New Waters S2 | Episode 6

New Waters Season 2 Ep6.png

Seas of Uncertainty

In an increasingly polarized world—when people want to know, "are you with me, or against me?"—the church can do a lot of damage in the name of certainty. 

Join our Season 2 cast in this challenging conversation, as they talk about fear, doubt, assurance, anchor points, essentials & finding wonder & meaning in the grey areas of life.

Recorded in the summer of 2019, this episode does not reference the pandemic, racial tensions or other current events. Despite this, the conversation you are about to hear feels even more relevant today than it did a few months ago. We pray that this episode will inspire you to learn, listen, discern & love well. 

+ Show Notes and Resources

+ Full Episode Transcript

LYDIA STOESZ: Hi everybody, and welcome back to the next episode of The New Waters Podcast Season Two. My name is Lydia Stoesz, and I am the Pastor of Educational Ministries at Prairie Alliance Church in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, as well as the principal at our school called Westpark School, and it's great to be back with everybody and chatting about the next thing. So let's go around the table and introduce ourselves.

DOMINIC RUSO: Wonderful, Lydia. I am Domenic, and I'm the Lead Church Planter of The 180 Church in the greater Montreal area, and it's great to be in this conversation and in this episode. It's going to be fun, gang.

NATHAN WESELAKE: My name is Nathan Weselake. I'm the lead pastor of Prairie Alliance Church in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

MILISSA EWING: I am Milissa Ewing, and I am the Family Pastor at Tenth Church in the heart of Vancouver, BC.

ROB CHARTRAND: And I'm Rob Chartrand, Lead Pastor of Crosspoint Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In case you were wondering, not the United States of America. Let me do that again, because I don't want to say Canada. You know why I say Canada all the time?

NATHAN: He's at the heart of Edmonton.

ROB: Because I'm always writing something for Kentucky. There's an Edmonton in Kentucky.

DOM: Oh, there is?

ROB: Yeah. Did you not know that?

DOM: I didn't know that.

RAJA STONE: Why would we know that?

DOM: Do you guys know about the nation of Quebec?

ROB: All right.

NATHAN: Is there a Quebec in Kentucky?

ROB: And I'm Rob Chartrand, lead pastor of Crosspoint Church in Edmonton, Alberta.

RAJA: And I'm Raja Stone. I'm the church planter and lead pastor of Uptown Community Church in the heart, maybe spleen of Waterloo, Ontario.

LYDIA: All right. This episode we are taking a look at some of the things that we have been talking about. We're looking at how to navigate the future in these new waters that we find ourselves in as church leaders and as Christians, and one of the things that we've been kind of talking around a little bit in the last few episodes has been this idea of where do we fit? Where do we fall on different issues? And one of the things that I've noticed as I have gotten a little bit more mature and working towards my... Just coming together and having more time in my position as a leader and in my faith, is this navigating away from these polarizing opposites and finding real wonder and meaning in the gray areas where certainty doesn't have to be the same as assurance. So I'm wondering where... There have been maybe stories from those of us around the table where you have maybe moved from a polar area to a gray area, or maybe you're staying in a polar area and you're saying, "No, this is the one way of thinking about this and it's the only way." So what are our stories about that? And they can be stories of faith, stories of really deep things, but they can also just be random things about bike racing or other things like that, that are just more fun and frivolous.

NATHAN: Feels like it should be a setup for me for bike racing, unless Rob-

ROB: Want to ride bikes?

NATHAN: ... let's ride bikes.

DOM: Well, I think of how easy this just impacts even how we think about beautiful things like marriage. I had certain views of how things were going to be, and I was really, really firm, and I married someone who's not Italian or part of Mediterranean culture, and my wife's from Ontario. And just really her gift to me was to help me think about, "Hey, those things maybe Dom are not as important as you thought and obviously as leaders and listeners, we're going to move towards maybe theological things and things that impact leadership in the church," but a lot of these things hit us every day. Everyday things.

RAJA: It's funny you mention that, Dom, because the thing that leaped to my mind immediately is when I first met my wife, she's of Scottish background and I'm Indian, and one of the things that was interesting when we first started kind of coming together was this idea of food. So she was always about like, "Scottish food." There's a reason why we don't have Scottish restaurants, because the food isn't-

LYDIA: Don't be dissing the haggis.

ROB: Haggis blood.

RAJA: Scottish food is the absence of flavor, I feel, but I could be mistaken on that...

DOM: We just lost half of our viewership-

RAJA: Of the six people, three people have left.

DOM: ... to our viewership right now. Lydia, you can bring it back. You can bring it back Lydia.

LYDIA: Well, I am a Wallace.

ROB: My mother was a Mackintosh.

RAJA: She's a Campbell, a clan Campbell. Anyways, so the point was is that when she first started Indian food, she absolutely was like-

DOM: Pardon your mouth. Pardon your mouth.

RAJA: ... "This is spicy. Too much. Too much." Now she eats as spicy as me. It just took 20 plus years of experiencing this food and kind of experiencing it and going, "Oh, okay, maybe this isn't as weird or wild or wacky as I thought." So yeah. Experiencing the new things and kind of jumping into that.

DOM: It takes time. Yeah. And it's funny the kinds of things we'll do when we love someone.

RAJA: Yeah. Or trying to impress them.

DOM: Love orients change in a very different way.

NATHAN: There’s a side to the marriage analogy here, the place where we see the difference between certainty and assurance that I've seen is my wife and I have learned to argue better over the years. Early on, there's not the assurance that there is later on. And those of you who know Tamara know that she's quite feisty-

DOM: She'll put you in your place.

NATHAN: ... and I'm pretty not as feisty and so what can seem to her like just a normal conversation is... To me I'm like, "I'm going to die." But pretty early on, let's say five, six years, there was this tone shift that had to do with assurance where we could say something to each other like, "Okay, it's going to be a lifetime." We have assured each other of a lifetime together. So from that place of assurance, how are we going to sort this out? And so that's different than certainty. Certainty was rigid. It was like, "Here's how it's going to be and we need to do it this way." But in the context of, "Okay, let's make this good. It's not going to change in that security of assurance." It was easier to sort stuff out.

DOM: It's beautiful. It's the covenantal language of scripture too, right? That beautiful language.

MILISSA: There's something about parenting in that as well. Before you become a parent, you're the perfect parent.

DOM: You have tips. You have all the tips.

MILISSA: You have no idea. Especially in our case, I'd been trained as a teacher. I'd always worked with children and youth. My husband used to be a youth pastor, used to be a mental health youth care counselor. So we felt like we were very well prepared and we had this certainty that if we did certain things, our kids would turn out a certain way. So when we're kind of halfway through phase one of parenting, if you consider parenting to last a longer time than it used to, and it meant we're getting curve balls all the time. Things that we were not prepared for. This certainty we had is kind of thrown out the window. It's more of like, "Okay, let's see what's coming today-"

DOM: And we love each other, let's do this-

MILISSA: Yeah. We love each other, we're going to navigate this together, but we have this assurance that we love our children and they love us.

