. People will say, people will say, they will say. And you still have to go out there and live it. The thing that you hear in your heart, whether it’s contemplative or prayer or God–I don’t know how we say that–but if whatever that still small voice is, it’s a voice that you want to follow for whatever reason, and you go to follow it. Then test it. The next step is to take it out of that place where you discovered it, hopefully in a contemplative place, and to go out and test it and to see if it is something that is actually honest. Will this bring life? Will this discovery or this longing that I have to be compassionate mean that I talk more or talk less when I leave my home? You have to go out, and sometimes I’ve been wrong. Sometimes, I did not get that right. I have to go back. I didn’t understand that. It’s not working because I I’m not getting it. I’m not hearing it yet. So more work for me, but that that kind of going back to those spaces. [Kansas], it was written by a girl who didn’t want a less life, didn’t want a constricted life. I read the Scripture, “You shall have life, and you should have it abundantly,” and I read that in a way that I wanted that…

Marc Schelske 53:22
Yeah…

Jennifer Knapp 53:23
…and I want that now to this day. And every time that I took that out, I would have somebody else come over the top of me saying, “Be careful about that abundant life, because you can have too much Liberty in your life.” I’m not asking to sample every drug out on the street. I’ve done that. I know that kills my body and that’s not good and I make poor choices. I know I want abundant life. I want my hand to be open. I want to be non-threatening to other human beings. I want to not be jealous of you. I want to be invested in your life, and want you grow and flourish, and I want you to not be an enemy, and I want you to be a partner with me. Let’s start there. That’s what abundant life is. All I can do is try and take care of my my space around me.

When I started looking at things like that, I would find myself in contest and being pushed back inside of some of my faith communities, like, “No, it’s doing it the way this looks.” I know that I can do the thing that looks that way. And right now I’m angry because I’m doing the thing, and I’m getting credit for doing the thing, but I’m an asshole on the inside. I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t agree with this. And you know, that went on to be a breaking point with me for some things, at the point where I kind of… there’s part of… some of the spaces, some of the reason why I didn’t work inside of Christian music anymore. There are those things that they do feel like we’re deconstructing and we’re having to undo those voices, you know.

At the same time, give the community a little grace. We do have to share our experience by telling and allowing people to witness our stories. But the I think, if there’s a difference at all, I would probably say there’s the spot of authority inside of that. Looking at people we know and reliably trust more on a lateral plane, rather than an up and down plane, rather than a plane of people telling us what we can do–kind of up and down and where you succeed and you rise, or you know, kind of how you the membership is counted–but rather, who are the people who are willing to collaborate with you, the people who are willing to witness as you experience and test and build your faith and and exercise the will, the free will that we have to be able to actually be participants in–and joyfully so–the journeys that we are taking.

Marc Schelske 55:51
That was good, and I feel like it really captures a practical picture of what the better place is that we’re longing for. That that kind of life is the better place that we’re demanding. And you were doing it then, and you’re doing it now, and you’re living in that, and it’s really encouraging. I mean, I was floored by how deeply Kansas 25 impacted me and spent time…

Jennifer Knapp 56:20
You and a lot of other folks! It’s nuts.

Marc Schelske 56:22
Yeah, and I had to spend some time trying to understand. What has happened here for me in this? And it was deeply– is still deeply meaningful. And so I just am so grateful that you chose to enter into the difficult space to give that gift to all of us, and hopefully, in some way to yourself, because it’s been quite impactful, and I’m just so thankful to have that as part of my journey.

Jennifer Knapp 56:49
Well, thank you. I would say, thank you for that. I mean, that is its gift. There are moments, and I’m sure as you’ve had years of the ministry, the times you look back on on your influence or your participation inside of faith communion, and probably go, “Why am I here? And have I done anything? Or what’s it mean?” And the older I get, legacy is not quite the word I’m comfortable with, but I me an, I think we all kind of hope that the trail behind us isn’t a path of devastation.

Marc Schelske 57:22
Right! At least.

Jennifer Knapp 57:24
So, that’s all to say that I genuinely have felt so honored to be able to witness folks take a moment… and just give them, like you were saying, like to sense… like the the response that a lot of people have had to Kansas going, “Wow, I really had to take more than a few moments, like a day or two,” and some people are still a little bit longer, depending on where they are on their journey. But that kind of pause–I think, particularly in our current climate where we’re so pressured by the tyranny of the urgent, with social media and phones and alerts are going off all the time and demanding our attention–to take a minute to be able to check in with your own self and your own journey in your life, to have offered a gift that allowed someone to do that? For me is, it’s just out… I can’t even get my head around it. Like, I wish I could have said, Yeah, that’s what I meant to do. Like, that’s a total lie. Like, I can’t claim that, but it’s beautiful to witness that. And to know that when I look back on on my experience in the last twenty-five years, in the weird way I kind of connect back to the earnestness of that young gal and go, “Wow, she really did demand that, and she hasn’t stopped.”

To be able to to know that… I like playing and I like making records. It’s fun. But I also… when I came back to career 2.0, as I’ll call it, I really wondered, “Is this going to be meaningful to me in any way?” Because I don’t really care about money, and I like playing and performing, but believe it or not, as self centered as I may sound and contemplative I may be, I’m actually not interested in all the praise. I don’t really want to be a rock star. Why am I doing this? Why am I coming back and playing? Like, if I’m just going to go to bars and play music for money and just do all the miles on the road, is this going to be a meaningful life to me? I had no idea that… because I was like, I’m not, …There’ll be no ministry in front of me. There’ll be no reconnecting. There’ll be no public dialog in and around faith, because the last thing I want people to do is put a “Christian” in the headline with my name.

Well, I can’t get around that anymore. People still do it, even no matter how much I cuss and no matter how far I’ve gone out. And I’m not writing specifically about Christianity, and this blows my mind. All I ever wanted to do in my work was to just leave a good path, like to offer… to open the door up to something that… I don’t know, but something I have. I didn’t write the rules of love. I just know that when you love people and you hope for people, and you go into a room and you want to offer a gift to people, and you offer it, and you don’t expect… Career 1.0, it’s more like propaganda. You constantly have to be a representative of Christianity all the time. And now I’m not trying to represent Christianity. I’m trying to offer a gift. It’s strange. Like, doesn’t it blow your mind?

Marc Schelske 1:00:42
Right! No, what you just described is what it ought to be. Like that ought to be Christianity, not the image management, just the offering the hospitable gift.

Jennifer Knapp 1:00:51
Who are you? Who are you, Mark, and what is the gift that you have?

Marc Schelske 1:00:55
Yeah…

Jennifer Knapp 1:00:56
What is the holy gift of you that you offer and present to the world. What do you work on? What do you uncover? How do you spend your time? How do you raise the bar to be the fullest you, the best you. And I’m not talking best, like the best abs, the best beard and goatee. That’s not what I’m talking about. How do you really make a mark, to let the people you know love them and literally change their lives forever?

Marc Schelske 1:01:26
Yes, Yeah!

Jennifer Knapp 1:01:28
If there is a Spirit, a Holy Spirit, a love of God, that’s permeating through and in all things, how–and in this space that I have found myself in this moment–how do I know how to recognize that? How do I get in rhythm with that? How do I be the unique me in this space that adds to that space? It is the thing that I will say, regardless of where I have found it to anyone I speak to., You know, I’ll be talking to a cabbie or talking to somebody who goes, “Oh, I heard this about you, that you’re a Christian.” I’m like, okay, that’s fine. That’s where I learned that, and that’s where I practice that. That’s fine. But here’s the thing, I’m here for you right now. Like, I’m not trying to sell you something. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be with you and witness you. How can I help you today? Like, what do you need? How do I be a friend with you? To me, that was… and then, this goes back to an early beef I had with evangelicalism. Like, man, don’t just try and sell! Guys on a street corner, standing on soap boxes yelling, “turn or burn,” telling you that you’re going to go to hell and you’re going to be punished unless you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Today, I’m like, that’s not a witness. It’s not a witness. What changes people is that you actually connect to them.

You know, I was, in some ways, critiquing my own experience into Christianity. What got me here was more about the spirit of the people that I was with than any of the talk of the Spirit that those people did. Does that make sense?

Marc Schelske 1:03:02
Yeah. Yea, yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 1:03:02
Like the coercion, like the kind of coercive nature. It was the relationships that I built, the participation and community, the understanding and being able to step back and be able to see and witness something good and something holy. I am amazed that I get to do that to this day. Every day I go, even if I’m bored and I go to a show, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m tired now. All my gear weighs really heavy. I can’t believe I have to drive six hours today. I get up, and I think, “I wonder who I will meet today?” I wonder what they will teach me today. I wonder what they will show me, and I wonder what I will show them. And just waiting for that to just happen, I wonder what fragrance the room will have when we get there. Oftentimes it’s beer and body odor. Every day is unique, because human beings are extraordinary. And if you tell another human being that you see their extraordinariness, it’s amazing to see how their faces light up and how extraordinary they really do become.

And that’s what I think about my audience, which is just weird. I say… people around me all the time know this about me, that I really hate saying “fan base” or “audience,” or any of that, because it’…s I just, I feel like I’m going out and connecting, and it’s been probably, more strangely, more of service and more of a gift than I would have ever have imagined in my previous days in Career 1.0. Not to say that it wasn’t earnest then, but it’s just a whole other level. It’s good because the money’s crap and the venues sometimes are crap too, but, but Yeah, the people are here, even though we’re not necessarily doing like I was told originally when I quit contemporary Christian music. “Well, you’ll never have a platform again because you aren’t doing the work for the Lord.” And I’ll be like, well, you should maybe come out and hang out with some people, because you just threw off a whole lot of people who are kind of having church. We didn’t preach, we didn’t treat… we were just gathered. We were two or more there, gathered in the Spirit. And, I shudder to thank anybody who doesn’t understand that thinks that I’m speaking religiously. I’m not. People are amazing human beings, and I am so grateful that those amazing human beings have continued to keep me standing up and have never mocked me for my earnestness.

Marc Schelske 1:05:29
So good. Jennifer, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you for spending this time with me. Thank you for this album and the long, long road of work that you’ve done getting to it. It’s an honor to spend this time with you and to be one of the recipients of how you’ve shared your journey.

Jennifer Knapp 1:05:51
It was a privilege, Marc. I appreciate it, and thank you very much for asking me.

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 1:05:55
At first glance, this conversation is an interesting window into the life of a creative person who had the unique opportunity to go back and reflect on who they were twenty-five years ago. But that’s not all this is. There’s something important here, I think, for all of us, even if we don’t have a body of work to look back on.

Jenn’s story is a story of growth. Now, that doesn’t mean every part was fun. Growth means change. Change always means loss, and loss means there’s going to be grief in the story. But that process of changing, growing, losing, and grieving allows us to let go of what came before that was limiting or unhealthy or just plain wrong, so that we can embrace the good, the new, that perhaps God is setting before us. In my own story, there have been times when my life of faith was really all about security. It was a kind of faith that longed for certainty, that demanded certainty from teachers, from scripture, from sermons, from precise step-by-step methods for prayer or evangelism or church growth. Well, that kind of Christianity is about making us feel okay, making us feel that the uncertainty of life can be managed by a God who turns out to be more like a wish-granting Genie.

But then life happened. There was change, loss and grief and growth. And instead of yearning for security, I now long for transformation. Like Jen–you heard her say this–I don’t want to do devotional times; I want to have a contemplative life. I don’t want to do church authorized service projects. I want to be the kind of person who is generous to those around me and and steps in where necessary, to bear the burden of others who are suffering. I yearn for a life that reflects a place that is better than this.

Young Jenn’s yearning and her earnest heart inspired me twenty-give years ago, and the journey that Jenn has been on since challenges me today in a different way. Can I persist in faith even when the calling of Jesus doesn’t look like what I was taught? Can I grow in my pursuit of God, even if it takes me beyond the safe borders that I was trained as a child in, or that I learned as a young pastor? Can I continue, step-by-step, to follow the Spirit of Jesus wherever that guidance leads, even if other followers of Jesus don’t understand?

There was a moment in the interview where Jenn spoke right to me by name, and I wanted to pass her challenge on to you, because I think this might be an invitation from the Spirit. Who are you? What is the holy gift you offer and present to the world? And as we reflect on that, I wonder if we, as followers of Jesus, can let go of those motives that lead to exclusion in the pursuit of certainty and security and rather embrace the other-centered, co-suffering way so that we can participate in God’s work to love the world toward healing.

May you sense the holy yearning for a better place than here and trust the better way of Jesus to lead us toward others and toward God.

Thanks for listening. You can check out what Jenn is up to on her website, which includes tour dates and much more about her music. Www.jennifernapp.com. And of course, she’s got a bunch of great albums on all the streaming services.

Notes for today’s episode and any of the links that have been mentioned you’ll find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW055.

Now, if you found today’s conversation helpful, interesting, compelling, then subscribe to Apprenticeship Notes. My email newsletter. It’s monthly-ish. Really, I send it out about eight to ten times a year. I’ll never spam you. I’ll never sell your information. This newsletter includes an exclusive essay that you won’t find anywhere else, insider commentary on my latest podcast episode, on my blog posts, books that I recommend, spiritual practices I’d like you to try and more. If you subscribe, you’re going to get a free little book, an ebook called The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. In it, I teach a spiritual practice–a prayer, a short breath prayer that I wrote that I’ve been praying for the last five years, and it has been so helpful to me as I face the anxiety and uncertainty of our time, and I want to share it with you. So subscribe to my newsletter. Get that book at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, you are loved, you are known and you are not alone.

Do you know the hidden history of the place where you live? If we want to be part of God’s work of bringing restoration and liberation, we can’t ignore what’s happened in the past. Telling this truth is the only way to get to healing.

Sarah L. Sanderson is a writer, speaker, and teacher. Her writing has appeared in PBS Newshour, Blackpast, Christianity Today, and various other journals. She’s a thoughtful human, a justice-minded Christian, and a skilled writer.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Do you know the hidden history of the place where you live? If we want to be part of God’s work to bring restoration and liberation, we can’t ignore what’s happened in the past, as much as we’d like to. Telling this truth is the only way to get to healing. Hey, friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 54. Knowing the past to make a better future.

THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR

Before we start, I’d like to tell you about Apprenticeship Notes. Apprenticeship Notes is my new email newsletter. What is this? Why should you subscribe? Why on earth would you want one more newsletter in your inbox? I’m glad you asked. Social media has just stopped working well for many people. Our social media feeds used to be spaces where we had some control. We could choose to follow people who are interesting to us. We could connect with friends, we could learn from the experience and wisdom of other people. For well more than 10 years, my social media feeds, particularly Twitter, were a significant benefit to me, especially as a writer.

But nowadays, in most cases our social media feeds are filled with ads, sponsored posts that are ads but don’t look like ads, and influencers trying to sell us on their latest master course. And even when we find and follow the people we want to hear more from, the black-box algorithms determine whether or not we get to see what they have to say. And usually what the algorithm shows us is just stuff that gets us ramped up. That means more anger, more division. It’s a mess.

