New Waters S3 | Episode 1

Shift Happens

The church has always had to adjust in light of dramatic historical and cultural shifts and this past year has been no different. Not only was COVID-19 a central disruption but many other shifts and changes have been amplified on the global stage.

Join our Season 3 cast as they talk about postmodernism, deconstruction and reconstruction, and how to be people who stay anchored to Jesus no matter what cultural shifts we face.

+ Show Notes and Resources

+ Full Episode Transcript

ROB CHARTRAND: Well, hey. Welcome to Season 3 of the New Waters Podcast. It's a podcast about navigating faith in a sea of change. We are all about loving the church, and of course, learning to think with curiosity, hope and wonder. My name is Rob Chartrand, and I'm going to be the host for this episode. This season, we're setting a new course as we talk to those of you who see all of life as ministry with Jesus. We've got a great new cast this season with a couple of repeats from Seasons 1 and 2.

So this has been one of the most tumultuous years in our memory with many shifts occurring because of COVID-19. Of course, there are other shifts and changes that have been amplified over this past year, and there will be more to come. So that's why we've called this episode, "Shift Happens." We're going to be exploring a number of shifts that have been occurring both inside and outside of the church, and of course, how can we respond to those shifts and what anchors are helpful for us no matter what changes we may face.

So this season, because of COVID-19, we have chosen to do things a little bit differently. We mixed it up. We're going to record this podcast remotely, which means we are doing this via Zoom, which of course, I think all of our cast members will agree is going to have all sorts of implications and surprises⏤like using live animals and children in a Christmas pageant. Anything can happen, and trust me, it has. All right, so before we go any further, why don't we go around the circle? We're going to have everyone introduce yourselves and why don't you tell us what your name is, where you're from and what you do.

I'll start first. Of course, you know my name is Rob Chartrand. I am from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I pastor Crosspoint Church, a church that I planted 11 years ago in Edmonton, along with a great ragamuffin group of lovely disciples.

SONIA FRIESEN: My name is Sonia Frieson, and I'm coming to you from the large metropolis of Neepawa, Manitoba. I say that tongue in cheek because we're just over 5,000. So I'm a bit out in the boonies. But I am a campus pastor with Prairie Alliance Church here in Neepawa.

ALICIA WILSON: Hi, I'm Alicia Wilson. I live in Hamilton, Ontario. I run a nonprofit called Restoration Project and teach woodworking to adults with developmental disabilities. When I'm not doing that, I do renovations on homes.

VIJAY KRISHNAN: Hi! My name is Vijay Krishnan. I live in a north suburb of the GTA, the Greater Toronto Area. I pastor a church here that as a layperson, I helped to plant about 15 years ago. Then 11 years ago I became the pastor. It's called The Well. Yeah, I was on Season 1 and got kicked off for Season 2. So I'm very happy to be invited back at least for Episode 1. We'll see what happens.

JOSIE VANCE: We're all glad he's back. Hey, everyone. My name is Josie Vance. I live just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. So I'm kind of neighbours with Rob. I have served as a pastor in the Christian & Missionary Alliance in the Edmonton area for about 13 years. Yet fairly recently I took a shift out of vocational ministry and into the public sector where I am working as a consultant in the area of organizational health and culture development at a college in Edmonton.

ROB: Well, hey, guys, it's so good to be able to sit down with you and talk about faith and life matters. Thanks for sharing. So let's go around the circle one more time. Let me get you to answer this question: What is one practice or habit or even an anchor in your life that you had before COVID-19 that helped you navigate a change over this past year of crazy?

SONIA: For me, one of the simple habits is just walking outside. That's something that has been very foundational in this time and I loved doing it before. Where we're situated, we have a lot of hiking trails and just areas. It's just a reminder that there's so much more to life than just my perspective. Even in the times of isolation, there's so much more. So that has been really key for my journey in this season.

ALICIA: For me, one of the things that has always been an anchor point in my life is connecting with mentors. So I think for me, to be able to continue that and the great thing is that most of my mentors are not closeby. So COVID-19 hasn't affected that. So when everything else in life changes, I think to still have that rhythm has been really good in this past year.

VIJAY: Yeah, I echo that for sure. For me, I would say practices, specifically Sabbath, like just knowing that every seven days, no matter how crazy the six were, it was one of those things where I was like, "No, I have to." It actually saved me. I felt like it was like God saying, "Hey, you can stop, I'll keep going, you stop." That, even from Day 1 of the week, was such a gift.

JOSIE: That has mattered for me too. But what came to mind when that question was asked was my connection with people. So people have always been an important part of my journey. Finding ways to connect in this season has been challenging, but most of the time, I love connecting with people, playing outside... so being able to do those things, we live fairly close to the Rocky Mountains out here. So getting out to the mountains as often as possible with some friends to go hiking or paddleboarding in the summer or whatever it may be. But just to get out, to get outside and to be with people. It's been good.

ROB: Well, this season, we are continuing with the format of our previous season. This is all about conversations. It's all about us doing the spiritual journey together and learning from one another as we have conversations about faith and life and ministry. So this season, one thing we're doing just a little bit different is we're going to have a bit of a more lengthy presentation from whoever's hosting the podcast. Of course, we're all going to take turns hosting the podcast in each episode. So we're going to do that, and then we're going to have a bit of discussion between the host and the rest of the cast members. So today, I'm the one who's going to be leading this conversation.

I think that most of us can agree that there have been a lot of significant shifts over this past year. So let me just give you, rapid fire, a few examples of major events in this past year. I mean, COVID-19, obviously, we all know COVID-19 has been happening. But of course, we're sick of talking about COVID-19, and so I'm not going to say anything more about that. We've seen the predominance and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. This has been something, of course, not only in the United States, but something that's had ripple effects around the world.

