Reclaiming Time: A Round Table on Church Relevance and Engagement

Joshua Noel: 00:00:25

Ephesians 5, verses 15 through 21 in the Christian Standard Bible Pay careful attention then to how you walk.

Not as unwise people, but as wise, making the most of the time because the days are evil, so don't be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is and don't get drunk with wine which leads to reckless living.

But be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual psalms, Singing and making music with your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for everything, to God the Father, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, Submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.

In the book of Ephesians, St. Paul is explaining what it means to be the church here in the midst of an admonishing to be united in servitude, St. Paul warns us to use our time well. Nathan Gilmore, why do you believe it could be important for the mission of the church to prioritize a time management of all things?

Nathan Gilmour: 00:01:15

So first thing I'm going to do is break out my seminary Greek and note that St. Paul here is using the word chiron rather than kronon. So, you know, kronon is the kind of time that you can divide mathematically and therefore the kind that lets itself be managed.

Chiron is a rhetorical term. It's borrowed from Greek rhetoricians. And it has to do with the occasion or the moment or, you know, the time is right.

It's if you want to use the English word time, either one can translate reasonably into it. Here's why that's important.

St. Paul here is talking about those occasions, those things that rise up and those things that are gone if you don't seize on them.

And one of the things that poor time management can do, if we are wasting time in that chronon sense, you know, what we end up doing is we miss those kairos occasions. So, you know, one thing that I always try to tell folks is that I'm all for going off script, but to go off script, I got to have a script.

And you know, if you are going in and you don't have anything planned, I mean, the spirit might be involved, but you're still unprepared.

Joshua Noel: 00:02:23

Yeah. Yeah, that's good stuff. Hey guys, welcome to the Whole Church Podcast, possibly your favorite church Unity podcast. Maybe not. Who knows?

We don't hold grudges. It's not a competition. Because competing for unity would just be weird. Like it's just icky feeling. I don't know.

I'm usually here just to announce TJ Tiberius 1 Blackwell today. I can't. He's not here. He has a headache.

Sometimes when you know as much as tj, which is approximately everything, it just causes your head to have some slight pain. So he had to sub me in because I just know far less. So I don't have to deal with such problems. I am here to announce roundtable. Lots of people.

We have the one Only professor, teacher, Dr. Nathan Gilmore of Christian Humanist Stuff. I didn't prepare my. My intro there, and it shows, and I apologize.

Nathan Gilmour: 00:03:31

It's all cool, man. It's a. Yeah. Nathan Gilmore, high school English teacher. Christian Humanist Profiles is my podcast.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:37

It threw me off, and I was like, wait a minute. Professor's not right anymore.

Nathan Gilmour: 00:03:42

And when TJ Says he's got a headache, he. He looked and he saw that I was going to be here. And he said, oh, you got to be kidding me.

Joshua Noel: 00:03:50

Well, we're also joined again with Matthew Thrift, Pastor Matt Thrift. He is the author Genuine Discipleship in the Modern Age. We reviewed that earlier this year recently. I'm trying to think what the recent one was.

Is that Enemies of the Heart that just came out or is about to come out?

Matthew Thrift: 00:04:08

Yeah. Yes. It came out just over a week ago.

And then I found out immediately after it came out that apparently Andy Stanley released a book years ago called Enemies of the Heart and renamed it. So that's super fun.

So it's a great time for me, really, because all of my book postings consistently just tag back to Andy Stanley's book, which is not my goal. But that's. That's fine. It is what it is. But anyway, happy to be here. Appreciate it, man.

Joshua Noel: 00:04:36

It's good to see you again, man. Good to see you. And I try to remember where the church you pastor is in my mind. It's like it's just cold there. My brain just goes cold and isolates.

Matthew Thrift: 00:04:46

Things I wish right now. No, I'm in. I'm in Newton, Kansas, at Kerner Heights Mennonite Brethren Church and Newton, Kansas.

Right this moment is approximately 3 degrees cooler than hell itself, is my guess. We've got all the heat and all the humidity. I was in OKC this past weekend and it was a little bit worse there, but still rough Midot.

Joshua Noel: 00:05:11

Oh, man. Okay. Well, I don't know. I don't know where I got cold from. I think maybe my brain's just like, higher than Georgia is cold. I don't know.

