New Waters S2 | Episode 5

Unlearning and Relearning

Join the conversation with our Season 2 cast as they share personal experiences of relearning and explore other unprecedented times in history when the church needed to unlearn and reform.

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+ Full Episode Transcript

DOMINIC RUSO: Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of The New Waters Podcast. It's great to have you with us as we navigate through culture and changes in leadership, and in this season, as we think about the future and the role of the church and leadership and all that fun stuff and messy stuff that we're working through. My name is Dominic, and I'm the senior pastor and church planter of the 180 Church in the greater Montreal area, and just really excited to be with some beautiful people around the table. They're going to introduce themselves before we get started in this conversation.

LYDIA STOESZ: My name is Lydia Stoesz, and I am the pastor of educational ministries at Prairie Alliance Church in Portage. I'm also the principal at Westpark School.

NATHAN WESELAKE: Little something fun about yourself? You got anything anecdotal there?

LYDIA: Sure. I have two kids, Alethia and Declan.

RAJA STONE: That's a great name.

NATHAN: That's fun.

LYDIA: It is a good name. Alethia is Koine Greek for truth.

RAJA: That's Greek for truth, yeah.

DOM: It's beautiful.

RAJA: Jesus says ‘I am the alethia’.

DOM: Very nice.

NATHAN: Good sort of bio stuff.

LYDIA: That was a good anecdote. Is that okay? Endearing?

NATHAN: That is good. Yeah. It's- your producer’s just smiling. He likes that soft touch stuff. I'm Nathan Weselake, the lead pastor of Prairie Alliance Church in Portage la Prairie Manitoba. I have a daughter named Acacia and a son named Soren. And Keisha.

DOM: A nod to Kierkegaard.

NATHAN: Yes. And he can also be like a defenseman, a Swedish defenseman, so it can go either way. A little bit of Kierkegaard in him.

RAJA: Hi, I'm Raja Stone. I'm the church planter, lead pastor of Uptown Community Church in Waterloo. I also have three daughters, Talia, Fiona, and Olivia. And on this podcast, which Dominic hosts, I think we should play a game. We've been playing this game and that whenever Dominic says slippery slope, you get to take a sip of your coffee.

DOM: Oh, I love that.

RAJA: So that we can just, you'll have the coffee gone and in a matter of moments.

DOM: Slippery slope Christians.

RAJA: They get to take a sip of their coffee.

DOM: Drink. Rob, you're next, please a little introduction.

ROB CHARTRAND: And I'm Rob Chartrand. I'm the lead pastor of Crosspoint Church in Edmonton, Alberta. And in the original Greek, Rob is actually Rob. Koine. I'm not sure if you knew that, but I have two daughters, Elisa and Bailey. Yes. Not to be confused with Bailey's Irish Cream, but Bailey from WKRP in Cincinnati. We just liked the name.

DOM: I don't know what that is, but that's cool.

ROB: I feel like I’m dating myself. Am I dating myself? I am one of the senior members.

RAJA: Just remember, turkeys can't fly.

ROB: What?

DOM: I don't know what that means. Milissa, save us.

ROB: Want me to do that intro again?

NATHAN: No, that was gold.

DOM: That was nice.

NATHAN: All right, dynamite. WKRP in Cincinnati, are you kidding me? Where do we go from that?

DOM: Hey, is that a movie?

MILISSA: It was a show. It was a show about a-

RAJA: A radio station in Cincinnati.

MILISSA: A radio station, right?

ROB: You want me to break out into song?

MILISSA EWING: Wow. Alright. I am Milissa Ewing and I am the family pastor at Tenth Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. And since we're all talking about our daughters, I also have two daughters, Ada who's 12 and Claire who is 10.

ROB: Wow. There’s a lot of daughters around here.

MILISSA: A lot of girls.

DOM: A lot of kiddos. I got three boys, so it's a bit different, but you know what? I think what's profound is these conversations that we've been having is going to impact all of them and we have lots to learn. So I just want to dive in right away in this episode and just frame a bit of the conversation is that in this episode we're really going to dig down and think about what it means to be those who learn and unlearn or relearn things for engaging in the future and for engaging in new questions, and like the podcast says in new waters. And I want to begin a little bit differently than our other episodes by just reading a passage of scripture off the top and just maybe making it a handle of sorts. And after I read it, I'll just ask you and see what you think. When you hear this passage, as you're listening with us, you might want to look it up. And the book of Ecclesiastes has all this interesting wisdom and helpful stuff, confusing stuff. And in Ecclesiastes chapter 7 verse 10 it says this, "Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions.” And I thought how beautiful that the Bible reminds us of our human tendency to sometimes want to live in some pure moment in the past that secretly will help us with all the difficulties. And obviously the book of Ecclesiastes is a special genre of writing. So there's a lot of ways of understanding the text. So when you hear this passage or you think of some of us who are teachers or preachers, what's something that maybe stands out right away? "Do not say, ‘Why were the old days better than these?’ For it is not wise to ask such questions."

RAJA: I used to say to people that nostalgia eats the future.

DOM: Hmm. You want to explain that a bit?

RAJA: Well, the idea is that we look to the past and we say to ourselves, if we did it just like that.

DOM: Right.

RAJA: So again, from my context being Pentecostal, my background, tent meetings. We need to bring back tent meetings. Now, whether tent meetings come back or not is irrelevant. It's just that if that's the only paradigm in the past when it was the high point, or the emotional high point of your life that you want to resurrect that to sort of, get some sort of high again that from the present, you may be not looking to the future as far as what the future might hold.

DOM: Sure. That's a great point. Anyone else? Passage ring a bell, Lydia?

LYDIA: I can't stand the term ‘the good old days’. So I'm the youngest in my family by a bit. There's five years between my next sibling and myself. When my parents and my family would talk about the good old days, it always was before Lydia was born and it wasn't like an intentional thing, but constantly like ‘in the good old days when we lived in Ontario’. I was born in Alberta after they moved. So it was always the good old days. I hate that term.

DOM: Do you love me? Do I matter? Do I matter?

LYDIA: The good old days before me!

RAJA: Yeah, it's BL before Lydia and AL after Lydia.

LYDIA: I guess so, yeah.

DOM: And obviously, yeah we have these catch phrases. They don't mean that, right? But the good old days has a-

LYDIA: No, no. So there's that exclusionary of what about the good days that are now?

DOM: Yeah. Yep. Anyone else? Those ideas that kind of the good old days. Anyone else have a good old days moment or angst?

MILISSA: The good old days. It makes me think of when I went and got my Bachelor of Education and the very first talk that the Dean gave was, “you are all here because you need to actually unlearn what you learned about teaching. Everybody thinks that they can be a teacher because everybody went to school. We think we know what it looks like.”

DOM: That's a good point.

MILISSA: The good old days, but you actually have to unlearn that and be retrained properly. It's the same thing about, I think being a pastor. A lot of people think they know what it's like to be a pastor. If you've been in church.

RAJA: That's a great point.

MILISSA: But those of us who are pastors would know that it actually is a lot of different behind the scenes than what we anticipated.

DOM: Yep. Any other thoughts?

ROB: Yeah. I think the operative word in the text is ‘better’. Don't think that the old days are better than the new. However, a contrarian thought is that does not necessarily follow that the old days are irrelevant-

DOM: Yeah, or back-

ROB: Or yeah, that they don't matter. And I think of Paul in first Corinthians 10 he's reminding the church in Corinth about the stuff that went down in Israel so many years ago. And he says, ‘Hey, these things were written down, as a reminder for us in the now, right’. I don't think any of us would say that the past is irrelevant, but, we can't just always be-

DOM: An idolatry of the past.

ROB: Yeah, we can't live in that past and we can't stay there, otherwise we'll miss what God is doing in the now.

DOM: Yeah. And one of the ideas that has helped me, as I think about this as we begin, is that, what's the difference between learning from the past and then trying to live in the past?

RAJA: Or recreate it

DOM: Yeah. Somehow recreate. Yeah. You know, and I often tell people when the earliest Christians were sorting this out, they didn't have a Bible. So even the fact that we have a Bible, we're already beyond the past. They don't have a Bible, they can't read. Most Christians are not reading a Bible or a text like this. They're living out of an experiential narrative of Jesus being alive in their midst. And letters are starting to emerge, right. And Paul's authority will emerge and Peter's authority and all that stuff. So it's a beautiful space and a beautiful inheritance that we have, which is not bad.

ROB: Yeah. But so exciting to be diving into this topic.

