What happens when the good life your culture is selling you, the success, the status, the winning, turns out to be the very thing that costs you your soul? A skeptical teenager in the western suburbs of Sydney picks up the four Gospels to close the door on Christianity for good, and meets a Person on a road instead. The first followers of Jesus were called people of "the Way," and forty years later, Graham is still walking it.
In this episode, Graham explores the Jesus Way and ten movements that carry us out of self-interest and into radical discipleship through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He walks through all ten: material success to spiritual riches, competition to compassion, power to servanthood, retribution to forgiveness, indifference to justice, conflict to peacemaking, legalism to grace, exclusion to embrace, expressive individualism to community, and frenetic activity to slow discipleship. He traces the Way through Scripture, from Isaiah's highway of holiness in the desert, to the early believers called followers of the hodos in Acts, to Jesus asking in Mark 8 what it profits a person to gain the world and forfeit the psyche, to the self-emptying kenosis of Philippians 2, to the call to abide, to menō, like branches on a vine in John 15. He engages with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Emmanuel Katongole, alongside the research of Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Tim Kasser on individualism, the self, and what a life organized around money and image does to us. And he asks how the church recovers a Way that costs something without turning discipleship into a new performance, what these ten movements look like on an ordinary Tuesday in Sydney, and why the whole thing begins and ends with grace.
Book recommendations: "Ten Movements of the Jesus Way" by Graham Joseph Hill, "The Cost of Discipleship" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and "The Divine Conspiracy" by Dallas Willard.
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See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/
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