I’ve been slowly transitioning away from using social media as the main avenue for communicating about my writing. It’s really scary. I can’t even express to you how big of a change this is. At one point I had 35,000 followers on Twitter, I could reliably post a new blog and around a thousand people would see it. But that’s not true any longer and it hasn’t been for a while. And so I decided to begin building a different kind of space where I could write, encourage people, and serve folks who want to grow spiritually and value the writing that I do. The first step of this new plan is my newsletter.

It’s called Apprenticeship Notes because the spiritual life, following the way of Jesus, is something you learn by doing. This newsletter comes out monthly. OK, honestly, monthly-ish, probably about nine to 10 times a year. So what will you find if you subscribe? Well, each edition starts with Today’s Note, a short reflection on some aspect of the spiritual life and the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus. And this piece will be written just for folks who subscribe, I won’t publish it anywhere else. The only way to read it is going to be to subscribe and read it in your email inbox. But subscribing is free, and it’s easy.

And then in addition to Today’s Note, the newsletter will include a link to my latest blog with additional commentary, thoughts that didn’t make it into the blog, a link to my latest podcast with insider information, further reflections that I didn’t include in the public episode, and some recommended practice for your spiritual vitality. This might be a book to read or a journaling prompt to respond to or some activity that you can try. I spend time crafting this newsletter so that every part of it is intentional, thoughtful, and most importantly, worth your time. If that interests you, you could subscribe on my website, or you can go to www.MarcOptIn.com.

And there’s a couple other benefits for you if you subscribe. First, I’m assuming that subscribers are people that are interested in my writing. So I will turn to those people to subscribers first, for writing feedback, beta readers, and early access opportunities when I have something new. I have a new devotional that I’m writing that’s slated for release in the spring and it’s almost ready for beta readers. And so that invitation is going to go to my subscribers. So if you want to participate in my writing in that way, you’ve got to subscribe. Second, I’m giving away a short little ebook that you get for free as a subscriber. It’s called The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Process for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. It’s short–70 pages–but I think you’ll find it encouraging and helpful. You’ll get that as a free PDF ebook when you subscribe.

So that’s my invitation. subscribe to my newsletter. Get fresh, encouraging writing to support your spiritual vitality. Get content that comes from the perspective of an inclusive, hospitable, and generous Christian theology. And support a writer, all in a space where there’s no algorithm determining whether or not you get to see this and no internet trolls. Seems like a good idea, right? Subscribe at my website www.MarcAlanSchelske.com or at www.MarcOptIn.com.

About eight minutes down the street from my house is the historic main street of Oregon City. Oregon City is the town at the end of the Oregon Trail. For certain Americans in the mid 1800s, Oregon City was a symbol of hope. It meant a new start, the possibility of land and work, a place to build your family and a future. That vision was so compelling that somewhere between 300,000 and half-a-million people traveled the Oregon Trail in about a five year period. And that vision lies at the heart of how Americans and Oregonians see themselves. Hearty, creative people willing to work hard to succeed. People who will pack up all their earthly belongings and head west across a continent, just to give their families a better chance. This is part of what many of us think it means to be American.

But Oregon City, that city of hope, is also the town where, in 1851, a black innkeeper named Jacob Vanderpool was tried and convicted explicitly for the crime of being a black man. Yep, Oregon. The lovely state where I live was founded as a whites-only state. The Oregon Territory had a law banning black people from remaining in the territory, and later the constitution of Oregon expanded on this with an exclusion clause that did two things. It banned slavery in the territory, but it also prohibited black people from living there. That clause remained in the Constitution until 1926.

When I look around at the state that I live in, I first see the beautiful trees, and the overwhelming beauty of the Columbia Gorge, and the rich, vibrant farmland of the Willamette Valley. That’s all easy to see. But for some of us–people who look like me–it can be easy to overlook that there are hardly any black people here. Officially, the 2020 Census reported that only 2% of the population of Oregon identified as Black or African American, and almost all of those live in a single county in one city. This is not an accident, the stark reality of that matters.

There are folks here–I count myself among them–who believe that the way of Jesus requires an open invitation without discrimination, and that Jesus’ other-centered way leads us to participate in restoration and liberation in our world. But to do that, we need to understand why our world is the way that it is. So, all that’s why I found Sarah Sandersons new book, The Place We Make, so compelling and helpful. Sarah is a neighbor of mine; she lives a few minutes from me. In her beautifully written book, she researches the story of Jacob Vanderpool, that innkeeper who was exiled from Oregon because he was black (and also so that a white man, another innkeeper could eliminate his business competition). During Sarah’s research, she discovered more about how this happened, how similar things happened to the native people who lived on the very land where Oregon City now stands, and even how her own family was involved.

Many of us (most of us, maybe?) have long since acknowledged the harrowing and unjust history that lies behind the mythology of our country. Many of us genuinely want to be part of building a more just community. But those big ideas can quickly become abstract, and as long as they stay abstract, it’s tough to imagine concrete steps we can take to move things forward. Sarah’s book grounds this history in real people and real places. Most of the names I recognize. I’ve stood in many of the places. And as I read, I found the abstractions of this enormous problem dissolving in the local details. I suspect that every community across America could use a book like this. Sara’s goal in this book is not to instill shame, it’s to uncover the truth. Shame is a terrible motivation for change. But as Jesus told us, the truth will set us free. Being able to look at the truth behind the places we find ourselves in is a crucial step to being able to be part of making those places more welcoming and more just.

So, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Sarah and her book. I recommend her book wholeheartedly. Sarah is a writer, a speaker, and a teacher. Her writing has appeared in PBS News Hour, Black Past, Christianity Today, and various other journals. She’s a thoughtful human, a justice-minded Christian, and a skilled writer. In The Place We Make, Sarah quotes Mark Charles, a pastor who is also a Native American and a Native American activist. He said, “The heart of our nation’s problem with race is that we do not have a common memory.” This seems to be the driving motivation for her book, and so I asked Sarah to talk about what that means for her.

THE INTERVIEW

Sarah Sanderson 10:15
Yeah, that quote was really powerful for me. The way that we, as white people, think about our past and talk about our past is different from the way people of color think and talk about their past. And it feels a lot of time like we’re just talking past each other, especially with recent laws that have gone in–I touch on in the book, and they’ve only gotten worse since the book was published. These states that are removing African American courses from their curriculum, they’re removing standards…,

Marc Schelske 10:50
Right.

Sarah Sanderson 10:51
And I don’t know if you saw this little clip of an animated video that they’ve created–Prager University has created to show in Florida?

Marc Schelske 11:04
Yes, right!?

Sarah Sanderson 11:04
And the little Christopher Columbus saying, “Before you judge, just remember that in those days, slavery was no big deal.”

Marc Schelske 11:11
Right? Right. Exactly!

Sarah Sanderson 11:12
It’s like, that is the epitome of this lack of common memory. Who are we talking about, when we say slavery was no big deal? Clearly, we’re not talking about the people who were enslaved, because it was kind of a big deal to them. So can we, as white people, move closer toward understanding what is it about a person of colors holding of their history, rather than moving farther apart? So that the divide keeps getting bigger and we keep talking past each other? Can we move closer toward understanding? “Oh, yeah, it was a big deal, and I need to look at that, honestly.”

Marc Schelske 11:56
Man, that’s, I think, a really helpful frame. I know, in my own personal experience–this is not to make any of my suffering analogous to slavery–but the emotional experience of having something bad happen, explaining that to somebody else, or responding, and having them tell you, “It wasn’t a big deal.” That emotional experience is rough. It’s not fun. And it’s not fun even when the issue at hand is not really a giant situation. My emotional response to being told I’m overreacting is never, “Oh, you’re right. Thanks for illuminating me.”

For me to imagine that the specific trauma that we’re talking about is not only slavery, where individuals and families were forced to work without pay, were treated brutally, their lives were treated as not valuable, they weren’t given care that they needed, often killed. You know, it’s not only that, but then that is embedded in a larger system, at that time, that narrated to the world, “OK, not only is it okay, this is what has to exist, this is the only way that we can have an effective economy.” Think about all of the pressure during the final phase of the COVID locked down. How there was so much pressure that we have to get back, because if we don’t, the economy will collapse. And then, multiply that across the billions and billions and billions of dollars involved in the slave trade, and listen to the voices of white people–not all white people owned slaves, but all white people participated in the economy that slavery allowed–and so then, for those people to say, “Well, the economy requires this.” Right? And then generations later, to be told when an African American person speaks up and says, “There are still traumatic consequences of this in the world and in our lives,” when they speak up and say that, to be told, “It’s not that big of a deal. It didn’t actually happen to you. Why are you reacting this way?” How do we end up in that place? How can a children’s curriculum like the Prager U curriculum that you mentioned, say, without being ironic, it just wasn’t that big of a deal?

Sarah Sanderson 14:14
Yeah, you’re touching on another thing that I really wanted to get at with my book, which was that history has shaped now and it’s still with us now.

Marc Schelske 14:26
Yeah!

Sarah Sanderson 14:27
And so you know, you can’t just say like, “Well, these things happened a long time ago. Why are we still complaining about them?” Because the things that they did are still here, you know? The processes and the systems and the, you know… as you mentioned, like who lives in Oregon today was shaped by what happened over a hundred and fifty years ago. And so for us to really look at, how is our history still with us? And for me, it was a lot about examining my own heart as a white person, and things that I didn’t realize were still with me. And to look at, “Okay, where is white supremacy culture showing up in my own heart?”

Marc Schelske 15:16
Yeah, the question that you just asked, I think, really is the heart of this whole conversation. It’s the heart of both what needs to be said and the heart of what I think a lot of people reject and react to. “What is the place of white supremacy in my heart?” Because I have not had personal relationships with a white person who identifies as a white supremacist. In our minds, when we hear that phrase, we imagine a sort of very visible, stark figure whose life is oriented around violent racial behavior. So we think of the KKK. We think of cross burnings. You know, maybe it’s dressed up a little bit, and we think of like David Duke, and how he was running for president some years ago–and that seemed crazy to some people. And so all of that is so very easy to push away across a line, that it belongs to other people, that belongs to bad people, that belongs to hateful people. And I mean, honestly, I don’t think most any of us identify ourselves as hateful.

Sarah Sanderson 16:18
Right.

Marc Schelske 16:18
And certainly, very few would say, “Yep, I am a white supremacist.” That is a label that’s attached to things that we don’t necessarily think of for ourselves, most of us. So when you ask the question, “how do I see white supremacy working in my own heart?” I don’t think what you mean by that is, “In what way am I a participant in the KKK or desiring to do racial violence?” I don’t think that’s what you mean. So what what does that mean?

Sarah Sanderson 16:46
It’s a good question. I got so familiar with the language in my own head, and my mom read the book, and she was like, “Are you sure you want to tell people you’re a white supremacist?” Like, well, that’s not what I’m trying to say. No, I don’t belong to the KKK. But it was a literal hierarchy of white people at the top, and then this, and then this, and then black people at the bottom. What are the ways that this thinking has seeped into my mental framework, without me even being aware of it?

I was very much a person who thought that I loved everyone and wanted to serve everyone. When I was 20, I went off to Malawi, and… you know, I wanted to help little African babies. I mean, my whole narrative of myself was “I’m a person who’s doing the right thing for the right reasons.”

Marc Schelske 17:40
Sure.

Sarah Sanderson 17:41
And then, when I got to Malawi, the first morning I was there, I looked out the window and the first thought that flashed into my head was, “This is a dangerous place.” And then I realized, I only think that because these people are black. And I did not know that lived in me. I had no idea that I was equating black skin with danger. But as I thought about it, of course, that’s the lie that had been fed to me my whole life.

Marc Schelske 18:15
Yea.

Sarah Sanderson 18:15
And you see that lie everywhere! And so, to be willing to say, “OK, yes. This lie exists, and, it has affected me.” That’s not the same thing as saying, “I’ve signed up for the KKK,” but it’s saying, “How can I deconstruct the lies that are swimming around in my head without me even knowing that they’re there?”

Marc Schelske 18:36
That’s the insidious part. Because, I think, if the idea that white supremacy exists in the neighborhood of people who want to do racial violence, I can discount it as nothing to do with me. And I can even think that what is necessary to fix that is that the people who have those feelings need to have their feelings changed. They need a heart change, right? It’s a sin problem. They need to have Jesus change their heart so that they love everyone.

That pushes the whole conversation into a very individualistic space, where the solution is for individual people to decide in their heart to be loving and kind. Well, certainly, I am all in favor of individual people deciding in their heart to be loving and kind. The trouble is that when it comes to things like mortgages, we don’t get to have a mortgage by deciding in our heart to be someone who is a responsible mortgage holder. There are gatekeepers who evaluate us on certain standards, some of those standards we know and some of them we don’t. And they decide whether we can get a mortgage, or more realistically, they decide whether we can get a mortgage that is in an affordable range for us, which is the same as deciding if we can get one or not. But it never involves them telling us no, right. They just say, “Oh sure, you can get a mortgage with a 21% interest rate.” And you’re like, “Well, I guess that’s not going to happen,” and you move on. And so that isn’t an individual thing. There’s a system in place.

So then when we back up from that system, and we learn about redlining in Oregon, where there’s neighborhoods that explicitly would not allow people of color to get a mortgage. I have church members who live in those neighborhoods now, people who own mortgages in neighborhoods where black people didn’t get the mortgages, right. And so while that individual may not have been racist in their explicit thoughts, it’s conceivable to say that there was a benefit that occurred to them that goes all the way back.

You know, you’ve got this beautiful painting… picture, wood cut, or painting of Oregon City at a certain date on the cover of your book. I can see those places. I’ve walked on those streets, and to realize that that city exists there at the expense of an indigenous community that was removed. Yeah, that’s not something you see when you’re walking down Main Street, Oregon City, stopping at the coffee shop, reading a book in the bookstore? You don’t have to think about that.

Sarah Sanderson 21:00
Right? Yeah. And I think that a lot of times the knee-jerk response of people who don’t want to deal with this issue is to say, “Well, it’s too big. We can’t give Oregon City back. So why would we even bother?” Right? But like figuring out, first of all, what happened? And then second of all, how was what happened–like you say–showing up today? And then, what piece of it can we take responsibility for? And you’re right, it’s got to be both big and small. Major laws have to be changed. And whole systems have to be turned upside down. But also, there are small things in each of our local locations that can be talked about. When we look at the local things, it starts to suggest what a path might be to respond.

Marc Schelske 22:02
I’m interested in hearing about that path of personal response. Let’s move in that direction. But first, before we do, you were involved in this project for quite some time. You have your head in these books and this research project, you’re getting familiar with these characters, coming face to face with, not only the events that happen historically, but even how your own family is entangled in that, Talk about what that was like for you. What personal insights came to you while working through this project?

Sarah Sanderson 22:33
When I began, I just simply was curious about… My brother had just told me, “Hey, Oregon was founded on anti-black exclusion laws,” and I had no idea. I was shocked. I wanted to know more. I came across Jake Vanderpool ‘s name on a website and something just kind of pulled me in. I wanted to know more about this one person, I think because it was one story. It felt like it was maybe possible to wrap my hands around this one person who lived really close to where I live today. Then when I got into it, I realized that my own family members had been part of the story, which I didn’t know when I began. My family members lived there at the time that Jacob Vanderpool was there, and so then it became personal for me. My family members were witnesses to this. And then I found out that I’m related to Theophilus McGruder, the guy who pressed charges against Jacob Vanderpool. Not only did they witness it, but they made it happen!