The US election, I mean, this has been a major event in this last year. Of course, there have been some cultural shifts that have become more pronounced than ever before. I don't know why that is. I mean, maybe people were bored under COVID-19. Who knows? But let me just list some of those. We've heard about the nones and the dones⏤of course this has been happening for a long time. But I mean, this has emerged more and more this last year, the conversation about it, about the religiously unaffiliated or people checking out of church. So the nones and the dones are on the rise. There's the post-truth culture that we find ourselves living in. Fake news, misinformation, I mean, people even willing to alter or ignore truth if it's going to push their political or social agenda. We've seen the polarization effect.

I mean, we have this extremely active and loud fringe on both the right and the left. Meanwhile we have this, this kind of silent, moderate middle who are unwilling to speak up just in case the bullies come out and counsel them or call them out. Of course, we've all seen the rise of critical theory. I mean, it's always been there, but it's reached such prominence during this time. So we have all of these shifts happening in culture. But in the meantime, we also have shifts happening within the church. I mean, churches have just been scrambling to keep up with the continual changes that are taking place under COVID-19. We've seen disagreement and polarization among members about quarantine restrictions and masking and clergy burnout and discouragement.

It's at an all-time high. I mean, Tom Rayner, he's predicting a mass exodus of pastors from ministry or their churches once this COVID-19 all lets up. Of course, on top of all of this⏤layered on top⏤we have these cultural overtones of disagreement within the church over all of these issues that are happening within the culture. So like, race and sexuality and climate change, and we could go on and on. So we're just trying to keep up with the rapidly changing culture. So shift, it's happening all around us. The number of shifts have been overwhelming. I mean, it's like death by a thousand cuts, shift is happening.

Of course, there's so many things that we could talk about, so many things we could explore today. I know we'll do that through the time that we have together in this podcast. But I want us to focus on one shift that I think is important and so important that we have to be paying attention to it. Really this shift is the undercurrent of a number of the cultural shifts we've been experiencing. So these cultural shifts that have been magnified under COVID-19, there's something beneath all of that that has been causing it. This is really what I want to talk about in this episode. So I want to talk to us today about what I would call a crisis of epistemology. Now, I know that that word "epistemology", it's not an everyday word for our listeners. So let me just unpack it a little bit.

Essentially, epistemology, it's a philosophical term. In philosophy, it's about theories of knowledge. So it essentially means how we know or how we come to know something is true. That's what epistemology is. The reason why this is so important is it's really, like I said, the undercurrent of so many of the major cultural shifts that are taking place today. What we're seeing now are more like symptoms of a much deeper crisis. Of course, symptoms are important. If we have symptoms in our health, we go to the doctor, and we want to figure out what's going on. But the doctor is not just going to pay attention to the symptoms, he's going to look at what's beneath the symptoms because that's probably what's more important. What's more important is not just the symptoms, it's what's causing the problem. I think it's important that we move deeper than just the symptoms we're experiencing. We say, "Okay, what's beneath the surface here of what's going on?"

So, I mean if I could summarize this, I would say it this way: I would say our culture has shifted from a modernist frame to a postmodernist frame. I mean, this is not novel, this is not new. But I think it's something that we need to continually come back to. What I mean by that is how our culture understands truth and knowledge has radically changed. So there's been this epistemological change that has happened, and the church for the most part has not shifted with the culture. Now, whether they should or not, that's something of course, we can talk about as we continue in the podcast together. But really, the church is still operating in a modernist frame whereas much of our culture has shifted to a postmodernist frame.

Now postmodernism, it's fairly new on the scene. It's actually been around since about the mid-20th century. Postmodernism, it's hard to define. If you ask even experts in the field, I mean, what is postmodernism? Right away, there'd be this scramble. It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall, it's just really difficult to pin down. It's often better to talk about postmodernism as a mood that pertains to knowledge. So I'm going to give you these three aspects of postmodernism that I think will help us frame it and define the mood that we find ourselves in this culture.

So here's the first one: truth is perspectival. So what that means is we all experience the world differently. We all each have a perspective of the world, we have an interpretation of the world. Since truth is subject to different interpretations, then what that means is meaning is perspectival⏤it's a matter of perspective. This is different than just saying, "All truth is relative." That's not quite the same thing. Because when you get into postmodern thought, it's really talking about language and pertaining to language, and meaning that we find from language.

The second thing about postmodernism is it treats metanarratives as suspects. So in other words, any big story that seeks to explain the universe or that seeks to govern all the way that we see reality, they treat that as suspect, so especially if it's through an appeal to reason because they would say that reason is laughable. You cannot really explain the world and the universe for reasons. So everyone's big story is nothing more than a faith assumption. That's what they'll say.

But here's the third aspect: there is an unbreakable link, they would say, between knowledge and power. So the knowledge that we have is not neutral. It's actually all knowledge that we know is somehow developed within networks of power. Those with the power control the language, and therefore, they determine what truth is. So what that means is people are mostly conditioned to conform to these views. So knowledge is not really a matter of right or wrong or truth or an untruth. It's really about who's holding the cards at the end of the day. Of course, this is a critical factor that plays into our understanding of critical theory.

Just covered a lot of ground. Guys, how are we doing? How are we thinking about all of this? Are you tracking with me? Anything else you want to add?

VIJAY: I feel like a lot of this stuff you could have written⏤like I would have read maybe two years ago⏤and said, "Yeah, yeah." Now it's like the recent events had just magnified almost every point that you identified as critical and front and centre in postmodern thinking. So it was a discipline to just keep my mic muted and listen. It's so good. So good.

