New Waters S2 | Episode 4

Misread Conditions

Canadians are a diverse people made up of complex individuals. We find our identity, belonging and purpose through a kaleidoscope of cultures, but are easily pigeon-holed by others.

Even with the best of intentions, we as Christians can over-simplify narratives with the hopes of sharing the love of Jesus with a specific age, generation, people group, etc …

In this episode—using Generation Z has a conversation starter—the New Waters cast explore such topics as generational & developmental divides, the limitations of cultural analysis, the power of presence & Jesus’ ability to “bridge” any person, people group or demographic to Himself.

+ Show Notes and Resources

• Kara Powell, author
• Rublev's Icon
• 1 Corinthians 9:19-23 NIV
• Revelation 7:9 NIV
• Dakota Hostiles
• Galations 3:28 NIV
• New Waters on Instagram
• New Waters on Twitter
• New Waters on Facebook

+ Full Episode Transcript

Milissa: Hello and welcome to the New Waters Podcast. My name is Milissa Ewing. I am a pastor in Vancouver, British Columbia and I oversee Family Ministries. On this podcast we are Navigating Faith and Future in a Sea of Change: What it Means to be the Church in the Future and today we are going to talk about Misread Conditions. When we look into the future, are we looking with the right lens and are we in danger of misreading conditions or have we got it right? Why don't we go around the table and introduce ourselves?

Nathan: Sure, this is ... I've been looking forward to this one. I think this is going to be a good one. I'm Nathan Weselake, Lead Pastor at Prairie Alliance Church in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

Dom: I look forward to all of them. They're all going to be great episodes, Nate, but this is going to be fun. This is going to be fun.

Nathan: I wasn't saying they're not all great, I'm just ... differentiation.

Dom: Yeah, this is Dom and I'm the Pastor of the 180 Church in Montreal.

Raja: Hi, I'm Raja Stone. I am the church planter Lead Pastor of Uptown Community Church in Waterloo and I, too, look forward to all of them.

Nathan: Wow, I'm feeling kind of singed.

Lydia: My name is Lydia Stoesz and I am the Pastor of Educational Ministries at Prairie Alliance Church and the principal at West Park School in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

Rob: And I'm Rob Chartrand, Lead Pastor, Crosspoint Church, Edmonton Alberta, and I look forward, because that's what we're doing in this podcast.

Nathan: Right, the future.

Lydia: Good one.

Milissa: Oh, clever. Very clever.

Rob: Yes.

Raja: On the waters.

Dom: Well played, Rob, well played.

Rob: Thank you.

Dom: Better than Nathan, whatever Nathan said that makes sense.

Nathan: I don't even remember what I said.

Rob: Yeah.

Dom: Neither do I.

Rob: It's beyond us.

Milissa: Okay, so I'm going to rein it in.

Dom: Yeah, yeah, control, you've got to control the ...

Milissa: As you guys know, I live in Vancouver. One of the things that I love about Vancouver is we live pretty close to the mountains. So on a pretty regular basis, my husband and I head out, so it's about 15 minutes from our house and we'll go out into the trails and we'll go trail running or hiking. We know that when we go out, we're entering into the wilderness. It's one of these unique places where the city bumps up against the coast mountains and it's just nothing except forest and mountain. So we bring bear bangers with us, emergency blankets. We know that we won't cell reception if we get past a certain point.

Dom: Like here, like where we're recording ...

Milissa: Like here, like here in this place where we're recording right now.

Rob: Dream vacation for Raj.

Milissa: Yes, yes.

Nathan: Raj makes so much noise you don't have to worry about bears.

Milissa: Yeah, yeah, except in this ...

Nathan: He's our bear banger.

Milissa: In this place, though, we're literally 20 minutes from downtown Vancouver.

Rob: You just walk right into it.

Dom: Wow, wow.

Milissa: And we just walk right into the wilderness, which is one thing I really love about the city. Sometimes, though ... Actually, not sometimes. On a pretty regular basis, because one of our biggest industries is tourism, tour buses will come to the trails and because people have just been in the heart of the cosmopolitan city with all of the amenities, they're showing up in high heels ...

Dom: Yeah, they're not ready for what's about to happen.

Milissa: Business attire, they've got their cell phones ready. They're taking pictures, looking all around and we're thinking like, "There's a bear in the area right now. Like are you ready if you come across a bear or are you ready to navigate the trail? Those shoes are looking pretty crazy for the roots and the rocks and the mud." To us, it seems like a case of misread conditions and on a pretty regular basis, there's somebody who's gotten lost and the North Shore Search and Rescue are rescuing somebody and the worse case scenario, people die.

Dom: Wow.

Milissa: Because they're not prepared for the wilderness. In a lot of ways, we've been talking about can we prepare for the future? Can we read the conditions right now in the church, in the culture, in Canada, in the next generation and can we prepare for what's happening, as we're entering into what sometimes feels like a new world, something that we're not really sure what's coming. And so I guess maybe my question for you guys is when is it time or where do you see that we may be misreading conditions?

Dom: That's a great question.

Nathan: Good intro. See, that's part of the reason I'm looking forward to this one.

Dom: Yeah, it's good.

Nathan: I mean, just the intro itself is probably almost enough.

Dom: You just raised the bar. Just raised the bar. I better not suck my intro.

Nathan: I'm used to telling funny stories at the beginning, so I wasn't really prepared to go deep ... I've got a kind of an amusing story when I wasn't ready for something. It was one of the first mountain bike races I did and it was early in the spring and I just assumed you bring your spandex shorts and all ... and off you go, right? So it starts snowing.

Dom: Wow.

Nathan: And so we're going to do this two hour race and I didn't know that there's some spandex shorts that are designed to go under baggy shorts, and then there's some that you wear in public and I had purchased the ones designed to go under baggy shorts. So I'm kind of wearing like female volleyball shorts.

Dom: Wow. Unfriend. Unfriend.

Nathan: And then, and then ...

Raja: Nathan, lucky this is a podcast, no visuals.

Nathan: And then it's snowing ...

Lydia: Anybody a visual learner?

Nathan: It's snowing and I didn't have leg warmers. So everybody's got these full ... So I just cut holes in my socks at the toes and just pulled them up my legs, but my legs, they're pretty scrawny. So they’re just falling ...

Dom: What a mess. What a mess.

Rob: That did not improve the imagery.

Nathan: The secretary at our church was Teresa Stanley, she's now our youth pastor and she was in this bike race with her kids and she had the misfortune of standing behind me for like 25 minutes as we're just shivering in line, waiting to go and I kind of realized I looked different than everybody else, right, in sort of the exposure category and ...

Lydia: Really?

Nathan: So after that, I pack absolutely everything. It doesn't matter what the forecast is, I'm going to be ready for hurricanes. I'm going to be ready for snowstorms. I'm ready for like plus 30.

Milissa: So whatever the conditions are you are going to be ready?

Dom: You're trying to ... for everything that's-

Nathan: Absolutely, yeah.

Milissa: Yeah, okay. Yeah, it makes sense.

Raja: Was that a misread condition of a story that perhaps we don't need to have in our minds? I'm not sure.

Milissa: So Nathan, is that a way that you approach ministry, like you prepare for everything? Whatever comes down the road? You will be ready?

Nathan: It's not a good sign when the person who's on your team starts laughing.

Milissa: Lydia's laughing.

Nathan: I don't know that I'm ready, but I'm certainly adaptable, right.

Lydia: That's true.

Nathan: I like to judo move things, so if things aren’t working, I can shift with it. I'm not brittle, but I don't think I'm necessarily prepared. You know, there's a lot of times I'm reaching into that gym bag, hoping I find my thermal underwear and there's nothing here. We're going to have to figure out a different solution. So, no, I wouldn't say I'm prepared like that, but I understand the future's going to be different than I probably anticipate and I'm going to have to be ready for some kind of a shift.

Dom: Yeah, and I often think of the question based on, you know, leadership styles. There's something about people who follow a leader ... You know, in any context that you almost expect the leader to be the kind of person who's preparing for different conditions. If they're leading ahead, you know, they're paying attention. It's important, it's an important posture but what do you do when we enter new waters where we don't really know how to prepare for these new conditions? Like, we're not really sure, do you just pack everything? And what if some of the things you have to pack, you don't even own yet? You know, I felt a bit of that, church planting as I often tell people, "You know, when we stepped out to plant the church, I never thought I'd be a church planter." I didn't really know what that all meant, and so I saw my journey as the leader, one of the primary leaders as having a tool box with tools, and I thought I could ... These are all the tools that represent all the skills I've learned and God's leading and strengths and all that stuff, and then I got to Montreal and I'm like, "None of these tools work here." Like I don't know how to use any of these tools. It's like seeing a car with a new type of drill and I'm like, "I don't even have the bit for this drill." Like what do I do? So that's ... I think of those types of moments when I think of these new conditions. How do we prepare for them?