The concept that kept coming to me was when Nehemiah stands…Nehemiah and Ezra, in Nehemiah, chapter nine, they bring all the people of Israel, they’re coming back from exile. And it says they stood in their places and confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors. And I think that’s something we don’t really know how to do today. We don’t want to confess the sins of our ancestors; we don’t really even want to confess our own sin.

Marc Schelske 24:12
Sure. Sure. Well, the issue then is that we have such a an individualized view of identity, and that has tracked into the way that Christians talk about the gospel. And so of course, sinners need to confess their sins, particularly if they get caught, right? So that’s very focused. An individual did a bad thing. Part of the process of restoration, reconciliation, and ultimately, forgiveness and salvation is that they own it, confess it. I think most people nod their head at that. But then because our cultural worldview is so individualized, the idea that I would be held responsible in some way for something that somebody else did is just alien to us. In the culture that you mentioned, the ancient Hebrew culture, the ancient Near East, and that time, the Bronze Age era, they did not have… they did not share with us that individualized worldview, they had a collective worldview. They believed that the family, the tribe, the nation were bound together in in very explicit ways. And so for them, confessing the sins of their ancestors made sense, because they had a mechanism to explain how the trauma of the present moment could be connected to things that I didn’t personally do but that happened in the past. That is something that just simply doesn’t exist in the current culture that we live in, except for voices that are beginning to say, “Hey, look, this isn’t about you pressing the button…

Sarah Sanderson 25:50
Yeah.

Marc Schelske 25:50
…This is about you being the fruit of a tree. And that tree has significance for what’s going on around you.” As I read the book… you know, I drive down McLaughlin Avenue probably every day. I go by buildings that have his name on them. The structure of the town of Oregon City, these people had a hand in what buildings went where and where the streets lie, and ultimately, who got to own those properties. Johnson Creek is right up the street for me and it sort of defines the map. And it’s named after this guy Johnson, who did some really horrible things to the native women who lived in the area. Johnson Creek! I see that… you know, all of this stuff. it’s so present. And so the way that I want to separate myself from it by saying, “Well, I’m not individually responsible for those things,” that wall gets gets thinner, more fragile, because I’m beginning to see “No, no, no, there are ramifications for things that happen that are playing out in my life currently.” And the issue is not that I need to confess my culpability for what happened 250 years ago. The issue is am I willing to acknowledge that some of the benefit that has come to me today that I benefit from is the result of those people’s choices? And not only that, some of the benefit that has come to me, would have gone to other people, maybe Native people, maybe black Americans, if those people up the family tree had made different decisions.

Sarah Sanderson 27:33
Yeah, there’s a book called, Reparations by Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson. They give as analogy of if your dad stole a car, and then died, and left you the car, it would still belong to the person that it was stolen from, right. Like, the police could still come to you and say, “No, this is theirs. You have to give it back.”

Marc Schelske 27:56
Yeah.

Sarah Sanderson 27:56
And so, even when it’s been stolen, many generations before, there’s still a sense in which there’s something that rightly belongs to someone else. And so how do we as a community decide to… not that we are responsible, right, like, I didn’t actually do the things 150 years ago, but can I take responsibility? Can we as a community take responsibility for this stuff that happened all these years ago? And say, “No, we don’t want to keep holding the bag of the stuff that was passed down to us, we want to set this right.”

Marc Schelske 28:36
And so then that raises the very difficult and complicated feeling question of “OK, then what does it look like to set it right?” Because, as you said earlier, whether or not giving Oregon City back to the native people who lived there at the falls, whether or not that’s the right thing–which people will argue–the system that we have, and the way land is owned with mortgages, and all of this, all the stuff that’s tied up over a hundred and fifty years, is not going to allow that as a simple solution.

Sarah Sanderson 29:09
Right.

Marc Schelske 29:10
OK. So then it it’d be easy to just take a deep breath and say, “Well, we there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Sarah Sanderson 29:18
Right.

Marc Schelske 29:18
So, the situation with Jacob Vanderpool maybe feels slightly more manageable. Because you could say, “All right, Jacob Vanderpool is a Dude. We can track down his family tree. And we can do some calculations and figure out what his grant-great-great grandchildren ought to have had, if his Inn was allowed to prosper. And we’ll do a fundraiser or GoFundMe or a government program, and we’ll help them with that advancement. So even though a lot of people would argue that and say, for various reasons why that’s not good or just or fair, at least as a solution, it feels slightly more conceivable then “Let’s return all of Oregon City to the native people who lived at the top of the falls,” and yet it still feels enormous. And so once again, I’m left in a place where even good-hearted people that want to say I see how restoration requires ownership and acknowledgement and confession and repentance, and… you know, the scary word you said in the title of Kwon’s book, reparations, which is just rooted in the word repair…

Sarah Sanderson 30:27
Right.

Marc Schelske 30:28
…that we have to do something to repair the damage done, I can see that. But I’m just at a loss for how to do that in a way that is is doable and just.

Sarah Sanderson 30:39
It is a huge question. It’s not like you and I are gonna sit here and figure out the answer, right? This is this is bigger than all of us. Honestly, here’s what I’m praying for, Marc. So I think a lot about Nehemiah and the people who confessed their sins and the sins of their ancestors. I also think a lot about the Egyptians when the Exodus happened. They’re on their way out the door, they’ve just had the very first Passover, the pharaoh has said, “Go, get out of here.” They’re going to the promised land. And it says that God moved the hearts of the Egyptians to give them gold, just shower them with gold. And I don’t know that every white person is called to just like empty their bank account for every person of color, but can God move our hearts to desire justice? I don’t know what it’s going to look like. But I’m praying that there will be a softening of hearts.

Marc Schelske 31:37
Yeah. How did that look for you?

Sarah Sanderson 31:40
Yeah, one simple thing is that I just knew that I wasn’t… I couldn’t take the money from this book. It’s not like I’m sitting on tons of money and I’m just giving away… but it just felt like I can’t take the money for this. There’s also the sacrifice of of my time. But these are like, small personal thing.

Marc Schelske 32:00
Right.

Sarah Sanderson 32:01
So, I don’t know what it’s gonna look like for every person to do small personal things like that. Like shopping at a black-owned business, or whatever it is. But I also think that collectively, as a nation, we need to have a conversation about our history. There does need to be some… I mean… I don’t want to say reallocation of funds or you know… people are gonna say communist or whatever, I should probably not even… we should probably go back and erase all of this. But we have to be willing to look at our history, to have these messy conversations: What has happened? How has it shaken out? And how can we enact laws and systems that begin to repair?

There’s one thing I did not talk about in the book. I live in Gladstone, which I didn’t say in the book, because there’s Proud Boys in Gladstone, too. I don’t want them to show up at my front door. But in Gladstone, just down the street from me, there’s a piece of property that once was used in 1922 as an initiation for the Ku Klux Klan. A hundred and ten people were initiated into the KKK at a spot that’s just six blocks down the street from where I’m sitting right now. In the newspaper, this 1922 newspaper, it says that two thousand people came out to witness this. And so you could say like, “Well, that happened a long time ago. What are we supposed to do about it now?”

But then, I found out that in 1980 twenty kids came to Gladstone High School, which is where my kids go, dressed in KKK hoods and gowns for costume day. They weren’t sent home to change. Their picture was taken and put in the yearbook. We had this thing in 1922. A hundred and ten people were initiated into the KKK. But then in 1980, people were showing up to high school dressed in KKK hoods and gowns. That still… like okay, that’s in my lifetime, but it’s not in a lot of people’s lifetime yet, right. But then, like my, my son’s best friend, he’s biracial. He was sitting in Gladstone High School just a couple of years ago watching a basketball game. And all the kids around him started pulling his hair and calling him the N word.

It’s about both. It’s about the legal and economic systems, and it’s about how are we going to reach the hearts and minds of the seventh graders who are sitting in the bleachers at Gladstone High School, and they don’t even know the history that they’re stepping into. They don’t know that the KKK was initiated down the street and their parents or grandparents came to school in hoods in 1980. But somehow it’s filtered down in the water to them. I don’t know what the answer is for the economic whatever, but in order to have the collective will to do something economically, we’ve got to get honest about how those things that happened a long time ago are still here in our hearts.

Marc Schelske 35:08
Right, exactly. Right. And the property that you mentioned is still a gathering place. It’s property that’s owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It’s used for large Annual Convocation gatherings. People go there for special religious events. And so what does that mean? What opportunity is opened if that organization were to understand this history? Would they be able to say, “We are the stewards of this place now, and maybe we weren’t a part of that event, but is there a way for us to, as you say, take responsibility in a way that leads toward healing and hope and restoration?” What could that look like?

Sarah Sanderson 35:53
Right!

Marc Schelske 35:54
Could an event happen? Could there be some way that that could be commemorated? Could there be some way where that could be named, so that people, like those seventh graders…

Sarah Sanderson 36:05
Yes!

Marc Schelske 36:06
…are able to hear the story and be told, “This is not who we want to be?” Because saying to a seventh grader today, “this is not who we want to be” is actually running direct resistance to McLaughlin and McGruder, and all those guys who literally said explicitly on paper, signed by witnesses, “this is who we want to be. We want to be the kind of people that exclude African Americans, we don’t want them here.” That is our heritage. I can’t undo what those guys did. But I can be a part of saying, as a community, “that’s not who we want to be.”

Sarah Sanderson 36:46
Exactly, yes. So I’m meeting with them in a few weeks. I’ll let you know how it goes. I have a vision for some kind of a gathering. What if we could get more people to come out for a reversal of that thing that happened in 1922, then came out for the initial thing? And you’re right! We have to say it explicitly because we haven’t yet. Explicitly, in history, it was said, “White people are better. And we’re going to not listen to these people. And you can own these people.” Yes, we’ve, we’ve overturned some of those laws, but we haven’t had a moment where we’ve said, as a nation. “This happened and we don’t want to be that anymore.”

Marc Schelske 37:31
Yeah. All right. So there’s another group of folks who are resistant to this conversation that you and I are both part of, and that’s the church. There are folks in the Christian church who will say that these kinds of conversations may be necessary to have, but they aren’t Christian conversations. Some folks will be even more extreme than that. They’ll say this kind of conversation is a distraction, or this kind of conversation is “woke,” where they’ve taken an African American term and turned it into a pejorative, and said, this is you getting drawn into some kind of secular liberal agenda, this is not what Christians should be about. So you’re a follower of Jesus. You may have even had people express these sentiments to you. So in your journey with this book, and now that you’re talking about it, how does this whole thing fit for you within the gospel work of Christian people?

Sarah Sanderson 38:22
Yes, I have had some people come to me with concerns like that. And for me, that’s why it’s important to get back down to where is this in my own heart. That’s pretty hard to argue with. Is there racism out in the world? We can debate that…

Marc Schelske 38:42
We can; certain people will not.

Sarah Sanderson 38:44
Right.

Marc Schelske 38:44
Our African-American friends will not debate it with us. They’ll be like, “The only reason you’re debating it is because you don’t want to acknowledge or take ownership.” Right? It’s not debatable.

Sarah Sanderson 38:53
But I mean, those people who have like… those people who say, “That’s woke, we shouldn’t be talking about that,” like they can debate that.

Marc Schelske 39:00
Yeah.

Sarah Sanderson 39:01
But for me to say, “No, I was afraid of black men because they were black. Because I grew up in a society that taught me that black men were dangerous.” How can you argue with that? I’m telling you; that’s how I feel, have felt, and I’m working to overturn. So there’s… that’s one aspect of it, getting down to the real confession of what’s really in my heart.

And then, you asked about the gospel piece. I think, what enables me to disclose that is that I know that I’m loved and forgiven by Jesus, because I had so much fear and so much shame. It was really hard to sit down and write this book, especially that chapter where I uncover my own personal things that I’ve discovered in myself that I didn’t even know were there. So much shame and fear. And the only way I was able to do it, was because I knew that Jesus loves me and forgives me, and I had nothing else to lose. So Paul says we have to boast in our weaknesses. And we’re free to do that because we’re loved. There’s no other way that you can boast about your weakness and your shame and your failure, and not boast, as in, I’m proud or happy that this is here, but boast in the sense of like, “I’m going to be honest about this, even though our culture does not want to admit that these things are still here.”

Marc Schelske 40:41
Christians ought to be able to be at the forefront of of owning this, of saying these things are true about me and our community and, and taking steps to name that. And we can do that because of grace and forgiveness. But that still leaves it in the location of the individual heart. So what would you say about the place of this larger conversation about racial justice and the systems of racial discrimination? How do you see that connecting with the work of the church?

Sarah Sanderson 41:16
Well, I mean, when we when we’re talking about repenting, naming our own sins, naming our collective sins, the white church has a lot to repent of. In Jamar Tisby’s book, The color of Compromise, he does a great job of laying out in all these different denominations, and all these different churches throughout American history, the church has engineered and been complicit with white supremacy for hundreds of years. I think every town can do the work of finding out what its history is, and beginning to ask, “How can we repair this?”

Every family can do the work. Every church can do the work of asking both denominationally and locally, “Who are the people that founded our church? And what did they believe? And what did they do?” Is it easy to pull skeletons out of closets? No. But it’s important. I mean, I don’t know that I’m convincing your person, your mythical… not mythical… but your your person that you’ve invited into the room with us.

Marc Schelske 42:28
I don’t know that they’re going to be convinced, but I do think that it’s something that we need to talk about. Because when you think about younger Sarah, or similarly, younger Marc, being members of the Christian community, maybe even in roles of influence or leadership, being people who, as you said earlier, really thought we were saying and doing and believing the right things, really desiring, longing, to be of benefit to folks in the world, right? And even, like your trip to Malawi, even taking steps to do what, at the time, felt like constructive ways of making a difference. Those people also exist now. And in the same way that you said it was scary for you to think of naming these things as functioning in your own life, many folks in our peer community in the church are in that place right now. We have to invite those people to courage, right?

The people that are standing opposed to this are not going to be convinced by this. They’re not going to read your book, unless the Spirit does some amazing thing and transform the situation. That’s not who we’re talking about.

Sarah Sanderson 43:48
Right.

Marc Schelske 43:48
Right? We’re talking to the folks in the average church, down the street from where I live, who think of themselves as good people who want to do the right thing, who want to be part of God’s work in the world, but who are afraid to push into this space because of the social risk.

Sarah Sanderson 44:09
Yeah, I mean, that is a real fear. And I’m hoping to offer in my own self, someone who doesn’t have all the answers, but who’s willing to step into the conversation anyway. I don’t think we need to feel like we have to have all the answers before we step into the conversation. Because the conversation is both speaking and it’s also listening. And so maybe the first step for people in that position who are feeling afraid, not knowing what to say, the first step is to do more listening.

Marc Schelske 44:43
To help us with that gift, as we close, why don’t you name some of the specific books and resources that people who might be listening to this podcast can go to if they are people who have that interior sense that they want to be in this conversation… it feels like the right thing to be in this conversation, but maybe they’re afraid to ask or don’t know where to begin. What are the authors, the books, the resources, the people that they can pay attention to on social media that you might recommend as a starting point?