LYDIA: Well, for me a few months ago I had a grade 12 student in my office and she was there with her parents and she's a typical teenage girl, so she's crying dramatically into her Kleenex and her mom and dad are worried and this is kind of not a totally unusual thing, but it was an unusual conversation in the actual content of it because this girl was crying because she was losing her faith and our Bible course was causing her to lose her faith. So some of the things that they were talking about were causing her to think that, "God isn't good and I don't want to follow God." And her parents are there, super, super concerned and I'm going, "I really am not that worried here. I don't think you actually are losing your faith. I think you're asking some questions." And the dad says, "I just want her to go back to the little girl that she was happy before where she didn't ask any of these questions." And I said, "Well, we're kind of past that now. We're going to have to dive into these questions and wrestle them because you can't go back. You just can't. You've crossed over there and that's a good thing, that's a normal, proper part of your maturation, but we're going to have to wrestle these down. So how do we do that?" And her mom said this thing that just kind of struck me as being rather interesting. What she said was, "Jesus asks us to believe some things that don't make any sense, but this is how we know that we're true Christians, that we hold on to these things that make no sense to us. And this is how Jesus knows that we are Christians and we'll end up in heaven when we die."

ROB: Wow.

LYDIA: And I'd never really heard the same arguments that people used to walk away from their faith, used to hold onto their faith because I've heard this from agnostics, atheist type where people who really question their faith saying, "If God was really good, why would this happen?" If these real simplistic things... You can't ask any questions because questions are wrong and questions will lead to doubt and doubt leads to having no faith. So a Christian says, "Do not ask questions." I've heard that not as a positive thing, but this is... The mom was saying, "Don't ask any questions, it's bad." She was also saying, "You have to put your faith brain away in order... And you can live the rest of your life as a normal human being. But then when you go to church on Sunday, you stick the Jesus brain on and you believe these things that don't make any sense and that only a very few people are actually Christians."

RAJA: Wow.

LYDIA: So you have to run this straight and narrow. And I was thinking about the fact that this is asking this girl to be polarized in things that don't make sense and instead of chasing these questions down, instead of wrestling with them, that in and of itself is showing that we're not faithful to God, and that we're not passing the test of Jesus to believe these strange things. And I'd never heard it in such a black and white way before, but it got me thinking about how polarizing some of our ideas are.

DOM: And I think too, Lydia as you're saying that it's some of the themes that we've talked a little bit about already. It's how, what happens when the people of trust in our relationships like parents, when they don't know how to help you, they become the people who actually become the problem in some ways, right? Because they're like, "We probably don't know." If they had the answers to these questions, they would have been saying this to her, right?

LYDIA: Right.

DOM: It's more because they don't know the answers to the questions.

LYDIA: Absolutely.

DOM: And instead of saying, "We're going to show you what it looks like to have assurance in Jesus. We don't know the questions. These are great questions honey, and we're going to learn and we have a community and we have a principal, we have all that stuff." It's kind of they start to decide, "No, no, no, no, no. That's not what we do here." And I think that's one of the bigger challenges because this girl is going to grow up and have no orientation about how do you love God as a human, your heart, soul and mind-

LYDIA: Absolutely.

DOM: ... and all of those beautiful biblical images are kind of just taken away, and that's a big one.

LYDIA: But the faith that is being talked about here it is exactly the same as the way you think about faith when you're five or six years old with Bible stories that you have a moral, that are a very concrete, very little kid type way of thinking, which isn't wrong when you're four and five. That is not... That's correct. But one of the things that I like to say and we'd like to say at our school is we don't think about math the same way that when we're 18 years old than we did when we were six. Why would we think about the Bible the same way? And yet that certainty that we have to drive into our kids at a young age that's coming through. And then we're seeing adults who still have that same way of thinking about their faith as children as they get older.

NATHAN: It's one of the things that we hope happens out of this podcast for a lot of people, I think... is it drives me crazy when people walk away from the faith and they don't have to. Because somebody like this mom has said, "Here's the line and anything above this line cognitively and behaviorally makes you Christian." But to take that line away and say, "It's actually... There's kind of a porous border that you can move along, and there's some core things certainly to hang on to," but it drives me crazy when you hear a narrative from somebody, "I used to believe," and they'll name some sort of trivial thing like Noah's Ark. "I used to believe in Noah's Ark, but then I realized that's not possible and so Jesus can't be God's son. And I just became," whatever they became and you go, "How does that happen?"

RAJA: Yeah, I call them “used-tos”. "I used to believe in God until this tragedy took place. I used to believe in God until this answer," And it's... One person said to me, "I don't share my faith, because if they asked me a question I don't know the answer to, then I don't know what to do and I don't want to look stupid to them. I don't want to look dumb." I was like, "Okay, you're actually approaching this completely the wrong way, because I'm pretty sure there isn't a theologian, pastor, academic that has all the answers. But if that's how you approach your faith as a list of answers that you need to have and that's what's withholding you from actually sharing about what Christ has done in you, your experience of what God has for you, then you So that certain we... I don't know if we've ingrained that in people. I don't know if the fear of what's out there right now in the culture is so much so that people don't even want to say anything because they don't have all the 'answers.' Yeah. That's interesting. It's a very interesting dynamic.

MILISSA: I think when you talk to people who... you look at and you think, "There is somebody who their faith is real, they've walked with God," and you hear their story. There's always this period of time that involves doubt or questioning some sort of crisis of faith. And we've all met people who have never been through that crisis or that doubt that they've pushed it down and haven't gone through it. And just from my observations, I would say that it's necessary to go through that period of time to deepen and go to a place where you could never have gone had you not asked those questions. And when we stop that process from happening, we're creating shallow Christians. Christians who when... It's like Psalm 1, "The roots planted deep, planted by the water, the living water, and when this hot sun comes and the leaves wither and dry the chaff blows away." That the only way to actually get those roots deep is to actually allow safe space for these doubts and these questions to be processed well in a safe community.

DOM: A young pastor that works on our team just preached on that text a while ago and there was a beautiful insight that he came to in that passage, in Psalm 1, it says that, "This tree, as it grows and it becomes strong, it grows fruit." And in the ancient world, part of the idea is that the fruit that grows on the tree is not just for the person who planted the tree, but for everybody around them. And there's something about the fruit of this kind of wrestling that is not just for you. It's not just for your own benefit. It's for others to share in it so that they know, and I tell people, "The question that you have is probably not one you're the first one to ask."

MILISSA: And it doesn't say fruit all the time. It says fruit in seasons-

DOM: In seasons yeah.

MILISSA: ... and there's going to be times when it-

DOM: It feels dry-

MILISSA: ... feels drier. It feels like, "Wait, where's the fruit?" And that's okay because if we allow the absorbing, the sunlight and the water and the growth of the tree, the fruit will come. We just have to wait for it.

DOM: And all those parts of the growth is the assurance, because this is what trees do. We're assured and we know that this is what they do.

NATHAN: And the fruit comes more if there's pruning.

ROB: That too, right?

NATHAN: Pruning represents suffering and those seasons maybe you're pruning.