Rob: When we launched Crosspoint, our church plant in 2010 ... so a critical part of any church plant is finding the facilities, getting the right facility, right?

Dom: Space, yeah, the space, yeah.

Rob: We landed this fantastic space in Northeast Edmonton ... For those of you who are at West Coast, I mean, the amount, we paid one tenth of the cost per month of what you would normally pay for your facilities and it was beautiful.

Raja: A blessing, huh.

Rob: 200 parking spots and all that.

Milissa: Yeah, I’m trying not to covet.

Rob: And four months in, we had the largest snowfall in Edmonton history in who knows how long and it was a Monday morning and I got the call from ... No, I saw it on the news. The building that we were meeting in was collapsed.

Dom: Come on.

Rob: Collapsed under snow. It collapsed under snow, like completely caved in. You know, I raced there. The media scrum was there. I pretended to be a reporter so I could figure out what was going on ... Fire trucks everywhere, I'm walking in with a little note pad. One of my staff is standing 20 feet behind taking pictures of me pretending to be a reporter, you know, just so I could hear what's actually going on. We lost our building, right, and so … For three weeks, we were just moving from space to space to space, but that's something that even we couldn't anticipate. There is nothing you could do to prepare for that, but on the one hand, one of the things we did prepare for is we had a great communication network. So I can remember sitting with my wife and our children's pastor in our living room on a Saturday night before the next Saturday, phoning people and digitally communicating with people, telling them, "This is where we're meeting. This is what's going to happen."

Dom: Where we're going to be meeting, yeah.

Rob: We managed to get ahold of everybody.

Raja: That's great.

Rob: I think one of the things we often say to our people is, yeah, I mean, you can't predict everything, and you can't be ready for everything, but leaders do anticipate. Like they do as much as hard work as they can to anticipate that change is going to come. But you can't predict everything. So much of it is outside your control.

Raja: Yeah, it's all about variables, right? I was talking to a new Bible college graduate. He had been in ministry for a couple of years and he was very frustrated and a little bit disheartened. And so I met with him to talk to him and asked him like, "So like what is it you're wrestling with?" He goes, "Everything I learned in seminary, everything I learned in Bible college, like none of it is even relevant or applicable," and the context, "I'm asked questions no one ever prepared me for. I'm asked for programs I've never had to implement, and no one even told me a budget would be important. I know theology. I don't know numbers, so I don't know what to do here." And I think, "Okay ..."

Dom: Math matters, Lydia.

Raja: Yeah, math does matter, but the point was simply that he was prepared for a certain type of occupation, he was prepared for a certain type of outcome, but he was never really told that, you know, you need to have, you need to be teachable in order to anticipate.

Dom: Yeah, you have to learn how to learn in this world.

Raja: Yes, yeah.

Lydia: Going back to your analogy, Milissa, like with the people who are on the hiking trail and they're not prepared, they're not reading any of the conditions. Like looking at the trail, going look at those roots, "My shoes won't go there."

Dom: And just adjusting early on.

Lydia: And adjusting and looking at the signs.

Milissa: Yeah, maybe looking in advance, looking it up.

Lydia: Yes, and looking at the sign that says, "Bear in area," going, "Oh, I don't have anything to fend off a bear, perhaps I should go back in my tour bus, and go buy some supplies, and then return."

Milissa: Right.

Lydia: But being able to anticipate that.

Dom: So, Lydia, do you think in some cases, the way we're trained or developed or our certain fears we have, we can almost sometimes choose to ignore the signs that are there? Like it's not even that we miss reading things. It's like we just don't even want to see them.

Raja: Or maybe it's like an overconfidence.

Lydia: Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I think is important is ...

Dom: Hubris, a type of hubris, yeah.

Lydia: And I never really use sports analogies, because I don't really understand ...

Dom: Do it, do it, Lydia. No, do it, do it.

Rob: Oh, this we've got to hear.

Lydia: There is a difference.

Dom: We're going to write this down.

Lydia: So I've been told that when you play, say something like volleyball, if the ball is coming at you, you're supposed to hit it, which doesn't make a ton of sense to me because I would want to leave and not get hit by the ball. But if you're doing that, and you're standing on the back of your feet and you're going to stand your position super strong and I'm just going to stand here, because this is where I'm supposed to stand in the court. That ball has to come directly towards you maybe for you to have a chance to react to it. If it's coming for your head and you're not standing in a position where you can move and adjust, it's going to hit you in the head and you'll get a concussion. Personal experience. But if you are standing in the ready position, on the balls of your feet, ready to move and ready to adjust to the things that are coming at you ...

Dom: Yeah, it's a good picture. It's a good picture.

Lydia: You can actually, in theory, play volleyball, play whatever.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, and you know, even to add to the metaphor, I mean, you're not going where the ... You're going to where the ball's going to go.

Lydia: Right, yeah.

Rob: Right? You're always anticipating where is that ball going to go and you're going to move and you can't do that if you're sitting on your heels. You have to be on your toes, right, so ...

Milissa: This sets us up well. We're going to continue talking about anticipating the future, maybe a little bit about flexibility, what happens when we misread and we're stuck with the consequences.

Raja: That's a good transition.

Milissa: So at this point in our podcast, if you've been listening to the previous episodes, we dismiss two people ...

Dom: A friendly person, and an annoying person, they've got to leave.

Rob: That's me.

Milissa: You said it, not me.

Dom: Friendly Rob. Nathan, more annoying than ...

Nathan: Just, even though Rob and I aren't going to be a part of this, still listen if you're a listener. Still listen.

Dom: That's awesome. Just listen.

Nathan: I mean it's going to be ... It's still going to be worth your time, right, Rob?

Rob: Yeah, yeah, because otherwise, you're going out of context.

Milissa: Didn't you say we were looking forward to this one?

Nathan: I am, oh, yeah.

Dom: We'll have you back guys.

Nathan: Okay, good.

Rob: Thanks.

Milissa: They will come back and chime in later.

Dom: That's awesome.

Rob: Thanks for listening.

Milissa: I don't even know how to open actually.

Dom: Just say, finally, finally.

Lydia: Just say, "Welcome back. All right, they're gone."

Dom: Finally, got rid of a ...

Milissa: Now we can have a real conversation.

Dom: Yes.

Raja: The dead weight has been lifted.

Dom: The dead weight has lifted.

Milissa: Okay, in my role at Tenth Church, as I mentioned, I'm the Family Pastor, which means I provide leadership and direction over the Children's Ministry and Youth Ministry and Young Adults and we started noticing something a couple of years ago that what we were doing in Family Ministries wasn't working anymore. In particular in Youth Ministry. But the things that used to work, like the big events, you know, the invitational events, the Laser Tag or whatever it was were our least attended events. Nobody was coming, so first we thought, it's because it's not novel anymore. Like you know, people go to Laser Tag for birthday parties so why go to Youth Group for a Laser Tag?

Dom: Sure, everybody does it.

Milissa: But we started digging in a little bit more and as we were reaching out to churches not just in Vancouver but all across Canada, we were realizing that youth pastors were finding the same thing, that what we did five years ago is not working anymore. So we entered into this period of learning, listening to God but also looking at different studies and reading lots of books and talking to people outside of the church about what's happening in the next generation. What we realized is that we were doing ministry for a generation that is not is Youth Ministry anymore. Essentially, we are doing ministry, we had just adapted to doing ministry for millennials and all of a sudden, we're dealing with Gen Z and some of the things had changed. So some interesting things we found out were, this is the most unchurched generation that we've ever seen, so they don't have the same baggage around church and Jesus but it's also the most indifferent generation that we've ever seen. "That's great that you follow Jesus. Good for you."

Dom: Yeah, we see that, too. We experience ... Yeah.

Milissa: I kind of have my own thing and that's great, like just don't push it on me."

Dom: They don't care enough to even ... they don't want to know, yeah.

Milissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We notice that there is a lot of questioning about spirituality, a higher power, but this kind of rejection of this absolute truth. So talking about the Gospel the way that we used to talk about the Gospel was actually pushing on people's buttons. They weren't liking what they were hearing. We also noticed a few things, like ... Well, high rates of anxiety and depression, so what is a conversation look like around mental health and do we talk about mental health enough. It's an unsettled and transient generation, so moving around a lot, traveling around the world, taking a gap year, pretty common. This is a YouTube generation, social media platforms that I don't know. I have no idea. I'm not on them. I don't know how it works. I don't understand it, but YouTube in Generation Z is rising as the top social media platform.

Dom: Yeah, my kids watch it more than TV.