Matthew Thrift: 00:05:21

I. I wish sometimes, but no, no.

Joshua Noel: 00:05:25

Someone who is more north than Kansas, I believe your other favorite pastor and Friend of the show, Joe Day, host of Buddy Walk with Jesus. How's it going, Joe?

Joe Dea: 00:05:36

Really glad to be back.

Joshua Noel: 00:05:37

Yeah, man, good. Good to have you. You know, it's a little bit easier to. In Joe's intros because he's been on the show so many times for so long.

I've got a little bit more practice. All right, guys. Well, we are jumping into a wild conversation today. We're going to be talking.

Building off or the last roundtable we did, we're going to be talking some about, like, how churches can use their time better. You know, there's a.

Often these days the complaint of, like, oh, well, news media, guitar people for however many hours a week, and we get them one hour a week. And we're going to talk about that complaint. And I think there's a real problem behind it and also a excuse there that. We'll get to that.

We'll get to that later. For now, I have to do TJ's parts that I'm bad at. And this is why DJ is supposed to do TJ sports. Go to our store, get merch. It's comfy.

And says whole church and that. That's cool. And supports the show. That's TJ's part now.

So, as always, we're gonna do silly question because it's the most profound and applicable form of unity. In fact, we've recently proven.

This recent podcast we released got one guy commenting really hard, really mean stuff at us, and we asked, hey, did you actually listen to it? He's like, yeah, but I skipped that silly question because that's just silly. It should be serious. I'm. Well, there you go.

You can't have unity without s. Silliness. That's. That's where he messed up, man. So we won't be messing that up. We're jumping into the silly right now. In today's silly question.

I'll answer first. Give you time to think about it, guys. Oh, this one's easy. Cool. Well, you know, it's one of the Would you rathers.

Would you rather see a koala driving a tank or a fish piloting a large aircraft? That's rough. I'm gonna say fish because I wasn't really specific and there's a lot of different kinds of fish, and I. I love.

I love sea life, but qualities are pretty darn cute. But I'm still gonna go with fish. Piloting an aircraft. Matt. Pastor Matt, where are you going? Koala with a tank. Fishing and aircraft.

Matthew Thrift: 00:07:44

Yeah. I gotta be honest, both of these Horrify me on a. On a deep level. I. I'm terrified.

I have a friend who went, and she lived in Australia for a while, and I always thought koalas were, like, cute and cuddly. And then she sent me a video of it just about eating her face off. They're terrifying. But with that being said, they are awesome.

And I'm going to go with koala driving a tank. I don't. I. I don't know. Not sure how a fish flying a plane would go. A little concerned it would end up in my backyard. So we're going to go with.

Go with the koala tank situation.

Joshua Noel: 00:08:15

Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. San Diego Zoo has Qualifornia. It's great. They just climb on you. They're so cute. But that's because they're very domesticated.

Joe, which one? Koala driving a tank, Fish piloting an aircraft.

Joe Dea: 00:08:30

Yeah. I mean, both of these fundamentally make me uncomfortable, but I feel like a koala is more adept to be able to do its thing.

So I gotta also go with the koala.

Joshua Noel: 00:08:40

Yeah. I think koalas have thumbs. They're definitely more capable. Maybe that's why I'd rather see the fish. It's sillier somehow.

All right, Nathan, where you going, man? Koala driving a tank or a fish piloting an aircraft?

Nathan Gilmour: 00:08:54

I'm gonna take the koala in a tank as well, simply because if you did put a fish in an aircraft and told me it was piloting the thing, I wouldn't know where to look to verify that the fish was, in fact, piloting it. And, you know, there wasn't some older sibling sitting behind the fish with the video game controller. So the koala.

I feel like I could connect the movements of the koala to the movements of the vehicle. Better.

Joshua Noel: 00:09:21

Yeah.

Nathan Gilmour: 00:09:21

Yeah.

Joshua Noel: 00:09:21

It's more. More easily verified. Very sc. Scientific answer. Gotta appreciate that. Gotta appreciate that. All right, guys. Well, we've made it through the silly.

We now have perfect unity. And the rest of the podcast is gonna be easy because me, Joe, and Nathan have never been known to disagree. It's never happened, I don't think.

But, yeah, I mentioned in our last roundtable discussion, we were discussing the relevance of church for the working class.

So this spring, we did a series of podcast episodes where we were just kind of asking people who don't work in minstrel offices, like, hey, what's relevant to you? Are these theological things we're talking about, church, do they impact your life at all? We took their answers.