DOM: It seems to me that as we talk about this, why is this not more... Why don't people already get this? As we're listening, I'm thinking, "Why are we even having this conversation?" What is it about the way we've taught people about the Bible and the church for the past years that's making this such a novel idea? I almost feel like we're really talking about this. But it feels weird, I feel like, "Is anybody going to listen to this? Or does everybody get this already?" And a lot of people are like, "No. This is new." I'm like, "Really? This is new?"

RAJA: It kind of comes into our understanding of entrance into salvation, so say this prayer, right? We talk about conversion a lot, right? "I want to be a convert. I'm going to say this prayer. I'm going to have this event, I'm going to hear the speaker, I have an emotional response. I'm going to say these magic words. And then suddenly I'm a Christian." But that's not how the Bible looks at Christianity-

DOM: The formation part of it.

RAJA: Right. It's the discipleship part. The problem is though, and we've talked a little bit about this and this whole podcast series is about new waters, about answering questions or wrestling with questions that this culture the society has given to us that we don't really know how to answer anymore. And it's like we need to give people more of the foundation of a disciple, right? We say at our church, "Don't try but train," right? So if you try to be a Christian, you'll fail, right? Because failure is part of it, right? But if you train to be a Christian, failure is a part of that development. We don't have that coaching/kind of dialogue with people who are wrestling with this thing. Okay, here's what you need to kind of think about or how to kind of get past this.

LYDIA: My pushback with that would be I wonder if it's actually a bigger thing and it's about our theology and how we actually see God. When we have a question, does God go, "Oh dear. They figured out that there's a hole in my thinking. Oh my goodness, what am I going to do?" And He's all of a sudden nervous because an 18 year old has a question about whether He's a good God because there's child slavery in the world. All right, well thank you Dom and Raja for your contributions, but we are going to ask you to put your listening ears on as a teacher would say.

NATHAN: Your listening ears, little Dom. No wonder they're so confused, these kids. Little Domy. Little Domy Ruso.

LYDIA: And you can go and sit off to the side as we continue the conversation and then we will invite you back.

[Interlude]

LYDIA: All right. So as we continue to talk about these gray areas and moving in towards the center, away from maybe some polar opposite ideas where necessary and learning how to maybe figure out the dance between the certainty and the assurance and how all of that works. I think there's an aspect of fear involved. I think there's an aspect where when we're on the polar ideas and everything can be certain and everything is in a very nice and well contained structure or box inside of our heads and we can understand things. There is some kind of safety in that or it feels like it's safe because anything outside of that can be quite scary. So when we're chatting about that family and the mom and the girl we're seeing some fear come in with that. And one of the things that I think is interesting is the idea that if we allow these doubts to happen and we allow this gray to come in, then at what point am I no longer a Christian. So if I can stay well within that fence, or if I can keep my kids well within that fence, then I can be assured of that. But let's talk about where that fear comes from and what that fear is, because I don't see God being afraid. I don't think that He gets nervous by questions. I don't think He gets nervous by 18 year old questions. I don't think He gets nervous by questions of 45 year old moms of daughters who are questioning their faith either. And so where does that fear come in and where has that fear come from?

NATHAN: There'd be a legitimate side to it. I don't think that's necessarily what we're fishing for in this episode, but I think there needs to at least be acknowledged that some of the fear is legit. What you think does matter and it changes behavior. So some of that is just based on the emotional, psychological fear of a parent. Where you're talking about it certainly doesn't come from God, so how do I connect my human fears with His sovereign assurance and live in that day to day... but as I think I've been guilty sometimes pastorally of just waving it aside, right? No big deal. If you just thought a little bit more carefully about this, if you just saw there’s three ways to do that, but it doesn't speak necessarily to the heart of what the person is needing.

MILISSA: I think there's often a fear of the unknown. If I can't name it and I can't see it and I can't explain it, then it's something to be afraid of. So I've lived all over BC. I've lived in small towns, I've lived in mid-sized cities, now I live in the biggest city. And when we made the move into the city as a family with our kids, we moved in from the suburbs. And there were many well meaning people who were like, "What are you doing? You're making the worst decision of your life to move into the city with your children." Most people move out of the city into the suburbs to provide this safer place and more space to run and all of that. And we felt very strongly that God was calling us. We're working in the city, we need to live in the city and incarnational in our neighborhood. And so we ended up landing on this street where my kids are having the kind of childhood that I had in small town BC where there are 15 kids between the ages of seven and 12 or so on our street. They're playing outside, they're bouncing back and forth between people's backyards. We know our neighbors, we have neighborhood barbecues. It's the most community that I've ever experienced since I was a small child living in a town of about 8,000 people. And when our friends from the suburbs would visit us, I worked really hard to try to show them this isn't something to be afraid of. This is actually what we've always been longing for and we found it in the most unexpected place.

ROB: I wonder if in our faith communities we have a discomfort with doubt and maybe we even have a... We've never even wrestled with the question of doubt. What is doubt? Is it legitimate? Is it okay? I think one of the characters in the Bible that we often disparage is Thomas, right? Doubting Thomas, right? I mean he gets a pretty bad rap. But if you really look at the narrative in the gospel of John, I mean Jesus didn't actually speak disparagingly of Thomas' doubt. That's not what the story is about. He actually legitimized Thomas' doubt. Because when he appeared, what did he say? "Okay, well here's my hands, here's my feet, here's the empirical evidence of what's actually has happened. The truth of the resurrection." And I think we need to have room in our conversations with people for doubt, and that doubt is not antithetical to faith. That's how we kind of polarize it. You have faith or you have doubt, whereas doubt is a servant of faith. Doubt is something that allows our faith and our assurance to grow. And if we can just get our heads around that in our faith communities, I think it would be helpful for people.

LYDIA: Yeah. Because God is not nervous when somebody doubts.

ROB: Jesus wasn't.

LYDIA: No. And if he is real and if the Bible is true, then sincerely seeking and sincerely asking questions will lead to him. Even if it comes through some things that you're like, "I'm not sure about that. That's a little bit weird." But then that leads us to kind of the next part of that because when we have these encounters where we can doubt and wrestle with faith and that becomes a legitimate way of developing faith and even maybe a necessary one as we think about child development and as we think about faith development. That you kind of need to wrestle through some things for yourself. That leads to disagreements within the church because your experience isn't my experience and my ideas of maybe what are important might not be yours. And so how do we navigate some of those disagreements within our church, within a local church context, within a larger church context, without it leading to splits or... Well, we can't be together because we disagree on these issues. So how have you guys navigated those kinds of disagreements? Or how do you think that they should be navigated?

MILISSA: Sometimes I think we've done... Well, not sometimes, I often think that we've done a terrible job of teaching people how to disagree in love. So what does it mean to actually... We might not see eye to eye, but I still love you my brother, my sister. We've been going through some conflict resolution training. There's this guy named Jim Van Yperen who wrote... If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. I think it's called Making Peace, A Guide to Overcoming Church Conflict. And he talks about the beauty in communities of reconciliation. But in order to get to be a community of reconciliation, we actually have to learn who we are, what our triggers are, what sets us off. And when we understand ourselves better, then we're able to reframe our emotional reaction when we come upon somebody who disagrees with us. And it's that piece about disagreeing with somebody and coming out and still being friends where the deep relationships are formed, but also where we are refined, where we become more holy, where we become more gracious and loving. It's integral to character formation. If we cut and run too early we're stunted emotionally and I think we're stunted spiritually.