Milissa: Yeah, my kids watch it more than TV, too. It's a ... Some of it has to do with this attention span, which that eight minute attention span that we're now seeing. So YouTube video, short, quick, get it, get through it. The other thing about YouTube videos is this interesting study that we found. This company put two different videos in front of a group of kids. One was this really slick produced, well done video and another one was this like really like homespun, YouTube raw ...

Dom: Raw, kind of raw.

Milissa: Raw, yeah, like unedited, lighting was bad, someone filmed it like in their bedroom or their garage or something like that and the questions they asked afterwards were, "Which one do you trust?" And they did not trust the slick one. They trusted the un-produced one. They trusted because they said it was real and authentic and "I relate to that person."

Raja: Yeah, they are very media savvy.

Milissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Raja: A lot of the methods that we used to market are now falling on deaf ears. That's what we've found, right? That the more we invest in graphics and all that, the less people believe it, because it's like we're just mimicking the advertising companies. We're mimicking everything else and so the message or whatever we're trying to convey is lost.

Milissa: Yeah, another piece there is there's no historical brand loyalty, which I found really interesting. So for me, I like to run and I wear New Balance shoes. I've always worn New Balance.

Dom: They're legit? They're the real deal, huh?

Milissa: They're legit, yeah. People are nodding.

Lydia: Not a sponsor.

Dom: I don't know anything.

Milissa: Not a sponsor.

Dom: You want to sponsor us, New Balance? Hey, let's do this. Let's do this.

Milissa: But I've always worn them. I like the way they fit. I like the way they look.

Dom: Sure.

Milissa: When I go into a store, I don't even try on other shoes. I just go straight to the New Balance section, I wear New Balance shoes. This next generation doesn't have the same brand loyalty.

Dom: Less of that.

Milissa: “If this isn't working for me, then I'm going to try something different and if you let me down, there's nothing keeping me here to stick with this brand and also if this brand doesn't produce quality and isn't ethical, I'm more likely to choose something else.”

Dom: I'm out.

Raja: Yeah, and if the brand representative has a foible, has a misstep, and something historically is brought to light, that brand takes a huge hit.

Milissa: Yeah, so as we were processing these things we were thinking ... Now of course, most of these studies are done by marketing firms. So how do we sell things to people?

Dom: Yeah, for sure.

Milissa: You know, they're always kind of on the cutting edge of identifying this generation or that generation, so we have to be careful about how use this information.

Dom: Yeah, how can it be helpful but how can it be dangerous, yeah.

Milissa: Yeah, how can it be dangerous, but as we started thinking about this and I guess maybe that's one of my questions for you guys is, as we start thinking about some of these things, what's useful and helpful for us in the church and what doesn't really matter?

Dom: Yeah, no, that's ... I mean, those are great questions and I think for our context some of the characteristics you mentioned in the context of Quebec, you know, the province of Quebec, so many people now are studying the province as like one of the leading spaces of secular values in North America, not only in Canada, but in the trajectory of ... You know, the debates around wearing religious symbols publicly, you know what do we do with that? I mean there's all kinds of laws being worked out about that and what does that mean for ... What are the conditions that we're going to have to pay attention to that? We didn't anticipate this coming or we weren't sure about that. I don't know if we know yet what to do, but one of the things we do know is that doing what we've always done better is not the answer. And for most of us, I think, around the table, many people who are listening, that's the predominant leaning. Like let's just do better worship music, let's just do better preaching or let's preach louder or let's get someone who's just a better interpreter of the Bible and all of those things in the past, doing the things we did better was enough and now I think these new waters have kind of ... The changes, we're about to meet our match in a new way and I often ... I've said this, you know, I just don't think we're going to preach our way out of these ones. And for Protestants, the primary mode for how we dealt with change is just to preach at it. Just be a better preacher. Get things down, preach about it. You know, people are not reading their Bible, preach at them, and so preaching was our go to wand and ... and you know, not to say that preaching is not important, and articulating the Gospel's not important. I mean, that's what many of us do and it's a gift that's essential to the church but just thinking of doing it the way we've always done it is not going to be as helpful as we thought it would be.

Milissa: You know, I think, preaching is a really interesting thing. I'm with you. I love to preach.

Dom: Sure, yeah.

Milissa: It's one of my most favorite things to do but as we were doing our research, we were coming up with a couple of different interesting things and putting them together and thinking, "What does this mean for preaching, actually?"

Dom: Oh, yeah.

Milissa: Like so this eight minute attention span, does that change the way that we construct a sermon? Or, Lydia, one thing I'm interested in from you is education. We were coming across all of this information about the way education is changing to more inquiry based. It's not about content delivery anymore. It's about discovery and problem solving and critical thinking and teachers being trained to be mentors, rather than deliverers of content.

Lydia: Absolutely.

Milissa: So how do you see that changing what we do in the future?

Lydia: Yeah, well, just in the education world we've seen a huge shift. Manitoba, we've just brought in a new curriculum for Kindergarten through Grade Eight for English and there are no outcomes. It is an outcome free curriculum, which means that there are no standards by which a teacher marks and says, "Yes, you are finished Grade One. You have the grammar that you need to have by Grade One. You have the reading level that you have by Grade One."

Raja: It's fascinating.

Lydia: That is no longer coming from the Manitoba government to the teachers.

Milissa: Wow.

Lydia: What is instead is the idea that we are creating a community of learners, inquiry based learning, "What do you find interesting?" And the wording in the curriculum document is "that the student should be the authority on their own learning." So the teacher is no longer the authority of ...

Raja: That's hor ... That's terrifying.

Lydia: The student's learning.

Milissa: What does that say about the authority of Scripture?

Dom: I don't think so. We've got a slippery slope world all of a sudden?

Lydia: Right.

Dom: Watch it, guys. This is wonderful.

Lydia: And so there's lots of questions for me. There's questions of ... so the Manitoba government like maybe talked to the assessment part and we also have a provincial standard for English Language Arts in Grade 12, so then how do we then mark that with no outcomes and if there are no outcomes, then how does that look? How do we navigate that? But at the same time, to say to kids who are six and seven, "If you have not achieved this level, you are not worth being in Grade Two, you need to continue to work. You need to continue to do better," and not have books open to you and not have this learning that is at your disposal open to you and you can learn what you want, I think there's a lot of danger in that side of it, too, and I think we're trying to correct and are we overcorrecting? Maybe we are, but there is this corrective thing that says there's no longer this standard by which we need to, for lack of a better word, break the children.

Dom: Measure, measure things.

Lydia: Yeah, yeah, and at the same time, it's also true that what would be the point of us doing content delivery when I can reach into my back pocket and I can find out that information? But what I need to be able to do as a student, is I need to be able to find out, is that true, is that reliable?

Dom: Is it helpful?

Lydia: Am I getting something from Wikipedia that has been mis-edited? Am I getting something from a news source that's not actually real? Is this something that's not true and not real and so inquiry based learning, the whole idea of STEM, which is Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics coming together, Design Process, all these things are very big in the way that we teach kids at a very young age because we want them to be able to be in charge of their own learning, because they are. Whether we want, whether we make it that way in school or not, you are in charge of your own learning as soon as you Google something or you YouTube it, which is interesting because I've been chatting with some of our high school students and they don't Google information for papers. They YouTube information for papers.

Milissa: So interesting.

Lydia: Yeah, so they're getting content, they're getting learning from that. We have to teach them how to navigate that.

Raja: And that actually comes to, like the idea between wisdom and knowledge, right?

Lydia: Yes.

Raja: That the amount of knowledge they have access to, that we have access to is ... and historically has never, it's never been this way. We have never had more access to knowledge than we do now, but we don't have access to wisdom and wisdom is how we frame knowledge, how we understand knowledge, how we apply knowledge.

Dom: Yeah, and I think, what Lydia was sharing about Education is a beautiful stepping stone for us, because historically, the church has been either at forefront of either leading this or very close to the forefront of how people learn, so the fact that we're un-inventing that is not a big deal, we're just going to change it. And people are like, "Oh, no, what are we going to do?" And everybody starts to, "Like I don't know, we've already done this before and we led the whole thing. And so now we've done it for 500 years and it's worked and we can control things and we study it and now we're entering this new waters. It's like, "Hey, like it helped us. It's not as helpful all the time, although, we feel a bit of the swing maybe too far, early on, which is okay. It's normal, the Internet's changed the rules." And so what the printing press was for the Medieval Church, the Internet's going to be for this church, right?

Milissa: Yes.