Sarah Sanderson 45:16
These are my top two books for Christians who… books for white American Christians, who want to get involved in this conversation, and they’re not sure how to start. So this one is Jamar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. So this is more of a history, and it’s pretty short. It’s not a comprehensive history, but it’s a history of where the American… the white American church has gotten it wrong. This book, Dear White Peacemakers, by Osheta Moore, is a lovely… there’s memoir, there’s some self-reflection, but there’s also a lot of speaking specifically to white Christians, and saying, “I know you’re afraid I know you’re scared. I know you don’t know how to speak into this. There’s grace for you.”

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 46:14
I’m a white, middle class American Christian man. As I close this episode, I want to talk for a moment, to those of you who are like me, just a white Christian, talking to other white Christians for a bit.

Like Sarah, I grew up in the church with an authentic desire to do the right thing, to love like Jesus loves, like Sarah talked about, I would never have considered myself to be racist, precisely because I was told that racists were hateful, violent, wicked people. And because I didn’t think I was hateful or violent or wicked, I couldn’t see how my life was deeply formed by attitudes and assumptions about the superiority of white people like me.

It’s taken a long time, a lot of listening, a lot of paying attention to the lived experience of black people in America, and a lot of setting aside my own self-defensiveness, for me to see what I had not been able to see. Whether I like it or not, there are significant differences between the way I experienced this country, and the way that black Americans experience it. It took paying attention to hundreds of little puzzle pieces: how I felt when I got pulled over for speeding, the tone with which I felt comfortable addressing the officer, the ease with which I move in so many spaces, just acting like I belong there, just going wherever I want, the way that I’ve been able to easily get a mortgage to live where I want to live, the way my financial creditors have been willing to work with me when I had hard times, and so many more little details.

And then there was noticing the justifications I had adopted. You know: my life was easier because I was educated, I followed the plan, I was a good Christian, or because I followed the law, or because I had the good fortune of having two parents in the home. Now certainly all those things made a difference in my life. But I wasn’t able to see that there were many black and brown people with the very same qualifications I had, who didn’t get the same opportunities I got. It took a long time to understand that I’m the beneficiary of a system that was built, brick by brick, over 400 years expressly to benefit people like me. And that system has been in place for so long that it had become invisible to me. And because the system was invisible, I was able to believe that all of what I have, I have on the basis of merit and hard work alone.

The truth is I have worked hard, but so have many black and brown people. I’ve put in the time, but so have many black and brown people. I’ve kept the law and played by the rules, but so have many black and brown people. Look, I know how difficult it is to admit that there might be such a thing as a system of white supremacy that has structured this nation since its founding, since before its founding! I know how painful it can be to acknowledge that I’ve been the beneficiary of that system. I know how much anxiety there can be around this conversation. I know it’s controversial. I know it feels enormous. I know it feels too big to handle. But use your compassionate imagination for a moment. If the issue of racial disparity and injustice feels too big to handle for a white middle-class American Christian like me, like many of you, than how much more painful does it feel for the people that aren’t the beneficiaries of generations of benefit of the doubt?

The ethic that shapes the way I see the world is the other-centered co-suffering way of Jesus. The apostle Paul summarize this by saying that when we bear one another’s burdens, we fulfill the law of Christ. Well, my white brothers and sisters, there is a burden being carried in this nation by black and brown and indigenous people. And that burden is heavy. It is costly. It is unjust and it is not their problem to deal with alone. It seems clear to me, that for us to fulfill the law of Christ in this time and place, we have to join in bearing this burden until we find ways to relieve it.

It was white people, like me, who stood up in Oregon and said, “We want to be the kind of people who exclude others for our own advantage.” They said it outloud. They said it with white hoods in a public gathering space about 10 minutes from my house. They also said it in writing in the Oregon constitution. Like I said to Sarah, I can’t undo what was done in the past, but I can step up and say, “I want our community to be different.” Does that align with your heart? Then begin thinking about how you can be part of bearing this burden and repairing it. In our conversation, Sarah said, “I don’t think we need to feel like we have all the answers before we step into the conversation. Because the conversation is also listening.” She’s right. If your heart is moved, if you feel that something must be done, but if you’re not sure where to start, then make a commitment to start listening and see how the Spirit leads you. Will you step into this conversation?

May you find the courage to enter into this hard work, and may the Spirit guide your imagination to see how you can be part of repairing what was done, so that others can experience the fullness of life.

Thanks for listening. Notes for today’s episode, and any links mentioned can be found at MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW054.

If you found this conversation helpful, then subscribe to my newsletter, The Apprenticeship Notes. Get my writing about once a month, subscribe and you’ll also get the free little book I’m offering, The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. This spiritual practice that has been so helpful to me as I face the anxiety and uncertainty of our time. I used it this morning as I was thinking about the war that’s happening right now in Israel. Maybe you would find a place for a spiritual practice of centering like this. Subscribe at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, remember: in this one present moment, you are loved, you are known, and you are not alone.

There are many debates and disagreements within Christianity. Behind most of these, you’ll find one very significant issue. How we read the Bible. The way we read the Bible and what we believe about how the Bible came to be directly gets at what we believe about God. Can Christianity work if the Bible isn’t perfect?

Zack Hunt has spent the last decade writing about the interplay of faith and politics in the public sphere on his eponymous blog, Substack, and Patheos as well as contributing articles to multiple publications. He’s also made appearances in Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Huffington Post, and various other media outlets.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 53. What if the Bible isn’t perfect?

TODAY’S SPONSOR

Today’s podcast is made possible by Journaling for Spiritual Growth. This is my new book. It launched in November of 2022, so it’s just a few months old, but it’s already finding its people. And that is so exciting to me, especially since this is a book with a pretty small target audience. I heard from one woman who grew up in the church, and her comment after reading Journaling For Spiritual Growth was how relieved she felt. For her, this little book helped her to untangle her picture of God and find a healthy way to pursue spiritual growth. I teared up, listening to her.

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INTRODUCTION

Marc Schelske 1:50

There is significant division and disagreement in the greater Christian community. This includes long historical arguments about theology, like exactly what it means that Jesus saves us and exactly how that comes about, and arguments about what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus, even arguments about practical things like the role and rights of women, or the nature of the family, or the role of the church and its relationship to government. Important stuff.

In the moment we find ourselves in, we’re witnessing a resurgence of a kind of authoritarian Christianity that seems to believe that everything would be better if their sort of Christian was in charge of everything, in charge of libraries and schools and elections. Of course, there are many Christians, myself included, who see this tendency as opposed to everything Jesus stood for. And even that is another argument between Christians!

And behind these arguments, you’ll find one very significant issue. Rarely in life can you reduce so many complex problems to one issue, but in this case, I think we can. What’s the issue that has such a wide-reaching impact? How we read the Bible. How a Christian reads the Bible says something about what they think the Bible is about, how they think God relates to humanity, and what exactly they think about how God’s power works. All of these big ideas are wrapped up in this one very practical thing.

Christians come to the Bible with a point of view about what the Bible is. Theologians refer to this question as the matter of inspiration, and this is the heart of so many of our different ways of being Christian. So many of our arguments about the issue is more complex than a simple binary. We can, for our purposes today, suggest that there are two main schools of thought on inspiration.

On the one hand, we have folks who believe that inspiration means that the Bible, as we have it now, is exactly what God intended it to be. And because God’s not a liar, that means the Bible cannot contain any discrepancies or errors. This also means that the words in the Bible stand as an exact, clear revelation of God’s precise will. These folks see the Bible as primarily a divine document. For some of these people, the Bible becomes almost interchangeable with God.

On the other hand, you have folks who believe that inspiration means that, however, the Bible was formed, God was involved and is able to use the Bible as we have it now for spiritual purposes. Now, this group tends to think that the Bible is, in one way or another, primarily a human document.

Now both of these camps that I’ve explained in this simplified way have variations, and an honest accounting of these views would include a lot more nuance than what I just said. But the core question about inspiration remains the same. In what way is the Bible a divine document? And in what way, if any, is the Bible the human document?

Zach Hunt has been thinking about this for a while. He’s worked in church life and ministry in a variety of ways for more than twenty years. He spent a lot of time and effort thinking about how the church got into this position, both through his own formal education with a graduate degree in theology and another from Yale Divinity School in Christian history and then through his own work in the trenches of pastoral ministry where these ideas have to take on practical skin.

Recently, Zack released a book on the subject called Godbreathed: What It Really Means For the Bible To Be Divinely Inspired. And right away, in the introduction, he gets to the heart of this problem. These are his words: “When we treat the Bible and God as interchangeable, something else happens, often without us even realizing it. Because the Bible doesn’t exist on its own, because it was written by people in a culture and time far removed from our own, it requires interpretation. So when we make God and the Bible interchangeable, what we are also doing is making ourselves or rather our interpretation of the Bible, interchangeable with God.” And so I asked him to talk with me about this problem and how it underlies much of the tumult in Christianity today.

CONVERSATION

Zach Hunt 5:43
What I’m really trying to have a conversation about in Godbreathed is this baseline foundation of where we’re all coming from. Because the reality is none of us come to the Bible as a blank slate, you know. You hear a lot of folks talk about, you know, a plain sense of scripture or plain reading, or they’re just, you know, reciting the Bible, or, “if you have problems, take it up with God, or Jesus”, or whoever it is, and really is like, none of that is true. We come to it with a whole host of assumptions, and ideas, and beliefs before we ever open its pages. And that’s okay. It’s inevitable.

The problem is when we don’t acknowledge that. You know, the problem comes in when we act as if we are free from any sort of bias, or, you know, preconceived notions, that we come to the Bible as a fresh slate and that we’re just repeating the words, unfiltered, ideas unfiltered. And that’s almost never the case, even when we repeat Bible verses that we use as proof texts to prove our theology. Oftentimes, the words that we’re repeating are not the words that we’re saying in our beliefs. There’s translation. There’s interpretation that happens from the page to the profession that a lot of times we miss because we’ve been conditioned to think that, well, we’re just, you know, repeating the Bible. And so what I’m trying to really get to in this book really is twofold.

One is this idea that it’s okay to ask questions, you know. Because growing up in my evangelical background, in my immediate context at my church, you know, that was okay, but in the broader world, asking questions about the Bible, or doubting or pushing back a little and criticizing, you know, was blasphemy because the Bible was akin to God. And so, if you’re questioning or criticizing scripture, you’re spitting on the face of God. And so I want to give people permission to ask questions, to be free to wrestle with Scripture in the same way that the people of God have since before there was a Bible. I mean, you go back to the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible story of Jacob, and he’s literally wrestling with God. So the idea that we can’t do that with the words of people written about God is crazy. But that’s an unspoken–sometimes spoken in certain contexts–constraint that most of us face.

But the other was, is trying to approach scripture in a way that is honest and that maintains intellectual integrity. Because, you know, to hold up things like biblical perfection or inerrancy requires more mental gymnastics than I am physically capable of. It’s dishonest on the most basic level, but to get to that, the people who affirm it, don’t start there. They’re starting before that with a confession of faith. It’s already been decided before the folks who believe in inerrancy pick up the Bible that the Bible is perfect. And so they spend all their time from that point on trying to reconcile and do all this work that’s completely unnecessary because the Bible doesn’t need to be perfect to communicate truth because that’s not how truth functions.

You know, your parents teach you truth all the time growing up. Your teachers teach your truth. Your pastor teaches you truth. None of those people are perfect. And that’s what makes the Bible challenging is that it has both. We have to do the hard work of understanding those cultural contexts and facts. But we also have to do the work of understanding the role of storytelling, and how that worked in the ancient world, in the ancient Near East, and for the people of Israel, and why there is still truth to be gleaned from stories whether or not they took place historically,

Marc Schelske 9:21
We had a really interesting example of how this plays out practically last night in our discussion at church. The lectionary passage that we had last night was Matthew’s version of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet. So we read this passage out, and we go through our discussion process, “What about this passage is meaningful to you” and something began to happen. People were talking about the story. They began unconsciously–not noticing they were doing it–to synthesize details from the different gospels, and those details were not in our text.

We stopped, and we said, “Wait, why do you why do you think that about this person?” “Well, the Bible tells us that this was a sinful woman,” and I’m like, “Wait, look at our text. Does our text in Matthew say this was a sinful woman?” We looked? No. Well, why do I think that? Oh, we flipped over, and we’re like, that’s in Luke’s gospel. Why do Matthew and Mark not name this person? Luke calls this person a sinful woman, and then John identifies it as Mary of Bethany. And Mary of Bethany was known to Jesus and the disciples. They were friends. So why wouldn’t the disciples and Matthew and Mark have recognized that it was Mary of Bethany? That doesn’t make sense. The minute I started asking this question of them, “Where are you getting that detail?” And we looked at the text, we’re like, “Oh, something is happening here.”

Why do we have this intuition to synthesize the stories? And I think it’s what you’re talking about. It’s that because we have this preconception that the Bible is journalistic reportage, that every detail is portable into all the versions. So like, for example, the metaphor that came up was that we think of the Gospels as four different security cameras aimed at the same intersection. And because they’re on different corners, they catch different details, but they’re all talking about the same event. But when we looked at the text the way we did, we’re like, that can’t actually be the case. Right? Just this one detail. The disciples knew Mary of Bethany. Why would they not have recognized her and left her unnamed in Matthew and Mark? Why would that be? That doesn’t make sense.

So what does that mean? Does that mean these are different events, and Jesus got anointed by multiple women? Does that mean that the human author of the Gospels had a point they were trying to make? Matthew’s version very clearly is making the point that this unnamed woman, who’s not a disciple, who’s an outsider, who wasn’t invited to the party, is the only one in the room who’s conscious that Jesus is about to die. That’s very clearly Matthew’s point. But Luke’s point isn’t that at all; Luke’s point is about forgiveness of sins. So these two narratives are talking about something different, and we can’t see that if we have to synthesize them into one story.

Zach Hunt 12:00
Exactly. And that gets to a big point that I try to hammer home, particularly in the second half of Godbreathed., The phrase or the idea that “the Bible says” is incoherent. It’s meaningless. Because the Bible doesn’t say anything. Because the Bible is not a book. It’s a collection of books. Some people have used the metaphor of a library, like a collection of books. I love that image. In the book, I talked about the Bible as an anthology. If there’s cohesion in the Bible, it’s this big story that’s being told. I mean, ultimately, that’s what the Bible is; it’s the story of the people of God, but it’s the story told by the people of God and how we understood God’s relationship with us and vice versa across time.

And if you understand in that sort of context and the sense of like a literary workshop that is continually being worked on, then the Bible becomes a sort of dynamic and living, breathing story today, not just this old book that sits on the shelf. Because you and I are part of the storytelling. You know, we may not write a gospel or an epistle or anything like that that gets canonized in the Holy Scripture, but if the Bible is the story of the people of God, that story did not end in the fourth century, or whenever you want to choose to say the Bible was, you know, closed. That story continues to be told.

