Alisa, Natasha, and Frank just returned from their 6th Unshaken Conference in Pittsburgh. Thank you to everyone there who played a part in making this Unshaken such a success. As always, they ended the day with a Q&A session, and also as always, they received far more questions than they could take. So today Alisa and Natasha wanted to answer a grab bag of questions they especially liked from the ones they couldn’t get to Saturday.

Quick Update

Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop stars alive today. Her recent album, The Tortured Poets Department debuted with a total of 2.6 million sales, which is her biggest debut and the top selling single-week sales since Adele’s 25 almost 10 years ago. CNN reported that it became the first album to draw over 300 million streams in a single day in and the first album to reach one billion streams in a single week on Spotify. Slate reported that her single Fortnight debuted as the biggest song in the world launching at No. 1 both the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Gloabal Excl. U.S. charts. Last week, Alisa listened to several songs on the album and forced Natasha to listen to a couple of them and they have thoughts!

Alisa and Natasha both have kids in the teen years, and it’s a very interesting time for parents. You start to see how some of the things you did well as a parent in the younger years are bearing fruit and feel a sense of gratitude (and relief!). But you also start to see how the things that you maybe didn’t do as well are bearing some of their own less-than-desirable fruit. So, parenting teens is certainly a time for reflection. In today’s episode, Alisa and Natasha share what they feel are three of their biggest parenting failures specifically as it relates to discipleship…as well as three of their biggest successes. 

Orange Curriculum is considered to be the most widely used Sunday school curriculum in the country. Last week, it came out that the founder, Reggie Joiner, and the CEO, Kristen Ivy have both resigned due to their admission of having an inappropriate relationship together. This came out just days before Orange's huge annual conference. These things can be rattling to those who have been somehow touched by the ministry in question, and by those who are connected to it by family or other relationship. In today’s episode, Natasha and Alisa talk about how to process the moral failings of leaders of Christian organizations and share three takeaways on how to process events like this. They also offer some hope they have for Orange going forward.

A few weeks ago, Alisa and Natasha recorded an episode called “Why the church must divide on (some) political issues.” They talked about why Christians need to care about and get involved in politics and that we shouldn’t be concerned about it being divisive. Today they talk about a related issue—why is the church so afraid to talk about politics? As Christians, we have just as much say in how our communities and our country function as anyone else. We should be EAGER to advocate for the common good. So if that’s the case, how did we get to this point where Christians feel like we’ve done something wrong if we bring up politics with other Christians or if we feel like we can say something…but just not too much?

We’ve all seen the deconstruction stories that flood our social media news feeds. We’ve heard the claims of “toxic theology,” and the #exvangelical propensity to identify historic Christian doctrine and ethics as oppressive and harmful. But what if there is a connection between deconstruction and modern impulse to seek therapy, psychological diagnoses, and therapeutic language to explain away objective truth claims about God and morality? If you haven’t heard words and phrases like Iatrogenesis, Social-Emotional Learning, and Gentle Parenting, Alisa and Natasha will define those terms and show how they represent a massive shift in the worldview of our current culture. They also explore how those topics are related to the deconstruction phenomenon. 

This Sunday is Easter, and churches everywhere will rightly be proclaiming the joy and hope we have because Jesus victoriously rose from the dead and is alive today. It’s also a time when a lot of people come to church who don’t normally do so. Some are nonbelievers and some are Christians who just aren’t already connected to a church home. But in an increasingly secular and skeptical culture, churches really can’t take for granted anymore that people coming have a reference point for understanding why Christians care about the resurrection so much and why we should even believe a resurrection happened. In today’s episode, Natasha and Alisa highlight some important conversations churches need to have surrounding Easter that tend to be ignored. 

Have you ever that if you grew up as a conservative Christian, you were indoctrinated into a fear-based view of God and shame-based view of yourself? Or that the fundamentalist “Christian Gospel” damages children by telling them that they are born into this world intrinsically bad and repulsive to God, learning that their sinfulness is to blame for the brutalization, torture, and death of God’s son? Well this is exactly what Jim Palmer, the chaplain for the American Humanist Association who also holds the title of Founder of The Center for Non-Religious Spirituality says. In today’s episode, Alisa and Natasha unpack some of these claims.

While Christians rightly value unity, some believe that we should not “get political” or divide over politics. Some advocate for Christians to keep their politics to themselves, while others teach we should “just preach the gospel.” In today’s episode, Natasha and Alisa discuss what true biblical unity looks like, and how Christians should engage politically in this cultural moment.