DOM: It's great. Yeah. So one of the things I think it might help people who are listening, who maybe are not pastors or church leaders, is to also maybe think about this question. And I'll just give you an example, is that this unlearning and relearning space that we want to think about for this episode is not just something that the church has to do. We actually can pay attention to almost every other sphere industry, school teacher, like Melissa mentioned. And I have a story maybe that will jog your memory for your own context, but Lego announced a few years ago that for the first time, I think the second time in their history, their stock and their sales had gone down from every other year. And one time it was when they realized that although kids were playing with Legos, they weren't as interested in Legos until Lego took the brand of Lego and connected it to movies that young kids were starting to watch. So the Star Wars movies. And they got that. But the most recent shift has been that kids want toys that have some digital connection. So Lego has decided that they're going to introduce a technological aspect to Legos. Alright. And so I thought even companies like Lego have a great longevity and influence and money. They too have to do this unlearning thing. And I think if we can forget that the angst that comes with this question becomes like, oh, as Christians or like the victim narrative versus like no everybody has to do this. We have to learn to do this and how can we learn with the industries around us, the CEOs, companies, leaders, teachers, schools, what this might look like? So any other thoughts when you think of who else has to unlearn?

RAJA: Yes my wife is a nurse and in the medical field.

ROB: So yeah- a great example.

RAJA: You are constantly unlearning, right? Whether you're a surgeon, you have a new technique, whether you're a nurse, this is a new medication. You are constantly unlearning and it's good that you're unlearning cause I don't want a doctor prescribing me 20-year-old eye medication when someone has a newer medication come out with less side effects. So the medical industry is constantly in a learning, unlearning posture.

DOM: Yeah. The curve there. Yep. Anyone else?

ROB: Well, I think it's just represented across so many disciplines in so many industries. The reality that you have to continue to take conferences, go back and take education, continue to upgrade. Yeah. Otherwise you find yourself irrelevant. You find yourself without a job and actually probably might be causing more harm in the industry than good. And it's interesting is that we as pastors, as ministry leaders, we're not immune to this. We ourselves have to be constant learners. I mean there's that old adage that I think we're all very aware of. Leaders are learners, right? And I think as we are forward thinking, there's stuff we have to unlearn and there's stuff that we have to continue to learn, which is I think part of the reason why we're having this conversation today.

DOM: Yeah. Yeah. Nathan, thoughts?

NATHAN: Yeah. You can fool yourself into this illusion of learning if you're always learning from the same stream, right? So I think that's just something important to understand that you're actually not educating yourself if you're feeding yourself the same stuff over and over. So-

DOM: It's not real learning.

NATHAN: I remember when- Yeah. We kept going to leadership conferences in the church, and I remember at some point we're like, this is just different vocabulary that makes it feel like we're learning new things, but we're really not learning anything. We're just learning new words. So we started going to charismatic circles. We started going to more dogmatic places and not just kind of this pragmatic leadership stuff, and there's a bit of a curve there for our leadership and our engagement with people around us. When we started to swim in slightly different streams.

DOM: Was there, Nathan, do you remember a certain characteristic that started to merge in you as you stepped out of that, oh this is safe learning, we kind of already know some of this with different words and this is, it feels like this is real unlearning and learning?

NATHAN: Yeah, it was totally disorienting-

DOM: Yeah okay that’s important.

NATHAN: Because unlearning is always listening to something new, right? You're actually taking it in. So there was, we all probably have this as we mature, but maybe in the case of Lydia and myself, we started to swim in these different streams. As you mature, you naturally probably understand you're not as good a leader as you maybe thought you were.

DOM: It's true.

NATHAN: But then you start to see all these different ways to do it and all these different ways to see it and all the different approaches and all the different metrics and you really aren't quite sure what you're doing anymore.

DOM: Yeah, no, and I think that's a big part of the disorientation. I think it really gets us to the root of, “who do I trust now?” ‘Cause all learning is finding the right people to trust, right? And anyone who learns, even when you get a new job or my experience has been your new pastor and your business leader, your first few months are like, “who can I trust here? Who's going to provide some information that's really going to be helpful?” And so that's why it's easy sometimes to not relearn or unlearn because we kind of have a trusted circle of people like these people are safe.

NATHAN: Right.

DOM: And you learning is actually a new question about how do I learn to trust again in new ways? Lydia were you going to add something about that? Or a thought?

LYDIA: I was just thinking that the whole purpose of education and the whole purpose of the education system in Canada is to create lifelong learners. And so not only to teach kids what they need to know, but to teach them how do they learn and how do they continue to learn as they get older. And so it should not be any different for us in the church to say we need to continue to learn and lean into our faith and continue to develop that way.

DOM: And, if you're listening to this podcast, I mean, we're hoping that you do some of that as you listen with us, that you're unlearning and learning and our hope and our prayers, even as we've thought about these topics has been to help stir in you, hopefully inspire you to want to unlearn and relearn. So as part of the episodes, many of you know this, we've done something a little bit different. We get rid of the smartest people at the table. And so for this episode-

NATHAN: A strategy.

DOM: So for this episode, so we can pretend like we're smart. So the women are actually stepping away from the conversation for this episode, and they'll be back in a little while to just correct us boys with all of our ideas. So see you ladies.

MILISSA: See you later.

ROB: We'll miss you.

[Interlude]

DOM: Well, this is a topic that for many people will bring out some of the fears, anxieties around how we think differently about learning. I think it's good to begin to just feel the weight of this question with a lot of the things that Jesus did that caused controversy around him saying, I think of phrases like, ‘you've heard it been said, but I say to you.’ I mean this is kind of the Jesus t-shirt, the Twitter handle for Jesus and how people would have heard that as a type of, there was some learning there and now you're to have to learn to think about this in a deeper way. And so one of the things that has helped me as we enter this conversation as Christians, I think what's unique or different from kind of maybe other spheres of unlearning is that if you work for Lego or for Apple or for any industry or you're a business leader and you're listening to this, you know that there's some things that you can unlearn and just say, we used to do this in the past, we're not doing any of it anymore, we're just going to throw it all away. That's one thing that we can't do. To be a Christian is not to be able to just throw away everything and start new. We actually have some things that we have to work through. Like these things we must hold onto. So Rob, you're going to-

ROB: I was just going to say, yeah there's some tenants and some beliefs of who we are. That's not a zero sum game. Right?

DOM: Like you start from scratch.

ROB: You think it of some technologies and some things that businesses and companies are doing. You know, GE electric is putting out these products and other products and they can get rid of them. It's a zero sum game. They're better off without them. That's not necessarily so for us. So the stakes are higher and that maybe contributes to the anxiety that a lot of people face.

DOM: Yeah. And we're in a sense, we actually are the ones that have to model real learning and unlearning within a tighter space versus learning and ditching all the old stuff and starting new, right. That's not unlearning and learning. It's kind of like just changing everything. Yeah. So I think about that and how Jesus maybe does leave us a bit of a legacy on how he was doing that. And one of the things that might be helpful for people listening who might feel those anxieties is to think about how Jesus talks about the wineskin imagery, right? That he uses, which is beautiful. There was old wineskins and they represent the great story of Israel and all the good stuff. And now don't try to put the new wineskin- the new wine in a new wineskin or into the old one cause it'll break. And so Jesus wasn't saying that the old wineskin was bad, it was just that it had itss place and it had its time. It was essential and it was from God. Right. So what are some things that as you think about in our churches or even in, in culture that had their time or a church like this mattered and it was beautiful, but we've moved on with it and it's been okay. Anything come to mind?

ROB: Slide projectors. You know the screen?

DOM: Yeah. When it started-

ROB: Remember that kid that was always up there couldn't move that-

DOM: ‘Cause it was up was down, down was up.

RAJA: And the overhead was backwards.

NATHAN: That was super hard though. I had to do that once. And they never asked me again. It is ridiculously complex.

ROB: Under pressure. Everyone's looking at you.

DOM: That's a funny one. Yeah. Anything else? More tense? We got rid of that. We don't use that anymore.

NATHAN: It still kind of hurts. Still kind of stings. So you're looking for things like church specific or just culturally in general?

DOM: Yeah, but church specific that we were actually more comfortable letting go of or like, hey, we used to do that and nobody's crying, ‘bring back the overhead projector!’

NATHAN: Right. Nobody's missing the corny church dramas anymore. I don't think that's really something that-

DOM: Maybe some people still do them?

NATHAN: Or we're worried about.

ROB: Once a year I bust out a mime. To ‘Watch the Lamb.’

NATHAN: It's called ‘Wash the Lamb’?

ROB: ‘Watch the Lamb.’

NATHAN: Oh, ‘Watch the Lamb.’

ROB: Yeah.

NATHAN: I'd like to see wash the lamb. That's a-

DOM: Rob, do you have a website? We can go and try?

ROB: Mime is never going to die. Mime will be around forever.

DOM: Wow, that's, that's beautiful.

NATHAN: So they're not letting go mime in your church?

ROB: No.

NATHAN: No, not on your watch.

ROB: It's a hit.

RAJA: One thing I think that... I was actually thinking about this, that this might be, I don't know, controversial, but Sunday evening services.

DOM: Mm-hmm (affirmative) Yeah it's true. It's still very controversial.

RAJA: Absolutely right. So I remember attending church Sunday morning, Sunday evening. Yeah. We went to Sunday evening service.

ROB: But new churches don't still do Sunday evening service.