Now that opens up a whole new can of worms about what inspiration looks like, you know, about the movement of the Holy Spirit, about how we interact with scripture. Those are huge questions that I only touch on in the book because, again, what I’m trying to get to here is we need to get back to the very, very basics. We have to start all of these conversations at the very, very, very beginning of what is the Bible before we get into this stuff about inspiration and healthier ways of reading the Bible.

I tried to tackle its history because I don’t think most people really are familiar with biblical history, not biblical history of, like, you know, when Joshua entered the promised land, but like, when was the Bible actually written? Who actually wrote it? How did it develop? Because I’m coming at this with several degrees and even, I was still surprised to learn new things. Mark is usually regarded as the oldest gospel that was written or the first gospels written. Mark was not written in the sense that we write a book today, like if you or I sit down, we write a book, it gets published in one single volume, but that Mark, maybe even other gospels as well–especially if you know the Synoptics are borrowing from each other (meaning Matthew, Mark, and Luke) this really, you know, makes a lot of sense.

Mark really started as a collection of what were essentially sermon notes, you know, of parables, of stories that were passed around by the disciples by other teachers, so that people had these notes to essentially preach from, to keep the story going and to continue to tell the story. And so those get coalesced into one single volume by an editor, by multiple editors, and then you have… You see this editing going on with Luke and Matthew off of Mark, and John’s over here doing his own, you know, wild and crazy things. If that is how the Gospels came about, if the Gospels come about over a longer process than most of us imagined, then there’s no original document to appeal to, to say, “Oh, the Bible is perfect in its original documents,” because those things don’t exist. I mean, in one sense, they literally don’t exist. I mean, we don’t have them.

Marc Schelske 15:13
Let me pause real quickly on this because I want to highlight something you just said that I think might be helpful to understand. So you just pointed to a phrase, critiquing that phrase, of “the Bible is accurate in the original documents.” And that phrase is important because that phrase is one of the stands that is taken by folks that hold to inerrancy.

Zach Hunt 15:36
Correct.

Marc Schelske 15:36
So sort of a simplistic inerrancy is the Bible that I have in front of me is perfect. But that can’t stand very long because when you read the Bible, as you have it in front of you, there are places that disagree. Something as simple as my example that in Matthew’s Gospel, the host of this meal was Simon, the man with skin disease. In Luke’s Gospel, the host was an unnamed Pharisee. That’s a difference. Maybe it’s the same person. But it’s clearly a difference, right? And so you begin to have to reconcile those things.

Well, a more nuanced version of inspiration is, “Well, the Bible is not perfect exactly as we have it today, because there’s been translation and scribal errors and transmission concerns, but the original document, what we refer to as the autograph that that parchment that Mark was writing on, that’s the document that the Holy Spirit inspired, and that document was perfect.” So that’s what you’re referring to, and it’s often held up as, “Well, yeah, we have these particular issues today in the text, but we can kind of wind our way past those.” But our confidence in Scripture is based on the idea that, in the original autograph, it was perfectly inspired without error. And you’re saying, well, in many cases, there’s no original document to lean on. The gospel that we have now is a curated document that’s built from a collection, and that collection existed because it was important to the people in the communities of the early church.

Zach Hunt 17:08
I think that’s a great point to hit on, you know, in the other direction. Because we’re critiquing conservative theology, but if you go to the other extreme, you get the “Dan Brown theology” (or theology is maybe too strong the word) conspiracies, you know, that the Bible was put together by a bunch… a secret cabal in Nicea in the fourth century, and they picked and chose blah, blah, blah. And that’s not true, either. I think exactly what you said is how I put it in the book as well. I mean, these are a collection of documents that came together because they were important to the people who read them. They were seen as true by the people who read them, even if those people did not experience those stories firsthand, even if those people had no way to prove historically that any of those stories were true, they were true to them because they had experienced that truth in their lives.

So, going back to the Hebrew Bible, that’s the reason that those stories were eventually written down, because they weren’t written down originally, either. They were stories told by campfires and out in fields and to your kids before they went to bed. The people of Israel wrote those stories down about Exodus and the promised land and things like that, and God being faithful because they experienced God’s faithfulness in their lives. There have been many times in church history, including today, where there are cabals of old men who make decisions and manipulate the church, but the coming together of scripture was not one of them.

But because it’s not that, it also speaks to the beauty of Scripture because it’s written by so many people. Like you said, we’ve got four different gospels, and you know, in the context of other faiths, that’s kind of weird. You know, why don’t we have one gospel? Why don’t we have one authoritative story? But that’s also very Christian, in the sense that we’ve got all kinds of churches and denominations and traditions and theologies because, at the end of the day, the stuff that we’re talking about is weird, and confusing, and huge. I mean, you’re talking about God becoming man and Resurrection, walking on water. Of course, there’s going to be different perspectives. And so when we try to flatten scripture into this one narrative, this one story, this one perspective, then we fundamentally don’t understand the Bible, we don’t understand the people, the story of the people of God, and I would argue, we don’t understand how the Holy Spirit works in terms of inspiration.

We look at 2nd Timothy 3:16, where we get the phrase theopneustos, which is the Greek word for “Godbreathed.” We think of that as sort of a one-off kind of moment, I think (again, not consciously), but you know, God breathed the scriptures, and we have them, and now we move on. But God breathing into, God breathing life, is an ongoing process. You know, we see that the beginning of Genesis when God takes dirt off the ground and breathes into it life, and gives humanity our start. We see it in Exodus when God breathes into the Red Sea, and it divides, and the people find new life on the other side. We see it–and this is how I conclude the book–we see it in the valley of dry bones with dead bones coming back to life, with flesh and sinews and eyeballs and ears and everything else. We see it in the tomb on Easter Sunday, where God breathes new life. And we see it every single day when you and I take a breath.

If we’re going to make the sort of claims that we do in the Christian faith, that God is the author of all existence, that God is the Creator, that God has all these big lofty things, then we owe our life to God, then therefore, that very breath that we breathe is God-breathed. And so that inspiration is an ongoing process, not a once-in-two-thousand-years one-off moment. If we understand inspiration in that way, that the Holy Spirit continues to breathe new life into us so that we can be inspired or in-filled with the Spirit, then our charge as a Christian is to continue to share that inspiration, that life, that God-breathed life, with others.

And if that’s the case, then scripture can only be used, or should only be used, in a way that generates new life, that is life-giving. So if we’re gonna talk about the Bible being God-breathed, then the Bible has to be life-giving or how we use the Bible has to be life-giving, otherwise we’re not using it in the way that it was intended to be used, either by its authors or by God. And I would go so far as to say that if we’re going to give a definition to blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, that ambiguous sin that’s mentioned in the New Testament, this would seem like it. If we’re going to take this text that we claim is breathed out by the very divine breath of God and is intended to bring life and hope and love to the world, and we use that and contort it and twist it into a weapon of death to wield against our enemies. I can’t think of a better definition for blasphemy of the Holy Spirit than that.

Marc Schelske 21:36
I had not actually made the connection before, I don’t know why, of the Genesis creation story of God breathing into the earth-formed body, God breathing in the breath of life, that that being the same act that Timothy’s passage is referring to–that’s really a great connection. And that passage when you brought it up, I think, is actually a really great illustration of the problem you’ve been talking about since the beginning. Right? Because that passage in Timothy that’s our proof text for inspiration, right? All Scripture is inspired for the purpose of teaching. Well, in order to understand that, I’m coming to the text with a pre-existing belief about what inspired means. Right?

So when I cite that verse to somebody in an argument, I’m like, well, “All Scripture is inspired, you know, this passage in Timothy says so,” I’m saying my particular view of inspiration–if I’m speaking from the view of plenary inspiration, verbal inspiration, it’s perfect without error, right? I’m bringing that meaning. That meaning is not in the text. The text just says all scripture is this Greek word that you cited, theopneustos, is God-breathed and useful for instruction. And then somebody has to look at that passage and go, “Well, what the heck does it mean for a passage of scripture to be God breathed? What is that about?” And if I bring my prepackaged belief that oh–you know, this is going to be a caricature, but this is what I was raised with. The caricature I was raised with was that Paul, or Mark, or John is sitting in a little, a little writing nook in their shed at a little wooden desk, with their papyrus, and there’s of like this Holy-Spirit-light beaming down on their forehead, and the words that are coming out, are precisely what God intends. Well, today, if I describe that process to you outside the context of Christianity, there’s a word for that. It’s called automatic writing. And it’s considered to be occultic.

Zach Hunt 23:34
Right. That’s the one I grew up with. And I talked about it. That was kind of my assumption as well. Yeah. I mean, we have to really step back and just ask basic questions. I don’t think that we do, because like you said, we show up and we’re like, oh, this verse means X, Y, or Z and we never stopped to think, “Well, why do you think that that means that?” I think that that’s a failure, not just on us as individuals, but on like, the church and discipleship. We’ve been conditioned for at least five hundred years to believe that salvation happens by faith alone. And so we’ve reduced “faith alone” to mean right answers. And so, we’ve streamlined the entire salvation process into essentially an assembly line of salvation, where you show up, you say the prayer, you believe the right things, we package you off, you go home, and you get to go to heaven. And that’s just not the biblical story. You know, if we’re gonna talk about a biblical story, that’s just… that ain’t it.

Marc Schelske 24:25
So let’s talk about one of the problems of what you just laid out. If part of what makes salvation possible is that we believe the right thing, if that’s one of the criteria, then it’s really important that you have a source of the right beliefs.

Zach Hunt 24:41
Absolutely.

Marc Schelske 24:42
That becomes fundamentally necessary. And so, depending on your tradition, you have a source. So in traditional Catholicism, the source is the Magisterium. You have the church saying, “This is the true doctrine about this idea, and if you agree with it, you’re in line with the church. You check that box. Post-Reformation, protestants don’t have a Magisterium that they call a Magisterium. They don’t have an official committee that says this is the thing. What we say is, “Oh, the Bible is our Magisterium; the Bible is our standard of faith and practice.” But in practice, the Bible has to be interpreted. That’s where you began, right? You began with the question that we all live in a culture. We all see the world around us in that cultural viewpoint. If I’m going to say about the Bible, “Oh, the Bible clearly says,” I’m reading my own cultural assumptions and predispositions to be able to say that, and now I have a source, which is my community’s Magisterium.

Zach Hunt 25:41
Right.

Marc Schelske 25:42
Whether that’s an official Magisterium, like the Catholic Church, or just my collection of John Piper books, whatever it is, I have a source. That source is what allows me to check the box of salvation that says I believe the right things about Jesus, God, eternity, and reality.

Zach Hunt 25:59
Exactly. Another phrase you’ll hear a lot, you know: “The Bible is my highest source of authority.” BS is what I would say. Because, one, that’s just intrinsically impossible. In making the Bible your source of authority, you are still the authority, choosing to make that your authority. You’re also making an authoritative decision on what those Bible verses mean, and which ones you’re going to follow, and which ones you’re not going to follow, and which ones you’re going to reconcile as weird and not applicable anymore. How I’m interpreting God’s authority in my life is still coming down to me, and whether or not I believe that that voice in my head is the Holy Spirit telling me to do something, whether I believe I’m being pushed or called, or however you want to phrase it. As Christians, we can die to self and do all these things we are called to do, but if we’re not honest about our role in that, that’s where problems become prevalent and where people end up getting hurt, abused, oppressed, marginalized, and even killed when we pretend as if “No, this isn’t me doing this. This isn’t my decision to X, Y, or Z, I’m under the authority of Scripture, I’m under the authority of God.

Marc Schelske 27:05
So somebody says, “Well, this is my view, (let’s say) on the role of women,” and someone argues back, and they’re like, “Well, you’re not arguing with me. You’re arguing with God.” And when they say you’re arguing with God, what they are actually doing is they’re pointing to a particular verse of scripture, and they’re saying that verse of scripture is God’s ultimate, all-time, perfect will for all cultures and all moments, and my understanding of that scripture is accurate. It’s a power move.

Zach Hunt 27:31
Oh, absolutely. It’s absolutely about power and manipulation. And it’s also deeply ironic because we’re appealing to the voice of God. You’re appealing to the scripture that we say is inspired to silence people. And yet one of the very first miracles of the Holy Spirit that we see in the book of Acts is the Holy Spirit enabling people to talk more, giving voice to the apostles to speak, and also for people to be able to hear in their own language.

I look at passages like that and say God wants these conversations. God wants us to be able to talk, to wrestle, to debate with one another. To me, that’s, again, why we need to look at the Bible in a different way than just this one volume, but all of these different voices. Because that’s what we see reflected in the Bible. It’s really the story of our own lives. Look at these stories as a reflection of ourselves. And when we do that, it makes more sense. Because we’re not perfect, we don’t have complete, total knowledge of everything. We’re gonna make mistakes. We’re gonna put our foot in our mouths, we’re gonna say dumb things, we’re gonna do terrible things. And we’re gonna do some terrible things in the name of God. And that’s exactly what you see in the Bible. All throughout the Bible is the story of the people of God, but it’s also our story. Because it’s people doing terrible things in the name of God. It’s people getting things wrong. It’s people doing great and beautiful and wonderful things as well.

And it goes back to these fundamental conversations about who we are as the people of God, what our story is, and where we come from. And so I hope people feel the same permission and freedom after reading this book that folks felt two thousand years ago when these stories that we’re reading in the Bible were written because you don’t have to affirm inerrancy to be a Christian. It’s a relatively new invention. You don’t have to believe the Bible is perfect. Contrary to what I was told, you can doubt or even disbelieve one part of the Bible, and that doesn’t mean everything else comes down like a house of cards because that’s not how the Bible works. You can believe that the creation story is a poem or a myth or whatever, that it’s not historically accurate–because science tells us that it’s not historically accurate, and Jewish rabbis will tell you that’s not really the point of Genesis one and two–but you can believe that and still believe other portions of the Bible are historically accurate because again, it’s not one book. Genesis functions differently than Psalms, which functions differently than gospels, which functions differently from the Pauline epistles, and Revelation, and so on. It’s about stepping back and just being honest about what the Bible is and who we are.

Marc Schelske 30:00
There feels to me to be a deep insecurity around scripture, around perhaps our basis for authority as a community. Maybe that’s part of what develops when Darwin comes out with evolution, and all of a sudden, we’re questioning. They’ve got the scientific method; what have we got? And so now we’ve got to start making biblical interpretation more scientific so that we can play in the same field. And so there’s this deep insecurity that we’re desperate to have one true meaning of the text, which requires a kind of understanding of inerrancy to even make sense. But in my own study, when I’ve begun to read the writings of ancient Christians, they just don’t have that insecurity about the Scripture. The Patristic writers, they were very clear. They’re like, “oh, yeah, scripture has multiple layers of meaning. And, and in fact, if you’re stuck on the literal meaning, that’s the most basic basic one. You got to get past that. You’ve got to get beyond the literal meaning to the spiritual meaning before you’re even experiencing what the Holy Spirit is doing.” They were not at all insecure about the idea that passages could be weird and that they could have disagreements, all that stuff. That was just like part of the deal for them. It seems like in evangelical Christianity, we’ve lost that capacity to play with scripture in that way.