We had a Roundtable taught to actual pastors and people who are in academia and like, hey, you guys are doing this. How do you feel about these answers? What do we reflect on?

And one of the things we got back when we were having that conversation, Dr. Beck, who is both a professor as well as a pastor, mentioned that it's so hard because you get the congregates for such a limited period of time while they're being. Watch this, Matt. Discipled by our media and by news outlets and stuff like that. And he's like that. How much more can we really do compared to that?

Like, we can't compete. I don't know what his exact words were, but I've heard that from many pastors. Like, I've heard this a lot or something similar to it.

So let's start there. Like, am I alone?

Have you guys heard pretty much the same complaint or excuse from other pastors or just on face value, how do you guys just react to that statement or that idea?

Nathan Gilmour: 00:10:57

I'll go take the first swing at it and say that. The more I thought about it when I was getting ready for the show, the more I think that this is a fragmented congregation kind of a problem.

So I think that there are certainly people who have hours to fill, and therefore they fill them with social media or with cable news or with, you know, those entertainment industries that grow up around the parties.

I've come to think that the parties themselves aren't really as much of a problem as I used to think, because they only want you in one place every two years, every four years, they're usually happy with.

But the entertainment industries, they want your attention because they want to sell ads, and they are perfectly fine damaging people spiritually so they can sell more of those ads.

So there's those people, but then there's people who are living different kinds of lives where the isolation from the church and the discipleship is coming not from social media, not from cable news, but from a plurality of communities that want more of their time, more of their attention, more of their resources. So I'm one of these second kind of people. My daughter's volleyball teams, they want me to be more involved. And yes, I did just use the plural.

My high school, where I teach, wants me to be more involved. My church wants me to be more involved. My family wants me to be more involved. Right?

And so I really am not in much danger of spending hours and hours and hours on social media debating politics with people just because I don't have time to.

So it's one of those things, I, the more I thought about this question, the more I realized I have a lot of follow up questions, but I don't have a whole lot of answers.

Joshua Noel: 00:12:39

Yeah, yeah. Joe, did you anything to add or anything you want to add to the complaint or even criticize, criticize the complaint?

Joe Dea: 00:12:47

So I'm, I'm, I'm as shocking as, as it is. I agree with, with Nathan on this one. It elicits a lot of questions, right. When you hear, and to your original question, have I heard this before?

Yes, I've heard this before. So the question becomes, well, if you have them for such a short period of time throughout the week, right.

If you have their attention, what is the culture of the church look like? What does the culture of the community look like?

Is there an edict and an ethic within the church that says that we are going to attempt to draw out this idea of community within the congregation, within the church and have that overflow into the lives outside of, you know, from 11 to 12 or from 9 to 10 or whatever the case may be on a Sunday morning?

I, I personally believe that there are always other communities, and I use that word very, very intentionally that are driving for discipleship time within the body or within, within the mindset of human beings.

Now sometimes those can be like Nathan was describing, literal communities of pockets of people that are drawing, trying to draw your attention, or they can be perceived communities.

When you take something like news, or you take something like entertainment, or you take something like social media, each one of them is looking to develop a perceived sense of community for the people that are engaging with it, because that keeps retention higher, that keeps ad sales stronger, that keeps, keeps your attention longer if you feel like you belong.

So the question then becomes to the people who are complaining that they only get their congregation for like an hour, what are you doing to help people feel like they belong in that community? And I don't think the answer is just as simple as do more stuff throughout the week.

Joshua Noel: 00:15:07

Right.

Joe Dea: 00:15:08

I know a lot of pastors that you're like, okay, so what I do is we've got a Tuesday night this and we've got a Wednesday night that, and we've got a Thursday, whatever, great. If they're, if they're life giving to the congregation and they're serving the congregation and it works, awesome.

That's not, it's not a matter of, that's wrong. But I don't think that's the sum total of the answer. I think in order to be equitable to the actual Question and issue.

You have to, you have to sit at the level of, unfortunately, Sunday and, And have. And. And. And color within those lines. First and foremost, before you start to say, what else are we doing? What other programs are we running?

Different things like that, you know, because I think it just becomes easy to just say, let's add more programming. Let's add more programming as almost like this, this safety net.