Dom: So again, the fear structures that are a misreading of the trends, often creates this whole church movement of, "Dear Lord, the heavens are falling and what are we going to do when people make up their own truth?" I'm like, this is not the posture of the church, of those who trust Jesus. You know, there are those who are like, "Okay, we're going to learn, we're going to listen," or we're going to think about how we who are teachers every weekend, I think, in the context of church are also going to have to maybe be wise about what we're learning and I think if we do that well, the governments who are also navigating this might just come to us and say, "You know, how do you guys do that? How do you teach people through this? What is it about your teaching style that might be helpful for us?" A very practical example of this is I think of a VR lab that we have in Montreal, it's a Virtual Reality Tour Lab and it's not there anymore but it happened for a little while and I was able to go visit it with my wife and she got tickets to go into this lab and to check out how VR is changing how people are learning. Some of the experiences were wacky, wild, super expensive, not ... You can't really do it with a lot of people, but one of the VR experiences was experiencing what it was like for someone to go blind and you went into the VR console section. Everything's black. You put on your headset and your headphones, right, and it's a story ... what was mind blowing for me was the story of a theologian in England who experienced going blind. I think it was in the 1800s, was going blind and started to journal about this experience. So because they had the whole experience, they were able to craft the VR experience, based on this journal entry. So it was I would say about five minutes long but as you're listening to him talk, he's reading you his journal and the experience and as he's losing his eyesight you're losing your ability to see in the VR experience. So you're not able to see as he can't see, as he writes but you're able to hear new things, because all your other senses are accentuated, right? And I thought, "This is going to be the future of learning, when this technology becomes affordable." The future of churches will have consoles like this in them, where instead of me reading you a long Bible story, you're going to put on your goggles and you're going to feel what it's like to be the man born blind. Put your headsets, let's do this, and we should be leading this. We're like, "This is wonderful, you know," and so instead, what sometimes the posture is is "Everybody's Biblically illiterate. People are trying to take away our education," and I think these are the kinds of episodes in our podcast and why we do this is to provide maybe a broader approach to how we should be thinking about this.

Milissa: Mm-hmm (affirmative), I think you said something really important. Well, you said many important things in there.

Dom: Thanks, Milissa.

Milissa: One thing that you said that really stuck out for me was when you misread the conditions the fear that comes.

Dom: Oh, yeah.

Milissa: When you realize, "Uh-oh, things look different than I thought it was going to look." So if we reframe that, rather than looking at this big change, this monumental huge change that history will look back on this time ...

Dom: It's in that mental shift.

Milissa: That this is a massive shift in the world. What are the opportunities? Maybe what are some of the greatest needs that need to be filled or met where Jesus is the answer?

Dom: Yeah, and I think also, just to be ... it's okay to say, "We don't know."

Milissa: Hm.

Dom: Like we still don't know, like it's very clear now across the board that the internet is about to go through it's first infant phase of the first generation of the internet, right? Like the Internet's fairly young and we've made some mistakes, you know. Elections can be tweaked by the internet, you know, so we know that now. So there seems to be a new wave of whether it's policies, whether it's governmental rules about how do we regulate social media platforms? They're more powerful than we ever thought. One of the youngest billionaires in the world uses Instagram. One of the Kardashian girls, she's the youngest billionaire ever. Why? We realize, "Wow, the internet can do that, too." Okay, somebody write that down, that's going to be important. So I think it's okay to say, "We just don't know yet and just because we don't know, doesn’t mean everybody needs to freak out."

Lydia: I think there, too, though, is something in that with the trends that you were noticing with your youth, that there's probably some answers to questions that are embedded in their practices that the church can dive into.

Dom: That's true.

Lydia: And instead of saying, "Okay, so how do we make it better? So they like unproduced YouTube videos, so let's make our church super unproduced and be like the videos that they're looking at …”

Dom: Like it's too quality, you're saying it's too reactionary to do that?

Lydia: Well, yeah, or what I'm thinking is you look at these questions and you go, "Okay, so these kids want something that's authentic."

Milissa: Yes.

Lydia: We were made for authenticity.

Dom: That's good, yeah, yeah.

Lydia: Who's the most authentic person we know? Well, that would be Jesus. These kids are being transient. Like it's not just that mom and dad are changing their job to get a promotion and they have to move. They're changing their careers, like that's a shift that's happening where ...

Dom: That's big.

Lydia: I'm not just doing this as a job and I change maybe my position in different companies, but I'm going from vastly different careers throughout my life and so there's this attachment ...

Milissa: Yeah, so it's about stability.

Lydia: There’s this attachment, this stability. Like my husband grew up in the house, he moved there when he was two. His parents just sold it like two years ago. And that's the reality for his family. I mean, that's not the reality for anybody much anymore that you live in a house when you're two to when you're ... and your 40s, your parents finally sell it, right? So that transience with ...

Dom: It's a great point. Yeah, but you can take that value and hold it up here and say, let's watch the whole thing.

Lydia: Yeah, and so what they need is that attachment. What they need is that connection and instead of connecting them with like the super cool youth pastor who'll go shoot them with lasers, what we need to be doing-

Dom: Which by the way, is not bad sometimes.

Lydia: Hm.

Milissa: Yeah.

Dom: Okay, I just want to let ... Let's do a little bit of that.

Lydia: What we need to do is connect them with Jesus.

Milissa: Yeah.

Dom: At Laser Tag.

Lydia: Sure.

Milissa: Lydia, when you're talking, it makes me think of part of our research. We did a survey with our youth and our young adults and our parents and all of our leaders and some of the questions we were asking is "Why do you come? What do you wish there was more of here?" Overwhelmingly, people said they come because it's a place where they feel like they belong. They come because they're ... want relationships and "If you could have more of something, what would it be?" And it wasn't more learning or more knowledge, more Bible study. It was more relationship, more opportunity to grow in relationships with people.

Dom: Wow.

Milissa: And it got us thinking that it isn't necessarily Generation Z. It's this universal need of all human beings to find identity, belonging, and purpose, and this is what started to shape us as we started to think about somehow we've misread the conditions and we think we're helping our young people to find their identity in Christ, their belonging in the family, their purpose in the body of Christ. "Who am I and what am I made to do?" But there was a bit of a disconnect and we had to kind of re-orient ourselves.

Raja: I was going to say it before, but everything we're talking about is the human condition and the interesting thing with the human condition is the Gospel is uniquely situated to meet the human condition and we have forgotten that. That what we're talking about cultures have all these different abstract thoughts and ideas but really we're talking about are people who need Jesus, but how do we translate that? How do we have that, right? And what you're saying there that they just want to feel connected to somebody else, right, because we're so digital, we're so distracted but like just that human contact. That ability of someone to say, "I accept you. I understand. You know, you're not alone in this journey that you're on," is so much more palpable.

Dom: I mean, Raj, I'm going to push back a bit, because I think there seems to be this dangerous development in our thinking that you either have human connection or you have technology, like as if you have to pick those.

Raja: Yeah, you absolutely can connect through Snapchat and through Twitter and through all these things, and absolutely for sure, but what we're finding, what we're seeing is that this Generation Z, they want something that like Milissa said, is authentic, you know?

Dom: Yeah, but I'm just saying, I agree with you, no, I agree to that.

Raja: And these ... Wait, wait, wait ... So these digital avatars that we've created of ourselves, they convey a part of ourselves, but that part that they convey doesn't really meet the longing of our soul and that's such a cliché to say it that way ...

Dom: It is.

Raja: But that's, but it's still the truth, though.

Dom: But that depends how you set up the avatar. Like you can set up the avatar for it to convey the best truth that you want it to say. So I'll give an example of with my dad. So the way my dad thinks about how technology works is all technology is an example of stupidity of a next generation who ... and I'm not saying you're saying this, Raj, but it's just the fact that when we're going on a trip, I'll be like, "Dad, I'm just going to Google this and figure out how to go." He's like, "I can't believe you guys don't even know how to get there without your phones. What happens if you lose your phone, you'll be lost in the woods." I'm like, "Not really," and so I try to explain to my dad, I'm not looking up where to go because I don't know how to get there. I'm looking up because technology tells us where there's traffic, where there's cops, where there's all kinds of other things, right, and he's like, his whole framework collapses, because he's like, "Really?" I had such a great argument for why technology shows you that you don't know how to get there and then you kind of broaden that and I think how that happens in his world is how the next generation's going to do that to us with how we're saying, "Oh, you use technology for this," and they're like, "Not really. Like it's bigger than that, and you don't know and you're not listening to us," and that's the thing that you're ... That's what you're saying more. We're realizing we have to learn to listen and my hope, this is my real hope and excitement about this conversation is that young people, the next generation, the young of the young are going to feel like they are part of the church because we're going to need them to help us how to figure out what the future looks like. Where in the past, we told them what to feel. We were the dominant voice and we told them and the pace of change is so fast now that for a lot of the things, we're going to be like, "We're not sure what this might look. What do you think we should do? What do you think this might look like? How are you learning?" And my kids are doing that, even with their own learning. I know, Lydia, you could speak to this in so many different ways, but my kids have to do an exam at school and they get home and they make up their own exam at home to study with an app that they have. I don't know what it's called now. They make up an exam and my son says to me, "Dad, you want to do this geography exam with me that I just made up?" And I'm like, "Ah, no, I'm going to fail, I don't know anything about geography." So he's like, "No, I made up this exam to study. Just download this app and we'll do it together." So he makes this whole exam, puts it on the computer. I download this app, a number pops up on the computer. I put it in the app and now we're both doing the exam at the same time. But the feeling is like, he's just now feeling what it's like to teach his dad something and I'm learning with him. I'm like, "Buddy, this is amazing." I don't know how to do this so I say to him, "Could you do this with a Bible story? Like make up a quiz of the story and then we'll try to do this together?" So I think that's one of the great joys that the younger generation for the longest time, I don't think we meant this, but told them, "You can become the church, you can lead, you can speak when you're older," now gets to play in the game a bit earlier. They're still not as mature as they need to be sometimes-

Milissa: And I'm not totally sure that if we wait until Generation Z, if we're defining Generation Z or adolescents, whatever, whatever we're talking about, if we wait until they're an acceptable age to actually speak into the conver ... just like 40, let's say?

