Mending the Fracturing Church: Discipleship, Trauma, and Trust (Andrew Hall)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian on Doctor James Spencer and I am joined today by Reverend doctor Andrew Hale, who has written a new book called Mending the Fracturing Church, How to navigate conflict and build trust for thriving Communities. He's also the host of the CBF podcast Conversation and the Clergy Confessions podcast and so excited to have Andy here today to talk a little bit about his book about churches and about what we can do to really strengthen them. So Andy, welcome, James, thanks for having me. I think just starting off, give everybody a little bit of a sense of your background. What you know, what's your experience with churches and maybe why did you feel like this topic was something you've you felt led to write about.

00:00:49
Speaker 2: Yes, I've been in the church since the womb. You know, my mother taught Sunday school, my dad served as you know, deacon, every possible committee you can think about. So when I I received my calling to ministry at fourteen, the last place I wanted to apply that calling was to the church. And I really ran from that for honestly about seven or eight years, trying every other kind of ministry that was out there and enjoyed a lot of different expressions, but my sense of what the church was was that the church was broken. It was full of broken people, and I didn't want to have to deal with that. And of course that's a very self righteous perspective. And transformation came and I spent three months with a pastor's family in Sri Lanka after the tsunami in four and I just saw what it meant to actually care for people and nurture people, to pastor a church and to be a part of a community. And I came home, sent my resume out, and I've been working in a congregational life since then, served in a lot of different expressions of church and a lot of different roles, you know, both as associate path and senior pastor in several congregations, church starter, serving in several different denominational roles. And you know, I'm unabashed in saying that I loved the church, and I think the church is at a critical juncture right now in which we need to be thinking critically and equipping ourselves at a different level to navigate the challenges we're facing today. And so really that's why I wrote this was trying to resource the church with a different set of tools.

00:02:31
Speaker 1: Do you have a sense, I mean, you've been in ministry now for a long time. Do you have a sense of why this has gotten so bad at this point? I mean, I almost hate to go back to COVID because it just seems like it's at some point it becomes the whipping Boy. But I know there are a lot of challenges during that time period. But I also know that even before that we were seeing some fracturing the church. So maybe just give us the lay of the land. When you when you're talking about the fracturing church, what are the major influences that you see causing the church to begin to fracture to a point where this is becoming a real problem.

00:03:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, first and foremost, the Church has always been in conflict. I mean, you just read the Book of Acts, and it does not take long for humans to be humans. Some really dicey stuff that's in there. You know. My favorite is the whole debate over whether or not, you know, we need to continue to circumcise people in order for them to fully you know, fallow Christ. And let me tell you, there's nothing more hilarious than dropping the word circumcision from the pulpit and just seeing people immediately, you know, you can see their sphincters shrink up just because they don't want to talk about it, you know. So it's yeah, but you fast forward through the decades, through the centuries, the church has always been in a place of flux. Uh. The world has always been advancing and changing, and the world has you know, and the Church have kind of run this this relationship in which we have shifted and adopted with that. Oftentimes the church has been the one advancing culture, and oftentimes the church is being drug by culture forward in positive ways, you know. Kind of fast forwarding to today in which we live in a day and age where there's a greater access to information. Everyone seems to be a resident expert on everything. There is a multiplicity of opportunities that are out there. But you do see a greater vocalization of certain generations that are no longer putting up with what they view to be a disconnect between the ways and teachings of Jesus and what they see in their local church expressions. I mean, overwhelmingly, when you see when people are talking about why they're leaving institutional church, but not leaving their faith. They cite the disconnect of the teachings of Jesus. They cite pulit derision, political idolatry, they cite all kinds of political and social issues that they seek to be detached from what they believe to be what Christ is calling us to in life. And so I think that, among many things, adds to it. The church has, you know, for lack of better terms, we've always been played by politics, right, it's since our since our inception, if you really think about it. But also you look through critical stages in the church's history, politics and what's happening in a government around the church has always given shape to it. This particular time seems to be a little bit different than what we've experienced before, and it's having a critical role in that churches are separating, I mean, families are separating as a result of politics. You imagine that stuff is definitely going to happen in the pews, you know, people not talking to their parents anymore, their children anymore because of their political perspectives.

00:05:58
Speaker 1: How much of that do you really put I know, I know you did a lot of cogsite and social psychology in this book. Those are areas that I sort of research in as well, especially on the cogsit side. When I look at where we're at right now, I mean, it's hard not to highlight the influence of a fragmented media environment. And what I mean by that is when I was growing up, you know, you had four channels. Eventually, if you're you know, you're lucky enough get cable, you could get CNN and watch news all.

00:06:28
Speaker 3: Day, right, but there was still a.