SONIA: I want to say I learned a new word: epistemology. I'm ready for that spelling bee. That was good. You don't need an app to learn new words. You just need to listen to this podcast, I guess. But no, it is really enlightening. I love the educational piece also of it. So really appreciate that.

VIJAY: There is actually a Rob Chartrand app on the App Store. I don't know, but ...

SONIA: Well, there you go.

JOSIE: I'm excited for you to keep going. There are a few⏤just a couple⏤places where I am going to want to dig in when we're done to say, "Hey, tell me more about that, the whole truth is perspectival. How is that different from relativism? What does that what does that mean for us?" So I know we'll get there. But looking forward to chatting more about that.

ROB: Appreciate the feedback, everyone. Again, I know we're tackling a lot of ground in very short amount of time.

Here's the challenge: it's that postmodern thought has really begun to frame how many people in our culture understand truth and how we acquire truth. How do we know what is knowable? Some of our listeners, you might say, "Well, hey, listen, I took postmodernism when I was in college, this isn't really something new." That's true. Okay? I agree with that. But it's almost feels like postmodern thought has begun to reach its apex. It used to be on the fringes of academia, it started working its way into our art and whatnot. But it is so pervasive now in our educational and political institutions. At the root of this post-truth, critical theory, polarization, cultural shifts that we're seeing, the rise of the nones, I mean, it is there. The basis of this is in postmodern thought. So it's part of our social imaginary, and this is a word Charles Taylor would use.

In other words, it's the way that we reflect on it, almost naturally. It's the sea of thought that we swim in, it's the way we have social interactions, work with each other. So for most people, culturally, they're living in a postmodern world. They think postmodern, but wouldn't ever be able to say, "This is what it's all about." So it's the idea of you never ask a fish about water because it's just in water all the time. So postmodern thought is, in many ways, assumed by most people without much reflection. This is the frame that our culture is in.

Now, I'm going to borrow a little bit from David John Seel's book, "The New Copernicans," here. He makes some really great points about this idea of frames. The first thing he says is that people think in frames. So most often, we typically think in one frame. This frame is our view of reality. It's our own social imaginary. When facts don't fit our frames, the ideas tend to kind of bounce off from us. This is why like when you go on social media, you see the far right yelling at the far left. They're just kind of screaming at each other. They're shouting across the great divide, throwing truth bombs, but nobody's ever changing their minds. It's because either one of them are in a different frame as they talk to each other.

But the second thing that Seal says is that reason and rational argument are ineffective between frames. So you might be able to reason with somebody with in your own frame. But it's really difficult to reason with somebody across frames because you're familiar with your frame and how you see the world. But most people aren't really equipped to think outside of their frame or to hear arguments outside of their frame. So our our gut instinct is just keep piling on facts, keep piling on facts. Facts are friends, right? Throwing it at the other side. But because they're living in a different frame, it seems like a futile exercise.

That brings me to, of course, to the point I've been making all along: that the church and culture in many ways are in different frames. So much of the resources that we have, so many of the great thinkers that we've had in Christendom for the past hundreds of years are really thinking in a modernist frame. We've gleaned so much from them, but the challenge is that we're living in a different frame now within our culture. Because of that, it almost seems like we're talking past each other. We're not conversing across frames.

So I think a great example of this is we saw the rise of the New Atheists that came out in the last decade, Hitchens and Dawkins, etc. Really a lot of their argumentation was still back in the modernist frame. They were using old school arguments against God, atheistic arguments. Of course, the church was like, "Well, we're ready for this. We've been doing this for hundreds of years." So really easy it was for us to kind of converse with them in terms of modernist apologetics. But the everyday person on the street might not be thinking in modernist frames anymore. They're thinking in postmodern frames. So the questions that they have might not even be those questions that we've been trying to address.

We're speaking to a very small percentage of our culture. I think this is particularly true with religious nones, religious nones would say they still embrace spirituality with an openness to many different modes of believing. So they're really in this perspectival world. We're shouting at them with apologetics from a modernist frame. Really, what we need to do is say, hey, how do we have a conversation with them in this new frame?

So lots to talk about, okay? I've already given you a time, but I'm just going to give you a suggested way forward of stuff that I've been reflecting on as I've thought about, how do we talk and how do we shift into different frames. I think one of the major things for me has been just developing authentic relationships with people in different frames. At the end of our Crosspoint gatherings, we always have a benediction. Then I tell people, I say, especially now that we're in an online world, I say, "Hey, connect with somebody who doesn't look like you and connect with somebody who doesn't think like you."

Because we think it's really important that people have conversations with those who aren't in the same framework as them. But I think another one, and this is the most important thing, is can I, who thinks really concretely about what I believe, can I have a conversation with somebody in the other frame that is open and that's receptive? Can I acknowledge the fact that maybe pure objectivity is not really possible this side of heaven? In other words, there's always an element of subjectivity that I'm bringing into every conversation. There's always a bit of a perspective that I have that is coloured by my experiences and coloured by my culture because we all wear lenses.

That doesn't mean I'm going to deny that there's truth or that truth is not knowable. But at least willing to have the humility to just say, "Hey, there are limitations to what I actually know." There's this great quote from Seel. He says this, he says, "Evangelical pastors have been tempted to become celebrity exemplars of certainty." I wonder sometimes what that does for our culture as we are communicators communicating to our culture. Is there a possibility that we could talk about our own doubt sometimes as leaders? Coupled with that is just a posture of curiosity and listening because you're not going to understand somebody else's frame unless you engage with it. That means personally, relationally. But it also means in terms of what you're reading, what you're listening to, and that takes work. It's in many ways, it it creates cognitive dissonance in us, which is really uncomfortable because we're suddenly having to engage in a different frame. It's always safe to talk in our own frame. But to talk another frame is really difficult.