NATHAN: It takes more discipline I think to not close a story off or to close off a narrative, right? We're wired for the closure. So we need to get rid of doubt in our lives and we need a certain amount of certainty just to function. And it's actually not a rigorous process for us to do that. We do that automatically. What is more rigorous and it takes discipline and intentionality is to let things sit and to not have to make up your mind. To not be prompted by fear. And maybe even just understanding that this is going to be hard.

MILISSA: Yeah. I know.

NATHAN: And it's hard for you and it's hard for me and we are going to make some mistakes doing this, but there's a graciousness then that we can approach it with.

MILISSA: It's like when you're a kid, I think about my kids and one of my daughters is very sensitive to movies, to the scary part, to the conflict and so we'd get to a certain point and she'd be like, "I'm done. I'm out." She'd go disappear in her room. She wouldn't want to see the resolution to the conflict. And what we realized is this fear was growing in her because she never saw it through to the end. She never saw the resolution. So it built up and built up and built up and built up till we got to this point where we were like, "We need you to sit through this movie to get to the end to dispel this something you've built up in your head that it's going to be terrible and awful."

ROB: I think I'm going to say something that we all agree with, which is... Is that disagreement is normative? There will be... I mean, from the time of the early church, there were disagreements and drawing lines is not necessarily a bad thing. In the early church, they had false teachers, they had heresies, they had wolves, they had people who were breaking protocol and relationship and whatnot, and they drew lines and they wrestled through those lines. And I think we have that. I think the bigger question though is where do we draw those lines and what's our response to those lines in our context, right? And we're... Those lines are being re-scripted right now because we are facing new issues. Which the church has done throughout centuries, I mean, imagine going and planting a church in a very remote context. And they're polygamists, right? The chief has seven wives, and you go in and say, "Well, the Bible actually says," and you're sure you've got this line, but where do you draw those lines? And suddenly six women are homeless and one has a double portion. And so it's... You got to be... It's messy. Mission and church is always messy. And in our context I think it's messy. So my wrestle is just this, I just want to state for our listening audience that we're not saying erase all lines, everything goes, but just navigating these lines and disagreements is messy work. And I think I appreciate what Nathan says, is you don't just do this as a reaction. You don't just do this on impulse. Sometimes it's good to just sit in it for a while.

NATHAN: It might even be the best strategy for somebody who's scared because if you entrench quickly and if you draw that line, so say this mum with the daughter, this is what the line is and that's going to be a really brittle boundary. It's going to shatter really quickly. It only has to be… It's like a windshield. It has just to be touched in one spot and the whole thing's going to fall apart. So the fear can motivate somebody to do that. But you're actually putting up a better guard, let's say, if you teach somebody how to engage with the world around them rather than just to put up boundaries.

ROB: And I think it goes back to something we've talked about before, which is centered set versus bounded set, and we're very... You've got to have both of those postures in mind and it really takes wisdom and it really takes wisdom from the Holy Spirit. As James says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, ask the Lord and he provided abundantly." Abundantly if we just ask him and man, we're living in a day and age where we really need to ask.

LYDIA: There's an interesting biblical kind of anchor point for some of these conversations when it comes to disagreements and sides and it comes from Joshua 5. It's kind of an interesting story if you take a look at it and look at it in a little bit of detail and just not gloss over it because it's the conquest of Jericho. But what happens is God tells Joshua to take Jericho and Joshua takes some time to prepare the people. And it's those kind of funny parts in the Old Testament where it's like, "So he decides he has to circumcise the whole batch of people in the community and it takes a few days for them to heal and then they're ready to go."

NATHAN: That's not funny. I don't find that terribly funny.

ROB: Wait for it.

LYDIA: I think it's hilarious.

ROB: And as Carol Burnett would say, "Comedy is tragedy over time." We can look back now.

LYDIA: But in the morning he gets up and he's ready to go and he sees a soldier and he looks at the soldier and he says, "Whose side are you on?" And the soldier says, "Neither. I'm the commander of the Lord of heaven's armies." So Joshua has been told by God, clearly told by God to prepare and to go and take this city, but God is not on his side. I think that's interesting because in some of the conversations, and you think about this mom and other people that I've talked to you and you've talked to you with that there's been some disagreements. I'm praying to the same God as her for clarity, for taking away fear, for all of these things. And I'm going, "And God is on my side about these disagreements," and she is doing the same thing. But even when God clearly tells Joshua, "Go and do this," God is not on his side. The question for Joshua is, "Are you on God's side?" God will never be on yours. That's not what he does. He is God. He doesn't take your side. So it's just an interesting way of trying to navigate then what am I coming at this from a posture of being on God's side and then how do I discern and navigate that? And then what is God's side on these things? And when you look at the person of Jesus, it's always towards the outsider. It's always towards inclusion of people into the kingdom. And then once the kingdom meets them, then there's conversations about it. But it's never nervousness about the doubting. It's never, "Oh, that's a question that can't be asked. And if you ask that you can't come in."

ROB: Yeah. It took the disciples quite a while being with Jesus face to come to terms with who he was, and it wasn't a decision in a moment, and even then afterwards when they are running for the hills when Jesus gets arrested. It is a prolonged process of coming to terms with a belief.

MILISSA: And if we kind of look at scripture, the disciples running away in that moment of testing really and to say... I mean, they were... Think about the doubt that they were feeling in that moment after having spent that time with Jesus. He can handle our doubt.

ROB: My experience in working with those who doubt, and there are many of them and I am one of them is oftentimes the value in waiting and letting them sit in that doubt is because oftentimes the doubt that they have is not a reasonable doubt. It's often a volitional doubt. There's something behind it that's happened oftentimes. There's a pain. There is a response to Christians doing really stupid things. There's something irreconcilable in their lives that they're wrestling with. The rational side of things. The reasonable argument attaches to that pain and whatnot and gives them a reason. But oftentimes what's behind it is not, "While I wrestled down the arguments, I looked at this side, I looked at that side, I came to a conclusion, therefore, this is where I am." Oftentimes it's, "This happened in my life and it was very painful. It was very difficult. And now I'm looking for a reason to change, to get out." Now I'm not saying that there aren't people who just have this cognitive dissonance and they have to wrestle it down and then figure it out. But oftentimes it is rooted in a volitional decision to walk away from God because of some pain or something that's happened. And you can even look at some of the atheists, the new atheists and whatnot, and you look at their backstories and oftentimes there's stuff behind it that happened. So I think the value of sitting and listening and loving and being patient with them through the struggle is going to help resolve that volitional side of things, which is probably more critical and more important than providing, "Well I know you're struggling. Here's a book. Here's the reason for God, just read it. It's so good and it's going to fix everything," rather than sitting through it with them.

NATHAN: Yeah. You're saying the reason isn't always the reason but the reason is a way to save yourself in a sense. So if I'm the person who's had that pain or that disappointment or that frustration, there's going to be pressure on me as a Christian to trust God more, to push through it somehow to be a hero in that narrative. But if I'm just hurting or anxious or depressed, I can't save how I think about myself in that. So I need to find something that makes me look good potentially that lets me deal with this. And so I can offer a reason, intellectual one perhaps, that lets me say, "This shift in my life is actually personal growth instead of losing something."