00:06:32
Speaker 1: Fairly common narrative that you would see across the major broadcasts. It was hard to find more what you might call now minority reporting. But with the Internet, you basically get a fragmenting of multiple opinions, some of it appropriate and viable, others of it just sort of conspiracy theory and you.

00:06:58
Speaker 3: Know, out there sort of views.

00:07:01
Speaker 1: But the point is we don't really have a solid common knowledge base in the same way that we used to. Do You see that as as sort of influencing and creating these fissures between the generations and then ultimately within the church.

00:07:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean from a historical perspective, though, we have to understand that bias media has always existed, So it's It's funny, as you know, we talk about, you know, the ads and things that happen during the you know, voting cycle and just despicable things, and then you go back to like some of the first uh, you know, presidential races and the things written from either either candidate or just like oh like, oh okay, We've always been nasty in this way. I don't think you can limit to just uh, you know, consumeristic media in the sense of what we watch on our devices. I think it also has to do with the media we consume, both social media, but also the algorithm is not in our favor. That was particular one of my favorite chapters, right just because I've experienced as a local church pastor and seeing the pain of political polarization today in the in the chapter specifically, in referencing I'm talking about that, I used Tom Sawyer as an illustration to what's happening to today. You know that that famous uh you know moment and that that great book where Tom is having to whitewash the fence as punishment for his actions, and he somehow convinces all the boys in the town to give him gifts and to to wash this fence. H you know, to whitewash this fence, or to paint the fence white. And that's what's happening today. We are are are experiencing, we are being tom sawyered by by politicians and by the media today who make money off sowing fear, in derision. I mean, at the end of the day, negativity is the vast majority of news propagating these stories slanted makes them money, but only makes us more angry. It makes us more divided. And and most of these people, you know, their colleagues, their friends, they say nasty things about each other, and then half of them are going to get a drink together after work, you know, in Washington, d C. But you know, the reality is that all of us are simply going to news outlets and social media outlets that we want to reinforce what we already want to believe. And so those those echo chambers are existing, pulling us further and further apart. We're not seeing is that discourse of coming to the middle of saying yeah, that is one way to look at this. Let's look at the basic facts on it, not your opinion on the facts of the matter. And what we are being modeled on TV. We're simply replicating into our lives. You know, I love sports, but I don't watch sports commentator shows because I get enough screaming from the media of people who aren't listening and talking to each other. But you watch and these guys are you know, guys and girls are doing the same thing. They're arguing amongst themselves, and it's like, this is what's being modeled in our We aren't seeing healthy ways to have conversations with each other. And then we wonder why we can't have it in our families, let alone have it with people that we voluntary, voluntarily go to this thing called the church. And so it's no wonder we are what we are today.

00:10:16
Speaker 3: So you think that has to do I mean that the situation of the church.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: I guess there's a part of me that wants it to and I really mean this, there's a part of me that wants it to look like I don't know that it does look like this, but I want it to be a body of believers coming together, united in Christ and allowing that sort of Christ mindedness to condition the way we think about all the stuff around us. And so no matter what, we're drawn back into conformity to Jesus, we're drawn back into trying to glorify God together and that these other disagreements they don't fade away. It's not like none of them are consequential. But ultimately we have to be asking ourselves, is it, you know, is disagreeing about this in the way that we are going to be glorifying to God?

00:11:08
Speaker 3: And so is there.

00:11:12
Speaker 1: I guess maybe I'm the question I want to ask is is discipleship the real root of the problem here that we just haven't learned sufficient to live under the authority of Christ such that when we're hearing all these different news stories and we're listening to all these different perspectives, that they're more formative of us than.

00:11:39
Speaker 3: Christ is.