Try and keep band aiding a problem that more often than not sits at more of a community and discipleship level than it does. Are there enough activities, especially for singles and especially for people with unique interests?

There tends to be a drought of engaging programming or activities or different things like that for specific groups of people. But it's not just let's programatize it. It's what are we actually doing to bake this into the DNA of our congregation?

Joshua Noel: 00:16:46

Yeah, yeah. And I. With what you're saying, like two things in my mind.

One is my wife's an optometric technician and really gets annoyed when I talk because, like, I work in a restaurant.

So when, even when I talk to her, like, and I ask about our patients so many times, I'm like, so when your customers come in and she's like, they're not customers.

But I feel like that's what we do in a lot of our church circles is we're actually just treating them like customers and they're not buying what I say, so I need to sell it better. You know, maybe we still wouldn't use the word customer, but like, let's be real, that's how we're treating it.

The other thing I'm gonna pull from late night TV for those listening. It's been probably been a while, but as recording, it just happened where Stephen Colbert's the Late show got canceled, right?

And Jon Stewart doing a bit of it, bit about it on the Daily show, he's like, yeah, that's not what we did with music. CD stopped selling because things went digital. We didn't just stop making music. He's like, yeah, late night TV is struggling.

You don't just stop with the content when it's your number one content unless there's some other reason to do it. And that's when they get into their whole other stuff. We're not here to talk politics, but I think a very similar concept is happening.

The church isn't competing with other things where people are gathering in person doing things. People just don't do that anymore. What the church is complaining about is I only get them for an hour a week.

They're not going anywhere for an hour a week like that, man. So, like, maybe it's a formatting issue in some degree rather than just the other thing.

But Matt, do you have anything you wanted to add or critique or maybe you just want to tell me something that I said was stupid?

Matthew Thrift: 00:18:27

No, no, no, I, I have.

I. I guess as I've thought through it over the past couple years, I, I think for sure, especially depending on your circumstance, where you live, where you're pastoring and whatever else, obviously changes the metrics by which, by which we're going to look at it in the first place.

But I know, like when I was in Utah, pastoring out there, the vast majority of people, certainly not all, not going to paint with too broad a brush, but the vast majority kind of fit into one particular political box. And there wasn't a whole lot of outside thought coming in or going out or anything else.

And a lot of people, again, not all, but a lot of people would spend hours upon hours upon hours upon hours a week taking in all of this political content, TV content, whatever else. So there was a. There's a certain subsect of people who. Yes, I would totally agree, although I can't disagree with anything JoJo said.

I think he's absolutely right on. And I, I think there's a point to get to that's. That's a bigger point that he brings up there.

But with that being said, it's one of those things where for certain subgroups of people, unequivocally, I think we are watching, where some people will get more discipled, quote unquote, or they're at least taking in more of their, I guess, like, singular voice, like conversations coming to them.

In a sense, that didn't happen, to my knowledge, nearly as much 20, 30 years ago, where you wouldn't hear somebody who is effectively your pastor now, even though they are a political commentator or whatever else. I think that is a newer issue and I do think it deserves addressing in its own right, because I've seen enough of that.

Yes, I've definitely heard the complaint. I've probably made similar complaints in my, my time in ministry myself. So I do think there's a validity to a subsect of it.

I also think what Joe is saying is probably the biggest point, which is kind of the commoditization of so many things within the church in the first place. Kind of that idea of like, I. All I can say is I've worked in small churches, I've worked in bigger churches.

The prevalent belief among all of them, unfortunately, not all, but many of them comes down to, like, all of these metric growth models and trying to figure out who can get the most baptisms and trying to get all your numbers up and all of this. And we model so much of church in the modern world after the business side of things that I think it's quite concerning.

And I think this is one of those areas where it comes into play where we're starting to think, man, we're, we're losing this monetary battle with culture. And I'm like, dude, I think you just need to do better at encouraging discipleship in communities throughout the rest of the week.

If you've got 30 minutes of a sermon, if you've got an hour of a sermon, spend that time encouraging people to get in community together where they're going to learn and they're going to be discipled in the first place. Now, again, not to say it's not a complaint that's valid.

There are aspects that are in certain subsets, but there's also a side in which I think that a lot of it's just the, the business. I don't think that's a word, but we can add it to the dictionary of, of church over the last couple. A couple decades. For certain.