DOM: No no. They canceled them. It could have felt like-

ROB: Oh I remember those days. Yeah. I've worked in churches where-

RAJA: The thing is though is that now because of how busy people are and how we've just have gone beyond that, Sunday services don't exist anymore. And I think for the most part no one's saying we have to bring them back.

ROB: But in their day-

RAJA: Yeah.

ROB: There was a great rationale and a good reason for it. It was the evangelism service or the revival service-

DOM: Made sense.

ROB: And in an era where that was super, God was doing something in a new way. They were relevant.

RAJA: Yeah, absolutely.

DOM: Yeah. And learning to celebrate those moments is a big part of this piece. I think the way you really can learn into the future or facing into the future is to say, hey, let's honour some of these things that were helpful. Cause we all know in the next few years all these ideas that we think are really helpful. Our kids. And the next generation will listen to this. And they're like, that was ridiculous. Why did you guys do that? Yeah. So we're engaged in some of that. I find it's interesting that Jesus, the great leader of Christianity, the churches, voice for how we make sense of things was helping people do this. And in a sense, the people who follow Jesus were unlearning and relearning. They were learning to reread the story of Israel now through the lens of who he was, all that stuff. And yet we, who should be great examples of this struggle with it, even the most sometimes in our churches, right? Church splits happen over this stuff. Real tensions on staff, on what should be kept or not kept. So as we move in this direction, one of the words that we've talked about in the other podcasts is this idea of renewal. So that's one, R word, if you're listening. The other word is revival. The other, R word. And so one of the things I want to push into this dialogue is the idea of reforming. Because the churches, at least in the Protestant tradition especially, but even in the Roman Catholic tradition or the Orthodox tradition is true, I think, is that the church is the community that's always reforming. So how do we embrace this idea that everybody agrees on? We should be always reforming by saying, the way we reform is by learning and unlearning new things.

DOM: So as leaders, when you think about that, what are the things we either have to do, or have to think about doing soon to help people live in this great legacy that we have, right? And then out of that place, there was a sense that this reformation that you're seeing now is not a one time thing. It's something that the church, throughout the ages moving forward, is going to have to return to. And the reforming was an intersection between the scriptures, the moving of the Spirit, the community of people and the changing world around them.

RAJA: Yeah. You know, I think Rob already said really well earlier in the podcast when he said that, "It's not a zero sum game." So the question I'm always faced with because our church tends to skew very young is, "What are the tools we use to know what we're meant to leave behind and what we're supposed to take with us?" Right? And the problem is sometimes we get it wrong.

DOM: Or we don't agree.

RAJA: Right. And so we say... I always make this joke at our church that people today don't use highlighters for the Bible, they use Sharpies to get rid of stuff they don't like. Just because people look at The Old Testament like, "Oh! God's so angry and so bloodthirsty, therefore I'm going to get rid of this." Or, "I don't like this." Or, "I'm uncomfortable with the supernatural part of the Holy Spirit, so I'm going to get..." Whatever it would be, whatever our paradigm, whatever our filter is, we look at it. One of the things we need to do, one of the things we haven't done effectively is what tools do we use... The Bible says like this is what was okay for then and to celebrate like you've said. But we don't need to continue doing it and we don't need to... We need to continue moving forward in this direction.

DOM: Yep. And I just think of examples in the Bible where people said, "Hey, are we just going to throw everything out?" Because Jesus, he's the Messiah or not everything, but that circumcision thing might change and people would've been like, "What? We're not changing that." We talked at another...

RAJA: Yeah. Acts chapter 15, The Council of Jerusalem. It's an amazing time where the church did reform. At that point in time, yeah.

DOM: Are you saying Moses was wrong? Can you imagine? Or he wasn't wrong, but it was just for that season and-

RAJA: Applicable for these people. And you can still do it if you want to, but it's not salvific and it's not covenantal, it's not any of that.

ROB: Yeah. And I guess there are different layers to reformation and different degrees. So in my own personal context, my own church context, it might seem like a very superficial layer, but this last year we inherited a building. Prior to that, we were eight years as a pop-up church. Every Sunday, set up, tear down and whatnot. And now we're in a locked in a facility, geographical footprint, in a neighborhood. We know we're going to be here for quite a long time.

DOM: So you're experiencing some of that now.

ROB: So we've had to reform around that, right? As the result of the environment. So part of that is reforming the how, the very pragmatic stuff, the rhythms and all that. Part of it is always reforming our belief systems too and what we think and just testing those as well. So that’s just to say there are different layers to reformation that happened in our experience.

NATHAN: I wonder if it usually comes out of experience because reforming is hard work. So you have to have a new sort of experience perhaps to give you enough courage to reform. So let's talk about something like the church's perspective on sexuality.

DOM: Sure.

NATHAN: So we're-

DOM: Pick an easy thing.

NATHAN: Yeah, exactly. So most of us are part of the denomination that draws pretty clear lines about homosexuality and we all are approaching those lines with varying degrees which come from different perspectives and everybody is figuring it out. And even, by the way I'm dancing around talking about it just sort of talks about-

DOM: It's a reflection of that.

NATHAN: ... How difficult it is. So I'd said earlier that we started to go to these different conferences. And part of it was a deep hunger I had to experience the Spirit in a physical way. Wanted to actually have a physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit in my-

DOM: To see it personally or to see it in other people?

NATHAN: In me. I was getting ticked off of other people getting... I was like the designated driver, right? Taking everybody home after they got to have their spiritual experiences. So we go to... This is the dogmatic where we're going though. It's not the charismatics. We went to Toronto, we went to Bethel and now we're going to the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis. So you've got Brueggemann, you've got this crew there, and we're in this cathedral that's empty most of the time except it's packed for the festival. This woman's preaching and I'm right into it and I'm filling up my notebook and I'm starting to actually get this physical joy, this excitement, this lightness and one of the people I was with more frequently has those experiences. And I'm like, "Hey, do you feel what I'm feeling?" And I'm getting all excited because this is like my awakening, right?

DOM: In this liturgical space.

NATHAN: In this liturgical place. So I'm like, "Oh, this is so crazy."

ROB: Can that happen there?

NATHAN: Yeah... God is so good. And then, we all clap. I'm the first to my feet, which if you know me, that's like the one time that's happened. And so I'm up and clapping. And then she says, "Thank you all and also say thanks to my partner of 30 years, Sharon for letting me be here with you all today." I was like, "Oh wow, how about that?" So, I come from this tradition, in this denomination and then suddenly there's this encounter that totally blindsided me and I'm going to have to reform something. I don't know what that is. And reformation is not the same as maybe like a lightning bolt but that to me is an experience that will have to leave to some sort of reformation.

ROB: Yeah. You got to resolve that dissonance.

DOM: And I think one of the most powerful things that we're going to have to learn is how do we do that as individuals before we call a community to do that with us, right? Because there's the saying, "You can't take people where you haven't been." So they need to see in you some of this hard work before they say, "Okay, will you help us, as we think through this and as we go through this?"

ROB: Yeah.

DOM: And that's one of the things I think about it.

ROB: So much of reformation, I think we... In our thinking, in our theology, in our encounter with God and all of that reformation. I think some listeners right now, even just hearing what Nathan is talking about-

DOM: Will feel some of that.

ROB: ... Will feel the tension of that and I think real reformation, the great reformation is something that goes beyond just these surface changes. Something that goes beyond just the external how to's, and as a pastor, I think it's very easy for me to just go to silver bullets. And if I could just tweak this, if I could just do this, if I could just build this platform, if I could just get a smoke machine, just get me a smoke machine on Sunday morning. But I think back to the Protestant Reformation.

DOM: So different, yeah.

ROB: We might go back and say, "Oh, it was the printing press. It was Gutenberg. It was this technological advancement that it happened."

DOM: That pushed it forward.

ROB: Listen, there was a hundred plus years of stuff going on beneath the surface, that was waiting. And then there's this watershed moment, there's Luther and all of those things, right? But it was stuff happening beneath the surface. And, when I think about reformation is I think a lot of times we're fearful of questioning our assumptions. That's a scary place to go.

DOM: It is, yeah.

ROB: But for true reformation to happen in some ways we've got to be okay with doing that, but we're afraid to do that. I mean, I'll admit, I'm afraid to do that. I'm afraid to... I'm more comfortable asking, "How to?" Rather than, "Why to?" But if we really hold our values to be true, if we really hold things to be true and we think this, "I'm on the more conservative side with human sexuality and whatnot." You bringing that up and having that question there, I think it's good to go and look at my assumptions behind what I believe and how I believe, because it's only going to sharpen what I think or it's going to challenge what I think. And that's not a bad thing. But in our conservative evangelical context, we're afraid to question our assumptions.

RAJA: And there's two points to that, right? The first thing that with reformation of any kind, there's always agitation. So reformation is a direct response to some sort of agitation.

DOM: That's good.

RAJA: Right? And the agitation of the protestant reformation was Sola Scriptura, right? And Martin Luther, he gets a lot of the credit, but the guys like Jan Hus behind him, these are-

DOM: Like are years before.