Zach Hunt 31:19
Oh, absolutely. This is not liberal progressive Zach making up ideas. What you described is directly from Origen, who is one of the earliest theologians in the church, and who has had more influence on the development of Christianity than anyone outside of Paul and Augustine. He says there are two different senses of Scripture. You know, one is the literal sense, which are the words that are literally on the page. But then, like you said, there’s this deeper spiritual truth. And what he says–that to me was as liberating as it was provocative–is that he even goes further and says that there are certain… stumbling blocks is the phrase that he uses or how its translated–certain stumbling blocks or just wrong things in Scripture that can’t be true, that can’t be the way that we should do things. Things like “slaves obey your masters for this is right in the Lord.”

He goes even further than that and says that those stumbling blocks, those errors, were allowed to be there by the Holy Spirit to draw us beyond the literal words on the page and down into the spiritual texts or spiritual truth in the text. Which is, which is crazy! Because, on one side, it’s liberating and allows us to be open and honest and say, when Paul says, “slaves should obey your masters,” that’s just wrong. But what’s crazy is he’s essentially saying that the Bible is not perfect and God made it that way.

Marc Schelske 32:30
Right?

Zach Hunt 32:30
So what I love is it’s not just like him saying, yeah, the Bible is not perfect, and so you can have this squabble with Inerrency folks like John Piper. He’s just saying, you know, “the Bible is not perfect and it’s not just people’s fault. It’s God’s fault. Because God wanted it to be this way.” And I love it because what it speaks to is this authentic relationship, this authentic trust that God places in people to tell our story, to tell God’s story, to tell our story together. And that it’s okay if these things come in, if–and this is obviously a big if–if we can be open and honest about that. If we can say, this is just not wrong. This is a stumbling block; there must be something deeper there.

And I think that we can get to that deeper spiritual truth without having to have a Ph.D. in biblical languages and all this other scholarly work because there’s the other guy I mentioned before, Augustine, who jumps in and says exactly what Jesus says in the greatest commandment: if your interpretation of Scripture, no matter how great you think it is, no matter how much grammatical work you’ve done, language studies, exegesis, if your interpretation does not lead you to love God and neighbor more than you’re wrong. I can, in the 21st century, look at a passage like Paul saying, “slaves obey your masters,” and say, “Well, that’s just wrong because that doesn’t lead me to love my neighbor. Why is that? Why would that be in there?”

Well, then it takes me to that deeper spiritual sense and reminds me that I see in a mirror dimly, right that I see in Paul the same failings that are in me that are in people a hundred and fifty years ago, that we’re still enslaving people by using this very passage. But I see a flawed human being, I see someone who’s not perfect, I see a person who makes mistakes, I see a person who’s who’s just like me, still being used by God. And that’s a really beautiful, hopeful thing. And if we can begin to see scripture in that way, then I can be used by God, too. There’s a lot of hope and life, I think, to be found there. But again, it goes back to like fundamentally rethinking, you know, our relationship with the Bible, our understanding of the Bible, and our calling, you know, as the people of God,

Marc Schelske 34:27
There’s a way of talking about the flaws of inspiration that leads to ultimately no belief in scripture or no belief in God. And I think, quite honestly, that that’s an evangelical or fundamentalist response to the question. Usually, that’s a person who was raised in a community that said to them the Bible is perfect and every in every way, it doesn’t have any discrepancies or failures. And that’s because God doesn’t lie. And if one thing isn’t true, the whole house of cards falls down. And they’ve looked at it for themselves, and they’re like, “Well, okay, it doesn’t hang too. Gather so the Bible must not be true. And probably the idea of God I was given as a child isn’t true either. I’m out.” And so they have left, but they haven’t left… they’ve left in a way that is still fundamentalist…

Zach Hunt 35:12
Yeah, right.

Marc Schelske 35:14
…that’s still rooted in the idea that the Bible has to be perfect, and since it’s not perfect, I’m out. That’s not what you’re talking about. You’re talking about something else. And so I’d love for you to walk us in that direction. Because I’m sensitive to the fact that folks who were raised with this idea of inspiration, one of the benefits of this view of inspiration is a kind of security and a kind of certainty. I can trust who God is because I can trust what Scripture says. If I take that away, am I taking away certainty? Am I taking away a sense of security? But that’s not what you’re trying to do. So what is better on the other side of this conversation?

Zach Hunt 35:54
Freedom and love. I think those two things are foundational to the Gospel. It’s one thing to just talk about whether or not the Bible is inerrant or perfect, or historically accurate, or scientific, or whatever. You know, that’s one conversation. The other half of the conversation–this is where the book ends up–is what’s the point of the Bible? You know, what does it even exist for? What does Christianity exist for? Like, why would we follow Jesus? For me, it’s not stay or go; it’s not just those kinds of options. We can also rethink what it means to be a Christian and what salvation is about, and begin to rethink that maybe this isn’t just about me going off to heaven, but about me beginning to help bring heaven to earth as it isn’t heaven. Just like Jesus prayed!

We have other options for dealing with scripture, other healthier options, options that allow us to take it seriously, even if we’re not always taking it literally. Because sometimes, taking it literally prevents us from taking it seriously. What I’m trying to do is offer people the freedom to ask questions, to push back, to doubt, to acknowledge that, yeah, the Bible is wrong about some things. Some things are minor. Sometimes they’re scientifically inaccurate because these are people who lived 3000 years ago. But sometimes they’re big deals like “Slaves obey your masters,” or “women be silent in the church”, or, you know, “if your child has been unruly, take them outside of the camp and stone them to death.” If we as a people can’t say that is objectively immoral, then we have completely lost the plot of the gospel.

Marc Schelske 37:21
That moment, when we look at those passages and decide what to do with them, is actually telling on our view of God.

Zach Hunt 37:28
Exactly, yeah.

Marc Schelske 37:29
Because if I can look at that passage, “take your unruly kids outside the camp and stone them,” and I have to say, “Nope, God said that. That is God’s design,” then I’m just admitting that when I say something is good, I just mean it’s something that comports with the will of God, and God is how God is. Period. In this case, God is an authoritarian who doesn’t abide disobedience.

Zach Hunt 37:55
For me, when I talk about Augustine, Origen, and this hermeneutic of love, I’m not looking at love just as a lens through which to read the Bible but as the beginning and end point of everything. God is love. When we say that, the description of that loving relationship that we use in the Christian tradition is Trinity. You know, because God is in this loving community, right? God is in this loving communion of Father, Son, Spirit. And when we say that, it’s not a descriptor of God; it’s who God is. There’s nothing behind that. It’s not like I say, “Hey, Zack is bald and has a beard,” but there’s more to me than that. When I say God is love, that is the core of who God is. And so that’s the beginning, and if that’s true, that has to orient how we think about the Bible.

If the Bible is inspired, then it’s inspired by love, and so that has to guide our reading. And that’s what Jesus says when he says, “This is the greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.” It’s what Augustine is saying when he says you can’t interpret Scripture correctly if it’s not leading you to love. And it’s what I’m saying in Godbreathed. Love is not just this warm, fuzzy feeling but this call to justice, this call to a better, more hopeful, life-giving way of being in and for the world. That’s not just how we read the Bible, but it’s how we live life.

And so, ultimately, what I’m trying to do with Godbreathed is to get us to fundamentally rethink how we live. Because if we’re going to make the claim that the Bible is our foundation, and the Bible is our authority, things like that, then we have to describe how that is and how that plays out in life. And so when I, when Augustine, whoever, that I quote in the book, talks about love, it’s not just this warm, fuzzy lens through which we read the Bible, but it’s the beginning and end point of our lives as individuals and reality as itself. I think that’s what the gospel is telling us. The gospel is Jesus trying to restore this loving relationship between creation and its creator. It’s love that we read in Genesis when God takes that dust from the ground and breathed the breath of love, of God’s love, into it to create humanity. And it’s love that we see in the book of Revelation when God makes all things new and brings people together, and there’s no more sorrow or tears or dying because death is no more. I mean, that’s, that’s love, you know, brought to its completion.

CLOSING REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 40:03
As I said in the beginning, so many of the tensions and disagreements we have in the Christian world come down to how we read the Bible. And there’s an unspoken question behind that question. How do we see God?

If our picture of God is of a strict authoritarian who brooks no disobedience, who demands unwavering loyalty, who has no time or patience for the struggles and uncertainties of being human, then it makes sense that scripture would be a reflection of that kind of God. If that God is real, then scripture, of course, would be an unquestionable, incontrovertible manual for pleasing this God.

But if our picture of God is something different, if we see God as Jesus portrayed: as a father who runs to the lost son, as a stranger who picks up the wounded alongside the road, as a shepherd who seeks out that one lost sheep, if those pictures are trustworthy descriptions of God, then Scripture must also be something different.

Zack invites us to consider that possibility. He said in our conversation, “We have other options for dealing with scripture, other healthier options, options that allow us to take it seriously, even if we’re not always taking it literally. Because sometimes taking it literally prevents us from taking it seriously.” If this is new ground for you, that I invite you to ask those questions. And maybe Zack’s book is a good place for you to start.

May you find your way to a spiritual place that is full of freedom and joy. Rather than laboring under the harsh eye of a God who is constantly measuring you, may you see that you have always belonged, have always been loved, and are always invited to be part of God’s work of loving the world. Thanks for listening.

Notes for today’s episode and any links mentioned can be found at MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW053. If you found today’s conversation helpful, then subscribe to my newsletter, Apprenticeship Notes. This newsletter goes right into your email inbox about once a month. It includes a reflection written just for my subscribers that won’t be found anywhere else, insider information about my blog posts and podcast episodes like this one, books and spiritual practices that I recommend, and an update on my latest writing project. Subscribe now, and you’ll also get a free little book when you do. It’s called The Anchor Prayer: A Prayer and Practice for Remaining Grounded in a Chaotic World. In this little book, I teach a spiritual practice that has been so helpful to me as I face the anxiety and uncertainty of our time, and I like to just share it with you. Subscribe and get that book at www.MarcOptIn.com.

Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, You are known, you are loved, and you are not alone.

Often the church seems in a panic to avoid the influence of culture, but what if the church is already fully bought into the assumptions of culture? Western culture assumes that strength, leadership, and being right are the way of success. Does the way of Jesus calls us to something different?.

Mandy Smith is a pastor, author, and speaker. She pastors St. Lucia Uniting Church, in St. Lucia, in Queensland, Australia. She’s a regular contributor to Christianity Today and Missio Alliance.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 52. Childlike faith is better than childish faith.

TODAY’S SPONSOR

Marc Schelske 0:18
Today’s podcast is made possible by the Untangled Workshop. Some of us don’t do too well with emotions, ours, other peoples’. It doesn’t matter. For some of us, they’re confusing. For some of us, they’re overwhelming. For some of us, it feels like we live at the whim of emotions that are explosively beyond our control. Others of us can’t seem to feel anything at all, even when it seems like we should.

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INTRODUCTION

In the church I grew up in, we were regularly warned about the danger of culture. The gospel was going to be watered down by culture. Our witness was going to be undermined if we got too involved in culture. We were supposed to be countercultural, but not not like the hippies! We stood for truth and truth had to be protected from the infiltration of culture.

Now, there’s something reasonable about this fear. Culture is a powerful force. We all grow up within a culture, it’s unavoidable. The culture that we were raised in shapes our thinking and our view of ourselves and others. In this sense, culture is the sum total of the norms, expectations, commitments, and presuppositions that most everyone around us implicitly assumes. There are certain visible expressions of culture like music and movies. But behind all of this are these shared common assumptions. So this concern the church has about the danger of the influence of culture makes some sense. We can and often do find ourselves living in a culture that operates from very different values than what we want to live by, or from what we believe God’s calling us to live by. In the normal process of getting along in life, it’s very easy to accommodate and normalize attitudes and values that we disagree with. When the values of Jesus conflict with the values of the world that we find ourselves in, we ought to pause and consider our participation. That all makes sense.

But the particular concerns we had, at least in the church tradition that formed me, were quite narrow. We were concerned with things like movies and music and entertainment. We were quite worried about particular folks that we thought would lead us away from our supposedly Biblical worldview, like feminists and liberals! And yet, as a child of the church who has been observing and thinking about this stuff for a long time, I’ve long suspected that maybe we’ve been focused on some of the wrong things. And perhaps by being so distracted by our particular list of moral concerns and cultural enemies, we failed to notice other much more significant ways that our culture has shaped the church.

This past year, I was introduced to pastor Mandy Smith. She has been thinking about how we follow Jesus for a long time. Her first book, The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry, suggested that maybe some of our foundational ideas about leadershi– being in charge, being strong, being the person up on the stage–are actually getting in the way of following Jesus well. But her next book… man, the subtitle of this book really intrigued me. The book is called, Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture. In this book, she spoke directly to this concern I’ve been feeling. Is there something in the culture that formed me, something deeper than the concerns I grew up with in my church community, that was twisting the way I was living and experiencing the way of Jesus, that was even twisting the way the church shapes itself in the world.

In the introduction to Unfettered, Mandy talks about two postures that are deeply embedded in us, at least those of us formed by the pervasive influence of Western post-enlightenment culture, I think, therefore, I am. And I do therefore I am. She suggested that these two postures are an inheritance from Western culture, actually some of the foundational drivers of why our culture is the way that it is. And then she suggests that when we are led by these motivations, we live in ways that don’t seem very much like the good news of Jesus at all. So I asked her to unpack that with me.

INTERVIEW

Mandy Smith 6:14
I’ve also had experience in a church that was very worried about being pure in a in a culture that was going to taint our faith. And in a way, those kinds of concerns about movies or music or whatever are easier concerns, because you can see them, you can see…

Marc Schelske 6:35
Right.

Mandy Smith 6:35
…oh, that movie has this scene in it, s o therefore I will not watch that movie. The kinds of things I’m talking about are just in the water, harder for us to really name. And sometimes even the way that we do the kind of critique of culture that we were just talking about, is more telling of the way that we’re shaped by culture. The way we do things is a part of our theology as well. And so if we bring in all of the polarization from culture, for example, into the way that we’re dealing with the more obvious elements of culture than it just shows how we’ve been shaped in our culture. We’ve been shaped in our own character, in the very foundations of our faith in ways that, sadly, are more challenging. We’ve been discipled, really, by our education, by the media, by culture. It’s just what we swim in.

So the trickier thing is to stop and be aware of these habits that we have, which makes sense when we live in a culture that that is secular, that in many ways doesn’t even claim to be founded on submission to God. So we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not being dishonest about it. But if the culture that we live in is shaped by an assumption that ultimately human agency and human intellect is our hope, then of course that will become how we are shaped even as Christian people. And so, I’ve noticed in myself, even, you know, daily things, that I am doing very Christian things… you know, as a pastor, even the way that I prepare to preach, which would feel like one of the most Christian things you could do perhaps…

Marc Schelske 8:27
Yeah…

Mandy Smith 8:27
…It’s so easy to do in a secular way. It’s so easy to do in the way that the world would do it, which begins with the assumption that it’s all up to me.

Marc Schelske 8:37
Okay.