Then, of course, in all of this, I think it's important, as I've been reflecting on it, that we stay anchored to Jesus. As a follower of Jesus, he is our centre. So while it's true that knowledge is perspectival, it does not necessarily mean that all knowledge is only perspectival. This is where you're going to find a lot of the problems and the dissonance happening in our culture is people just say, "Well, it's a crapshoot. You know what, whatever you believe you believe. It's just all perspectival."

I don't think the original postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, whatever, agree with that. They would say, "Well, yeah, there are actually truths that are better than other truths." So for me, it's been fundamental to remain anchored to the historical resurrected Jesus, not only as an idea, but also personally in my relationship with Him. There's different types of knowing. As modernists would say, there's rationalism, reasonable knowing, there's empiricism, scientific knowing, but there are other forms of knowing as well. There's this relational knowing. Love, of course, can't be measured. Love can't be reasoned. But that is a different way of knowing. So for me, as we're wrestling through all of this, it's really important that we stay anchored to Jesus.

All right. Lots to tackle there. Why don't I just open it up for you guys and hear from you? What are you hearing? What have you been thinking about? Just very briefly.

VIJAY: One of the other things that came to mind for me when you were talking, Rob, about frames. This last year, Netflix put out a documentary called "The Social Dilemma," which was kind of a confessional basically, for all of the people who are on the ground floor of social media. They made this point that the algorithms around social media are actually built to reinforce the frames. So when you use this language of frames, it's like, "Yeah, that's kind of maybe always been human nature, but now you add postmodernism, but then you add social media and say, every time you click on a "suggested for you" thing, it is almost like it's turning like your little rickety old picture frame into a steel box. And, they said, we've created a machine that now automatically does that. So yeah, it's just taken this dynamic that maybe was already existing pre-social media and exponentially hit the gas pedal.

ROB: Good.

ALICIA: I love, Vijay, how you brought in social media because I think so much of our knowledge now has been just transformed by the way that it's delivered through social media. So even that is an important conversation of how do we understand our knowledge in the realm of social media, whereas historically, it was much more just a condensed amount of people, few people were providing the knowledge. Whereas now everyone is able to access it in a different way.

JOSIE: It really hits on that idea that knowledge isn't neutral, but it's developed in networks of power is one thing, but social media is... I mean, talk about a network of power. It's a network of power that's now totally out of control. We aren't quite sure how to get that back to a place that is maybe good for us.

SONIA: I wonder how can we move forward without humility, as you made that mention. Because any of the suggested ways forward do require humility and really analyzing why it is that we feel like we need to defend a certain, yeah, the way that we come across or in our conversations. Will we have the humility to surrender and listen?

ROB: Boy, that's been some great feedback so far. We want to have a bit of a closer conversation, we know that when five voices are going off at once, it's a little bit challenging to hear from everyone. So what we're going to do is we're going to give Sonia and Vijay an out. We're going to give them an opportunity to ... They'll still be listening in on the conversation, but they're not going to be continuing in this conversation until a little bit later. So they're going to turn off their mics. We're going to have a tighter conversation with myself and Josie and Alicia. Then we'll invite Sonia and Vijay back just a little bit later on. After your time is up, you'll be able to come and play with the rest of us.

ROB: So as a follower of Jesus, who lives in a world where there are two very evident frames⏤and we could say there are many other frames, but we're just talking about the modernist and the postmodern frames⏤how do you find yourself staying anchored to Jesus in the midst of this shift that's happening?

JOSIE: Most recently, for me, staying anchored to Jesus and being alive in him in the midst of this shift has actually looked like getting out of the water I'd been swimming in for so long. So working as a pastor in in church ministry and the roles that I was in were largely in ministry development and leadership development. So working with leaders who were then doing a lot of frontline ministry, it was super fun, and really cozy and comfy, and an environment that I loved. Yet my world was getting pretty small. My fishbowl was getting pretty small, and I didn't fully see it. But I knew there was something in me that was saying, there's something more.

I think there's a risk to getting out of the water you're swimming in. But it is also when we are anchored to Jesus, it enhances and it makes critical that relationship that we have with Him. I am needing to go into my days prayed up. I am needing to in a way that I maybe didn't feel like I had to as much before because I was with people who were like-minded. Yet every conversation I have, I am now in a place where it's listening to the voice of the Spirit and saying, "How may I serve in this context? How may I bring Your light in this context? What does it look like for me to be salt here, Jesus?" Listening for that and being willing to engage in that way.

I will also acknowledge that it is a shift. The context I was in, I would say, modernist frame, as many of us are in the church world, going into the postmodern world. It's quite evident in postsecondary education as well in the public sector, like that's just the way we think about things. Socially, the importance of and respect for a multiplicity of perspectives and opinions is there as well. So how do I walk into that, maintaining my core beliefs, yet also being part of the environment that I'm in a meaningful way? It has been, it has been about relationships, just conversations and the opportunities for great dialogue have been great.

I'm just loving the people that I'm journeying with. A conversation starts in one way, in the workplace. I'm asked, I'm wondering where it's going to go. Whereas where I was, say, a year, two years ago, I would have had an immediate sense of direction course, here's what we're going to do. Here's what I'm going to say. I'm a fish out of water now. It's totally, it's totally different. There's more pause. There's more reflection, there's more reliance, and more humility as well in that space. I just see that we need it.