00:11:42
Speaker 2: Yes, and yeah, I was sitting here like, well, way to actually talk about like a biblical model what it be, you know, it means to be in community with other people, and yet what we have modeled for us outside in church right now is such a tribalistic perspective of what the church. Yeah. I read an article a couple of years ago for our denomination looking at a study that basically said that, you know, what we need to understand is that your congregants, people in the pews are spending more time with Tucker Carlson than they are in their Bible and in church, and that really ticks some people off. But it was actual study that looked at our media consumption, how much time we spend watching these things versus how much time we spend in spiritual formation or discipleship, and that the numbers are mind boggling, right. And it's not that, you know, to be a good Christian means to have your head in a Bible all day long. But in the same sense, it's it's not teetering in our favor, and ministers get frustrated all the time. They'll perfectly pin a great sermon, you know, in our tradition is typically twenty minutes or so, and it's like you're twenty minutes that is literally a drop in the ocean of what somebody is spending elsewhere. And so I do think it's a discipleship model. But it's a discipleship model in which we need to recognize is that the same old methodology by which we go about discipleship might not be the correct way in doing it. And that's really I would say, at the heart of my book. Yes, it's looking at cognitive social psychology through theological length, but at the end of the day, it's actually looking at a different kind of discipleship where we are equipping people to better understand their mental functioning, their emotional functioning, their physiology physic physiology in order to better be more you know, and more to be more faithful to their following of Christ in order to love their neighbor in a more authentic way. And I think that's where the church is today, where you know, we want to preach responding to many of the issues that are happening our day, and that is important, right Jesus even addresses yeah, uh, you know, contemporary events that are happening. But I think what many ministers are missing out on is the root, the foundation that's going to allow somebody who might be politically swayed one way or the other to hear what you have to say or to actually do something about it. They need to understand at the root is what is compassion, what is empathy, is what is fear? You know? What are all these things that cause us to maybe not truly live into the teachings of Jesus in the way of Jesus we see in the Gospels.

00:14:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean I think I'm having a sort of a separate We're doing a series on job and trauma as part of the podcast, and so one of the conversations that's come up there is about a book called The Body Keeps Score, I think is what it's called. If you've ever read that, and you just think, basically, the premise of the book is that once you've experienced trauma, your body tends to hold on to that trauma in physiological ways that maybe are less.

00:14:49
Speaker 3: Noticeable to you. I think that's a fair sort of pithy summary.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I mean I think that what you're saying rings true because anxiety, loneliness, some of these physiological effects that we're feeling the the mental, and there's no need to really separate those out necessarily, right, We're all one single bodied person, but we do tend to look at them in these categories. And so as you're seeing these church the church fracturing a bit, what we may not be dealing with is, you know, individual brokenness at at a level that institutional structure can't fix. Is that a Is that sort of a fair assessment.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, you add on top of that generational trauma and yeah, familiar trauma. We all you know, I'm a big family systems believer, and you know Bowen talks about that. You know, we have the system by which we function in our life, and that system we carry with us into all the different types of communities that we experience in the church. So the church is experiencing all of our individual trauma and collectively what we've experienced as a whole. It's a mess. It's any wonder that the church can ever be healthy considering that we as human beings are as flawed and as broken as we are. And I mean that mainly from a cognitive sense and an emotional sense, not necessarily a theological sense. We all know that to be a true and so, yeah, that that is our challenge today, right, that that we all carry around so much anxiety and trauma. You were you were citing some of the studies earlier and and and they're looking at right now the physiological toll that all of this is taking on our bodies and the direct correlation between why we're seeing such an increase in high blood pressure and stress related illnesses, cancers that are caused by long term cortisol levels in our bodies. It's it's any one that all of us are bringing this into our faith community. And then collectively we have all these experiences. So maybe your church has gone through a split, maybe you had a church bully, maybe you had a minister who just was a you know, autocratic leader, you know who knows, and then people remember those things and they carry those things, and then it makes us suspicious as we have conversation and try to navigate the next conflict together. And so it's really messy. And so you know, what I'm urging congregations to do is we need to better equip ourselves for the time. I think ultimately, as we equip our people to better understand their own soul, their own psychology, their own emotional state, the healthier they will be. And ultimately, if our individual church members are thriving, then our congregations will thrive. Not in the sense of thriving of all of a sudden we're just you know, growing numerically, but the church in its truest sense it if we're really loving our neighbor as ourselves. We have to love ourselves in an authentic way, and we love our neighbor. You know, ultimately the work of crist is going to thrive through that. But it is complex.

00:18:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's difficult. I mean I wonder. Yeah again, I've done some work on this.

00:18:17
Speaker 1: We used to run a campaign called the go Dark, Shine Bright campaign where we were trying to help people understand the influence of social media and cell phone use and all that kind of fun stuff just on their everyday attitudes, right, and so we were suggesting that they take a seven day fast from social media, right, just completely step away from it. Trying to give a practical step for how do you remove an obstacle to spiritual formation, you know, faithful spiritual formation and replace it with something that is going to help your formation into you know, your spiritual formation. How do you see that sort of thing playing out in church is today? You know, there the problem seems relatively clear. What do churches need to pivot to? How do they how do they begin addressing some of these Like we just talked about physiological issues. I mean, I can't really think of the last time I've been at a church that talked about, you know, physiological issues in relation to spiritual formation and how these things may be holding us back. You know the role of sleep in one's life and the necessity of you know, getting a sufficient amount of rest to hold attention in the right areas. You know what I'm saying, like, how do you how do you think about the church positioning itself to really speak on those areas?