LYDIA: So jumping back Rob to something that you had said before about at some point we need to draw lines. At some point we need to find the lines and where they actually are and there's cultural lines, there's theological lines and there's personal lines. So I guess a good question to keep moving us forward on this is how do we know when to cross lines? How do we know when to move lines? How do we know when to say, "No actually this is the thing"? Because what we know is that people in our culture are looking for, "Where do you stand on this? What do you think? Tell me what you think so that I can either accept or reject it on my own personal idea." And so us constantly saying, "Well, it's a gray area." Isn't necessarily always helpful for people, especially in younger generations, and as we move forward into the future.

ROB: Sometimes my wife will tell me that in my preaching as she's saying, "I come to church because I want to hear some certainty and navigating a world full of change, different viewpoints all the time." Sometimes people just need to hear some certainty or have some form of assurance in what you're preaching and to hear someone say it clearly and confidently. So yeah, maybe there is, and I guess the question is, "Is there value in certainty as leaders?"

NATHAN: Oh, that's a tough one for me. My wife's similar. She's often frustrated about what she would perceive as lack of decision and I would call wisdom, right? We're just going to hold these things together for a long time and then eventually something will emerge out of it. So we don't have to be premature in it, but there is considerable pressure, not just in a marriage dynamic but in ministry for somebody because people are looking for lifelines. "Give me something to hang on to, right? I'm scared. Give me a reason why I don't have to be." And if you can make people scared and give them a reason why they don't have to be, you can become a very successful politician and a pastor, I would say. So there's that model. I'm not answering the question, I'm just saying why it's hard because we don't want to be that. But personally I'm feeling like this section of the new waters is probably the hardest one for me to swim in and even to contribute here is like, well, yeah I don't really know where would I draw a line? I would wait for the line to appear. But what kind of certainty is that?

ROB: And then sit on a side of it.

NATHAN: That's right. I think move around, and look for holes.

ROB: Let someone else draw the lines. Yeah, we'll make a decision. But yeah. You find in your ministry context, people are always coming to you and saying, "This is a line, on which side are you?"

MILISSA: Just tell me what to believe because I don't want to live in this gray area anymore. Just give me an answer. Something to hang my hat on.

LYDIA: It's interesting because I remember growing up, kind of the mantra of our home was, "You have to major on the majors and you minor on the minors." And so when we like, "So what are the majors that we have to major on?"

ROB: And the difficulty is the day and age in which we live in — in our social media discourse — things that we want and we think are minors we can't ignore anymore because it gives people a reason to argue and it gets blown up and magnified and then suddenly we can’t not make a decision about it.

MILISSA: I think those outside of the church because of that would think that some things that we might consider are the minors, they think those are our majors.

ROB: Right.

MILISSA: So to even we can't skirt around that. You're right, we have to actually talk about those major or those minor things maybe to put them back in the right perspective, right place.

ROB: And unfortunately people aren't comfortable with us saying, "Well, we don't really have a position about that. We don't really have an answer.” And we're okay with, again, uncertainty and doubt and wrestling and, “Oh it might take us a few years to figure that out." But again, we live in an instant society. The social media pundits are speaking now and they're speaking very loudly and we're almost forced into this corner where we have to respond quickly and people don't like or some, anyway, don't like that uncertainty just sitting out there. That dissonance.

MILISSA: I think for some people too what we might consider minors are majors for some people because it's their life story.

ROB: Yes.

MILISSA: I think Lydia and I have talked about how for many people, women in ministry and in leadership is a minor, but for us in our story, it's become actually a major thing because-

LYDIA: It's part of your identity. It's who you are.

ROB: Sure. That's right.

MILISSA: ... it's part of my identity. It's part of who I am, and so it might be a minor thing for you to say, "You have misheard God's calling. You have misread what the community is saying. This is a minor issue. Let it go. It's not that big of a deal. But actually to me it is a big deal."

ROB: Yeah, no, that's helpful. What that does then it moves us into some of the really difficult sticky issues that we face. So we've referenced it already human sexuality, LGBTQ and all of these cultural wars that we're having. And I think where it gets sticky and where it gets difficult in terms of lines is we're trying to find agreement and acceptance at the same time, or we're confusing agreement for acceptance. And the reason why it's so difficult is because we're not just navigating issues of belief, we're navigating issues of personal identity. And it's very, very personal for some people. And the difficulty is if we say, "Well, I disagree with you," then you don't accept me versus, "Hey, I disagree with you, but I still accept you." And it's difficult to hear that. And rightly so because it's not just my belief system you're rejecting, it's my very identity. The person who I am. And so drawing those lines is not as simple as we would think.

NATHAN: But in that walking alongside somebody, maybe this is one of the lines that our ropes are trying to hang on to is in that discipleship process because that's what it is, right? You're walking along somebody trying to disciple them. Pre-Christian disciple perhaps, but you're trying to influence in some way. You need to trust that the Spirit is going to do some of the things that if you go too fast on you'll do very offensively, but the Spirit would do organically. And we do a lot of damage when in the name of trying to be certain we preempt what the Spirit could just do. And if we truly think that we're right, so if we're certain then the Spirit will find a way. Will certainly find a way for us to communicate what needs to be communicated in the spirit of truth. And certainly there's places in the Bible where it's polarizing for people and they don't respond to that or not polarizing offensive for people. It's not always a happy, the Spirit shows us something and we all change exactly that way. But it's hard to draw our lines but quickly without feeling like you're missing out on something important in a relationship with somebody and optimistic about their future.

NATHAN: I used to lifeguard when I was a kid and you do these drills. I never actually had to save somebody. Well, I saved one person. I had to jump into the water, get this little kid. But aside from that, I never had to save anybody, but we'd had to do these drills. And the worst thing, if you were pretending to be the victim, if the person teaching the course had them get a rigid bar with a net on the end or a hook to get you out, you knew you were going to get clunked, right? Because you can't extend that thing far enough without losing the ability to control it. So you kind of loft it over this person's head and it comes crashing down on the victim and then you drag them to safety. When you use a rope with a ball on it you understand that you've got all sorts of options. You can swim out there with it. You can wrap it around their arms and drag them back. You can whip it around your head and throw it. So there's maybe a metaphor there for how we can still offer help. Still offer a certain kind of assurance. But you're not doing damage in the rescue.

ROB: Yeah. No, that's helpful.

MILISSA: There's a... My husband and I... I say me loosely, my husband is into rock climbing. I had to learn how to rock climb to spend time with him.

NATHAN: How many shapes can you do? Rock climbers can do a lot of shapes. Can you-

MILISSA: Not very many-

NATHAN: Two? Three?

MILISSA: No. Maybe when I was younger. No. That's lying actually. My husband will be listening to this and he'll tell... He'll call me a liar.

NATHAN: No chin-ups is the answer? Is it?

MILISSA: No chin-ups. No. I rely on my leg strength completely. No upper body.

ROB: Which you should do that.