Joe Dea: 00:21:41

He is 100 correct in the sense of we, whether it's for 10 minutes or eight hours a week, whatever the time frame is, we have these gimmicks in our pockets that are a gateway into whatever we want to hear. And there are. There is a constant stream of voices. Doesn't matter what they are, pop culture, political, religious, or something else. There.

There is a steady feed of different voices that are going into our ears and going into our hearts. And I want to be clear about something. We are shaped and formed by the things that we take in.

We are 100% disciple by the things that we consume, regardless of however long we take ingesting it.

And so, yes, when you talk about if, if 100% is the entirety of a church congregation, I would argue that more often than not, it's probably a higher percentage that leans towards that, that culture aspect of it. What are you instilling within the, within the life of your congregation, your church, your people? And, and how are you.

And how are you encouraging them to take those edicts into their everyday lives?

But we cannot blow past the fact that we have to address what we are allowing to shape us and to be the dominant voice within our minds and within our hearts and within our lives, because if we become so focused on something like. Like politics. I'll use myself as an example here. I found myself like a lot of folks in October, November, December, January, so very opinionated.

And it started to invade my ministry, and it started to invade the content that I produced, and it started to invade the conversations that I was having. And it became such a loud voice because of everything that was going on.

It started to affect me and my walking around and all of these sorts of things. It didn't hurt or it didn't help anything that at the time, my leg was broken, and so I couldn't really do a lot.

So a lot of it was getting mainlined, straightened to my veins at that point in time. But you notice there's. There's a very quick and fast cutoff that took place where I stopped talking about politics because I.

Because for my soul, I needed to quiet. And not to mention, there are people who were doing what I was trying to do and doing it way better than I could have done it, and.

And it made sense for them, and. Awesome. Mazel. Fantastic. But it was starting to affect the way that I was doing ministry and caring for people's souls.

So I needed to cut that off because it was starting to shape me. It was becoming a discipling voice to me.

And so, yes, in the midst of all this, even though a lot of us like to think big in all of that, we do need to drill down and say, okay, so in the lives of the folks that are attending our congregations or are next to us in the pews or whatever the case may be, what are we taking in and what are we allowing to dictate the conversations that we're having and the relationships that we're forming?

Joshua Noel: 00:25:28

So there are several threads from that. So I'm probably going to backtrack a little bit because I had to take notes. But I do want to talk about the politics bit.

I want to go back to that later, especially because I think you can't avoid that in this conversation. And it's almost like two separate conversations. There's a format question and then the content question.

And, you know, a lot of the churches that complain that, oh, I only have them for an hour a week, well, they come in and either you're like, well, Jesus hates the gays, or it's, well, we're going to read this Bible verse and talk about what happened back then in this old, ancient time. Meanwhile, our politics are talking about people actually dying in our country.

So sometimes it is kind of like a, well, this Politics thing seems a little bit more relevant than what you guys are talking about. So I think there is a content based thing, but I also do think there's a format thing that.

So I think there's two different conversations, which is difficult to have with this particular group of humans who like to talk a lot. One is we talk about biznifying, commoditizing.

I wonder how much of that plays a part when what we've sold as important for the church is the sermons and the music.

And now all of a sudden people can download Christian music and listen to Christian podcasts and it's like, well, I could get better versions of this somewhere else. And you've sold it as this is the point of church. And I can get that somewhere else. And then also just kind of like, does it matter then?

Like, right, like we. The whole question thing is, oh, well, we can't get them in our churches, but they can get the message somewhere else.

They can get community somewhere else, they can get music somewhere else. Maybe church is outdated.

Like, I don't want to be afraid to ask that question too, because that kind of seems like the thing that's glaring us in the face is maybe church itself is just the problem. What do you guys do with that? You know, obviously I don't think church is the problem, but I think it's dishonest not to ask that.

Nathan Gilmour: 00:27:29

Yeah, I mean, if I. If I could take a first swing at it.

I mean, really, I mean, you know, as I thought about this, the ecclesiology question really did come up front and center. So what is a church, and what is a church's role in the world that God loves?

And one of the answers that I think is going to become inadequate is that, you know, the church is a place where people come so that they can, you know, gain some kind of comfort so they can go back to being workers and Americans and so on and so forth. Right. Because as you said, Josh, if you need that, there's plenty of outlets that can give you that content.