RAJA: Right, yeah. Like people who are asking questions.

DOM: Luther's the guy in the poster but there’s a lot of...

RAJA: He's the guy with the Twitter feed that said it for everybody else, right? So, the Wittenburg Door, right? So he's the guy-

DOM: And to the Roman Catholics listening, the Catholic church has thinkers. Luther's in the Catholic church calling for a type of reform. They kind of will disagree on how it should work itself out. And Luther will win that one.

RAJA: Yeah. Right. But the thing is with agitation though, sometimes your agitation is part of the reformation. But it also might be part of the clarification of why you believe what you believe. And I think a lot of the learning and unlearning that we're doing today is coming back to the "Why?" And Rob, what you just said there. We experience things, we encounter things and unless we have the why's behind what we believe in and where we can actually have the process of saying, "This is the reason I believe this. And I'm open to a different perspective. I'm open to hear people, I'm open to a dialogue”, but some things are immovable and some things are transforming. So reformation is agitation and agitation can either be good or bad, but it's always clarifying. It's always this moment of saying, "Okay, we've missed this. We've gone off track." Or, "Actually this track is good because this is the reason why."

DOM: Yeah. And then, that's one of the things I often think about, because I spent years studying the reformation and the early church is that, when reformation is taking root, you don't really know it. Like Luther's not thinking, "I can't wait to change the church." And the world-

ROB: Every time he hit that nail he was thinking, "I can't wait to see what's next."

DOM: Yeah. The dialogue just kind of happened. He's not really thinking of those ideas. And so, what I think is really beautiful about that is how do you instill in yourself and in people a desire to want things to change because of the love for the church versus reforming for the love of a crowd? Because today, reformation will sell. You can set up a website, get people liking you, sell a lot of books.

ROB: Yeah. Polarization's a hot item.

DOM: Yeah, just create something. And Luther is not doing any of that. He's like, "I love the church. I love the scriptures as I read them. I love being a monk. I love all these things. But it seems that the God is calling the church to a deeper place, both of repentance of reformation, all those things. Is anybody with me?" And some people are like, "We are with you, but maybe we have to slow this down." All these questions are working themselves, right? And so, I try to think about that. Maybe one of the things we need to be praying for in this unlearning space is God to give us a deeper love for your church so that we create spaces for renewal and reform to happen over these next few years. That's not really about whether the crowd gets that because some of the steps of reforming have to happen before people even see it as important.

ROB: And a deeper love for his church. Not our perfect vision of the church or how we should see it and then should be it.

RAJA: Again Rob, I'm not to be your cheerleader today-

DOM: You’re on fire, Rob.

RAJA: ... but reformation should be just more of a clarification of Jesus, right? It should be drawing us more-

DOM: The Trinity.

ROB: ... Trinitarian theology, right? To just make Dom happy over there.

DOM: The Bible happy.

RAJA: Yeah. Slippery slope. And if you're listening, take a drink of your coffee. So the idea is that a reformation is a clarification of the character nature of God and drawing us near and is close to that, right? I think a lot of the reformation we experience today, and the reformation as reforming is-

DOM: Might be one-dimensional, you think or?

RAJA: It's more methodology.

DOM: Sure.

RAJA: Right? It's not necessarily theological, in a sense of like a really good foundation. It hasn't caught on to other things.

DOM: We are just changing some systems.

RAJA: Yeah. Methodological. But you're right though, there needs to be a reformation. And let's go back to what we talked about in the other podcast, Renewal and Revival, right? I’m saying, "Okay, what have we missed out on the Spirit's work in our lives?" Right? Nathan was saying such a great thing and it's in a Pentecostal, Dom. You, Rob and I come back from this background, right? But Nathan was saying that I want to experience this for myself. And I love the analogy of the designated driver. I don't want to hear you all talking about the great experiences, I want to experience it. And that's absolutely a part of our reforming of the openness to the Spirit, the openness to what He has to do in our lives. And so I think this is... We have to talk about like the layers of reforming, right? Methodology, theological, supernatural whatever it would be.

DOM: Yeah. And one of the hiccups I think to some of this important work has to do with the long legacy that we all live in. It's the word that we live in, which is denominational structures, right? You sign off on all the things you believe and now you have to live in that space. And years ago, I read a quote that just really has haunted me almost. And the quote is, "Smart people change their minds." And I thought, "Wow! It's true." If you're smart, you'll pay attention to what's going on and you might just change your mind. And over time, I thought I grew up learning about this. I don't know if it's the same for you guys that a real faithful Christian never changes their mind. That's how you know you're really faithful. So how do we figure out... And maybe wisdom is knowing when or how to change your mind.

NATHAN: Let's just recap what you said because I think there's so much there. You've talked about agitation as a precursor to reformation, but most of the time we shy away from agitation. It pushes us back to that place where we can get comfortable.

DOM: Let’s do what we have always done.

NATHAN: Yeah, exactly. So it is a necessary precursor but doesn't necessarily push you in the direction of going, right? You interpret that often as a bad thing. But your whole structure, if you grew up in a Christian church is largely set up that way because the by-laws or the statements of faith, it's all set up so that it minimizes disruption and minimizes agitation. So the prevailing church, so to speak, the constantly reforming church is actually structuring itself to make that incredibly difficult because the people that are going to be the agitators aren't going to be the central ones who have the voice. Those are going to be the people who can go over the fine print, make sure they get enough heads in the room nodding. So the reformation rhetoric, it’s good rhetoric, but it's very, very difficult to do that without being seen as a rebel and not a reformer.

DOM: That’s well said.

DOM: Let me give you a story that I think about often. And I'm going to ask you to give me a way of what this might look like in the church. Because I don't know what it looks like in the church, but I'll tell you an idea. Is that years ago Google, who, we could say with Apple or maybe some other innovative companies is in the top most innovative companies in the world. They are some other philosophy and vision is changing everything, right? So a few years ago, they decided that they're not edgy enough, they're not creative enough, they're not on the... Just imagine being in that boardroom meeting where it's like, "We're not on the edge anymore." Right? So they decide they're going to invent a new company called Alphabet. Alphabet becomes the arm of Google that is going to be the crazy innovative side. And when it began, one of the earliest visions for Alphabet was to eliminate death, right? I'm like, "That's amazing!" Right? So you're just thinking... Even companies are thinking once structures start to get formed, we naturally... We don't want to implode the structure, but we're going to create something on that like an incubation space for new thinking to happen, break stuff. Try whatever, right? What might that look like in the church? What might it look like for denominations? Not only the Alliance, but a number, to create an Alphabet. And just say, just go at it. Like, "Listen, read, bring stuff to us." Can we ever get there? Can reforming be about that?

ROB: The problem with churches is we moved to production too quickly.

DOM: Yeah, we don't have to implode-

ROB: Pastor goes to a conference, he comes back and he's got to change everything because he's got a new idea, right? Rather than beta testing and-

DOM: Living in the space, putting-

ROB: Yeah. Let people try it and see, give it time.

NATHAN: It's pretty hard to create that arm that's anything other than method. So let the kids free to play the music louder and to have their service at a different time. And they're not going to have a building and they're going to meet in a pub and they're going to... That's all how it's going to happen. But to knock down some conservative, theological boundaries of the church and say, "Let's actually experiment with this, see if some fruit comes out of that." That would be-

DOM: Would you agree with this Nate? That may be the issue is not that we can create like an Alphabet type thing. Is that right away, most of us who are leaders are thinking, no matter how creative you are, we don't know how to... If it's doctrinal, we think right away... Like how would we ever interject this conversation into the bigger family, the church, then with-

NATHAN: That's the trouble.

ROB: I think you're exactly right. I mean it would be very difficult to do because there are maybe some things we don't want to mess with. How far do you go on that?

DOM: Well, let me give you an example. Well, I'll give you a Biblical example, right? We have a passage in scripture that says, "There's nothing new under the sun." We love- people love that passage, right? There are people that they hear any change as slippery slope, right?

RAJA: Take a drink of coffee.

DOM: Because there's nothing new under the sun, what has been will always be. Phrases for why, nothing changes, right? And then the incarnation happens. Was that new under the sun? You better believe it, the resurrection happens. Was that new under the sun?

ROB: And part of the problem is just how we deal with wisdom literature and it's not a-

DOM: Right, exactly. But people read those texts and they make them mean, God's never going to stir us to realize. He's going to surprise us maybe in new ways and we're going to need-

RAJA: But let me push back on that though. A resurrection was new in the actual embodiment of it, but it was prophesied, right? That why the Pharisees’ has this big debate was the resurrection, right?

DOM: But it never happened.

RAJA: Right? No, but God did give the hint, God did say that this was going to be something that for the reforming of creation, this was going to be the tool, the lever he was going to use. Jesus was a first. Of course, right? But it wasn't like out of the blue, there was no... In the Old Testament it was talked about, it was spoken about. And I just want to come back for a second there about Google, I think it was called Google X.

DOM: The Alphabet thing or maybe, yeah. I don't know.