00:19:46
Speaker 2: And yet it's all there in the gospels? Right How many times does Jesus come across someone a physical affirmity and and and he actually does something about it? You know, one of my favorite passages is the passage of the Garriscene demoniac. For most of us, all we've ever heard preached on that is the supernatural implications of it. You know, this is a text where Jesus asks, you know, who are you? And this says religion for many, But the root of that story is actual social, religious, and political isolation. Right here is a person who has been excommuned by their community, chained up, naked among the tombs of the community, and just left out there to waste a way. That man is experiencing so much social isolation, religious rejection, physiological pain, and yet Jesus response to him is to to in a sense, cure him of what was ailing him. And even what was ailing him was his community. And I love that passage because the guy wants to leave and go with Jesus. And wouldn't you, I mean, if if the people you lived with and grew up with rejected you and changed you up naked among the tombs of the dead. But instead Jesus commissions him to go back and to share that. And I think that's part of the challenge of a church today is how do we share stories that are healthy about mental health crisis, about physiological crisis that we are experienced, about chronic illness. All the stories are there within the Gospels. It's just an opportunity for us to share them. We see that modeled in Jesus. You know. Here here is you know, the son of Man, both one God, one hundred percent human. And yet, oh, by the way, that story of going to the garrisone demoniac is the Disciples and Jesus crossing the sea, a great storm comes across them. And what is Jesus doing. He's sleeping in the bow of the boat. If that's to serve enough to itself about rest and renewal, you know, And so I think I think it's an opportunity versus a detriment. It's an opportunity for men and congregational leaders to think deeply, to think that the Gospel isn't just for our spiritual health, but it's for our full health, and how do we begin to reread the Gospels through that lens. There's an abundance of discipleship opportunities that I think are there that we can grow with.

00:22:22
Speaker 3: I've had a.

00:22:24
Speaker 1: I mean, as I've thought through these issues, and I haven't really looked at the data on.

00:22:31
Speaker 3: Church.

00:22:32
Speaker 1: I suppose church not splits, but this sort of tension within the church. I've read some of the work on pastors wanting to leave their congregations. I've read some of the work on pastors being concerned with political disagreements within their congregations. And then I think the Barna Church Thriving stuff is kind of interesting. They do address some of these major issues. What do you think are the obstacles as we see data sort of rolling in, what are the major obstacles to churches making this switch and beginning to start the process which will probably be a fairly long road of capturing that aspect of the Gospels that you're talking about and actually helping people understand that how they treat their bodies in a the rest of the week is actually going to condition their ability to be discipled overall.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd have to look at some research on this, but just kind of speaking, you know, off the cuff, I think it's actually in the favor of the church because you look at the self help industry. You know, the number of self help books that are published a year, the amount of time that people invest into their physical health, you know, the numbers of people investing in therapy personally are on the rise. I think it's in favor of the church, and I think, honestly, if the churches may be honest with itself, people used to go to the church because the church was the place where they found everything they needed in their life. The church was quite literally the center of our communities. And for many, the church isn't relevant anymore. And why isn't relevant Because it's not asking the questions that are relevant to my life. It's not addressing the things that I feel are deeply rooted in who I am, the struggles that I have. And so I think if the church is honest, it would see this as an incredible opportunity to begin to talk about things that really matter to people. And for some, because you're not accustomed to maybe talking about these things, it feels like you're asking about talking setting the Gospel to the side. And I just shared a few examples of how in no way is it it's actually elevating the Gospel in our lives. So I think it's an incredible opportunity. I think the church would find that people actually would feel the churches relevant their life. The church is actually talking about things that matter, that are transforming who I am, the struggles that I have, the struggles that are taking place in my family. For many churches, they want to avoid this because they think these issues are contentious or raise even bigger issues. And if they're not coming to the church for the answers, they're going to go somewhere else, right, And so why not capitalize on the opportunity of now.

00:25:22
Speaker 1: When you think about that, you know, I mean, I think about my kids, right. I have a twenty year old son. I don't know whether he would say he ever found a place where he quote unquote belongs in the church right where.

00:25:36
Speaker 3: He really fit.

00:25:38
Speaker 1: He's kind of a history and theology nerd, which I can relate to and you kind of think, well, that would make sense in the church, right, But it doesn't always. And so I think there's a sense in which I guess I'm wondering as as the next generation comes up, I guess my concern would be that some of the some of what has become normal in our congregations doesn't feel normal to the next generation. It feels odd and unstructured and maybe even duplicitous or contradictory. And so how can elder boards, pastors, however, the church is structured congregations. That seems to me to require significant change within a congregation to be accommodating of a group of individuals who maybe are feeling the same sorts of discomforts with the church. How do you navigate that our church's identity is X, but now we need to switch over to being hy.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: Well, we know how people do it?