ROB: That's great. How about you, Alicia?

ALICIA: Yeah. Josie, as you were talking, one of the things that really stuck to my mind as this year has unfolded and living the pandemic life is looking at just what slowing down has allowed. Because I think as my life has slowed down, I've recognized that I wasn't creating space for actually hearing people or listening. We have a household of eight people, some family, some not family, that God has just gathered over this past year to live in our house. As I've slowed down and lived life day to day, always around these people, because we can't go anywhere, I've really been challenged to say, "Sometimes I just need to let go of my need to be right or sometimes I need to let go of my judgment of how this person is living."

I think there's this misconception that we have to build community around everyone who thinks like us and acts like us. I found over this past year, just that really being challenged. I also feel that so much of my work is working with adults with developmental disabilities. It's been really good because I live in my head a lot. But the reality is, is that often they don't actually care how much I know or what I learned at university, but more am I showing love and care and respect and gentleness.

So yeah, to be able to be pulled out of our heads, and I think often as leaders, we feel like we have to do all the head work. We can easily remove ourselves from simply just being with people. I think that's been really my... this past year of just the challenge of how do I be with people.

ROB: Yeah, that's really great. Being anchored to Jesus for me is, I realized, that both frames are part of who I am, it's part of the world I live in, part of the church I live in. So I'm anchored to Jesus almost in two frames, in many ways. I think reasonably, I think I can say that Christianity is the most reasonable worldview. I can't prove it. But I can demonstrate how it's reasonable. I think empirically, I could look at the historical Jesus and say, "Okay, there is strong evidence for that, for an evidence-based faith."

So in that modernist frame, I mean, I think I still want to live there. When I have conversations with people, I can't deny that. But then within the postmodernist frame, again, there's that posture of listening and humility. So I've got friends that are outside of the church, which is really hard for a pastor to do. Because A, we're not cool. You ever want to stop a dinner conversation with a bunch of strangers, tell them what you do for a living and all of a sudden, "Oh, they're in a different frame, a totally different world than me."

So the question is, often, is I want just relationship. I want friendship for friendship, not friendship for the sake of winning, friendship for the sake of an argument. Friendship, it's not a means to an end, friendship as an end in itself. I want relationship with people, authentically. I think that's what God calls me to.

But then on the other hand, I think the greatest gift I can give to a friend is the gift of Jesus because it's so meaningful and personal to me as well. So of course I'm not going to not talk about it, I must talk about it. But what I find is, again, postmodern thought is in their social imaginary. Most people don't critically think about why they believe what they believe or what they think about and how they know that they know. So to explore those conversations, I don't know about you, but that's really difficult to do. Without being the know-it-all or without being the one who's thought about these things, and nobody else has thought about these things.

ALICIA: There's almost this, it's more comfortable for me to really be honest with my doubts and wrestle through things with the people that I live and with my close friends, but then there's this expectation that when I'm leading that you know everything. How do you balance that tension?

ROB: Yeah, that's a great question. Because there are people who want certainty. I mean, we all want certainty. We don't come to hear the Word of God spoken and just all the pastor says is, "I doubt everything. I don't know about any of this," right? It's like, well, you walk away, disillusioned and lost. So you want to be able to bring sense of certainty. But again, I think it's that posture of humility.

So there might be a text that it could mean this, it could mean that. I think to just say, "This is this, this is that. This is where I land on it, and this is why I land on it." Then there are other texts that are really, really, really clear, like, "This is clear. Yeah, this is why this is fundamental." But I think that posture of humility and willingness to talk about the other side and a willingness to accept that there are perspectives without saying that all perspectives are equally true and valid, it's a tough thing, especially if you're a preacher, and you're proclaiming the Word.

So I want to pose a scenario for you. A kid grows up in the church, grows up in youth group, hears the Word of God, is part of a Christian family. Suddenly they go off to college. When they get off to college, they're in a liberal arts program. They're really exposed, maybe even for the first time to, first of all, postmodern thought, that truth is perspectival. That knowledge is power and whatnot. They realize that the world they were living in had a really stiff framework around truth and knowledge. Now they're living in this other framework. For many, many people, this is where they become religious nones. Because they're in this environment where they can actually freely explore ideas, where they're uprooted from their family of origin, they have a lot more freedom to change their beliefs.

How do we come alongside and talk to them about that? This seems to be something that's pervasive among the emerging generations. There are more nones around among the Gen Z and among millennials than ever before. How do we have a conversation with them about that or how have you experienced this with emerging generations?

ALICIA: I think often as young people leave for university or leave home, there's this natural tendency, and we've heard terms for it, but that there's going to be a deconstruction of their faith. That they're going to start picking it apart and figuring out what resonates, what was just given to them from their parents, what is their own beliefs, and what makes sense for the world that they're now living in. Where I think that often we fail is we get so afraid when our young people start to deconstruct their faith. We get so afraid that they're not going to come back to everything, and that we actually use that as they deconstruct, that we separate that relational piece. But when we do that, there's no room for that reconstructing of the faith in that reconstructing of, well, now I have all these different truths that I'm trying to fit into the faith.

It's just the box has become so much bigger, right? That we often want to put God in this little box. An example is coming to mind. It's not necessarily with the young people, but I remember working. I was youth pastoring. We had a family in the church that lost a two-year-old. It was a horrific experience for the family and a lot of the young people observing. One of the things that I found is that everyone wanted to explain why this happened. They wanted to explain it in the way that it fit into their understanding of God, into this box. But the reality is for many, and the family in particular, their box had just been completely exploded of who God was and what He was doing.