And I'm using that Internet, you know, jargon very advisedly here in better quality and with less commitment. And it won't ask you directly for money. It'll just make you listen to some ads. Right. On the other hand, and I mean, this is where I tend to fall.

If, in fact the local people gathered as the body of Christ has a mission to be an ambassador from a foreign country that, you know, the Greek word is Uranus, the English word is often heaven, then it really is important that People actually gather in a place and live in certain ways as a colony of that foreign country. Now, I mean, like I said, I'm convinced of that latter one.

But I also recognize that, you know, as I talk to folks and as I think about my own experience, there's a lot of folks who show up to church because they don't want their kids to grow up without it, because they think it's going to be some sort of therapeutic benefit, because they want to combat their own loneliness that, you know, so on and so forth. Right. But once again, you know, kind of, as you mentioned, those are the sorts of things that are good for human beings.

I'm not going to deny that they're good, but I don't think that they are at the center of what a church is, even as I can point to places where churches, in fact, do that. But it's one of those things where I'd say, you know, it's a matter of what we seek first. Right.

So for me, and I'm rambling on here, I apologize, that ecclesiology question, what is a church and what is the church's role in the world that God loves? Those are the questions that are going to drive discipleship. And I'm going to say one more thing, I promise.

I love the noun discipleship because it's the beginning of a conversation, because discipleship is an abstract word for concrete practices. And whenever I hear someone say, well, we don't need to do this. We need to do discipleship, I say, oh, good. Now tell me more. What. What is what?

If you're looking at a person, how can you tell if they're doing discipleship or whether they're playing euchre? Because, you know, I. I have a hunch those are different, but I need to know how they're different.

Joshua Noel: 00:30:15

Yeah.

Nathan Gilmour: 00:30:15

All right, Now I'm going to shut up and let Joe and Matt talk.

Joshua Noel: 00:30:18

That was. That's good stuff. That's an important point. Joe, you want to chime in there?

Joe Dea: 00:30:22

Yeah. So, I mean, some of the questions that you've.

That you're asking here are some of the same questions that, being as heavily involved in digital ministry as I have been over the years, man, these are. These are the questions that sit at the heartbeat of it. Because, you know, there's three levels of. Of Christian digital ministry. There's evangelism.

It's where you're dumping all of this money into it because you're generally using it as an evangelical tool to promote the gospel. Then there's the consumer Level, that's where I would say probably 75 to 80% of online churches sit where they stream their service.

They stream, they, they sometimes some of them stream the worship depending on their, on their setup. And the idea is you just, you, you, you log in and you watch and you consume. And it's a very consumer friendly environment.

I would argue a lot of church services as a whole sit at this level, even outside of it being digital. And then there's the community level.

And so you have to ask the question and you really have to define the term when you start to say, okay, so, so church this and church that. Okay, great, what is it? What is the church? What is the role of the church? What is the purpose of the church?

And I go back to this, this term community, this place of belonging. And, and yes, that can happen online too. You know, it's not just a, a, a brick and mortar thing when you talk about the coming together of people.

But you cannot forsake the coming together of people. And so you have to ask the question, why then do that if it's just about the sermon and if it's just about the music?

Well, honestly, for most churches, your people can probably get a more polished, better version of whatever you're doing elsewhere because there are organizations and there are churches that dump millions. Yes, with an M into the quality of what it is that they are putting out on a weekly and sometimes multiple times a week basis. So then what is it?

You go then to the level of what happens when the body of believers actually come together? Well, it's the body of believers. It's not just about like drawing people into the door. Okay, great, if people come into the door.

But what's happening for the people that are actually there on a weekly basis? Are they being poured into, are they being fed? It's not that.

It's like the way station for like you fill up on a Sunday and then you go back around the block through this.

I promise you, if that's the relationship that you have with church, you're probably going to run out of gas by Wednesday if it was a really good sermon, you know what I mean? Like that sort of thing. So that's when it comes back to, is it outdated?

Well, the consumer model I think is being proven to be outdated because it's being showcased in other mediums. The playing field is entirely different than it used to be.

But at the same token, we, we started off this conversation by talking about this plurality of communities that are vying for the attention and vying for the. The bandwidth space in. In the mind on. On a. On a daily basis.

Well, as somebody who is very well versed with the business world, as somebody who's very well versed with marketing, with advertising, all of those kinds of things, all of those things want you to believe wholeheartedly that what you are consuming is every single solitary thing that you need. But go to the store and buy five Snickers and call that the entirety of your. Your diet for that day. You're gonna feel like garbage by the end of it.