Dom: Yeah, whatever that is.

Milissa: Let's say 40 is a magic number where we feel like you might have some wisdom or whatever it is. It's actually going to be too late, like ...

Dom: They're not going to understand. Yeah, they're not going to understand what their voice is.

Milissa: They've moved on, you know. It's we need to teach or not teach, maybe listen and give them an opportunity to discover their voice in a safe place.

Dom: And just give some space, yeah.

Lydia: And I think, too, to engage with them, because one of the things that happens with social media and I see it all the time, and legally it's my responsibility, if it happens with any of our students is cyber bullying, and that's a huge thing. Like with kids that are part of social media and stuff happens and in the evening, in their bedrooms, they're talking about each other and they're trying to say bad things to each other. And one of those things is for us to have our hands off, saying, "Oh, that bad technology. I don't understand it." So here you go, here's your phone, here's your stuff, I mean it's the same thing as putting a bunch of 12 year olds into a room, forever, shutting the door, and being like, "Yell, if you need some help. Bye." And then saying, "Why are they bullying? Why are there issues?" Well, because that happens. That's a normal part of adolescence, but we have to be able to navigate that with them and be able to engage it with them and not just say, "Well, when you figure it out, how to be the church in the digital age, let us know."

Dom: It's true we need to be in there.

Lydia: We have to be with them, with them with their app, saying, "Show me how this works." Teaching them the wisdom of it and not just, "It's foreign, it's different, but it can't be bad or it has to be bad," or that sort of thing, just engaging it.

Raja: Yeah, and that's a really good middle ground, because like on the one hand, like Dom's right, like they will have to help us understand the technology but we have to help them understand what is their authentic self look on technology. So with my daughters, who are very technologically savvy, but what I always say to them is that, "Whatever is seen on there, does that connect to your authentic self?" Right, like they know how to curate their digital self-

Dom: But why does it have to be ... Maybe it's okay that it's not fully self ...

Raja: I don't know about that, because what we're teaching is ... We're teaching them to wear a digital mask.

Dom: No, I think we do that, like take technology out if it, like we have times where we present our full self to people we trust and there's times that we hide that. There's times when you want to present a part of who you are in a way that's just more ... not hypocritical, but more ... I don't know a better word for surface-y but just like I don't want to share everything and that's okay.

Lydia: Well, kids do that, that's a normal part of development. You know, you dye your hair pink for a while and I mean mom and dad freak out a little bit but it's like hair dye.

Dom: You laugh it off or whatever.

Lydia: It's not a big deal or you put on dark makeup and see if you really like emo music. I mean that's stuff from when I was a kid and people tried all sorts of different things on to see who they were and where they fit and that's normal and so we're seeing that normal in technology.

Milissa: Do you think there might be a misread condition then, if we're misreading into this generation is like this but it's actually just a symptom of developmental stage, right?

Dom: I think so. I think part of it is ... Yeah.

Milissa: Like adolescent angst, this longer emerging adulthood and we have this idea, there's all these jokes and memes and skits about millennials, but millennials are like 36, 37, 38 … Have mortgages, have families, have homes. Is what we joke about about this millennial generation actually true or does it have to do with the fact that when we're doing the studies on millennials, they were developmentally supposed to be ...

Dom: Maybe I'm wrong, but there is a sense at least from my personal experience that my upbringing was my parents' kind of a ... because the world wasn't as dangerous for them was hands-off style. "Go play with your friends. It's fine." Like, "Go do something and call us if you're dying." You know, a bit of that, and it's almost like the generation is shocked that now we're learning as parents to have to actually be a lot more present because of the complexity of the world of our kids and they interpret that as like, "Oh, my gosh," and like we just kids played before. I'm like, "My kids play?" Like, I'm not trying to figure this out. They don't play as much as your kids play or they play differently. I played video games and I remember my dad yelling at me that playing video games was going to make me dumb and, you know, I was never going to be able read. You know, now I laugh at him. You call me Dr. Russo when you refer to me, yeah. So, you know, all those things, and I'm careful because when my kids are playing, I have the trigger of saying those things.

Milissa: Well, that's so interesting.

Dom: Because they're playing too long and I'm like, "Well, no, that's not true," I'm like, "You guys play for an hour, then I want you to read a story in your book," you know, "Write me something on what it was about, then we'll play a bit of basketball, and then you can play Fortnight again." Right, so my parents are like, "Wow." I'm like, "Yeah, we're learning how to do this. It's different than your generation," and we're going to feel that in the church. The intergenerational tension of that.

Milissa: I think that intergenerational piece is actually pretty key. We've talked a little bit about unity and reconciliation and so what does it look like to have cross generational unity?

Dom: It's profound, yeah, it's a big, going to be a big thing.

Raja: Yeah, like at our church, so Uptown is kind of a unique church because we have a lot of university students. And what's always been very interesting to me is the university students want to invite older people to speak in their lives. They look for mentors and it's such an interesting concept because you would think that this generation like, "I don't want any ... Like don't tell me what to do." Instead what they're saying to us is that, "You know, can I meet with somebody who's like 30 years older than me so I can just ask some questions that I don't know how to ask," or "I don't know how to navigate adulthood." Right, adulting, you know.

Dom: So true, so true.

Raja: And so they're asking us, saying, "Hey, can we ..." and the church has this unique place where the generations are taught to play nicely with each other because they both have value to Jesus. They both have ... They all have value in the Body of Christ, and so the elderly aren't displaced because they don't know anything anymore and the young aren't misplaced because they know all about technology. It's like, no, no, they actually have ... Their stories can talk to one another and help each other on the journey of life.

Milissa: So some of that has to do then with that identity, belonging and purpose of all generations. So one of the things, shifts that we did in our youth ministry is we shifted into home groups. We call them crews, and so we grouped people together. We sent them out into homes to do basically like a Life Group or a Small Group in a house with two mentors. We were kind of thinking about this developmental stage when young people are naturally turning away from their parents and they're turning towards adults. Kara Powell talks about for a young person to successfully navigate through adolescence into adulthood, into emerging adulthood and then adulthood, it's kind of a five-to-one ratio. Like five adults for every one person. So we start thinking, how do we actually … Get kids around those five people, so if you think parents, youth pastor, small group leaders, if they're volunteering on a serving team, there's the leader there as well. So we can actually, there's a way of getting the five people together … If you create that mentoring piece, but I remember when I was a brand new Christian and I desperately wanted a mentor and I was meeting kind of on a casual basis with our pastor's mother who attended our church. She had been married to a pastor and I thought to myself, there's a good chance that my husband will be a pastor someday. This is somebody who can really give me something that I haven't seen before because I didn't grow up in that context, and so we met for a couple of times, really fruitful, and finally I got up the courage to say, "Will you mentor me? I would love to connect with you on a regular basis. I have something to learn from you. You're very wise." She got really uncomfortable and said, "Let me go think about it." She came back a week later and said, "I don't have anything to offer you. I'm not sure that I have anything to give." And for me, that was the last time I asked somebody to be a mentor until about five or six years ago. Like I was so ... I felt really burned as a young adult. But I also think what was happening in the value placed on the wisdom of an older generation of the church.

Dom: Well, and I think, Milissa, you touched, I think, one of the biggest things that I've felt in our church planting space, where I've ... if I think across the board of how many people I know that are in their say, like 50s or late 40s, I just think of 10 years older than us. So think of someone 10 years older than you that you know that you want to be like because they model a life rooted in Jesus, sacrificially giving of themselves, right? And I looked at them and I'm like, "Where are you guys? Like would you mentor someone?" I think it was great for them to talk the talk, but now when the younger people are going to say, "Could you step up and be a spiritual mother or father, because we don't have ... Our parents are not here, like they're not even Christians?" Many of these young people are going to enter our churches and their families of origins are not going to have Christian parents. We're really going to see when we need these people to step up as spiritual giants, that maybe they didn't deliver, they're not as mature on the tree as they think they are.