So I think for a lot of young people, they go to university and their box has exploded of what their understanding of God is. But then they're left with people trying to say, "No, no, that box still exists. You just have to figure out how to put all the pieces back together." The reality is it doesn't fit back in. Once you go through those traumatic life experiences or those monumental changes that often we're not the same people that we were before, and we have to come to a new way to reconstruct how we understand God. Maybe that's where that meaning comes in. Right? That we assign different meanings.

So maybe the truth hasn't changed that much. But we've learned how to seek a different meaning. But I think when our first reaction as a church is to just say, "No, no, you have to figure out how God fits back into that box," rather than saying, "Why don't we reconstruct the box in a bit of a different way, in a bit of a different shape?" That's actually where the power is to put those pieces back together and not just say, "No, you have to figure out how to get back in that old box."

ROB: Yeah, that's fantastic. So much about postmodernism is deconstruction. But we, as followers of Jesus, are so much about reconstruction, I mean, we have a God who reconstructs us, who one day will fix everything and reconstruct the cosmos. So it's important, I think to have that posture of not just tearing things down, but building them back up. How do we keep that reconstructive posture when we see our emerging generation's beliefs unraveling?

JOSIE: This is where the the real life stories hit our theories and our thoughts on who God is and what He's like, and what does it mean to follow Him. To be able to explore those questions freely and not be inhibited from exploring them. I had a conversation with a friend two days ago. She's a teacher in a Christian school. There's a couple of students who wanted to chat with her. They're going through just faith crisis, and coming from some of that deconstruction that has happened in their own life with some trauma, being disappointed by believers who have let them down and not sure how to respond to that.

Some writing by Alicia Britt Chole popped up. Alicia Britt Chole, she wrote a book called "Anonymous." In it, she says, "Sometimes we fear faith struggles." Then she says, "To deny doubt is far more lethal than a genuine faith struggle." I think, I believe, if God is who He says He is, He's okay with us wrestling with those things.

ALICIA: As part of that posture, maybe being able to be open, that God is actually working around us, and I'm actually not as important in that person's story as I think because I'm trusting that I can help guide people in that reconstruction, and I can help. But God's the one that's going to meet them where they're at. God's the one that's going to shape that. So often I think we get in this panic mode, especially with young people that we're like, "Oh, we got to jump in and redirect their course and not trust that God's actually already there walking alongside of them."

Maybe even to look into the older generation that how often do we hear the stories of the older generation saying, "God walked this whole path with me." Because I think we need those reminders that even when things don't make sense, God's there. So we need the generation that's already gone through all those struggles and suffering and questions and just changes in society to say, "Look, God was there for me, and He'll be there for you. He'll be there for the next generation."

ROB: Yeah. I think one of the key anchors in the struggle with the emerging generation, particularly those who go off to college, because when you go off to college, what you what's happening, as sociologists would say, is you are differentiating from your family of origin. So because you're no longer with your family of origin, as an adult, you're developing an adult identity. Your adult identity oftentimes is one that's divorced from your childhood and identity or your family identity. You're just figuring out, "Who am I? Who am I?" One of the challenges is in this process of differentiation, a lot of emerging adults will differentiate from their family because that's natural, but they'll also differentiate from their faith.

Part of that is because they want to separate themselves from their family of origin. So it's interesting, one of the things that I discovered is what keeps a young person alive in their faith during that whole series of identity formation and differentiation is having an auntie and an uncle in the faith. So having a relationship with some other person, it could have been a former youth pastor, it could be somebody they connect with in their new place, like someone that works in their dorm. That person will be an anchor that will say to them, "It's okay to keep on with this faith, you don't have to fully throw out the baby with the bathwater in differentiation." You can actually just stay with this person, and they can be like a guide to you.

They don't still have that authoritarian oversight that a parent would have. Instead it's a different type of relationship. So I just think as as we help the emerging generation navigate this sea of change, and this shift from their other frame into a new frame. Those relationships are really, really critical. So I would say even to all of us, make sure we adopt young people, if we can find them.

JOSIE: Yeah, so true.

ROB: Have them over for dinner, take them under our wings, and do it without judgment. Do it with humility, and with love and just be really, really interested in their lives for that reason. But they need those anchors as they're processing this new world of differentiation.

JOSIE: That's good. I can speak from being a parent, when we talk about the next generation coming, I've got a 15-year-old, or excuse me, a 17-year-old daughter, 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter.You asked the question earlier, Rob, what happens when they go off to college? I think we need to start having those conversations before they go off to college and giving freedom for some deconstruction to happen⏤not some.

It just needs to happen. Right? That's part of our that's part of our formation too, figuring out what are the anchor points and what are the questions that we're asking. Sometimes we can search out the answers and mine out the answers to those questions. Sometimes they are mysterious. They come through a lifetime of learning in some cases.

ROB: Yeah. Do you find that a lot of folks, maybe our listeners or even in our churches, even in our leadership, feel ill-equipped to have these conversations because we're not familiar enough with the postmodern frame because we're so much in many ways, within this other frame? So, at least, I find that that is true. I have a number of parents who've reached out and say, "Can you help me? My kid's asking this question, I don't know what to do." What do you think we could do as churches to help people navigate a lot of these questions without defaulting to the modernist framework answers?

JOSIE: One thing Alicia said really stood out to me. She said, "Those that I am connecting with, they don't care what I think or what I know. They care," and you said, "Am I living in love, care, respect, and gentleness?" Those are the pieces that open the door for us. It reminds... yeah.