RAJA: And so, what I love about that is the guy who did that gave a Ted talk and he said that, "Our company, our entire goal is to figure out how to fail better." Right? It's like, "Oh, okay, great." But he said that, "Google gave us..." And he listed this astronomical amount of money. And so, one of the things I think the reason why the church has had a hard time of exploring new ways is because we operate under very razor-thin margins, right? We are lucky to have enough volunteers to fill out a schedule or have enough musicians or have enough budget.

DOM: For the practices of the way we do-

ROB: For creative space and time.

RAJA: Right. And so for any of these extra areas that we want to invest in, that takes away from what we're barely making for our budgets. And so you need that access to be able to say, "Hey, can we give this group of people X amount of dollars or space or time or whatever?"

DOM: Yeah, and I would argue that we probably would not have the Alliance as a denomination if A. B. Simpson did not somehow see himself as someone creating like an Alphabet. Like, I'm going to move out here and God is stirring something in me and I don't even know what this looks like. And all of a sudden all these other people from other families of churches join him. One, two, start to reach foreigners, weird Italians. Thank you, A. B. Simpson. So the whole idea is that right now I have a feeling that very few denominations and I'll just speak for the Alliance, are cultivating the kind of space where new A. B. Simpsons are going to come from. Would you agree or disagree? Like if we needed a new A. B. Simpson, which is how pioneering leaders emerge that start things and push things forward. In our spaces, are we cultivating the thinking, the visionary leadership, the resourcing to see these kinds of new leaders emerge?

RAJA: So I think that's a great question. Not just A. B. Simpson, but the other ones but, I think what the reformation reforming is teaching us that A. B. Simpsons are operating, are emerging outside of our spaces.

DOM: But A. B. Simpson was very wise to not do that. He's just saying, I'm a son of the church. Like I'm not trying to create this rogue thing that's going to bash the church. I'm like, I'm going to do this new thing. And at some point he's going to realize, thankfully, God will use him as one of the key voices to help all denominations in their missionaries and in every season, he's kind of the missionary guru at the time. And then a family of churches will emerge, which is called the Alliance, right? So I think when people hear it as outside, it sounds revolutionary. It sounds like, "I'm a rogue person. You don't get me, God speaks to me." A.B. Simpson was too wise for that. He was just saying, "No, no, no. I'm a son of this church, but let me go live here and work some of this out because God is doing something that we've never maybe seen." So how do we cultivate spaces of learning and unlearning, which will allow a new A.B. Simpson? I mean it could be an A.B. Simpsonette. I'm just saying. I don't want to be-

NATHAN: The Simpsonettes, that was his backup band.

DOM: Simpsonettes.

RAJA: Amy and the Simpsonettes. We are losing our credentials-

DOM: I don’t want to be male exclusive. I told you the smart people are not here right now.

NATHAN: They dance across the stage you Simpsonettes, kick those legs out. Give it up for the Simpsonettes, everybody. The Simpsonettes.

DOM: Rob, you need to save me out of the Simpsonettes.

ROB: I'll save you from the Simpsonettes. You know Dom, I’ll quote Alan Hirsch on this one. And he would say that, "Innovation never happens at the center of ecclesial power." If history is demonstrated that it always happens at the fringes, right?

DOM: But it'll still needs ecclesial structure.

ROB: Yeah. And it actually never happens necessarily in abundance. It actually happens in scarcity. Where you have to be creative, you have to be innovative.

DOM: And then we sometimes want to make it an abundance thing. Is that the idea?

ROB: Well, we just assume we throw money at something and we form a committee at central office or whatever and that something good is going to happen, but that's not where the greatest innovations are actually taking place. That's not where the bright spots are. The bright spots are these places where ... I remember being in Africa years ago, I served on a national board for ... an international board for a pretty big charity and they were over there, and their organization was a disability organization and they had to figure out, how do we create wheelchairs for persons of disability in Africa? And you've got to think these are rural African villages, mud huts. The roads are rocky and rough and whatnot, and the solution for America or North America was just, we'll send them some great wheelchairs. Those wheelchairs didn't last a week where they were. Well, what happened was the Africans just created their own, out of wood with their bare hands. They looked at the framework and they said, "Okay, we've got to innovate. We've got to create our own version of it." They were more durable, they were easier to manufacture and then employed local people to help put these things together. Right? The innovation didn't happen in the central office in North America, it happened right out there at the fringes. And I think if we can see and observe what local churches are doing, I think we had a great example here. We're talking to Nathan and to Lydia about what they're doing in their local Christian school. Not to say that we can actually cookie-cutter and replicate that. But we can learn from that, we can learn from that bright spot and say, "Okay, here's an innovation. Here's something that could happen."

DOM: What makes this ... and I love that and I agree. I think what makes this more challenging for us is that at some point the whole church, the universal ecumenical church, how diverse we are, whatever, needs to say, "Hey, for this, we're going to agree together as we go forward." This is still a somewhat sectarian view of the church. We're just work it out there, you work it out there, everybody works it out there. But I think more and more the world is looking at all Christians and then saying for some of these issues that are more maybe doctrinal or more complicated and touching denominational distinctive, we need a more united like John 14 to 17 framework where Jesus is praying and saying, "Guys, there's going to be moments in history where I'm going to dump some stuff on you guys and you're going to need to be so united on this stuff together for the world to see you as my disciples." Those pieces ... Because I'm not disagreeing with you. That's beautiful. But it's a little bit of a ... not a cop out, but it's like, "What happens at the fringes? People are learning it. The locals are going to do it. Agreed."

ROB: So how do we do that with discernment? I mean, how do we do that without this, to quote you- “Slippery slope”.

RAJA: Take a drink.

ROB: Fears. And just embracing sheer relativism, anything goes. It's the wild west and thought and all of that. How do we discern that?

DOM: Well, I think one is we realize we're not doing it alone, so I don't get to just decide what we're doing. We do it together in community. And not in community, just us. In community with the global church, global voices. I mean one of the most beautiful things that's happened over the past few years is more and more African and Asian theologians are writing and giving us ... I mean just think about how beautiful it's been to have the theologians who are ... have a refugee story reread the Christmas story and realize Jesus was a refugee in the Christmas story. I'm like, "Wow, I would have never connected all of those pieces, right? So one, there's the global voice of the church and because of the internet, the global voice of the churches here. It's not like we have to go everywhere. We can hear it. Two is I think just that come to mind right away, how do we do this to your question, Rob, without slippery sloping fears that emerge, is one is our DNA as Christians is to have done this from the beginning. Jesus was doing this when he called his disciples to say, "You're going to go into the whole world and make disciples. You don't know what the world looks like. You don't like some of those people in the whole world. You don't know how the Roman empire is going to kill you." It's in our DNA to have to do this. This is what makes us Christians. To not do this is actually to violate the identity of what it means to be Christian. And the other thing I would say is that when we reform and when we unlearn, you might disagree with this, but I really feel strongly about this and I think other people might as well, is that there are moments in our history that have a special authority in this conversation. And across the board if you're Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, we would say that the early church is the golden age of how we work through some of this stuff. There's something about how the early church worked this out in the first 400 years, right? Where the creeds emerged. That is a bit of an anchoring point, we're not just picking a random Azusa street, although I love Pentecostals in Azusa. We're not picking a random time in history, we're going to live back into this space of a golden time where the doctrinal formation of the church was taking shape and we're going to listen with a new lens there with a global church, right? Now that's hard to do, but I think that's some of the pieces. I would add more, but those are just some of-

ROB: What would you guys add to that? I mean ...

DOM: Yeah, there's maybe a lot more, but those come to mind.

NATHAN: Well, I'm thinking there's probably people listening that are running churches or they're thinking about at this level, but probably a lot of people listening are just like, "Okay." But personally devotionally in my engagement with my local church, how do I reform personally? Because certainly there has to be a nucleus of people who God is doing new things in their lives or they're personally experiencing agitation. And I'm sure you guys have that person in your church who you don't want to think about them when you're preaching the sermon, but you can't help it. Right? And you're thinking this is actually going to be the one that helps them. And you just ... And then you check your phone at 12:05, but always a bad idea. But shortly after the ... and you've seen that this person has in fact emailed you from their phone during the sermon and you're like, "Yes!" But no, imagine that they have not really transformed or reformed from this. In fact, they are very agitated, but they're withdrawing. And I think that the personal application out of a lot of this is in those places where you're agitated. That's like your psychological fringe. So to take the ... there's a fringe moment. There's an agitation moment for Peter when he's having a dream.

DOM: Yeah. It's a great story.

NATHAN: And he smells the stuff he smelled before and maybe he likes the smell, but he can't eat it. And then then God very clearly says, "Yes you can and should and do."

DOM: And go see Cornelius.

NATHAN: And what does he say in that moment of agitation? "No Lord." I can't remember who said it, but it's clever. You can't say ‘no’ and ‘Lord’, they disqualify.

RAJA: That is clever.

NATHAN: One of them has to give.

DOM: It's true.