00:26:52
Speaker 3: And is that even a problem? Like is that?

00:26:54
Speaker 2: You know?

00:26:55
Speaker 3: Maybe that's the first but is that Yeah?

00:26:58
Speaker 2: I would label that as generational gaps, and they exist in our churches. You know, depending on your faith expression, you could have whole generations missing from your congregation altogether. I'll give you an example. I'm afforded the opportunity with my role that I get to visit churches on a Sunday morning. And in the last four years, I visited a congregation that no knew that they did not have any children in their church, right, and yet they still did a children's sermon every Sunday morning in worship, and I thought, who is this for? But at the same time, it was it was an honest expression of what that church was dealing with, which was this was a model of how they did children's minister in the past. No one quite literally connected their children to this congregation, and yet they're still doing the same old thing for whatever reason. Right, Yeah, so generational gaps doing exists within our congregations, and they're very real, and the church needs to wake up to it today. However, you know, the idea of all of a sudden just doing whatever you think the next generation wants is also a full hardy path to go on, and so I think it begins in the most simplistic sense of cultivating inner generational opportunities for connection and conversation within your church. You know, the most basic thing you can do if your church gathers on Sunday morning, if you have some sort of spiritual formation or discipleship hour. Bring everybody together, ask everybody to leave their small groups, their Sunday school classes, whatever your tradition might be. Bring them all into a gathering place, you know, intentionally place people at different tables to diversify who's at that table, and cultivate opportunities for people to get to know each other, for people to learn each other's stories. That is the slow work of recognition from a congregation side, from the ground up, of helping people understand that we do have differences, that some generations do have different perspectives, but not completely different and maybe just just one degree off. I think that's one of the most basic things that a congregation can do. The next level up, I would say, is you need to begin to intentionally invite the younger generation into leadership. Now, we have that mentality in the church and it's pervasive in every type of organization of you need to waste your time, you need to earn your key this generation. And I'm saying millennials and younger basically saying that's fine, we'll go somewhere else if you don't want us to be a part of leadership. Now, if you don't want us to be a part of real transformation in this organization. Now we'll just leave. So cultivating diverse opportunities with intergenerational expressions within your leadership is ultimately going to bring about the long term change that's healthy for your congregations. So those are just two practical things I think church is going to do. But generational issues are real and they are fighting congregations. And I write about this. You can really point to about five really core divisional issues among generations, but there are so so many more than that that we need to pay attention to.

00:30:16
Speaker 1: What are a couple of those, I mean, just out of curiosities. I'm not sure I have them clear in my head. I have ideas, but they may be completely wrong.

00:30:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, no no. So I mean, first of all, politics, I mean, you look at the division among the generations when it comes to their political affiliation, and those things alone are going to sift into our church. Technology is another tremendous thing, So I write about in the book, talk about my papa who passed away in twenty eleven, born in the Great Depression and yet lived at some point in the same time as you know, at that time it would have been kids who were watching Sophia the first Today it would be like Bluey right. You know, if you think about the the technological transformation that that man experienced in his life alone, and that technology divides us, the usage of technology, the lack of access to technology. So those are some of the big economics and economic perspectives, you know, and assumptions about those generations. To give you an example, looked at a study that found that basically, if you were to purchase this particular home in the nineteen sixties, it would cost you roughly ten thousand dollars. That same house today would cost over a million dollars. And those economic challenges that are faced across generation are very real. So you have, you know, an older generation who's been tithing, you know, dedicated to that, and you have a younger generation who is limited in their capacity to give to the church, and the assumptions that take place there. So those are just a few of the real critical issues that are at heart within our generational gaps.

00:31:57
Speaker 3: That's really helpful.

00:32:00
Speaker 1: Question that sort of prompts for me is do you think that the younger generations have a different notion of the prototypical Jesus in their heads. And so I'm kind of drawn on social identity theory here. But the idea is that you you know, we tend to have within our society sort of you know, we could speak of, you know, a true competitor, right, let's say in the sport of basketball or football, and we all have sort of this prototypical image that comes up a set of fuzzy characteristics we could point to and go, yeah, that person was a true competitor, right, they were hard, nos.

00:32:42
Speaker 3: They did it, you know.

00:32:45
Speaker 1: And it strikes me that we could do something very similar with Jesus, and maybe we have. Is that the Jesus that we tend to see as prototypical as from a more stable generation that had different economic opportunity, that had different you know, political stability and instability. That's a different sort of prototypical Jesus than we have for a generation that is in a you know, a completely different economic situation, a completely different technological world, and completely different political stability and stability mix.