ROB: So it's almost like you're saying, Josie, that there are certain postures that transcend frames, that, it doesn't matter which of the two frames you're in, they're actually workable, functional, valuable in any of the frames, no matter where you are.

We're going to invite Vijay and Sonia back into the conversation. We're going to give them a chance to give their thoughts to even push back against some of the things that we've been saying and to even probe a little bit deeper. So why don't we welcome them back? Guys, we're looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

VIJAY: Sorry, I was gone for the last 45 minutes. Did you guys talk about anything? Sonia, you go. Because if I start, who knows?

SONIA: Sure, as we reflect on the different frames and what does that look like, I wonder, where does Jesus stop being Jesus? If that makes sense. Where are the areas where it gets muddled and we can think that we need to be Jesus. It really does expose our need to recalibrate or realign with what is our trust level to Him. Do we actually trust that He is big enough in that frame? Do we actually trust that He is enough in that, in the gaps where there are lots of gaps? Is He big enough? I think that's a great way to assess are we anchored in Jesus? As we think about what does that even look like? Well, I think I offer maybe one of the ways is is really reflecting how much do I trust Jesus?

ALICIA: We've always been taught to trust our knowledge over the person of Jesus, right? That if I trust my knowledge of who He is who, I know Him to be experientially.

SONIA: Right.

ROB: Yeah.

VIJAY: One of the things I was wondering as I was listening when we talked about being anchored in Jesus... Protestant tradition, that I am a product of for sure, has mostly ignored the Gospels, except about the death and resurrection, and has spent most of the last however many centuries, but certainly 50 years or whatever, talking about justification by faith. We have ignored His teaching. One of my New Testament professors, and I was going through a course on Luke, he said, "One of the primary ways to read the Gospel of Luke is to understand that Jesus was breaking His word or "circles"⏤we're using the word "frames"⏤He was constantly busting those circles, and that's what got Him killed.

VIJAY: So I think, "Okay, what was He teaching that was so disruptive? Nobody could get away from the disruption?" The disciples were disrupted by it, the religious leaders were disrupted by it, the Greco-Roman culture was disrupted by it. So I've been thinking, "Okay, then He must have some disruptive things to say to me about how I feel about this." So I guess one of the questions I have for you guys is the followers of the Way were working their faith in Jesus out in the context of a Greco-Roman frame and a Jewish frame. Do you think though, those are as distinct and separate as the frames or were they primarily working it out within one frame and there was just some nuances? If the answer's, "No, no, they were different frames," then maybe there's a lot for us to learn from the first century Church in terms of what it means to follow Jesus when there are clearly defined frames that are completely outside of your paradigm.

ROB: Yeah, I think when we talk about frames, we can assume that they're rigid, but I think every frame is porous at the borders. So what that means is there's bleed-over into either frame. So it's more like a Venn diagram where things are overlapping in many ways. So we like to draw hard lines because that helps define things. We love defining things. But in many ways, it's not just an either-or, it's a both-and, in terms of the frames. Can you imagine living in the first century where it's polytheistic? You've got the Silk Road, and you've got cultures from all around the world living together. It's not monolithic. It's heterogeneous, and there's just so many different people from so many different frames and you're learning to live that way. So I think the frames are different, but not so different.

VIJAY: Yeah, like one of the constructs I think that some people have been giving over recent years⏤one of our own, Lee Beach, wrote a book on it⏤on this idea of exile, and drawing on Daniel in Babylon and really even the people of God in Greco-Roman culture for a century as saying, "Yeah. These are worlds." When you read the story of Daniel, it's like he was picked for what he looked like and what his academic potential was. They were brainwashed, emptied of⏤you're going to abandon all of your idea of monotheism or Jehovah God, you're going to adopt these things. You're going to learn new ways, and this guy was actually having to learn magic arts⏤which you know Rob Bremer and Soul Care would have a field day with what Daniel had to learn. Man, how many Soul Care sessions he'd have to go to?

VIJAY: But they said that he became the best practitioner of magic arts, and that the people around him said the spirit of the gods is on that. You think, that guy had gone through serious trauma and seeing his whole family, in a sense, or people, you know, wiped out and deported or whatever, exported, and yet he survived four megalomaniac rulers and two empires, and in a way that was not at all completely separatist, and yet didn't abandon. We've talked about this tension of saying, "We can't abandon some things that we say, 'Oh, yeah, well, truth is truth.'"

VIJAY: It's like, "No, we think some ideas are better than others." Yet he was immersed in a way. I'm sure he didn't make all the right calls all the time. There were some things that we would go, "Whoo, that's a bit suspect, you did that?" So we talked about for our young people, how do we create environments where are we teaching Scripture like that⏤as opposed to the story I heard was on flannel graph was he was courageous, you should be too. So those have been helpful ideas for me as I go, "It's not a certainty of answer. But it's something that describes the world I live in that goes, 'Oh, someone can be devout in a world like this.'"

JOSIE: I wonder if that picture of the Jewish culture and the Greco-Roman culture, which I do think those are... I mean, they were quite different frames, culturally speaking, the way they thought about stuff and the way they practiced life... I wonder if that parallel might be helpful for us to think about when we think about shift within the church. We've got the modern thinking toward postmodern thinking, while the Jewish Christians, Paul had hard work to do in, "Hey, here's a new way of thinking, we're going to be openhanded. We're going to welcome people in under the banner of who we are as followers of Jesus, and we're going to figure out the cultural stuff as we go."