NATHAN: So eventually, because Jesus is his Lord, he says, "Yes Lord." However reluctantly. And he lives in it long enough for the initial impression to either be validated, which it is or-

DOM: Tossed out in a sense.

NATHAN: Or yeah. It was just indigestion.

DOM: Yeah, it's good.

NATHAN: So my encouragement personally for people, is in that place of agitation, No mid-sermon emails or quick no’s because that actually might be the place where there's going to be tremendous fruit for you. As in the case of Peter was for all of us, when God prompts you in a certain way and you're agitated and your whole reflex is to interpret that agitation as something's wrong. But that thing that's wrong might be inside of that inside of you.

ROB: Or getting defensive.

NATHAN: Yeah. Defensive.

DOM: And I would say it's the leaders who can in a mature way navigate that. That makes Peter trustworthy with the role he's going to play as the first great voice. I mean that's the work of maturity though. That's beautiful in Peter.

NATHAN: Rob, do you think of that moment for you? Reform or a personal crises moment like that?

ROB: Yeah, I can think of lots. I guess what I'm trying to wrestle with is what's the framework that I would use to process those kind of changes. And I could go two ways, but let me just go one way, is, so I'm thinking personally, my personal convictions, my theology, my belief about God, on certain issues. And-

DOM: And that wanting to change?

ROB: And having wrestles-

DOM: That’s changed over the years?

ROB: I can go way back to a number of years ago. And I mean the first Bible college I went to was highly Calvinist in its belief and I was a baby Christian. I was just two years into the journey.

DOM: Drank in that juice.

ROB: I drank it up and I-

DOM: “Jesus was a Calvanist!”

ROB: Yeah. And not just anyone who's from a Calvinist tradition, I think I highly respect it, I highly respect the thinking at that time, but it's all I knew and the movement that I was part of, it was, you was fearful of questioning that and thinking through that. So I think I did intuitively back then, but I've ... I found it a helpful framework now, but I go back to something called Wesley's Quadrilateral.

DOM: It's so helpful.

ROB: And it's so helpful for discerning-

DOM: I shared it with my church.

ROB: And he looks at for windows for listeners who maybe aren't aware of-

DOM: Four lenses.

ROB: John Wesley, four lenses. The first one is scripture. And I think we love scripture, we live on scripture and we think that's so important.

DOM: Our decisions have to live under the authority of scripture.

ROB: It has to. Yeah, the under the authority of scripture. So I'm not low Bible. I'm high Bible kind of guy. The second one is reason. God has given us mental faculties. We need to understand these things. Yeah.

DOM: And he's renewing our mind.

ROB: Yeah. The third one is experience, right? Because experience is so incredibly important. I mean, how does this work out in the real world?

DOM: The changing world.

ROB: At the end of the day. Yeah. And then the fourth one, which I think this is the one we're a little bit more nervous about, as evangelicals is tradition. Right? And looking at the-

DOM: So I tell people how tradition is history, it makes a little less nervous.

ROB: Yeah. And tradition not to be confused with traditionalism. Right? Traditionalism is the dead faith. Right?

DOM: Yeah. And the tradition is the living faith of the dead.

ROB: Living dead, living faith of the dead. Yeah. So I mean those things, so if I go back to my Calvinism-Arminian thing, I mean for me, I really had to read the scripture. I really had to look at it. And second, I had to reason this thing through and as a philosophy student, and there were some things where it just ... A couldn't equal B for me. In my own personal experience I had to wrestle this out. What did this mean? You know, what was I going to be a hyper-Calvinist? And just assume that everyone's going to ... And then finally just looking at it through tradition. Is there strong tradition within the Christian Church going all the way back to the early church.

DOM: ll, and I told people example of the fact that we worship on Sunday, I mean nobody in the Bible's worshiping on Sunday. Yeah. That's a tradition of the church we worship on Sunday because the resurrection will reorient how Christians will worship. So there's an example of tradition.

ROB: Yeah. And so at the end of the day, I'm not trying to get any side on this, but at the end of the day-

DOM: It's a beautiful quadrilateral-

ROB: I had to wrestle it down and I needed a framework. And I think a lot of those who are listening, it's helpful to have a framework.

DOM: Yeah, you can look it up for… Wesley’s Quadrilateral.

NATHAN: I did one helpful thing to Wesley’s Quadrilateral, somebody has added it before, this is not my addition is the Holy Spirit. Informing all four of them. But my own personal experiences in different seasons in my life, the Holy Spirit has weighted one of those more than the other. Has weighted an experience or made me pay more attention to tradition or highlighted a part of Scripture. So just from personal experience that ... Because you can be at a stalemate with these, and the Spirit tests it.

DOM: Because almost the Spirit's in the middle kind of the-

NATHAN: Yeah. The Spirit’s-

DOM: It's a good point.

NATHAN: Gives the decisive vote to-

ROB: And you're not minimizing the importance of Scripture. You're just saying in that moment.

RAJA: Yeah. And you say that too, you highlight it. A funny start with a Wesley Quadrilateral. I spoke at the University of Guelph to their Power to Change group, and I taught on this topic because they gave me the thing and like, "How do we interpret the Bible?" This young guy comes up to me afterwards, he's an engineering student, he goes, "Can I use that?" I'm like, "Yeah, that was a point actually."

ROB: No, I have copyrighted it.

DOM: Wesley gave us this thing.

RAJA: Exactly. There's no copyright on it. Go ahead.

DOM: So just to end with a personal note of a reforming in my own life that's really led to shaping a lot of our church and a lot of how I think now is, I was wanting to pursue some graduate studies. And the first school I went to in Montreal looked at my transcript and said, "This is from a Bible college?" And they're like, "Well, we don't really recognize any of this accreditation." So I cried. And so I'm like, "They took my money, like they took my real money." But they were like, "Sorry." So I went to another university, Concordia Alumni. So I went to Concordia and I said, "Hey, I would love to do my master's here." I went to this Bible college, I want to study history. And the person who interviewed me was a lady, her name is Pamela Bright, and she was a Roman Catholic. And she asked me where I learned at Bible college and I said, "I went to a Pentecostal Bible college." And she says, "Wow! So do you speak in tongues? Do you understand the renewal of the church?" All these things. And in my head I'm like, "Catholics, you're not supposed to know this." She's like, "That's beautiful." And then she said to me, that really blew my mind. She says, "We'd love to have you. There's so much we can learn from what you learned in our Catholic tradition and with our Catholic students." I was like, "What?" And I remember that it created such a trust thing that now I had all these preconceived ideas of what Catholics are like, they have a weird doctrine, which wasn't really worked out at all. It was just somebody said it to me and I read it on some sketchy blog at the time when they were still popular. And then I started to learn with her. So I became her TA. She ended up supervising my research and she just transformed my whole world. And so much was this reforming but not alone with a person who also said, "Hey, as you're going to be reformed, we're also being reformed by you being here." And it was this beautiful space and she ended up passing away near the end of my studies and she to this day is one of the most important gifts that Jesus gave me in my journey and I'd never expected, I wasn't sure was going to come from and it did something in me that now really permeates how I think about any other Christian tradition where I'm like, "I probably don't know enough about this. Is there something you're reading that could help me? How can I grow more in this tradition? Or how can I learn with you in this?"

ROB: Yeah. You never want to reform alone or in isolation. That's unhealthy. You have the learning community. Don't do it in your basement, in your pajamas, playing video games, reading articles-

DOM: No, because when it's disorienting, somebody has to hold your hand.

ROB: Yeah. Do it in community and with good, thoughtful people who love you and are for you.

DOM: This has been great guys. Thanks. Like we said, we were going to invite the smart crew back. The two ladies are going to join us back and give us some of the-

ROB: A breath of fresh air.

DOM: ...some of their thoughts.

[Interlude]

DOM: Lydia and Milissa are back with us and it's great to have you back and I'm sure you have some thoughts and things that you heard in our dialogue that would help us and help our listeners. So any thoughts stand out for any one of you as we begin?

MILISSA: Yeah. As I was listening to the conversation, one thing that I kept coming back to is this unlearning and learning is a long process. And how in our culture that seems to be changing so fast is the discipline to create the space to allow a room for this long part, whether it's personal or whether it's as a community.

DOM: Yeah. It won't happen by mistake. You really have to be intentional.

MILISSA: It won't. Yeah. Yeah. And do we as in the church have the ability to create that safe space, but also ... Sorry, there’s a mosquito.

RAJA: Rob, just went caveman. He's like, "Fly, must kill fly."

ROB: That wasn't a fly. That was a spider. That thing was going to eat my eyeball that night. I was wondering what you were doing, I thought you had a question-

DOM: I was like, "Rob." And the I saw it, and I was like the Simpsonettes are speaking!

LYDIA: My teaching background was kicking in and I'm like, "Somebody is putting up their hand. No, it is not your turn to speak."

ROB: Okay. You had a really great thought, let's keep going.

DOM: You had a really great thought once and that's great, I think you need to just keep saying that.

