In our path to Deconstruct the Book of Revelation, it's important to do two things: summarize the plot of Revelation and point out explicitly why this is a commentary about Roman persecution at the end of the 1st century. Once we layout this baseline of understanding, we can see that treating it any other way is a creation of later generations with nefarious intentions.

The Book of Revelation was disliked vehemently first the first 300 years of Christianity and its first primary usage came at the hands of pettiness. John of Patmos wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Contextually, it's a commentary on the Roman Empire. And yet, today, it's thought of as the premier source of the Bible predicting future events. Today we look at the framework for how Revelation became popular and how it turned into an End-Times predictor, rather than the angry commentary of just some dude.

Our conversation in this episode is led by Trish Hecker, founder of Open Door Support. She has a Masters in Social Science with an emphasis on Human Development and is a certified Sexuality Educator. In our series we've been deconstructing the Bible as a source for creating sexual ethics today, but it's been Trish who has helped us understand what a healthy sexual ethics looks like utilizing modern research and information.

In this episode we do a short recap of what we've covered in our "Deconstructing Sexual Ethics of the New Testament" series and spend time thinking through the renegotiations that have been made for heteronormative relationships that have not been given to the Queer Community.

The Bible does not talk about homosexuality. What it does reference, only a small handful of times is same-sex sex and a modern, puritanical society has conflated the two. In this episode we look at several references to same-sex sex from Leviticus to the letters of Paul, to help understand how same-sex sex was thought about in antiquity so that we might help undo the harm to the LGBTQ+ community by grossly misunderstood biblical texts.

The letters of Paul have probably been more instrumental in creating a modern sexual ethics of the church than any other biblical source. Here's the crazy part: Paul has been vastly misunderstood. This episode we talk about the 2 primary ways Paul has been misunderstood and why this should stop us from using Paul to create sexual ethics for today.

The foundation for understanding and deconstructing a sexual ethics from the New Testament starts with understanding sexual ethics from the perspective of 1st century Judaism. The laws that come from ancient Judaism are the jumping off point for the conservative, puritanical sexual ethics that come over to the New World. The problem? They're all renegotiated to fit the context of whoever is using them. In our conversation today we look at the basics of these laws and their meaning to help us in our process of deconstructing them from being used by modern society.

Today marks the beginning of a new series that will deconstruct the sexual ethics from the Bible that are used to try and create a "Biblical" sexual ethics for a modern day. Today's conversation is more about creating a foundation for the rest of the series, but it's an important conversation as we'll be using this information throughout.

There are a lot of words that Christians use for granted, words they know because they've been raised with a cultural understanding of them, not a contextual one. However, words like gospel, salvation, saved, Son of God, Christ, are not words meant to be used by a powerful church, but by the powerless followers of the historical Jesus who believed they were taking a non-violent, compassionate stance against all empires and power. In this episode we discuss the evolution of some of the most misused words and their contextual background.

In this conversation we go over a recap of our Slow Church series and try to think of a vision for both our Bethania and Unorthodox community that can incorporate a way of being a church centered in this slower method, a way that rejects the hold consumerism has on our community and lives, and a way of being more present with our neighborhood in general, and with the vulnerable among us in particular.