JOSIE: There, there was a massive paradigm shift when the gospel went from one culture and began to permeate another culture. Huge shifts happening there. It would have been tough as a Jewish Christian to have to, "Okay, I got to adapt. All my life, I've been thinking that this is the way to go. This is how I should think about things. My framework is being blown up a bit here. Whoa, what am I going to hold on to? I'm going to hold on to the person of Jesus and walk the.... walk the road ahead." So I wonder if that's a helpful parallel for us to think about as we think of the church now encountering a completely different world that we're living in.

ROB: I think of this whole matter of gospel contextualization. When I say gospel, I don't mean the salvific gospel of the Reformers. I mean, the gospel who is Jesus. Okay, so how does how does that contextualize itself? Because I think one of the best things about the Christian faith is that it is radically inclusive in its ability to communicate and find its way into cultures. I mean, it's demonstrated this throughout history. You think of the early church, up until even so the time of Constantine, it was a global movement. It was in so many different cultures that this gospel had taken root through believers in Christ.

ROB: I think a great example is, I mean, of course, it goes without saying Mars Hill, Apostle Paul Acts 17. I mean, he took the gospel of Jesus and he contextualized it. The resurrected Jesus, he contextualized it into a culture, the Areopagus and the philosophers debating about different things. I think he didn't lose the essence of it. But he didn't come out swinging with a "Romans Road." He didn't come out swinging with... He said, "Okay, this is what's happening in this culture. This is how we communicate Jesus to this culture." I think, let's not lose the essence of who Jesus is, but it does require an understanding of the culture in some ways. Because what did Paul do when he got to the city?

He wandered around, he looked. He said, "Oh, and then I see. I look and I see this altar to an unnamed god." So I think if we're going to be good communicators of the gospel, we need to have some semblance of understanding. I'm not saying we need to know everything, but some semblance of understanding of those we're communicating Jesus to or sharing Jesus with.

Well, this has been a great conversation. But I'd love to go back to what Sonia was talking about a little bit earlier on, about this idea of Jesus being the same in every frame, in every environment, and that does not change. How do you guys respond to that idea?

VIJAY: Well, I think that the idea of, someone said it this way once, that Jesus universally appeals to people and universally offends them, but not in the same way. He was pointing out across cultures, how in Western culture, we might find Jesus' teaching on sexuality to be very offensive and restrictive and out of vogue. But we find his teaching on turn the other cheek, oh, that's so progressive. You go to an honour-shame culture, they would find the teaching on sex to be very honourable and right. But the teaching on turn the other cheek so offensive.

So one of the questions I've been asking is, "Okay, what ways is Jesus is like that I'm aligned? What things about my life is do I find offensive, and I ignore, and I don't like?" I think one of the ways, the only only way to do that, Rob, as you said, is to seek out people who think differently than us and actively listen to them. Because usually, we surround ourselves with people who think the same way. So we won't be offended by what everybody else, certainly, yeah, the social media algorithms in. That's not helping. So I find for me, I have a couple people in my life who I find very disruptive. I have tried to more actively seek them out and just ask them open-ended questions to learn.

SONIA: I like what you say there, Vijay, like, what if anchoring to Jesus actually looks like surrounding ourselves with the unpredictables? What if that's an aspect of being anchored to Jesus? What does that actually look like? Even as I throw that question, where's Jesus not in this? But I liked, Alicia, how you said, some of us were taught not to know Jesus even as a person. So maybe that's an area to explore, where are the areas that I don't know Jesus yet as a person? That's available and going in with⏤

JOSIE: That's a great question.

SONIA: With that mindset of exploring that.

ROB: Yeah, even just have that posture as we go about our daily lives is practicing the presence of God and just saying, "Jesus, where are You at in this conversation? Where are You in this tension I'm feeling, in this conversation that I'm having right now." Or Jesus, how do You love this other person who I'm sitting with right now? So almost intentionally bringing Jesus into the everyday moments of your life is something that I can't say I do very well, all the time. But I find it's really, really helpful to do that. Because I think Sonia you're so right, I mean, Jesus is not different in the different frames. Jesus is Jesus. Jesus is truth. That's who he is. He transcends our frames, and even all of the relationships we have. Yet He's so very imminent as well. That's the brilliance of Him. That He's so involved in the minute details of our lives.

ALICIA: I think, whatever the frame is, Jesus is Jesus. But sometimes I think the way in which, if the gospel is good news, and it's about bringing abundant life and and not destruction and death, that we have to recognize that the thing that brings life into one person's life or one culture, one frame, might look different. I work with a lot of people with addictions, and you look at, as they're starting to move away from those addictions, the thing that brings life.

So if they're moving from meth to cigarettes, that those cigarettes are actually more life-giving than the meth. The meth was causing death. So for me to judge them, knowing that God has them on their own path and is moving them through that, we have to be able to recognize that for this time right now, that smoking or drinking is actually not the biggest death. That that's actually a movement towards life. I think often we want that like black-and-white economy of morals, that we fail to recognize where Jesus is working and bringing life into people's lives. That actually might be death in my life. But for this person, it's a movement towards the abundant life.

JOSIE: Well said.

ALICIA: Thank you.

ROB: Well, guys, we had a fantastic conversation around some pretty lofty ideas today. I really appreciate the insight that you guys have given, the personal reflection, the stories. Of course, this is a conversation that we are going to continue as we walk through life together. So thanks for your contributions, and I'm looking forward to meeting up with you in our next episode together.

REGAN NEUDORF: The New Waters Podcast is brought to you by New Ventures, a ministry of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Canada. Today's episode was produced and edited by me, Regan Neudorf. Our theme music was created by Dad vs. Son. Thanks for listening and joining Jesus at work in Canada as we love the church and learn to think differently with curiosity, hope and wonder.

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