MILISSA: Okay, so in our fast moving culture, do we have the ability or the discipline to be able to create that space, that place of waiting, the place where we might let our creatives spend that time thinking about the next idea, those of us who aren't creative, maybe stepping aside and humbly allowing somebody else to maybe think about what the future might look like or what the next reformation might be.

DOM: That's a great point, Milissa yeah, it's a real discipline.

MILISSA: Yeah. I was listening to ... Or watching a TED Talk about the process of creativity and I apologize to whoever gave this talk. It was a woman, I don't remember her name, and she was talking about creativity and procrastination and this idea that some of the most creative people in the world procrastinate or what we think of as procrastination. So it's this idea where you come up with an idea, and then it looks like you're doing nothing. So whether it's playing a video game, going for a walk, watching Netflix or something like that. But what's happening is this idea is incubating-

DOM: And developing itself.

MILISSA: ... and developing, and then when you actually sit down to write it, it's that subconscious thought, and something amazing happens. Something amazingly creative happens. So the guy who is ... It was a guy, it wasn't a woman on the TED Talk.

DOM: On the TED Talk

MILISSA: Yeah. I wish I could remember who it was. So he was saying that he, as a researcher, decided to try this on his own. So he literally stopped writing his book, the chapter on the book, on procrastination in the middle of the chapter. And then he stepped away for like three months. And he kept wanting to go back to it because he was not a procrastinator. It was really, really difficult. It was a discipline for him to actually set it aside. But when he came back and actually wrote it, he wrote a completely different chapter than he was anticipating and it was so much better than he thought it was going to be because he let the idea marinade a little bit.

DOM: And didn't succumb in some ways to the fears. Like, "What if I forget I got to go do this”, but just let it just sit there.

MILISSA: Yeah. But I think we spend a lot of time thinking about risk management and what is the outcome going to be. I think we talked about limited resources, all of these things that hinder this process. But if we're not creating a space, what's ... Are we allowing the new A. B. Simpson to emerge or Simpson after whoever that-

DOM: Maybe the gift of Sabbath is part of that maybe.

NATHAN: I think it's pretty easy to agree and see the wisdom in that when it comes to creativity and ... but what about when it comes to doctrinal statements and that's the harder one to understand because where this pressure on all of us, well personally, what do you believe? And it's a very hard thing to say, “I don't know right now.” Or “I'm actually suspending that decision until it gets more clear.” Hard enough to do personally because you feel like the point of your faith, if you've been raised a certain way is to have that certainty. That's why I do this. But you can't change unless you've got some space there and you can't grow. Do you think that that same procrastination idea fits that other sphere?

MILISSA: Well, it made me think of something else actually from the field of education. So I don't know Lydia, maybe you'll have to correct me because it's been a long time since I've learned this. So when we learn, the goal is to create a space for our students to be in the zone of proximal development. So there is a comfort zone where I'm thinking, let me give an example. Maybe learning how to read. So the comfort zone is, this book is in my reading level. I can read it, I don't ... I'm not stretched by it. It's good. This is fun for me to do, versus the anxiety zone, which is, this is way above my level. This is causing me to shut down. I can't do anything with this. But there's a place in between. It's the zone of proximal development, where it's this the right amount of stretching, and that's where the learning happens. And so as teachers, we would lead the students into this zone of proximal development and guide them and help them through this process. But unless we actually bring … Nobody is going to willingly go into the zone of proximal development, right? We want to stay in the comfort zone. So I was thinking about this, the doctrinal or the assumptions that I've had. And I think that every single time I've been challenged, I've entered into this zone of proximal development, but there's been somebody there to bounce back my thoughts and my questions.

ROB: A training partner for your mind.

MILISSA: A training partner.

DOM: A little bit. Yeah. Who loves you and is paying attention to ... Lydia, do you want to add to that?

LYDIA: When you guys were talking about your stories of reformation, I think this applies to what we're talking about. So it's kind of hard for me to hide my opinion on women in ministry but-

DOM: Try.

LYDIA: But I grew up in a home where that wasn't an option. And so I was in university and I chatted with my dad, my dad at the time he would have been in his 60s, and he was a Baptist pastor who didn't really push through into things like discerning things from the Holy Spirit in the same way, the Bible was very, very strong in his theology. And I said to him, "I'm actually wondering about whether or not I should go into ministry." And this was something women didn't do. So I was having this conversation with him and his response to me was, I think, really an interesting one. He said, "Well, when I was thinking about going into ministry, I remember somebody told me that you need to pray about it and you need to ask God if there's any other job that he would have for you to do other than ministry. And if God comes back and says, 'No, there's nothing else that's coming to your mind', then that's God telling you to go into ministry and He'll be with you and He'll sustain you through the whole thing."

DOM: Beautiful.

LYDIA: And so he actually suspended his belief because he trusted God to tell me what God thought, as opposed to saying, "I know the Bible, I've studied the Bible my whole life and I have my opinions on it. And I know God doesn't want you to go into ministry because you don't have the right chromosomal makeup." He didn't do that. He trusted if that was God's opinion, God would tell me. And I think that's a super powerful way of approaching that.

DOM: I think some listeners, because I think we feel here around the table with Lydia, we feel that the power, I mean the beauty of that almost thinking I want to do that more. And at the same time we also might feel the feeling that a lot of us know people that you leave them alone with God and they come back and they say ridiculous things and you're like, "What the heck, that's not in the Bible and you're insane".

LYDIA: Absolutely. So there's that trust.

DOM: Yeah. There's a bit of that trust and there's the relational credibility with your dad to say if you came back to him and said something, he probably had the relational strength to say "Lydia, but what about this as well? Or what about that?” Right?

LYDIA: So there was that knowledge and that relationship. Clearly there was a good relationship between me and my dad-

DOM: Yeah, there's some of that relational thing.

RAJA: And even maybe subconsciously he recognized in you the potential.

DOM: It's beautiful.

RAJA: I think that's so fantastic.

LYDIA: Yeah. And it didn't occur to me, like he passed away a few years ago, so it didn't occur to me to like, he didn't agree with that. So I've never been able to go back and say to him "Like, what the heck? You didn't agree." Thanks dad.

DOM: It's profound. Or maybe he wanted space to maybe change that perspective? I mean, I can't imagine if your dad was here seeing you lead or the way we see you lead, which was so grateful to have your voice here. Just that if he would say, “Hey, like I would have reformed my position on this”, how I've seen you, you know?

LYDIA: Yeah. Well he did because was there as soon as that was clear. Then he was chatting up a storm or about Greek and Hebrew and all the rest of that jazz. And the other thought that I had when you guys were talking about early reformation thing, a couple things with Luther. First of all, he didn't get everything right. You would not agree with everything that Luther said.

ROB: Oh absolutely, no.

LYDIA: And yet I think it's true that he never meant to be not Catholic.

DOM: 100%.

LYDIA: And I don't think Simpson ever meant to be not Presbyterian. True. Yeah. So, that's one of my questions is how do we question some of these assumptions that we have? How do we, how do we reform our theology? How do we trust God for that without freaking out when there's something there. And this idea of the immutability of God, the fact that God never changes and doesn't change his mind so once I come up with the truth, then therefore the truth can never change. And I can never change my mind. I wonder about that. Not that God doesn't change-

DOM: But our understanding of him is not...

LYDIA: ...but our understanding is, is fallible. You might be infallible, but our understanding is very fallible. And so, then my question is how do we know these things to be absolutely true? So like how do we know that? Say just as a random, throw it out there example, how do we know that the affirming churches today aren't going to be the Martin Luthers of tomorrow?

DOM: In some ways I think we hold in the tension of learning, listening, loving people that are different than us in a way that's going to honour Jesus. I mean, Jesus invited us to do that even when people... even with our enemies. Forget about people that we have some differences with, right. So I think there's some of that we don't really know.

RAJA: I love it. So this is going to date me, but a singer-songwriter by the name of Rich Mullins, he used to have the saying and he used to say that "Only God is right and everybody else is just guessing." You know? And so to some point we have to have with humility, our positions, but one of the things that I always think about is that if God kind of puts down in scripture, we talked about scripture a lot, then God doesn't come back and contradict that scripture at a later date just because culture or people... and so it's kind of what Rob was talking about beforehand, like how do we, how do we walk that line graciously but still hold to what is laid out for us, you know?

DOM: Yeah and I think reform the reformers had a really profound way of working this out. They talked about there's general revelation, which is the revelation in the world. You know, the people have, everybody has, even without the Bible. And then there's special revelation, which is the scriptures. They're special in some ways. They reveal something special when they point us to Jesus, who is the real word of God, right? So there's that tension you live in. But then also there's this other space that the scripture’s primary work is, it's primacy as it relates to issues related to salvation. And what we're feeling the tension of, is we also want the scriptures to be the primary revelation for all other things. And yet we're entering spheres where it's like as technology changes as robots and autonomous driving vehicles, all that stuff, it is something that's going to push us again, maybe in another episode as to how we understand what we mean when we say the authority of scripture.