Milissa: This is maybe one of the limitations of age based programmatic ministry, right, is that siloing effect of generations. It didn't used to be this way, and we've lost something of the unity of the body of Christ.

Lydia: You know, Ephesians talks about equipping the body for the work of the church, not doing the work of the church as the pastor. And I think that there's something there to saying, "No, it's actually your job to be the church and it's my job as a pastor to equip you to do that."

Dom: Help you.

Raja: Create that space.

Milissa: Yeah, that's really good.

Lydia: "And not for me to be your own personal consultant and to provide a program for you to go to."

Raja: One of my early mentors used to say to me that if you see a need, you're called to fill it.

Dom: You can, just step into it.

Raja: Like that was always, that was terrifying to me, because ...

Lydia: I see nothing. I don't see anything, I don't see anything.

Raja: He says like, the first complaint you make about a church is the thing that you were meant to fix and if we could teach our people to understand that, that if you see a gap, if you see an absence, if you see a missing piece ...

Dom: Step up and help us, yes.

Raja: Then obviously the Spirit or God has placed within you to see that and that's the first step to the solution is for seeing it. And as pastors or our people in church, we may not see it and so at Uptown, what we try to do as much as possible is invite people in the conversation. I want everyone to own the responsibility of meeting the people that they see, it might be missing or absent within our church … So that they realize that, you know, the priesthood of all believers isn't just a great T-shirt slogan but it actually applies to who they are.

Milissa: We've been talking about misread conditions in terms of generational divides, developmental stages in a person's life, what it's like to misread people in the church. One of the threads that's been coming out for me is communication. We misread the conditions when we're not actually communicating well. We think of communication as "I'm talking," but we miss the other part about listening, really well. I think that there were probably a lot of misread conditions when it came to how people approached Jesus and what they thought about Jesus and what they presumed his agenda was or was not. And so as we look at generations or cultures or contexts, our local contexts, our Canadian contexts, as we are trying to read culture well, culture's reading us, as well and reading Jesus as well.

Raja: Through us.

Milissa: Through us, so what are some of those maybe communication barriers or gaps or some of those misread conditions that are going back and forth?

Dom: That's a great ... that's a whole ...

Raja: Well, it's the disconnect between belief and behavior right, so we proclaim one thing and we behave another, right? So they're misreading who Jesus is because we're misrepresenting, mis-living ... I don't know if that's a word, but what Jesus means our life's a priority of Jesus in our lives. So like I had a conversation with someone who came to our church and they weren't from a faith background. They were third year university and the thing he said to me, he kind of startled me a little bit, he goes, "You Christians talk about God a lot and you sing about God and you think about God a lot but you don't live as if that God was right next to you. You almost live as if this God lives in your church on Sunday, and that's when you go visit Him, rather than as you go to work or as you go to play or as you hang out with people. God doesn't seem to be there because you act and say things, you behave in certain ways that if you actually believed all the stuff you're saying about God, then I'm not sure how you can live as if that was true in this moment."

Dom: Raj, do you think ... I think that's true in some ways, right. There's the hypocrisy factor, that everybody, I mean, you can do a whole episode on that, but I think people misread Jesus and Jesus didn't do that. Jesus wasn't a hypocrite, like He always lived authentic and people misread him. So what is it about that that's also a big deal? That you can actually live properly and maybe peoples’ lens are not ready to feel that.

Raja: Yeah, I think so too but …

Dom: I don't know, I don't know the answer.

Raja: Yeah, but I actually think Jesus ... and this is going to sound like a weird thing to say, but I think Jesus played into the misreading because when Jesus ...

Dom: Whoa, heresy. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

Raja: So when Jesus says a parable, the disciples come back to Him and they ... "What the heck was that?" and Jesus says, "I teach so seeing they may not see, hearing they may not hear." In other words, He wanted to invite the curious into a deeper conversation. So one of the things I used to teach my youth, my young adults was "If someone asks you if you're a Christian, never respond. Don't say yes, don't say no."

Dom: So you're a Satanist.

Raja: Ha. Say, "You follow after ..." You say, "You're a follower ..."

Milissa: Cut that out. Edit that out.

Dom: You're a Buddhist. That's got to be in there. The word Satanist is going ... The ratings are going through the roof.

Raja: The question we want to ask is does Dom have an off button. So the question, what I always say to my youth, my young adults was, "Don't respond when someone asks you if you're a Christian or not. Instead ask them what does that mean to them. What does that mean to you?"

Dom: So you can listen, yeah.

Raja: Right, and so you can hear what they have to say and then you can compare ...

Milissa: So you're clearing up the misread condition before you actually answer.

Raja: Right, because oftentimes, it's a trap. When someone says, "Are you a Christian?" What they're really doing is laying out a trap for you and you don't realize it because as soon as you say, yes, then they offload their, whatever it would be. "Oh, you're this, you're that." They're, "This ..." Like, "Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa," right, and whether it's they've experienced this in media or they experience in real life, it's like, "Okay, I would rather invite you into a deeper conversation than just either I'll line myself up with the labels you're going to place on me anyways."

Milissa: Yeah, the misread condition when people misread us, we've been talking about this identity, this belonging, this purpose and how much it hurts when we are misread, when people approach us and they've assumed something about us, these labels that are given to us that we assume as our own label and our own identity. When I was growing up, so my dad, his heritage is First Nations and he ... My grandmother was deeply ashamed of who she was. She married a Caucasian man, my grandfather, wonderful man, but she passed on that legacy of shame for many, many reasons we don't need to get into here, but she passed on that legacy to her kids and we are not native. This is not who we are. So they lived on a house, they're from an island off the BC Coast and half of the island was reserve and half of it is not, and so they lived kind of at the, and on the border of the reserve and chose to send their kids not to the band school but to the public school because this is who we are. But at the public school, the level of racism that they encountered just reinforced this, "We are less than, this is not something to be proud of. This is something to be ashamed of." And so my dad, married my mom, a blond Scandinavian looking woman and when I was born, they looked at me and lo and behold this little girl comes out with dark eyes and dark hair and did some soul searching and thought, "You know what, we don't want to raise our kids in this environment, this racist environment." And so they chose to leave that community and kind of distance themselves from that culture as well and I think at that time, I think my dad, it's fair to say that he still was kind of exploring what that meant for him as well. I grew up feeling like I'm, you know, a white kid and growing up in small town Canada, and this is who I am but every once in a while, there'd be this somebody reminding me that "You are not, you are something else," and I kind of floated between two cultures until I hit university, and started studying Education and took this Aboriginal Education course. The professor started out with listing generalizations and he admitted these are generalizations, "But many of you if you're looking for your first teaching job, you might be working in some ... a band school somewhere, a reserve school somewhere and so these are some of the things that you might encounter." So he started listing these general characteristics and my mind was blown because he was describing my family. And so I had thought, you know we talked earlier, I can't remember who said it but culture, identifying culture ... Maybe it was you, Raja ... that culture it's like asking a fish to describe water. I had never thought that it was uncommon for your aunties and uncles and cousins to be kind of a permanent fixture in your house and to maybe have people living with you at a time or somebody's community cultural practices, the extended family as your whole family. And aunties and uncles and togetherness and I just thought everybody was like this. I didn't realize that this was maybe a cultural distinctive that I had inherited and so I had this ... a bit of an identity crisis. Like, "Who am I? What, where do I fit? I'm not sure where do I belong. Do I belong in this culture? Do I belong in that culture? Does it matter that I don't belong in a culture?" I think I've talked to some friends who are second or third or a fourth generation Canadians, especially the second generation, which culture do I belong in? Do I belong in the ethnic culture where I was born or my parents were born or do I belong in this dominant Western Canadian culture? Where I've landed on this through much prayer and discerning is a number of years ago some wise people in my life started speaking into my life, started speaking truth in my life that, "Milissa, I think maybe you're a bridge. Like I think maybe God is calling you to be a bridge." And it was said so many times to me that I felt like God was peeling off these labels that didn't belong to me. Some of these racist stereotype labels that had stuck on that I won't repeat here because they're kind of ugly.

Raja: Offensive actually.