00:33:20
Speaker 3: Does that ring true to you at all?

00:33:22
Speaker 2: Oh?

00:33:23
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah.

00:33:23
Speaker 2: My friend Zach Hunt every year does the March Madness brackets around the different expressions of Jesus in America, All of us intergenerationally within our own generation have these different expressions of who Jesus is. You know, I straddle Gen X and Millennials, and you know, my generation is known around this concept of moralistic, therapeutic deism. That often the ways that we shave Jesus is around that particular perspective. And so you know, that's the challenge. But that is that is the intentionality, and that is the worth of cross generational connections that we begin to understand. You know, you think about the Jesus that would have shaped my Mema and Papa born in the Great Depression, right, you understand why, you know, a generation born where they literally didn't have two pennies to rup together. You know, my mema talked about that she used to have to stuff newspapers into the ends of her shoes until her parents could afford a new pair of shoes for her years down the road because of the holes in her shoes. Right, Yeah, that generation understanding Jesus and looking at the life to come was such an important critical thing, right because the life right now really sucked.

00:34:43
Speaker 3: Right.

00:34:44
Speaker 2: And then imagine the Jesus that people would have experienced during the torment of World War two. So yes, every generation, every context is shaped by the circumstances that have happened. We can't help that. We're human beings. We see Christ in that light. But ultimately that's why the Church needs to be a heterogeneous community and which we have multi generations, multi ethnicities, multi expressions that are taking place in it for us to have a more robust and fuller perspective of who Jesus is and understanding that we will never truly fully understand, you know, who the Son of God is, who the God of the universe is. Let alone and allow that to sit in awe and wonder versus allowing our conceptualization are acutely defined Jesus that we can put into a box, shape the way that we do church, shape the way that we view other people. And really that's at the heart of kind of what I'm trying to do here is to help people understand we all have implicit and explicit bias. We all have things that shape the way that we see the world, the way that we see ourselves, and the more that we can check that and hear from someone else, it broadens our perspectives. It makes us better human beings. At the end of the day.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a posture almost that we have to understand that our view of Christ is incomplete, and we have to resist the temptation to close off other perspectives simply because they disagree with ours. We've got to learn to sort of evaluate some of those, take them in and recognize that the next generation, the next person next to us, may very well be able to add something to our understanding of Christ and to our faith that is very important, very biblical, very theologically sound. It's just that within our experience, it was a blind spot for us, and now someone else is opening that up to us.

00:36:32
Speaker 2: Sounds like you're talking about like humility. I can't remember that's something we're like call to or like or is there a moment in the Gospels in which Jesus asked the disciples, who do you say that I am? And they keep talking about everybody's different perspectives of who he might be. It's like, that's what I love about scripture. That's what I love is that we could always go back to it understand Oh wait, like this has happened before. How can we learn from this circumstance and what was happening in this moment. Uh yeah, I think it's an incredible moment in the church is history. I think we're at an existential cross erd is not in the sense of the church is not going to survive, but the institution that is the Church of the twentieth and twenty first century is at a place of radical transformation. And it's scary. It is scary. But at the end of the day, what we're talking about is being more faithful to our calling to follow Christ and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And it's going to look different, it will, and it's going to require a different set of skills and perspectives from us. But that is the invitation of Jesus at the end of the day, right, Jesus used the word that oftentimes has been used to shake the Bible at people from a judgmental perspective is the word repentance. But that word, the Greek word, actually means change your way of thinking and living. And so it's a continual, ongoing process that Christ is inviting us into to change our way of thinking and living. And so that's why I feel like the work that I've invested in, you know, it's not just about this book. I get to do this stuff, but you know, throughout the week and work with congregations around these things that at the end of the day, I think we have an opportunity to be more faithful to our calling to follow Christ and to transform our minds so that they might be renewed, so that we might have a better understanding of who God is and what God is calling us to in this world.

00:38:27
Speaker 1: You mentioned humility, and I agree. I think humility is a necessity. I think sometimes our humility, or our lack thereof, manifests itself in different ways. And I'm wondering if you see this in congregations where there is a spirit of humility there that's being blocked a bit by defensiveness, this sort of desire not to change, or concern that changing is somehow going to create a distorted gospel or a you know, limit our faithfulness in some way. How big of an issue is that actually when you work with congregations.