NATHAN: That's how it's done I think.

MILISSA: Yeah. So with rock climbing, the rope is really important. I mean, there are climbers who climb without a rope, but of course we don't. And one of the things that I've thought about over the years about climbing with a rope is you're climbing up, it feels risky, you get to a certain place where you feel really exposed and you start to get afraid. And what you have to talk yourself through is this a real fear? Is this a legitimate fear or is this kind of an imagined fear? Because I actually still have that rope attached to me. My husband's on the other side of the line and he's belaying me. He's helping me. If I fall off, I'm going to be caught. I'm not going to fall to the ground, to my death. And the other piece is when I get to a really tricky section I might need more slack. I might need a little bit more rope. He's pulling me too tight and I need to call down to him. Like, "Give me some room. Give me some slack so I can actually maneuver around this rock." I couldn't have done it if it was too tight. It's still there. It's still there if I fall and I've taken some pretty good whippers in those moments and skinned my knees, but I didn't die and I became a better rock climber because of it. And then when you get to the top, the view is worth it. And one of the most scary places then is when you get to the top and you have to be lowered. And so you have to sit back into your harness and you have to trust that that person has got you and you have no more control anymore. You're depending on that person to lower you down the rock face to get to the bottom. Time and time again it doesn't matter how hard the climb was up. It's that initial moment of sitting back into my harness and trusting that my husband's going to lower me well to the ground.

NATHAN: That's really... There's so many different directions there are. So you can only get lowered to the ground because you've been brought safely to the top. So you've got some trust there already. As hard as it is to do the initial little free fall, when you're navigating something new in your faith. If you've been brought through some things, don't forget about those things. It makes you trust the rope a little bit more. You remember the faithfulness of God in the past. The slack stuff on the way up is so good too, but you only get slack because there's somebody holding the rope at the top. What I'm trying to do is take this rich image and put it into a conversation that you're having with somebody in your office or there's somebody who's wrestling with something in their journal. And they're sensing something of what you're saying about this rock climbing image and the rope and they're trying to think about how to apply that to their lives. We've got the person at the top, you've got the slack in the rope, you've got the free fall. It's just I think it's good stuff for imagination to try and use a bit of that and see if we can’t push for it.

MILISSA: Here's another little metaphor in there actually, is that when you fall, you want to cling to the rock because you think that the mountain is your safe place, but actually if you stay close to the mountain and say you do have that slack, you're going to get totally banged up. You're going to smash against that face. You actually have to, when you fall, you got to push against that and you have to trust the rope, trust the person on the other side of the rope. If you trust the wrong thing, it's going to hurt. It's going to be way more painful and you learn after time, after climbing after a long period of time that the falling makes me a better climber, but I learned how to fall better is what I'm trying to say. I learned how to... My instinct to cling onto the rock and then scrape up my knees and my arms and even my face at one point is lessened because my instinct now is to push out from the rock and let the rope do the work and the person on the other side of the rope essentially.

NATHAN: Oh, that's good.

LYDIA: Milissa, when you were talking about that too, I was thinking about there is that discernment process when you're climbing, but there's also this discerning process when we're climbing in this context, in this metaphor. And so as we're talking about that, we're talking about somebody holding the rope. We're talking about a rope, we're talking about a mountain. What are those things? Where is Jesus? Where is the Holy Spirit? Where is God? Where is our community? How would you label this diagram of a mountain climber in this context?

MILISSA: In another episode Wesley's Quadrilateral was brought up. So I'm wondering if, to extend that rope metaphor a little bit, that sometimes the rope, depending on what the Holy Spirit is doing, sometimes that rope might change kind of that lifeline. Sometimes it might be scripture.

NATHAN: No, that's good.

MILISSA: Sometimes it might be reason. Sometimes experience. Sometimes it's tradition. But there's always the same person on the other side of the rope.

ROB: At the top of the rope there's always someone holding it.

NATHAN: Let's put Jesus there.

ROB: I think that's-

NATHAN: That's... yeah.

ROB: Our Sunday school teachers across North America would agree with that answer.

NATHAN: We had our Executive Pastor, Chris had this great line in one of our morning gatherings. He was talking about worry and he said, "Worry is just imagining the future without Jesus being a part of it? But you never have to imagine your future without Jesus being a part of it." So you're navigating up this rope and to use our metaphor, he's never going to let go of the rope. Now, you can get all the slack you need, but you're never... And you're latched in, right? You're not hanging onto the rope.

ROB: And He's okay with you hitting the wall once in a while and scraping your knees?

NATHAN: Yeah. My knowledge of rock climbing is so limited, but when I've seen awesome movies about people doing it, there's always this moment where the climb will end if they don't take this risk, right? They have to jump. And especially if they're free climbing. There's this place where this could go really, really bad and we don't actually have that because we always have that rope. And if it looks like right now in this season of my life, I'm on the fringe or I'm working through something and that handhold is way too far you can still jump with some real assurance.

MILISSA: Yeah. I remember this one time when my husband and I rock... He's a far better rock climber than I was. And the hard part of the climb is called the crux. And I could not get past the crux and this is when we were first getting to know each other. Actually we weren't married yet, so I was just learning.

ROB: It was a test.

MILISSA: It was a bit of a test and he stood on the other side of that rope. It felt like hours while I kept trying this crux over and over and over again, but his patience- That's actually one of the things that won me over that he was patient.

ROB: Oh yeah. That was his test.

MILISSA: Then I came down and took a look at it and he pointed it out again and said, "You could try this, you could try that." And he allowed me to fail. He allowed me to try different things. Eventually I made it over the crux, but I wouldn't have if there was impatience-

ROB: Were you exhausted by that point?

MILISSA: Oh, I was totally exhausted.

ROB: Oh yeah. So you were trying.

MILISSA: Really very, very hard.

ROB: I think where the rock climbing metaphor breaks down is where... It's a singular activity that we're talking about. I'm doing it in isolation and alone. And I think if we could add to it, it would be... This is something we would want to do in community in the presence of others. In a safe community obviously. And I think that's our heart around the table is that we could build safe communities where people can address these questions and kind of look at the line, then take the hill. And I think that's so important is that we keep that in mind.

LYDIA: So taking that metaphor of rock climbing and looking at where we are as a church and where we need to go. There is this idea that sometimes, and we see this in Jesus' life, sometimes he says, "You need to submit to the culture around you. You need to be Christians, but be in the culture." And so he's got things that he says about, "Give Caesar what Caesar's and just exist in the culture." And then other times he talks about subverting culture. He says, "You've heard people say that you should do this, but I'm saying this is how you should act and you should go beyond and you should kind of subvert it a little bit." And so the question is, “how do we do that dance with these ropes, with these lines of where the church needs to sit and where the church needs to be moving?" And one of the questions as we look at our culture around us and this desire for certainty, would you just tell me what you believe so that I can decide whether or not I'm with you or against you? Is this a place for the church to be reactionary and say, "Okay, I'm going to give you a dissertation of all of the things that I could possibly believe in. This is where our church stands. You can read it through. If you agree, good. If you don't, then you can go find one that does." Or is this the place of the church to say, "Actually, we're going to subvert that part of culture," and we're going to say, "No, that's actually not the best way for people to get along. That's not what God is calling us to do, to live in unity in Canada. Actually what we're going to do is we're going to sit here and we're going to sit in the gray areas of some of these things." The major things are who is Jesus? The major things are what is the gospel? But part of that restoration work that he's doing is saying, "Sit with people, relate to people. It's messy. It's not going to be black and white and it's not going to be polarized. It's just going to be sitting there and dealing with it as it comes.” And we can't write that down in a black and white statement.