Mandy Smith 8:37
And while I would claim… if you asked me consciously, “Is God helping you write your sermons?” I would say, “Yes, of course.” My theology, my conscious theology, is one way, but theology is also expressed in our habits, and our instincts and how we actually make choices in the moment. So in the moment when I’m anxious about whether my sermon is going to be very good, and every single week, I have a fear that this is the week I have nothing to say, every single moment, you know, every time when I’m like, Okay, it’s time to get work on that sermon, and the anxiety is there, and everything in my culture has taught told me, when you feel that anxiety, that’s a sign you’ve got to really work hard.

Marc Schelske 9:19
Mmm, Okay.

Mandy Smith 9:20
And so the first thing I want to do is get in front of my laptop and just bang away feel, like I accomplished something. But if I really believe what I claim to believe, that God is the author of every sermon, that God is writing the sermon in me, that God is already working in my congregation, and knows how this passage of Scripture is going to mean something to each single one of them, then wouldn’t I actually begin in a different way? Wouldn’t I stop to say, maybe there’s already a power at work that I just need to somehow join. I need to set aside my own power long enough to figure out a way to join this thing that’s already surging in and around me. But it’s really deeply ingrained to do the other thing.

Marc Schelske 10:06
Yeah, I mean, that idea that the whole goal of life is about attaining, holding on to, and expressing power–that is the world that we are just soaked in. Competence is one form of that. Hustle culture is a form of that. And we’re not even talking about expressly Christian things. And yet, as you say, these are ways that we engage our life in our faith, our relationships, even inside the community of folks who’ve said, “Yep, I follow Jesus, Jesus way is What matters to me.” Your statement, “theology is expressed in habits,” really grabs my attention. I’d love to hear you talk a little bit more about that.

Mandy Smith 10:54
One way that really is telling is when suddenly there’s a crisis. You know, you’re in an elders meeting, and you’ve just discovered that the offering is tanking, and you got to fix this now. Or I’m often in spaces where it’s a denominational, kind of level, and there’s a problem. All the churches are shrinking, and we got to fix this thing. And it is interesting, because the more evangelical or conservative spaces often go to a place of strategizin. You know, get the consultant in, get some guy in to come and tell us how to fix it, or read a book, we’ll do a thing. Sometimes when I’m in the more progressive spaces, it becomes this kind of… let’s just have a think tank, you know, we’ll have a collaborative conversation, and we’ll get to the bottom of this thing. We’ll lament, and… you know. I’ve been in both of those kinds of rooms, and I don’t want to make fun of other people, because I do the same thing.

When I’m chairing the meeting, it still goes the same way, but it’s more… maybe it’s easier when someone else is chairing the meeting to notice it. That it just spirals. It spirals into anxious… a kind of despair, a kind of desperation. It’s that feeling that often makes me think, hang on a second. This is this is a sure sign God is not in this, because even when things aren’t great, and we haven’t got the answers yet, when God is involved in the conversation, there’s a lightness about it. You know, there’s a… when you see all the psalms of lament, Yes, something’s wrong, but the Psalmist just pours that out to God, and there’s a space where you feel seen and held in that, even even before any resolution comes or any change is possible. You see in those psalms, almost all of them turn to praise and thanksgiving.

Marc Schelske 12:52
Yeah, and the thing’s not even fixed yet. If we think about the narrative sequence of the Psalm, whatever was causing the lament is still probably going on!

Mandy Smith 13:03
Yeah. So this is not to say that we shouldn’t have conversations, and have think tanks, and that we shouldn’t have a strategy. My question is what’s the order of this? So the way I often put it is that our western culture has taught us that it’s all up to you. This is why we’re all burned out and exhausted and doubting. It’s because there’s this fundamental kind of assumption underneath it all that It’s all up to you.

Marc Schelske 13:31
Yes!

Mandy Smith 13:32
Which is not a hopeful space to be in. No wonder we’re all depressed and anxious. And so in that moment, the knee jerk response… you know, there’s a crisis. It’s just hit the fan in our personal life, or in our church, or in our denomination or whatever, and we have been shaped by a culture that says, respond, respond, respond, respond, fix it, answer it, solve it, go, now. And we just do not have everything at our disposal to be able to do that. It’s always going to be a desperate endeavor. So, I see us as Christian people, who would claim to trust that God ultimately is carrying everything… we kind of ping pong back and forth from “It’s all up to God” to “It’s all up to me,” and back to, “It’s all up to God.” Because it feels really spiritual to say, “Well, it’s all up to God.” But we still have to do things. We still have to get up and preach that sermon or plan that thing.

Marc Schelske 14:31
Right!

Mandy Smith 14:33
And so then once we’re engaged, then it’s back to being all up to us again. And neither of those actually requires any partnership with God because either he’s doing it all or we’re doing it all.

Marc Schelske 14:44
Right. It’s almost like we don’t know, we don’t have a model, maybe, of what that partnership looks like. Because the response of saying, “Well, it’s all up to God,” I think for many of us feels like we’re saying, “Well, I should be passive. I should not take action. When I should not push… on the progressive end of things I could sense myself saying, “Well, I don’t want to impose power into this situation. I want to step back and not drive it. And even that is a kind of passivity which we, sort of from life experience, we’re like, “well, that’s not going to get anything done.” And it’s going to leave a vacuum for somebody else to step in, and they’re just going to do the thing that I’m not doing. They’re going to take charge.

Mandy Smith 15:25
Right.

Marc Schelske 15:25
So we have all this going on in our head. So what does it look like? Maybe this is a conversation worth digging into, then. What does it look like to try doing those things in a different way? What does that different way even mean?

Mandy Smith 15:41
Yeah. So we still do have a call to respond. Passivity is not… I don’t know why we think passivity is this inherently Christian thing? Jesus emptied, yeah… but he got up and he did stuff all day long, you know. He said, “Yes” to the Father. So, what I propose, and it starts… It’s Alliterative, so it must be true–is that we do have a response, but it’s not the first thing. So I say Rest is our first response. And from that Rest, we always Receive something. When we’ve set aside our own agenda and our own power, we always Receive something and then we know how to Respond. And that rest may be, you know, go on a sabbatical.

Oftentimes, it just means take a breath, stop. I’ve been in so many rooms, where there has been some kind of crisis that’s just hit the fan and somebody is good enough to think, hang on a second, let’s pray. Let’s sing a worship song, or let’s read a passage of scripture. And I’ve never seen that happen without it bringing some kind of… it’s like someone just open a window and the air is just different. And it doesn’t mean that it’s been resolved necessarily. We may not know the answer yet. But in every situation I’ve seen it happen, it’s brought just a different peace. It’s reminded us, okay, we don’t have to fix this this second. Or it’s reminded us of something from from our past. It’s given us a new imagination of the future. It’s maybe made us remember, oh, there’s a person we need to bring into this conversation. It’s just brought a different something into the room that’s reminding us we’re not alone in this.

And this, for me, comes from Jesus saying, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest, and take my yoke upon you.” It’s kind of an oxymoron, but this is the kind of rest that He invites us into, that is not rest and do nothing. Like, “You chill, I’ll take care of the world for you.” And it’s not, “You’re out there doing everything in your own strengths. And I’m chilling back in the throne room, because I’ve sent you out to do my mission on on my behalf.” I don’t know where I pick it up, maybe youth group camp or something, this sense of like… maybe it comes from like pilgrimage days, or crusades, or something of like, the king has called me into the throne room, and he’s given me a mission, and he sent me out. And in that metaphor, he’s still back there in the throne room, and he’s sent me to do hard stuff. And so when it gets really hard, I resent him. And that doesn’t feel very hopeful.

But what about this possibility that God is already on mission in the world. And for some reason, he wants us to deal with him, like we bring something to it. Maybe the joy of watching it unfold, and the the way that we’ll need to depend on him when it gets really hard. I don’t really know exactly why he doesn’t want to do it by himself. But I love to imagine instead, that we have the kind of father who just wakes us up in the morning really early, and it’s like, “There’s something going on today. I want you to be a part of it. Grab a few things. We’re going. Like, there’s an adventure in store. And it is going to be hard, but I’ll be there with you when it gets hard. And so then the partnership is possible, and then when it’s difficult, it just it requires us to dig even deeper into our reliance on him.

So I summed it up with this, with this invitation to begin with rest, which is the opposite of what our culture tells us. But if it’s not all up to us, we have that beat. You know we have that moment to say, “Yes, Jesus invites us to rest in Him.” And whatever yoke we take up is a yoke we share with him. You know, we have this image of this double yoke that that the older ox would carry most of the weight and be the one guiding the younger ox sharing this yoke together. And that feels more like partnership. That feels more like relationship.

Marc Schelske 20:00
Yeah.

Mandy Smith 20:01
And that feels more hopeful.

Marc Schelske 20:03
There’s a great deal of trust that is shifted there, right? Because the model that you ascribe to our western cultural heritage, the trust is really in me. If I’m trusting in myself, rest is about rejuvenating my resources. So the rest I do so that I can recharge whatever resource I have, so I can again, trust in my ability to get this job done. What I hear you saying is that the rest is actually because we’re trusting God’s presence, and we’re trusting God at work, and we’re trusting that somehow we’re caught up in what God is doing. And so the rest is about embodying that. I don’t have to rush into a solution, if I actually trust God is involved in this conversation already.

Mandy Smith 20:51
Oh, absolutely. Yes, it’s fundamental. And the things that we are longing to see, you know… we’re longing to see lives transformed, our own and others, we’re longing to see communities renewed, we’re longing to see the church actually remember her mission and be flourishing and fruitful again. We’re longing for the whole world to be restored. And maybe that happens on the other side of our control.

Marc Schelske 21:18
Maybe! Pretty sure…

Mandy Smith 21:21
Yeah. So the places where I have just been wrapped up, caught up in something that that was so transformative and beautiful, it’s been a space where I’ve had to step out of my comfort and, and say Yes to things that make me feel really stupid, or where I’m worried about being embarrassed, or I’m worried about being disappointed. And it makes sense, really, because of the really transformative moments are moments where nobody planned it. You know, where it just kind of happened. And it comes from this space of saying yes to things that we didn’t make happen. So even, you know, having a time of opening up the floor to somebody else in the middle of a church service, somebody who we don’t know what they’re going to say, and that very sense of not being in control and not understanding what’s about to happen is a transcendent moment. But it’s scary if we want to be making sure every minute is programmed and everything is controlled, you know.

Marc Schelske 22:20
In Unfettered, you play with this idea of trust, trusting rest, and the activity that grows out of that, if that’s a fair way to put it. You play with that idea using the language of childlike faith versus childish faith, I think. Can you talk a little bit about what those distinctions meant for you, how that was helpful for you and thinking through these things?

Mandy Smith 22:46
You know, this does not begin as a theological endeavor, or a primarily intellectual endeavor. It was a personal experience, that then I had to read and talk to people and figure out what on earth is happening to me. I was really surprised when I started looking into the childlikeness stuff, because Jesus specifically says, “Unless you become like a child, you can’t enter the kingdom.” And we’re all busily thinking, like, “How do we get into the kingdom?” And I don’t hear anybody saying, “Oh, he told us already. It’s really simple.” You know…”

Marc Schelske 23:16
Right. Be childlike.

Mandy Smith 23:18
And if we ever do see anything about that, it’s usually whimsy and wonder, which is lovely, but you can’t live in that space. That’s nice for when you’re on going for a walk or on vacation or something. And so then we don’t know how to actually live daily life like a child. And I think it has a lot… in the way that Jesus is talking about it, it seems to have a lot to do with not expecting to be in control, not being surprised that you’re small, not being ashamed that you’re limited. And so much of our western culture really does shame human limitation.

Marc Schelske 23:54
Right, yes!

Mandy Smith 23:55
There’s this there’s this kind of assumption that like, you know… most of our ads are like, something’s wrong with you, because you haven’t figured out how to keep your hair from falling out yet, or how to make your children eat their vegetables or whatever, so just buy this product, and you’ll be like everybody else who somehow doesn’t have to struggle with that human limitation. All of that reminds me so much of Jesus’ temptation in the in the wilderness. I feel like there was an ad campaign happening there, too, you know. He refused to be ashamed of his humanity or his humanness. I love him for it, because he was not ashamed our humaneness. The strange experience of being a human being is the experience that I think we were more comfortable with as children. So the whole point for me about the childlikeness is to remember we have done this before, and we can do this again. As human beings, we are limited, we get tired, we run out of ideas, we get old, we get sick, all of those things are true.

And as human beings, we also have this remarkable quality about us that has this capacity to create, and to love, and to make a difference in the world. God gave us… You know, in creation, God gave us this partnership with him to steward this beautiful creation that he’s made. You know, even if we didn’t have ideal childhoods, there still was a way when we were children that we were more comfortable being humans, that we weren’t surprised if we couldn’t solve all the problems. That would just remind us, we should ask for help. We weren’t ashamed if we couldn’t do everything ourselves, but we also knew… I’m gonna… I’m walking into this room, and I have something to say.

Marc Schelske 25:36
Yes.

Mandy Smith 25:37
And there’s something really beautiful about finding the balance of those two things. So for me, the childlikeness is being unafraid to be powerless. And I also talk about adultlikeness, which is being unafraid to be powerful, because we often don’t talk about the negative side of being an adult either. So, if you ever say, “We should be childlike,” somebody will always say, “But don’t be childish!” you know. And for me, “childish” is this kind of passivity of like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing to say, I’ve got nothing to bring,” which feels really humble, and feels kind of Christlike, but it actually can be disobedience if God is calling us to use our agency. Underuse of power is also power abuse.

Marc Schelske 26:22
Yeah.

Mandy Smith 26:23
The other kind of power abuse is the one that we talk about more often, which is adultishness, which is being afraid of powerlessness. So wanting to always be in control. And so the beauty, the balance is found in knowing we’re not everything, but knowing we still have something to bring, and stewarding that faithfully.

And I will just say this one thing, that I think it’s really important at this moment where we are thankfully, having really good conversations about abuse of power. I never know how to say this well, without sounding kind of bitter about this. But the reality is, most of the power abuse that we see in politics and in the church has been masculine power abuse, because women haven’t had a chance to. We don’t even know how women abuse power! I hope we get a chance to find that out. So this is not to say that men are the only ones who do it, they’ve just been the ones who’ve had the most opportunity. And so it would be really helpful, in my mind, if while we’re having these conversations, we talk about the ego, all that kind of stuff are the traditionally masculine ways that power is abused. And there may be some women who have used power in that way too. In my experience, and in the experience of many women that I talked to, power abuse looks more like avoiding power altogether.

At this moment, when we are saying, “Don’t seek the limelight, don’t reach for the microphone, don’t pursue positions of influence,” I see how that’s an overreaction to the abuses of power in the ego sense of things. But it has really done a number on me and people like me, that speaks directly to my temptation to avoid power, and to avoid the agency God has given me, I just think we need to be really careful because there’s there’s also a kind of power abuse in under-use of our agency, because God has called us to speak and proclaim something into the world, to make a difference in the world and to act on his behalf. Which is terrifying, because you can make a lot of mistakes! Yeah, it’s easier to do nothing. So that’s a long answer to your question. But that’s what comes to mind for me with childlikeness and childishness.

Marc Schelske 28:32
So maybe you could share some thoughts of how that shows up in practical ways, maybe in your own life experience or ministry experience.