Milissa: Offensive. And also outsider and don't belong and impostor, that was a really big one. I felt like an impostor when I was in both camps and instead I was renamed. I felt like God was renaming me bridge, which actually is a reference to reconciliation. And so, as we think about our Canadian kaleidoscope of cultures, a multitude of cultures in Canada, right across the board, even when you think about Western Canada and Eastern Canada. Or here we are sitting in Manitoba versus Vancouver, my home. The different cultures in our country, how are we called to be the bridge, not just culturally, all the different cultures that are represented in Canada, but also within ourselves. We are complex people. You can't pigeon hole one person into one demographic to one generation to one age, to one ethnicity. What does it look like for us to really bring reconciliation?

Raja: Well, would it be important to say ... and again, just thinking like ... The bridge is always from who ... From culture to Jesus. Right, because we want to have a spiritual experience, right, so we're talking about the bridge, but bridge to what? Like just bridge over a chasm? No, no, no, the bridge to Jesus.

Milissa: Yeah, the bridge to Jesus.

Raja: I think will be kind of a really neat way to end off because that kind of brings all the misread things together and saying, "Rather than being a gateway, rather than being stopped, people encountering Jesus," we are instead, inviting them through who we are, our story into Jesus.

Milissa: This is actually coming back to a previous episode where we talked about the Gospel reconciling, Christ reconciling all things to Himself. I think this is probably a good time to invite our listeners.

Dom: Two silent listeners.

Milissa: Our two silent listeners ...

Raja: Wayward.

Milissa: Off of the couch. They look too comfortable over there, so come on back and join us.

Dom: Apostates here we come.

Milissa: All right, welcome back, Nathan and Rob. Thank you for your patient listening.

Nathan: Thank you, Milissa.

Rob: Glad to be back.

Milissa: Was there anything in our conversation that brought up questions or comments?

Nathan: You're pointing to me? I'll go first. Thank you, sir. I was really ... Just basically I camped in this idea that this generation is ... that you researched has no brand loyalty, so that's going back to the beginning of what you were saying, but it started spinning all through a lot of what you were saying. When somebody, when a generation has no brand loyalty and they're transient, but we're trying to put a bull's eye on them, and understand them, we're going to miss it all the time. And it reminded me ... We might miss it all the time. It actually reminded me of my generation when I was the generation people were trying to understand and the people who were the worst at it were the ones that were trying the hardest. So they would have the study and they would have the buzz words and they would say it just this way and it was like, this is just not working and it was like a cultural analysis, cultural exegesis and it just it missed, a ton. And so if it missed back then when things were moving slower, it seems to me very difficult now and we ... in your conversation, you really came around how difficult that analysis is but I think you moved into something that's different than cultural exegesis or analysis or interpretation and that's the Christian category of incarnation that you're living the Word that Jesus is revealing to you and is in you and you're present with it alongside somebody. So cultural analysis, it always makes somebody feel like a project and that was what I felt like. This guy knew that if you dropped this buzzword and I would listen to him and think he was relevant and then he could say his thing. I'm like, "Well, you're just ... You've studied me too long. You're not walking alongside me." Incarnation takes you from being a project to a brother and sister. And so that's a worthwhile shift and then once you've made that, you're walking alongside somebody, you actually find out, I think, they're not indifferent to spiritual things. You find out they hear voices, right. They hear voices at the end of a movie. They see all the traffic buzzing around them and they feel something or in a song. They're ... We've used the word before in, around this table in Season One, their lives are haunted, kind of like that beep that just came from nowhere. Raja's breaking bubbles. Tying us in with the bubble-breaking demographic. We cracked it, we found them.

Dom: These people with their technology.

Nathan: You want me to just keep going, Regan?

Regan: You have a pen and a paper right in front of you.

Raja: This is too good though, this is too good. I have to put it on a digital note so I can ... Sorry, I was just ...

Regan: Yeah, yeah.

Rob: You want to circle and star it and say, "But this thing about ...

Raja: I was actually ... I have no service, I'm taking notes, right?

Nathan: That feels better then. That feels better. Thanks, Raja. I thought you were tuning out. You're like, okay.

Raja: No, no, no. I have no ... I'm serious. I’m just taking notes. This is too good. I'm like ...

Nathan: Cool.

Raja: You said something that popped into my mind and I had to write it down.

Nathan: So it might be a misread condition to assume indifference and perhaps that when we're analyzing somebody, we come to the conclusion they're indifferent. When we walk alongside them, we realize, nobody can actually be indifferent. And then the model for witness and that's something we didn't necessarily hear, at least I missed it. Like so then what do we do? How do we share this faith with somebody? I think that there was two places that the conversation danced around. The first was ... it reminded me actually of Samuel. When somebody starts to hear a voice, they just need somebody to tell them what to do with what they're hearing. So perhaps you say to somebody who has these longings or they're hearing things or they're feeling things, you say, "Well, next time that happens, you say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,' or you say, 'Here I am,'" or some version of that that resonates with them, and the other thing that I think you can do is what Raja was pushing us to and then Dom, you just like slammed the door on him. And it was the ... I came up with a phrase, sacramental connections and this is different than anything you can get anywhere else. So it's I'm thinking of Rublev's Icon with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and there's that chair for you, that actually doesn't exist anywhere else, except the church. And so some of the voices that they're hearing are drawing them to that, so you're on one hand saying, "Okay, next time you hear the voice, you say, 'Speak, Lord, your servant's listening,' or 'Here I am,' or you just say, 'We've got a seat at the table for you.'" Both of those things are open ended-enough but still invitational enough and I think they're timeless enough, because incarnational genre of living, if you want to call it that, is going to be timeless.

Dom: So how did I shut the door on that?

Nathan: Well, think you ... What I heard Raja saying was, "No, this is different, what the church offers is different," and you were saying, "No, it's actually not different."

Dom: I don't ... I would think it is different ...

Nathan: Okay.

Dom: I was just saying, we have to be careful that we don't accentuate that what the cultural questions are, that we create this dichotomy, that you know, if they do this, then we have that. That's what I was concerned about, but I definitely think that what the church has to offer is different than the world, for sure. And I actually love the beautiful sacramental language. I think it's huge.

Raja: Yeah, we have to be gracious to Dom, because, you know, English is his second language so we clear ... You know ...

Nathan: Third, third language.

Dom: Sorry for being trilingual, guys, sorry. It's complicated for some.

Nathan: Yeah, all right then, I just misunderstood your fire for something else, so that's cool. Thanks, Dom.

Dom: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Rob, what are your thoughts about ...

Rob: You know, I'm just reflecting on the process of what we're attempting to do and I think we are trying to be good cultural anthropologists and missionaries and saying, "Well, there's this culture of emerging adults, young people. We're seeking to understand them so that we can help them enter into this restoration movement that we're talking about." So we're talking about Gospel restoration and all of that, so I think of the Apostle Paul and his words in 1st Corinthians, you know, that's ... Ultimately, what Paul was trying to do in his mission to the Gentiles, he says, "I've become all things to all men so that by all possible means, I might save some." Now men is not, he's not being gender exclusive here. He's just ... It's just a general term in the Greek language that doesn't mean that ...

Dom: Humanoids.

Rob: Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean ... and when he says, "Save some," he's not saying, "I want to make you into a project, so that you can get your ticket to heaven," you know, so if we understand the word salvation there what's he saying is he's saying, "I'm becoming all things to all men," incarnation, you know, "All people," thank you. "So that I might save them," in other words, they might enter into the fullness of this restoration of Christ and we're thinking about this for the emerging generations and whatnot and yes, it's true. There are general principles and distinct characteristics of the emerging adults and emerging generations. But I think to jump on top of, piggy back on top of what Nathan is saying is we can understand all of those but the other characteristic about this emerging generation is the most diverse generation in human history, so while we're ...

Dom: That's a new territory, yeah.

Rob: Yeah, so while we can say ... I mean, this is what they're like. I think it's important that we do good localized Gospel contextualization and with the people we're with and not just assume that, well, this is the ... These are the silver bullet types of things, but we've got to know the people we are ... and the only way into that is through incarnation. It's by entering into their world, into their lives. Listening, you know, seeking to understand before we seek to be understood and I think that that's the most powerful tool that we can have.

Nathan: One interesting thing that's just coming to me now, is that pastoral longevity plays a role in this. Because if you can't be in one spot long enough to get roots down and be incarnational there, you're stuck with analysis. And if your church governance or your own character issues keep you transient, then you're always chasing.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, example of that, I mean, we've got young adults, emerging adults in our faith community, who I remember when they were 12 and I remember what their family situation was like and in the last few years, their family's blown up, parents are apart. It's a ridiculous mess and I was there through all of those stages of their lives and so now that they're in their 20s, when they ... You know, when I come alongside of them and I hear them and I talk to them, and I authentically try and love them and enter ... it means so much more. Why? Because, well, I've been there for 10 years and been through all of those stories with them and that's the cost of incarnation for sure.