ROB: In our context what I'm trying to do, I can't say I always do it. I think it's real simple to just stand up and say, "This is the answer." This side of the position this is where we are." Without acknowledging the other side, without talking about the other side. And I think it's helpful. The posture I try to take is, "This is what others think, but this is what I think and look at these issues and consider this for yourself." Rather than then say, "This is what others think. Boy they're really dumb and here's the right answer and choose this answer." But it gives room for people and permission for people to actually talk about and wrestle on some of the issues. They don't do it for everything, but we did a seven week series on kind of fundamental issues and questions that people have, apologetics and all of those sorts of things. And hey, we quoted all the other authors as well. We didn't just quote ourselves and those on this other side of the line. So I just think that it's important that we acknowledge that there are other arguments out there and then some of them are good and then there are some that are really not very good as well. And then to explain to people why we think what we think as a way forward. I'm not sure if that's helpful. Took us on a bunny trail, but...

MILISSA: We recently had a guy named Mark Anderson come in and do a parent night with us. So what I was finding as I met with parents, and I mean I'm guilty of this myself, is that I have this view of what the right answer is for my children. And so I start praying my agenda over my kid's life rather than actually taking the time to listen to God and hearing what His agenda is for my kid's life, what His vision of my kids are. And so he came in and his anchor was, "Train a child in the way they should go," and so on. And he really was talking about in the way they should go. And one of the most beautifully subversive things I think we could do is representing this rich... I'm coming back to that term that we've used again, this rich kaleidoscope of cultures. Whether it's generational cultures, or ethnic cultures, identity cultures and Father, Son, Holy Spirit. What is your picture of who this person is? How can I listen to you and how can I see them as you see them? How can I pray for them the prayers that you have for them? How can I be the person... How can I have the privilege of walking alongside this person and maybe just pointing out, "Wait, what you're doing in their life that they might not see? And paying attention to the work of God in somebody else's life."

ROB: Got a very listening posture-

MILISSA: Very listening.

ROB: Non-directive.

MILISSA: Very humble. I don't necessarily... I may come thinking I know the answer, but if I take time to listen and pay attention, I might actually witness some other miracle in their life that I wasn't expecting. Something that the Spirit is doing that none of us was looking for.

NATHAN: And everybody needs to give each other permission to do that. You've got somebody comes for a conversation and if they want certainty and you're listening, they might be upset. And you need to give yourself permission to not give them the answer that they want, that has them going and feeling better because the problem's been solved, but even personally. If that's what a good counselor does, doesn't have this rudimentary narrative, "Okay, I know three things about your home of origin. Clearly this is what's going on. Do these two things. You go, you're better." That's not a wonderful counselor. So the wonderful counselor, the Holy Spirit who is helping us navigate these things is also going to listen and might listen for quite some time and maybe even let us in step with him. A counselor is more about, "Let's figure your path up the rock face that's unique to you." And that takes them permission to do. You can be frustrated when you're trying to transform and you're wanting specific direction and the Spirit wants to give you space.

LYDIA: Awesome. Well on that note, let's invite Raja and Domenic back up and hear from them.

[Interlude]

LYDIA: So Domenic, Raja, as we have been chatting, what have you been hearing? What would you add? What would you ask?

RAJA: Of all the podcasts we've had, I wish this one would be a recommended listening for almost all Christians.

DOM: Amen. Amen.

RAJA: Just to say that doubt and faith are two sides of the same coin. It doesn't have to be one or the other, right. I always say to my young adults, "Don't think binary. Yes, no. Right, wrong. Think quantum. Yes, and." It's not just... You don't have to be one or the other. It's like faith and doubt can exist together and actually can fuel on the other. Some are like, "My doubts have actually fueled my faith because it's forced me to look further and deeper." And I used to mountain climb actually as well too, but in Ontario, our mountain climbing is a little different than a BC mountain climb-

MILISSA: You should come and visit us. We'll take you out.

ROB: ... Blue Mountain’s not a mountain.

RAJA: I might be horrified, but anyways I love mountain climbing, but I used to say to my youth though that, "The safety of a mountain climb is based upon your anchor points. So you go up a certain amount and then you put a steel peg into the mountain face and you attach yourself to that and you go from there. So that even if you fall, you're not falling the entire distance. You're only falling the amount that you've had your anchor point." And so what I try to teach them is, "Make sure your anchor points are secure and you know what they are." And so in faith we have anchor points. Christianity isn't a doctrinal statement. It's a person named Jesus, right? It's the Holy Spirit. It's the father. It's scripture attrition. These are your anchor points. And you can go different paths. And with mountain climbing you can try different paths up the mountain face and realize, "Oh, there's absolutely no way," whether it's a crux or whatever it be, you can only go a certain distance and you have to kind of backtrack and try another different way, right? But it's your anchor points that are always going to keep you at least making sure that the fall isn't fatal.

DOM: That's great. Raja had some, some good thoughts there. I think one of the things that I was hoping you guys would have pushed a bit further was that the Bible gives us verses that I think some of our listeners might be thinking where doubt is very dangerous. And I think we've kind of just went over those as if they don't exist in the Bible. We wouldn't be having this conversation if they weren't there. All right, James talks about there's a type of doubt that lends you to being a double-minded person-

ROB: Double-minded... sure.

DOM: Yeah. Right away they're like, "What are you guys talking about? Aren't you Christians?" So I think the Bible really in a beautiful way helps us understand there's different types of doubting.

ROB: That's right.

DOM: There's the doubting that I think we're talking about, which is doubting in community for discernment, right? But then there's a type of doubting that's about disobedience. It's a doubting that moves us to disobedience, and I think people are probably wrestling with that tension. Like, "How do we know what the difference between those doubts? They're different." And so that's one part of that. And the other issue to just stay on the doubt part for a little bit is I felt that our conversation may be felt too Christian-y as it relates to doubt, non-Christians doubt. Are we just not just Christians doubt and everything was framed in like, "If you doubt the Bible, if you doubt God..." I don't know if you've ever heard of Charles Taylor and he's an important thinker related to secular culture and the way people process the haunting of religious images in their minds, and one of the things that's becoming important is, “where do people who don't believe in God, where do they go when they doubt? Is doubting a universal thing? Does it look different when you doubt from within a religious community than when you doubt from without outside of that religious community?” Because I think that's a conversation we need to help people more with because the people that we are going to meet are going to have doubts and they're not going to be Christian doubts. And I mean doubts about God. There's going to be doubts about life, humanity-

RAJA: Relationships, marriages.

DOM: Yeah. There're big things I felt this, this kind of lived a little bit in that apologetic Christian doubt. Like, "How do we defend faith?" And I think this is going to be bigger for them just that. Those are my initial thoughts on the doubting part.