00:39:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I've had opportunity to talk about this a couple of times with some folks. But you know, cognitive psychologists are looking at why rightness is such a big issue right now, and what they believe is that our desire to be right is triggering a survival mechanism in our brain. So quite literally, it feels like to take a stance on something to express what you need. If you don't, it means the difference between life and death. That the very breath from your lungs could be taken from you if if you are not heard or if you change your mind on something. Yeah, that's scary because you know, we live in a world where right now, I can't tell you the last time I heard somebody actually publicly say I was wrong and not give an excuse of why they were wrong. Like, take more example, I'll go off the cuff here. Kanye West like bought an ad and wrote in the Wall Street Journal to apologize for his anti Semitic remarks that he made in the last couple of years, but then followed it up with an excuse that he credited to a brain injury he had ever twenty five years ago. And it's like, just say I'm sorry, I was wrong. I should have done this stop like full stop right. But this is what's being modeled to us in our world today is we we always have to be right, and so if we're always desired to be right, and that happens across the spectrum from from conservative all the way to progressive.

00:40:27
Speaker 3: Right, you know.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: What's going to happen in our congregations. So humility of saying maybe I don't know it all, or maybe this thing that I hold tightly that I believe to be an essential thing of my faith is maybe a non essential thing that I have conflated. And people ask, well, then what is the essentials? Actually you have some essentials, right, you can go to the apostle Nicene Creed that has stood the test of time, and these are the critical essential things about our faith. Everything else is left up to interpretation. Right. You look at the levitical laws you have, you know, dozens and dozens of laws, but then the time you get to Jesus, you have hundreds upon hundreds of commentaries on these laws. It's all everybody's perspectives and opinions. And so humility is hard because we want to be right about God. But I think God is more gray than we give God credit for.

00:41:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's always interesting to me. I agree on the Nicying Creed. It's like you have these sort of broader God guardrails and it is relatively broad I mean, you don't get into you know, I mean, the Nicing Creed could fit on one page. It's not like it's a you know, an extremely long document. Obviously there's a lot of history behind it. But you also have things like Romans twelve ten, which seems pretty straightforward to me, right out do one another in showing honor. It's it's unqualified, it sits right there.

00:41:47
Speaker 3: You know.

00:41:47
Speaker 1: It's obviously needs to be situated under a love for God and an understanding of how to honor another.

00:41:54
Speaker 3: But at the same time, it's still pretty clear.

00:41:57
Speaker 1: It seems like a non essent, you know, a pretty essential element of what it is that we do. And so often it feels like what we're trying to do is be right as opposed to really try to honor another. And that gives us, in my estimation, you know, sort of now I realized it's a little simple story. But it shortens the amount of time we're willing to give people to come around. It limits our patience of how we're going to bear one another's burdens. It just gives us a shortened time span before we were willing to write someone off. And I think there's there's some sort of dynamic there that I'd be interested just to get your take on how does time sort of play into this, Like let me frame it one more way than all the answer. But like I've talked to some people who are deconstructing, like that whole fad that went through the deconstruction, questioning the faith, all that kind of good stuff, And part of their complaints were people would listen for a time and then they expected me just to correct and and it's like maybe it just takes more time.

00:43:09
Speaker 3: So I don't know.

00:43:10
Speaker 1: I'm interested to hear your thoughts on time and patience and honoring one how does that all work together?

00:43:17
Speaker 2: I mean, faith is a lifelong journey. We're consting the process of renewal and transformation, and I think we one of the challenges we have is many of us were handed a gospel that focused on a finite moment of coming to faith, right, and then we forgot that everything after that. You know, the same generation who believes that the invitation of Jesus is to ask Jesus into your heart right, which is not in scripture. So you know, Jesus says, come follow me in this ongoing process, right, And so you know that you talk about a generational divibe, but also the logical divide in which we when we understand salvation to be a moment and time, that might limit your perspective of the ongoing process of being transformed in our life.

00:44:13
Speaker 3: Right.

00:44:13
Speaker 2: And I think we can look to the example of the disciples. You know, Jesus had, you know, dozens of dozens of disciples, but he had these twelve, right, that he invested more time into. These are the people that eight meals with him, that slept in the same place as him, that washington perform miracles for three years. They journeyed with him, and yet when given the opportunity to faithfully live into his ways, most of them fell flat on their face. Right. How many times did Jesus talk about being a peacemaker, How many times did Jesus talk about responding to hatred with love? And yet who is it Peter that pulls out a sword when Jesus is being arrested and it cuts a dude's a year off? Right, So we see that even the very people who walked with Jesus still didn't get it right, even though they witnessed it. And so I think we go back to humility and understanding that spiritual formation discipleship had a lifelong process, and we want people to come to a place that helps us understand. I think sometimes that we don't want to truly invest in people's lives because we only want to hear them for a limited amount of time before we move on to our next thing, and so I think our availability is a challenge to that. But ultimately, I think it's a theological shift that has to take place of understanding. This stuff just takes time. You know, Deconstruction has always existed there, it's just the terminology we've been using for it as of late, right, that people have shed themselves of a limited theological perspective and transformed themselves into something different. I mean, we wouldn't have the Free Church today if if Martin Luther didn't say, among many many other reformers, say hold on a second, I've got I've got some issues with what we're doing here, right, But that's the danger, right, when do we become the religious you know, zelots and the Sadducees, who are who are you know putting their stakes in the ground to say this is who God is, this is how things work, and how things function. Yeah, is Jesus not knocking you know, down those things, turning over the tables to say this is not what you think it is. This is an ongoing process.