Mandy Smith 28:41
Yeah, I remember being in an elders meeting a few years back, and we were making a big decision on behalf of the whole congregation. We’d gone through a whole process over about six months. We brought somebody in to help us think about it. We prayed about it. The elders had all made themselves available to the congregation. We’d had meetings and conversations. It was time to just make the decision. And we all felt like, “Yea, we should move ahead into this.” And in this elders meeting, somebody said, “Oh, but you know, we should just put it in the bulletin one more time and say, we’re thinking we’re going to go in this direction, unless somebody has a problem with that.”

And that sounds really humble. And I do think that that’s the kind of thing that we do when we are worried about power abuse. And I think this person had good motives, that they know, it has happened in churches many times before that the leaders just walk all over everybody. I get it, but I was surprisingly disturbed, because there was this roadblock in this ability to just say it’s time to make a decision and move forward. And that is a really risky moment. You know, that’s really scary. And this is What leadership is, is saying someone’s got to make a decision and risk failing and looking stupid.

And so, I actually preached a little sermon, and I think I was preaching it to myself at the same time, because I was just processing some of these things myself. I said, You know, Jesus had authority. Jesus astounded people with his authority. And we just think authority is a negative thing because it has been abused, but Jesus’ Authority came from his submission to the Father. He wasn’t just stomping all over everybody, he had emptied Himself, and so whatever he received from the Father, he has the right to bring… in the same way that a parent has authority over the child, not because the parent is just the boss, but because the parent has given so much for that child. You know, you’ve lost sleep, and you’ve prayed, and you’ve read books, and you’ve tried to figure out how to help this kid grow up. That doesn’t mean that a parent is 100% correct all the time, but it means the parent has a right to speak into that child’s life.

And so I kind of preached this little sermon to the elders and said, each one of you has had dozens of conversations with people in this congregation, we’ve prayed, we’ve given our time and our energy to this thing. We have authority because we have submitted to the needs of this congregation. We’ve listened and we’ve prayed. And now we have the right to act and make a decision. I think it’s really good for us to acknowledge that it is really scary to use that agency and to step into that authority, but the kind of authority that isn’t abusive is the kind that comes from our submission, our emptying. It’s not just “I get to stomp around and boss people around,” you know? It’s coming from how we’ve emptied.

Marc Schelske 31:30
That’s really good and helpful, I think. I tend to be on that side… because I’m so concerned about the way power has been abused in the church, I tend to be on that side of almost thinking of power in itself as a bad word. And to think of the emptying, the kenosis, that we get out of Philippians 2 in Jesus life… I mean, it’s clear looking at Jesus’s life, whether the kenosis refers to the incarnation, or whether it refers to his humble demeanor, or whether it refers to the cross, all of those things are acts of agency. Maybe agency is a word that I can use more safely than power. They’re all acts of agency, where he’s moving in a particular direction with a particular agenda. He is doing that, right? So then what would the emptying out be? Well, the emptying out is that it is entirely other-oriented, it is taking into account the real and authentic needs and experience of the people that he’s serving. It is not about self-building. It is not about self-protection. It is not about trying to appear strong or competent or brave or in charge, right? So if we strip out those things, which are the things we’re so used to being the definition of what it means to be a competent person, then maybe there is a model for agency that is self-giving and other-centered.

Mandy Smith 32:53
Yeah, yeah. Because for me, so the way this actually unfolded, I was on a sabbatical, and I was like, “What am I supposed to do with myself, Lord?” And I felt this permission to just be like a child for eight weeks. Just eat when I feel like eating, and go where I feel like going, and cry if I need to cry, and nap if I need to nap, which is great. Man, that sounds good, doesn’t it? I could use that right now. And what it ended up becoming was just remembering those little urges that you had as a child of like, “I just feel like lying in the grass and I’m gonna line the grass.” But it took a little while to get back… to kind of clear away that junk that’s in the way of those little moments of like, “Huh, I wonder if that moss is really soft, it looks really soft. I’m going to touch it.” And I promised myself I’m just going to say Yes to every single one of those things. As long as it’s not illegal or dangerous or whatever, I’m just going to say Yes. And it was so surprising how many adultish kinds of Western kinds of habits were keeping me from that joy and that childlikness. That it was like, “You know you’re gonna look stupid. You’re gonna be disappointed.”

Marc Schelske 34:04
Yeah.

Mandy Smith 34:04
Why would you bother? That’s a waste of time. You’re an important person. Important people don’t lie on the grass.

Marc Schelske 34:10
Right, right! Yeah, exactly.

Mandy Smith 34:12
And that started making me think, like what is it that so precious about these things that seem like nothing… Lying on in the grass seems like nothing, and yet there’s this almost like spiritual warfare happening when I’m wanting to do it. And it made me even more determined, like, dang it. I’m gonna lie in the grass, if it kills me.

Marc Schelske 34:32
Yeah, those formational voices are so loud and weirdly also, while being loud, easy to not notice.

Mandy Smith 34:42
Yes, it was just this kind of instinct that came along, there was this joyful instinct that just wanted to explore the world, wanted to partner with creation. And then there was this other instinct that was like, “Just protect yourself. Worry about what everybody else thinks,” which is this adultish kind of something in us, which just made me so sad. And so for eight weeks, I was like, I’m not listening to you. I don’t care. But it was real. I don’t want to minimize it. It was real. I remember one day, at the very beginning, I felt this instinct to drag a stick along a long fence in a park. And I was halfway along the fence, and I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to go back to the beginning of the fence now and find a stick.” And I couldn’t find a stick. It became this real project now. And so I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna drag this stick along this fence, if it kills me.” And I was really self conscious, because other grownups are walking past and I was like, “What are they gonna think of me, I’m supposed to be a lead pastor, I’m supposed to be, you know, sensible person.”

Anyway, all of this is just to say that when I was wrapping up my sabbatical, I had awoken something in me… I’d had eight weeks now, and I’d awoken something in me, and I could no longer tell the difference between my childlike instinct and the Spirit of God in me. I was just so awake, so open to the world. And when I went back to work, it took on a much more serious turn. This is where I had to learn about agency, because it wasn’t just like, “oh, doesn’t matter if I lined the grass or not.” Now it was the very first week I went back to work, we read the passage from James that says, “If anyone among you is sick, then call the elders and pray and they will be healed.” And when I heard that being read, I saw the picture in my mind of a woman from our congregation, who, if you would ask me, the person who was hardest to imagine being healed, it was this woman. And I just felt this childlike thing in me that was like, “Pray for her to be healed.” And I had to make a promise again, I’m going to say Yes, because all that junk came at me again. “You’re gonna look…” even more so! “You’re gonna look foolish, you’re gonna disappoint people, you’re going to be disappointed.”

I was not a part of a tradition that does healing prayer. I didn’t know how to do healing prayer. And I know that it can be abusive sometimes, too. That the person being prayed for can be wrung through the wringer. I know that’s traumatic for people sometimes. So I was like, I don’t want to do it, but I’ve promised God that I will say Yes to these prompts. And that took our whole congregation on this journey of learning how to pray well for people. And it started… At first, I didn’t do it, and I mentioned it in passing to someone else, and they said, “I had the same image in my head when we heard that passage.” So then I was like, Oh, dang it. Now we have to do something. And so I thought, well, the passage says to call the elders and pray for that person, so I just called the elders to pray. And the more people who heard about it, the more people said, “I’ve been wanting to ask the healing prayer for me as well.” So instead of us as elders praying for this one lady, twelve people came to ask for healing prayer.

I read the passage from the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus says, “Father, all things are possible with you. Take this cup from me, and not my will, but yours be done,” which I think is the most perfect prayer. That’s not a model prayer that we think of in the way as the Lord’s Prayer, usually, but it’s such a beautiful prayer when you just really want something, but you also just want to give it over to God, whatever the outcome is. So we pray that prayer. We said, “God, you can do everything, heal this person, but not our will, but yours be done.” Which we summed up by saying, we don’t know What God will do, but we know What he can do. To live in that beautiful space where we’re gonna assume God is working, but we also can’t ever know exactly how he’s going to work.

So all of that is a very long way of saying, what began with just a childlike instinct of lying in the grass–and nobody saw me, and it doesn’t matter if I did it or not–became a very public… I mean, it became the way that I lead now.

Marc Schelske 38:52
Hmm, wow.

Mandy Smith 38:54
Leading, doing important things, of sensing a prompt from the Lord and saying Yes to it. And it’s terrifying, because I have no idea what’s going to become of it. And it also is the space where anything transformative, anything powerful and miraculous comes. I have to keep doing it. But, and I was actually just lying in bed this morning, praying for this podcast and remembering this, that sometimes the childlike Yes, sometimes that obedience takes you into really hard things.

Marc Schelske 39:26
Yeah.

Mandy Smith 39:28
So, this is where that adultlikeness comes in, of the perseverance, and the tenacity and the patience. So it’s not like, you know, that was wonderful because it became a wonderful prayer experience for our whole congregation, but that person wasn’t healed in the way we expected. In fact, they passed away. And right now my ministry, you know, I’m in a space of doing regeneration work in a congregation that has almost closed its doors, and there’s some really hard stuff. There’s something cruciform about that, that God… Jesus’ childlike obedience to the Father took him to the cross.

Marc Schelske 40:12
Yeah. Yeah, right.

Mandy Smith 40:14
So it doesn’t always become something fun. But also his childlike obedience to the Father is what got him up every morning to go out and proclaim good news in a world that needed it. And that got him rejected, that got him in so much trouble. But it brought the kingdom.

Marc Schelske 40:33
It sounds like when you tell that story, that in the initial experiences on your sabbatical–the grass and the fence–that there was almost a diagnostic function happening, where those silly activities were sort of surfacing these voices that were impeding you from hearing and responding to the Spirit. And that maybe to even get to the, like you said, sort of bigger, more important moments of listening to the spirit, that somehow these voices that are enculturated into us had to be had to be brought out. Like, I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid of something, I’m afraid of looking like something… what’s going on?

Mandy Smith 41:17
Absolutely. It’s all the false selves in us, right? And this is what I’m realizing through experience, that we aren’t going to be transformed until we’re obedient. Because it’s in the discomfort of the obedience that all those false selves come up. So, if we are called to proclaim something, and we don’t understand it, or we’re worried about how we’re going to look, or if people are gonna like us, and we proclaim it anyway, we’re gonna be transformed by that. And when we get rejected… you know, probably some of the most transformative moments in my life have been the moments where I did what I thought I was being called to do, and it didn’t bring me to a place of success. In fact, it’s brought me to a place of rejection, which is… I’m a peacemaker, so that’s the worst thing for me. Then there’s a moment to come back to the Lord and say, “Who are you again? Who am I again? Why are we doing this?” You know, to hide in Him, and to find our identity in him, and every single time those false selves in us are healed, or we’re released from them as we come to know more and more who we actually are.

Marc Schelske 42:37
This is another place, I think, where the culture that has shaped us surfaces, right? Because the culture that shaped me certainly is an Up-and-to-the-right culture. History is improving. Technology is improving. If we just work hard things will get better. Everyone has the same 24 hours. What are you doing with yours? You know, and if we support someone with mental illness in the right way, and they get the right counseling, and the right drugs, their mental illness will go away, and they’ll become a normal contributing member of society. That’s the narrative of our culture, and I think you’re saying that maybe that’s part of the problem.

Mandy Smith 43:17
I guess the question is, what is improving? It may not look like the world’s idea of success, but if we are being made new, then that is a different kind of improvement. So our values are changed. Our goals are changed in all of this. I’m starting to see, you know, I used to talk a lot about how small the kingdom is, and Jesus talks about that all the time. This kingdom is like yeast. I think it’s just that we have to think about it in those terms, because that’s how it seems to us, but actually, it’s the most powerful thing. It has outlived the Roman Empire. The things that we think are really big and important, they can all be measured. You know, the Roman Empire could be. You could count all of its treasures, you could count all of its soldiers and chariots and fortresses. And that made it feel real, because it was physical and solid, and it had power, and, Yes, it did a lot of stuff. That was real. It did accomplish things in the world. But in some ways, because it’s so material, it can be overcome. Another army can come and take it apart.

Marc Schelske 44:32
Right.

Mandy Smith 44:32
The people can die, you know, but when we’re talking about the kingdom, that is a thing stirring in the human heart, You can’t see that, so it feels like nothing.

Marc Schelske 44:45
Yeah, right. Right.

Mandy Smith 44:47
But that’s the eternal thing, that’s the real thing that’s really happening here. And when that can be passed from one human heart to another human heart, then even in oppression, even in persecution, that’s happening underneath the surface. And so, I often like to remember that, you know, yeast seems small and insignificant, but once you knead just a tiny bit of yeast into a whole big lump of dough, you’re not getting that out. Like, if you really hoped to make sure that bread didn’t rise, you’re just out of luck, because it’s through the whole thing now. And so I’m trying… I can see my imagination slowly changing to realize, like… I actually feel sorry now for the things that are passing away, for the things that look so big and important, but which will not last, because the thing that Jesus has given us is forever, unfading, living in a place that nothing can touch it.

I’m reminded of Thomas Merton talking about this diamond. He says there’s a point of light in each of us. It’s like a diamond. That is God’s name written in us, and it’s the center of everything. It’s the center of our true selves. And I think maybe the more we become like Jesus, the more our whole self becomes that. It’s not just a little point in us anymore. It becomes… you know, prepared for an eternal glory. You know, I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s description of heaven in the great divorce, that heaven is the most real, and maybe we just need our imaginations restored to be able to embrace that.

Marc Schelske 46:42
As I said earlier, the church of my childhood was obsessed with avoiding the influence of the culture. As I survey the landscape of Western Christianity over these past two or three hundred years, I wonder if we ended up falling into the very ditch we were desperate to avoid. In our conversation, Mandy spoke with such gentle pastoral wisdom. Is your sacred imagination sparked? Mine is. Her distinction between childish faith and childlike faith really intrigues me. So much of human behavior is essentially childish: selfish, desperate for security, willing to take from others if it makes us feel better, excited to be the top dog on the playground, liable to argue that our dad’s bigger than your dad. Does that sound at all like the way the church is behaving? Does it sound at all like the way of Jesus?

What if the way of Jesus starts by not being ashamed of our limitations? What if all our attempts to be strong and right and in charge are actually part of what Paul was talking about, when he warned us of the influence of “the Flesh?” What if the posture of the warrior isn’t reflective of the way of Jesus? Honestly, I have a hard time imagining the western church without these fears.

I suspect the Spirit of God is inviting us to imagine something different. Something that looks more like a table gathering, and less like a conference or concert. Something that looks more like mutual aid and community service, rather than something that looks like a corporation or an empire. Something that is uncomfortably inclusive, and that has the courage to respond to the difficult prompts of the spirit, something that in Mandy’s language looks more childlike. If Mandy’s insight intrigues you, I recommend both of her books. You can find her and her writing at www.TheWayIsTheWay.org.

May you find the courage to let go of childish ways so that you can embrace a vibrant, childlike faith. Thanks for listening.

Notes for today’s episode and any other links that have been mentioned you can find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW052.

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