Milissa: I think when we think about incarnation, I'm interested in some of the incarnational ministry that you are doing, Lydia, in the school you're a part of, given the demographic. Do you have any stories to share with us about that?

Lydia: Yeah, for sure. So one of the challenges that we have in trying to welcome the indigenous kids and their families into our school is that there is a terrible history of church-run schools in our country and what they did to indigenous people in the past. So now we are a school of choice that people are choosing, but we want them to feel welcome. We want them to feel like this is home, that this is their school, that they can come in with their head held high and that their kids are important and their kids aren't just important, their kids are prayed for. Their kids are answers to prayer, every single kid who comes in off the bus from the reserve is an answer to prayers that we've specifically prayed for them and their families and have been praying as a school for a long time. And so one of the ways that we try to do that is we hired a First Nations woman who is very connected into the different communities around us and she connects with them through ... she's a nurse and so she's kind of left that job and become our Home and School Coordinator, to connect the homes on the reserve to our school and just kind of help, wherever she can, just in some of those things. We have a lot of our parents of these kids didn't graduate from high school and so navigating high school, navigating graduation, navigating how do you apply for university is a thing. So we've hired her to help us. But one of the ways that she really has connected with her First Nations roots and with the community is through dancing. And so she started a Powwow Dancing club for our kids in Grade Four to Six and this is super fun, because everybody who is in those grades are invited to come. It doesn't really matter, it doesn't matter at all what color you are. So the little chapel in our school is packed Wednesdays at lunch and you just have these kids just going to town and she's teaching them what you're doing when you're dancing. So when you're dancing in one of the dances, you are ... as you move your arms around, you are praying blessing and good things for the people that you are dancing around. And so because we're a Christian school, we're praying that God would bless the people that these kids are dancing around and they are learning how to do that as they dance. And in the Jingle Dress Dance, they're dancing dances of healing and so they're praying for healing as they dance, and there's a bunch of other ones that they do and I'm not a 100% sure of all the details but we had this dance going on and we thought, "Well, our spring concert's coming up. What do we do? We need to do something in order to have this happen and in order to share with our community what's going on.” And so we decided that we would have as our closing number and the spring concert, the theme for it was, God's Story and so we started with songs of Creation and then we went to songs of the Fall and then we went to songs of Redemption and then we went to songs of Restoration, we had about three songs for each one.

Rob: Four acts.

Lydia: Four acts.

Rob: Wow.

Lydia: And we had some people sing some Scripture verses in and reading some things in between last song. This is what happens, the worship team, which is our worship band class which is about five or six high school students come out and they start singing a song called “Revival” and all of a sudden in the middle of it, it kind of starts to get a little bit quieter and I stand up with my mic and I read from Revelations 7 which says, "Everybody from every tribe, every nation, came walking in and they said, 'Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,'" and at that moment the doors open and all of these kids in all different colors of skin, all dancing the different dances, they come in and they dance and what takes over the quarter beats of that worship song is the Dakota Hostiles, which is a local drumming band and they're drumming away and these kids are dancing. And people are looking around and they're looking and they're going, "What is this that I'm feeling?" And they're seeing First Nations kids, they're seeing kids from Indian descent, they're seeing kids from Caucasian descent, all dancing, all praying over this congregation. And then the rest of the, the whole school is standing on the risers and K to Six stands up and they sing this song with all of their might and it's... the lyrics are "Revival hearts on fire, Holy Spirit, rain down, change us from the inside." And people are weeping and they rise to their feet at the end and like basically I just go, "Go get your kids from the classes, good night." And that's it and I was chatting with one of our indigenous dads afterwards and he said, "I knew that the brown kids were going to be dancing, but when I saw the kids with all colors coming in, I just lost it," and you could still see the tears streaming down his face. And we saw our First Nations families, they came in proud. They had their heads held high, they came right to the front with their cameras out. They knew that their kids were going to be part of something amazing and something that really meant something to them. And then they lingered afterwards and one of the moms said to me, and this was, this is probably one of the highest compliments I think our school can get. She's talking about a Grade Six student in our school, her daughter and she said, "She told me that she feels most comfortable in her skin when she's dressed in her regalia and she's dancing her Jingle Dress Dance," and she was doing that in our school and she was worshiping her Creator when she did that. Yeah, I'm excited to see what that's going to happen as these kids get older and what's really exciting to me is that this is not the culmination of a whole bunch of work. This is the beginning of what God's going to do here with this community and with these people.

Rob: Wow, that's great.

Raja: Wow, Lydia, that is all the feels right there. My goodness, oh, my goodness.

Rob: Yeah, and those who are listening, you don't see Nathan sitting across from us, sobbing as ...

Dom: It's true. It’s so true

Raja: Trying not to cry.

Rob: He is human.

Nathan: I'm not trying not to cry.

Rob: This is your, this is what you're caught up in, this is part of your life's work and ...

Nathan: Yeah, this is our church.

Rob: So why is that so meaningful to you?

Nathan: I had a similar word, like bridge, it was reconciler, and when I had a powerful prayer experience, a delivery experience through a specific evil spirits that were stopping the work in my life with First Nations people, it's part of my heritage. My parents actually lived in Tallcree, Peace River, in Northern Alberta, for a while and ... but it only served to make me more entrenched in racist and so there's ... when a dam breaks in a godly way, there's a lot of tears and it's funny, it's like, it's predictable as anything. As soon as somebody starts talking about reconciliation, then this is what happens to me, whether I'm talking about it or Lydia's talking about it. It's just ... I couldn't even be at this concert, I had to go to the District Conference but they were all sending me videos. I'm bawling in my hotel room watching this stuff. Yeah, it's just my passion and my call, so it stirs me every time it comes up.

Dom: I think, too, we don't want to underestimate how much the rest of the church in Canada will need to listen to you guys and to learn from you, you know, so because of the local incarnational work that you've done, this is not just for you. You know and we're going to listen and learn with you and I think of this is just the beginning.

Rob: Yeah, and what I appreciate about it is it's not just tokenism. It's not just something that, you know, "Well, we've got to do this," or "We want to do this, and we want to give the nod to cultural pluralism or what not." You're saying, "Well, how do we create authentic Gospel centered community together and live in that?" And even though it's messy, even though it's hard, and even though we don't know, we don't have a map for this, we want to do this thing.

Raja: And the integration of all the cultures. It's beautiful, right? This is something that our world is so desperate for, right, it's the Galatians Principle, "There's neither Jew nor gentile, male nor female." Like if we could just come together and realize that we are one, right, and just to see these children, you know ... Just hearing ... Like honestly, Lydia, I'm an immigrant. I was born in India, came to Canada, and I remember going to school, it was predominantly a white school, just realizing how different I was from everybody else and so to hear that, to hear people talking about that, to hear that, is like I would have been transformed as a child to not have been ashamed of my Indian heritage but to have been said … "No, no, no, this is actually important, this is actually a part of who you are," in my church. Our church was predominantly white, so like Waterloo is a very waspy area and so as an immigrant coming into that, we were always in the margins in our church because there was no expression of that. But to hear what you've done, I just honestly, I just wish I was a child in that school so I could have experienced that.

Lydia: Well, and it is a picture of heaven, because it is straight from the picture of heaven that Jesus gave John.

Milissa: That's that sacramental piece, heaven touching down.

Lydia: Yes, exactly and it felt like it, because we couldn't do anything but just be there and say, "This is what we were created for and this is what these kids are created for."

Nathan: There's a ... and yet, it was ... One of you asked me yesterday, I think it was like a strategic question, "So how are you going to connect with the First Nations people in your community?" I didn't have an answer for it and I think that's really trenchant for what we were talking about, because if I had analyzed the culture and know what these folks are into and then tried to provide that, they would have felt like projects and there would have been some sense of now that I understand you and there's mastery involved, then I can ... Even with good intentions, there's still some sort of latent manipulation happening there, but there's ... We haven't discovered a way to explain this stuff, aside from using the deep, but cliché words like love, and your heart just breaks in the right moment and then it rings authentic for people around you and sometimes it takes 10 years, but that's kind of how it happens.

Milissa: One of the most beautiful things about what you guys are saying is that, Lydia, you said, there are people in the room who were emotional but they didn't know why. They couldn't put their finger on it. It was something about the picture of the Kingdom to come that's here and when people get to experience that, it transcends culture and generational divides and those conditions that we try to navigate, I mean try to figure out what's going on, when we actually get in the same room, something amazing happens. That's the compelling Gospel. I think it comes back to the Gospel. That's the good news and it doesn't matter what we're looking for, what trends we're trying to look for. I mean, I think it's wise. I think it's good to take a look at what's going on in our communities and the world around us, but ultimately it's a work of God. We do our best and then we step back and we let God do what only God can do.

Milissa: So thank you for sharing everybody. I'm going to be thinking about this conversation for very long time.