00:46:19
Speaker 1: Well, man, I appreciate this work. Maybe we just leave the audience with one sort of tip, you know, if your church is struggling with this, aside from buying your book right and kind of understanding what's going on here. And I mean, I really mean that. It's not just a you know, product endorsement. It's like, we have to be informed about what the dynamics are they're influencing this so that we can start pressing into them. If we just say there's a problem here, we don't really have a solution for it.

00:46:50
Speaker 3: So we have to understand some of the dynamics that are going on here. But what would.

00:46:55
Speaker 1: You you know, we talked a little bit about the sort of intergenerational dialogues. If a church really wanted to get that started, what sort of what would you suggest? Just knowing how churches sort of think my experience with churches, it's like, well, do I schedule this on a Saturday? Do I put together a planning committee?

00:47:16
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean?

00:47:17
Speaker 1: Like you can You've probably experienced that spiral way more than I have. So how would you recommend churches sort of move toward this sort of intergenerational dialogue as a practical stuff.

00:47:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of my favorite authors, Henry now and just incredible. He talks about that very thing that it's quote say forbadim, but he talks about that more and more. The desire grows within him to walk with people, to share meals with people, to sit down and to hear people's stories. And he talks about then the challenges that we then have to put a committee together in a meeting together, and that happen right, you know, but ultimately it is you know, he wonders if not the first thing to do is to just be with people and to simply truly love them. And so I would say that is the most simple and complex thing that churches can do. And I go to Acts chapter two. I'm say start with the Bible, which is you see Acts chapter two forty two through forty seven where you see this early expression of the church. Yes they are worshiping together, Yes they are doing Bible study, their former Bible study discipleship together, but also says they're breaking bread in each other's homes. They're supporting each other's businesses. People are selling land and possessions in order to get to the needs of those that are happening around them. So, you know what I would say to the church today is the answer is not more worship and more Bible study. But it's not to not do those things. It's to cultivate simple opportunities to just be present with each other. If you need to pray at the beginning, pray at the beginning to ask the Lord to bless the time. But then don't be obsessed with thinking that we need to crack open scripture in that like doing that. You know, if we all see things differently, we're all going to argue over whe the scripture says to start with some simple questions. What's your favorite ice cream? Tell me about what your favorite toy was when you were, you know, eight years old. I do this work with congregations where we invite them together to come together with the agenda of just only spending time together and cultivating some conversations that really begin to build a mutual sense of trust and respect for each other, which is the bedrock foundation of us navigating anything difficult together. My favorite chapter in the book to write was that churches that play together stay together. And it's looking at the study that found that families that often incorporate more play into their lives together are the healthiest families that are out there, and I've found the same to be true for congregations. I think we have lost a sense of what joy and amusement is in together and community. I think we need to find that again, and finding that together again, we can then have the energy and that synergy to begin to navigate some of these challenges.

00:50:09
Speaker 1: Great advice. Andy, really appreciate that the book is going to be out. By the time this episode airs, your book will have released, So i'd encourage listeners to go check out Mending the Fracturing Church by Andrew R.

00:50:22
Speaker 3: Hale. You can find it on Amazon, I'm sure, and I'll put a link to the pages that I have in the show notes so you all can go get this. I think it's just crucial for the church. We need the church. The church is sort of the hope of the world.

00:50:37
Speaker 1: It's not going to go anywhere, but I think it can have healthier or sicker versions of itself, sort of manifesting the witness of Christ and.

00:50:45
Speaker 3: We really want to be.

00:50:48
Speaker 1: Giving a healthy, robust testimony for Jesus, and so just encourage you to.

00:50:53
Speaker 3: Check this out.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: Check out Andrew's website as well Andrew Hale dot com for other resources there, and check out the podcast CBF Conversations.

00:51:02
Speaker 3: It's on Apple as well.

00:51:04
Speaker 1: So Andy, thanks a lot for being here man, and really appreciate the work you're doing. Appreciate your thoughts here and hope it does really well.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: Thank you, James, I enjoyed talk with you.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: All Right, everybody, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian.

00:51:18
Speaker 3: Take care,