ROB: That's helpful.

RAJA: And I just want to come back to something you guys mentioned about Thomas. Thomas's story is fantastic and doubting Thomas, right? But what I love about how Jesus responds to Thomas. When Jesus finally puts his hands out and he says, "Okay. Look, here's the empirical evidence," and he says to Thomas, "You believe because you've seen." But then he says something after that which is for us, he goes, "Blessed are those who believe without seeing," because that's going to be the rest of Christendom from that point on, right? Because Jesus is going to be with us for a brief amount of time. He says, "Blessed are those who believe without seeing," right? It's like, "Oh, okay-"

DOM: Hashtag blessed.

ROB: [laughing] Don’t say that.

DOM: You guys spent a lot of time working that out and it's hard. You could feel it in your questions, you could feel it in the tension. You moved a lot to the certainty, peace, "How do we have certainty when people want that?" They make you that when you're like... Like Nathan's points, just let them go and don't give them that. I was thinking about that as what people want maybe is a type of certainty that leads to control versus the kind of assurance certainty, which is the words we were using early on that promises a type of assurance that Jesus is with us. Not that we'll be able to be in control, but that he's there. And one of the things that's maybe more personal that I've wrestled with as a leader that maybe our listeners are thinking about is how do I create room where I need to think about the lines of my own life. Like, "God, I have to think deeper about this," and yet I can't process this with any of my church right away or my board maybe is not ready for that. And I think about it and how it might work for listeners in the idea of the Roman Catholic tradition. For example, if there's a doctrinal idea with the Pope, does the Pope get a chance to have dialogues about ideas, right?

ROB: Does he have a sounding board?

DOM: That what if he says something, does it automatically become the authority. And it doesn't for people who understand how the Catholic structure works, but the Pope's voice as the voice of the church only really is activated when the Pope sits on the chair, which is where we get the idea from. Ex cathedra, he speaks with ultimate authority now, right?

RAJA: On the throne.

DOM: And I thought we need something like that in some of our spaces where it's like, "I just want to talk with you guys. I don't know where this is going to land. You guys might tell me I'm crazy." But now when I stand up in front of our church and we've processed this with the board and we've listened and we've prayed, now I'm going to speak with a sense of certainty now. And because we don't have those spaces, even when I'm talking it out, I'm like, "I'm not speaking with certainty here, I just need someone else to hear me out," and do we need steps, better steps to say, "Here's what those steps look like in our circles, in our Protestant tradition or in our smaller denominational family." And here's how it looks like when our president or our board of governors says, 'Hey, together, now we feel like this is something God is giving to us and now we're going to submit to that together.'" Right? How many of us would say, "Yeah, we trust that?" Or we would say, "No, no, no, I haven't worked it out for myself until I can see how weird that is for someone else."

NATHAN: And that it's weird means that our initial reaction is more telling than what we say afterwards. So your initial reaction when somebody brings up something that they're worried about. Pastorally they come and they tell you something that they're doubting or that they've wrestled with that they've maybe never told anybody else. Your reaction is going to be as important as anything you say. And for development in all areas like childhood development it's mirroring.

RAJA: It's true.

NATHAN: You will be scared of a mouse for the rest of your life, if the mouse ran across the floor and mum freaked out.

RAJA: That's what my problem is.

NATHAN: You are not going to remember. That's why Raja with the bugs, somebody in your past had a hard time with bugs-

DOM: Made you eat the bugs-

NATHAN: ... and they just kind of-

RAJA: "I'm allergic."

NATHAN: So let's carry that through, because Lydia right at the very beginning, she said, "God's not worried. Jesus isn't worried."

ROB: Yeah. They're not of this.

NATHAN: So when you come to Jesus with your thing and you look at his face and you're worried that, "If I actually verbalize this somehow, I may not be a pastor next year. I may not be in this relationship. I may not even still be able to hang on to this rope." You're going to see a look on his face that's going to be very assuring. He's not going to panic. And you can take your cues from him. So we need to, as leaders, be remembering that.

LYDIA: And I think all of that comes through with this relational piece that you can't systematize, and you can't put it into a systematic order-

DOM: That's clean.

LYDIA: ...Of how to do it. That's clean. You have to walk with people and journey with them and chat with them and let them see your expression. Like Nathan was saying, what is the look on your face when someone says, "I think I might be losing my faith?" Do you go, "Oh my goodness, if you don't think this, then you're done." Or do you go, "You know what? Let's talk."

DOM: I've done that.

LYDIA: What's going on?

DOM: I've had to work through that. I'm like, "Yeah. You're not alone in this."

LYDIA: And God's not nervous with your questions. He's bigger than those questions. He's happy with them and that's okay, but it's messy and it's relational, but so is Jesus' ministry.

RAJA: And it's also saying too that we've made certainty this benchmark within Christianity. I flew out here to Winnipeg. I sat on a plane that I don't know how it operates. I know there's engines and there's lots of them going on, right? I don't have 100% certainty that I understand how this thing works, but I have enough certainty that I'm sitting on this plane-

DOM: And you don't even know the pilot or anything.

RAJA: I don't know the pilot. I don’t know the training. I don’t-

DOM: Sure. It's true.

RAJA: There's so many systems on this thing that I don't know how it operates, but I have enough certainty to sit in this plane, to travel out to Winnipeg and it's like that's kind of what Christianity is to me. I know enough that I know there's engines and I know there's fuel. I know there has to be thrust to take... I got that, but the rest of it I don't quite know. But I have enough certainty to just actually sit here instead. That 100% certainty is necessary for this type of journey.

DOM: And Lydia, to your point, I often encourage people in my role. When I'm meeting with them pastorally I try to show them how what we're asking them to do now is something Christians have had to do before. Like, "You're not the first one to do this. It's going to be okay. You're part of a big family, thousands of years, it's going to be fine." And it kind of alleviates for them. They're like, "Wow, really? How?" They might not know how long this is. And even the creed, which we often have talked about in these episodes, and many Christians would say, "Let's use this as a starting point." These are the anchor points that Raja was saying, didn't develop right away in its first rendition. We have an early rendition of the creed, then we have the Nicene creed, then we have the Nicene Constantinople creed, then we have the Chalcedon creed, then we have… It's like Christians are saying, "There's some mystery here. We know some of the points, but as we've come back to this by the spirit, he showed us another anchor point. Then we put another peg here and he showed... And we put another peg here." And I thought about that because no one gets to put pegs in alone. I don't get to pick the anchor points. None of us get to pick anchor points for ourselves. We're part of a family of churches. Together this seems like a good anchor point for other people when we leave here, right? So we do it together. Something like that. I think of.

LYDIA: All right, well we could continue to chat about anchor points and where they come from and also just a lot of the things that were said here. We're running out of time and this is the time for us to kind of wrap up our conversation here. But I know that the conversation is going to continue as we look forward to the future. And one of the really cool things about the mystery of God is He walks with us into the future with that and continues to help us maneuver those lines and breathe life on those things, as long as we are walking with Him and clearly working to be on his side. And so thank you everybody for your thoughts and insights and thank you everyone for listening.

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