ROB: And you know, you're raising questions of authority of theology.

DOM: Who are we going to trust?

ROB: Is it merely salvific knowledge or is it something beyond all of that? And again, that's a perfect example of let's get back to our assumptions first and let's have a conversation about that and be okay to have a conversation about that.

DOM: And the reformers, what's beautiful about the reformation traditions, all of them is we can read with them. We're not the first ones to have this debate. We can go back and read about the stuff that they did well and we're going to borrow that. And then like Lydia said, the stuff that Luther said, hey some of that eventually became antisemitic. You know, a lot of like, “What was that?”

LYDIA: I like James.

DOM: He was like “Yeah, I like the book of James.” So those things, how do we tongue in cheek laugh and still trust some of that stuff?

ROB: So Lydia, to get back to your question, how do we know? Or how do we not know? And I think at the end of the day we have to hold some of these things loosely in terms of our epistemology and in terms of how we know-

DOM: And come to know things.

ROB: At the end of the day, how do we know we're actually sitting in this room sitting on a chair? I mean, if you wanted to get very Decartian here, Cartesian, how do we know? You know, maybe we're just thinking brains in a jar somewhere, imagining all of this.

DOM: You mean we're not?

RAJA: This is the Matrix.

ROB: I say all of that just to, just to say that, we who are children of the enlightenment who've inherited Western thought, we are very linear and, we pride ourselves in that and we're caught in this framework on that and we love certainty. We love foundations. This, equals this, equals this. I think we just need humility though. I really do. I'm okay with having a position of certainty, I’m okay with that, but not from a position of arrogance. I think from a position of humility and saying, okay, this is what I think. This is my rationale. This is my argument, this is what I believe about it, but I could be wrong and I'm okay to be wrong.

LYDIA: And realizing that there's some things like what is the gospel, God's restorative and redemptive work for the entire cosmos, including me, full stop.

DOM: There's the creedal, framework that the church has given to us.

LYDIA: And then how much do we add to that? How much do we say? Well, and then there's this, and then there's this, and then there's this.

DOM: That's the distinctives question. And denominations are going back and saying, “Hey, some of these distinctives, maybe we need to keep them as peripheral things that we can hold on to loosely, but let's not move them to the center.”

NATHAN: Have you ever heard the phrase it's very hard to be right and not hurt somebody with it?

DOM: Yeah. I think it's Dallas Willard?

NATHAN: Yeah. We moved from an epistemology or a thinking that has to do with I'm right and I'm certain because theoretically, analytically, here's my position and you move into a place where there's a higher kind of knowing that is about loving people. And then you're starting to talk about the fruits of the Spirit. And then I think you can have a certain kind of certainty that has more to do with love and the fruit that that's there. And by your fruits you'll know them. And we've all been in environments where somebody was so sure they were right and everyone just leaves bruised and broken and beat up. So the rooted-ness of certainty should provide a kind of haven for people around you.

RAJA: So let me just push back on that for a second. And, not that I don't agree, because obviously, God is loved and all. But part of me wonders as well too is if our understanding of love is so incomplete in the sense that sometimes we define love as, ‘everyone is going to get along and everyone's going to feel good about themselves.’ But sometimes love is also correction. Sometimes love is also a rebuke. Sometimes love is submission to authority of God. Not, don't want to misplace that. Right. I think that we need to have, we talk about a fuller gospel. I think we need to have a fuller love, fuller understanding of love, because the love that God gives to humanity is a love that has some parts to it where it feels like I'm not allowed to stay in this posture of rebellion or this posture of like I'm right and you're wrong kind of thing.

DOM: Pride right?

RAJA: Yeah, pride.

DOM: And that's why the learning in a humble posture is actually correcting that.

ROB: Yeah. But I think, what Willard might be getting at is that the antithesis of this kind of love that he's expressing is a rightness that's actually idolatry, which is an anti-love. So it's a ‘seeking to be right for right's own sake’ because of your own self-protection or for your own platform building or whatever it is. And there's something, it's rooted in something that's not love.

DOM: Yeah, we are certain that God is faithful. I mean that, that's what we are certain about. How that works itself out sometimes in our limited perspective is hard to understand most. Milissa I'm just wondering if you wanted to add more from just hearing in on the conversation?

MILISSA: I'm just thinking about one thing right now in another episode we were talking about vulnerability and authenticity coming from the framework of a younger generation and this high value and authenticity. How comfortable are you guys with living some of these questions and allowing people to see you wrestling with some of these questions?

ROB: There's just a little anecdote, about a few months ago, we had a woman in our congregation who's actually going to become one of our elders now. And we were sitting around the table and we were discussing creationism. There's someone who was discussing creationism, early earth, young earth, older, et cetera. And she said, what's your position on that? I said, "Well I lean towards theistic evolution."

DOM: I love dinosaurs.

RAJA: Barney is my friend.

ROB: No, but I said, I lean towards the theistic evolution, but I see aspects of both sides and I'm okay to hold all these things loosely and not make a decision at the end of the day. And at first, she was really, really shocked about that. She said, well, I thought pastors are supposed to have certainty. And I said, “No, I'm okay to live in the tension there.” I followed up with her a couple of weeks later about that. She said, “I appreciated your response and that I understand it now.” I said, “There are some things I'm certain of, I want you to be clear. Jesus is the risen Lord of the universe and you know, there's some hills I'm going to die on.” But there's some things that they're secondary to tertiary. I think that they are, especially the emerging generation, want to know that we are wrestling with some of these things. We say to Crosspointers all the time "Listen, we realize you're all at different places on this and it's okay not to be okay. You might not, you can still be in community with us and wrestle. That is totally fine. ‘Cause we're wrestling too with some of these questions.” And I think that creates an open arms invitation for people to come and be part of the church. And they will say, a number of millennials, will say that's what they appreciate about Crosspoint.

DOM: One of the things that we did, I don't know if you ever watched the movie where they're trying to take gold from a place where if you move it like the rock comes Indiana Jones style. So you have to replace it with something else. Like you pull something and you put something there. And at the beginning of this year, I did a teaching series on the creed and how we got the creed, the Apostles' Creed, not Apollo Creed. And talked a little bit about the Nicene Creed and I remember thinking, "I'm going to have to give people a handle on what is non-negotiable before I start to push against the things that they might think were solid things that they're going to change and… so many people were like, that was like super fun. Like I, we never knew that, that's how Christians understood the faith. So we made this bookmark that we gave people on one the Apostles' Creed, the other side was Nicene Creed. And we encouraged them to read and throughout the series and some of them are like, "I grew up reading that". I just kind of broke it down in sections and I preached on the sections and the most profound thing I think that helped me and people was to say “to be a Christian is to affirm things that we did not choose.” We didn't get to pick this creed. It's given to us. And so we submit to the story that we're in. And for a lot of people that was hard for them. They're like, "I don't believe in anything that I don't choose for myself." And I'm like “to be baptized into the church is to say I trust the voice of these Christians.” And many of them were martyrs, by the way, they died and suffered for this framework. And that I think is part of the way I'm learning to help people live in that, instead of going right to some radical things that are like, "Oh my gosh, I have to change my belief on that?". Just say, "Let me give you something to stand on. And now we're going to push against that".

NATHAN: So, can I just jump, come back? Melissa's you lobbed us to question. And then we started to talk about church-

DOM: Well that's what she asked, how we would do this with our people?

NATHAN: Yeah, but we'd never talked about what that might be for ourselves. So we didn't answer it in a vulnerable way. We just said, here's how we could with creationism perhaps. But, the hot button topics that a thinking Christian is wrestling with these days are the gender ones that have come up, universal salvation, those sorts of things that probably will never go away for us if we're thinking. If we're unlearning, we'll be getting stretched, if we're reinforcing, we'll be getting entrenched and the next generation, if they appreciate the vulnerability, even in something like this podcast is there, if they talk about it with a friend, they're going to be like, I really liked so-and-so because they went for it in our churches. How do you go for it? And still get the bills paid? But that's kind of outside of the topic of what we're getting at here. But it is interesting too, there is still a market for that church that doesn't do that. Because if the pastor isn't living in that liminal rough proximal zone or whatever you called it, then the people don't have to. And so I've seen in situations where the pastor who doesn't give self-deprecating vulnerable anecdotes is the favorite preacher. And why? Largely because if they're not challenging themselves, then we don't have to be challenged. But if you see those churches where there's transformation happening, I suspect you've got somebody who's feeling pretty raw on a Sunday afternoon.

DOM: Yeah, I mean this is been kind of, it almost feels like it's the introduction to a whole other season we can go into, right? But I'm really grateful for all of your voices and for the pushback and the thinking and our prayer is that anyone listening, you would feel stretched and encouraged and know that your own questions are not questions you have to navigate by yourself. But other people like you are working this out, so you can share this with a friend. Listen to maybe this episode now in a small group setting and talk through some of this stuff. That's our prayer, but tune in to the next episode, coming soon. Later.

Regan NeudorfApril 21, 20201 Comment