You may love those. You may. Snickers may be your favorite candy in the whole wide world, but you're gonna feel lacking by the end of it.

That's where the body of believers, that's where the collection of the saints steps in and shows its relevance, that it's actually something where people can feel like they belong and that they are in the context of something bigger than themselves.

Joshua Noel: 00:35:08

Yeah, well, two things on that. One is, that's why I think it's important to have an understanding of what we mean when we say Sacramento.

For those churches that have sacraments, this is like a means by which we experience the grace that God has given us. Like, I actually can't take communion online.

I actually need to be there in person from a practical stance that's just like, hey, more people are going to go if you. They need for that. But I still don't feel like that's quite enough either. I don't know. I like to go for the.

The sacraments, but I'm not gonna go every time for that alone. And then, yeah, I don't know. I think community is key. It's interesting.

So tj, the co host of this show, is on another podcast that we have on the network called Systematic Ecology, and him and Reverend Laura Whitman recently did a what if episode on, like, what if Church was more like Comic Con. And at first I was like, oh, this is kind of cool.

And then hearing, like, just how Reverend Laura talks about Comic Con, like, this is a place of belonging. This is a place where, hey, you can dress up how you want, be who you want to be, interact with anybody. Everyone's accepting of you.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, no, there is still a need for that. People still want that.

Matthew Thrift: 00:36:21

Where.

Joshua Noel: 00:36:22

Where are we missing it, Matt?

Matthew Thrift: 00:36:23

And do I think. I mean, yeah, I've never been to Comic Con. No shade. It sounds great. Just never been myself. But.

But with that being said, I think there's the element of, yes, you belong. Yes, there's all of these things that are absolutely accurate.

There's also the piece of like interactivity that when you go to Comic Con, you get to dress up, you get to be part of it. You're, you're part of this.

And I think one of the things that as I've kind of researched, looked more at Gen Z and kind of like emerging generations, the thing that time and time and time again is said when it comes to church and the relationship with church with younger generations is like they want to be involved and want to be part of something. They want experience. They want more than just the consumeristic.

I came into church, I listened to a decent TED Talk, I heard a third rate cover band play a couple Hillsong tunes, and then I went back home and like, again, no shade, like, I. We try, we try. But yeah, I mean, during COVID I was working at a pretty large church in Utah.

Not the one large church in Utah that everybody thinks of just for, for reference, but, but a evangelical Christian church in Utah.

And while I was working there, one of the conversations we had that, that came up was, hey, understandable, because that's the way that we look at metrics. We're human beings, we think about these things. Somebody said, hey, do we still need a live stream?

Because I'm looking at our numbers on the live stream and I'm looking at Hillsong, I'm looking at whatever the. I mean, we were in Vegas and in Vegas you've got all these big central churches out there.

They're like people from our community are watching central churches or whatever, church's livestream, and they're not watching our livestream. Is it even beneficial at this point?

And I remember saying, at that point, I was like, hey, you have to clarify, like, why is it you have a live stream? What does that even mean? What is all of that?

But it all gets down to the root of like, are we offering anything, whether it's live stream, in person, whatever else, are we offering any community steps in our services where you can physically be involved in the service? And one that I think you've brought up in sacrament is communion, the Lord Supper or whatever it's called in your particular group.

Like, that is one of the things that we get to see where Christ is actually inviting us into participation as a community.

I think it's something we get to lean into as Christians in the world we live in today and say, look, this is a great way to be involved, to be part of something bigger than yourself.

And I, I do think we miss a certain element of that in a lot of our church services, the way that kind of like the seeker sensitive services, there's lots of good, but lots of bad that's come out of it and of has been that, yeah, come listen to one guy share his thoughts and that's about it. And. And are we then, if we're in that model, I think then we have to be drastically concerned.

If we're devoted to that being the only model, we've got to be drastically concerned with what people are taking in the other hours of their week. If we're willing to say, hey, discipleship happens best in community, one on one, in small groups in these things.

And we're going to not just program away this problem, we're going to intentionally create community spaces where you can be part of this.

I think then it becomes less of a concern what people are doing with the rest of their time, because we can hope that they're getting involved in these things. We can encourage that consistently.

Because I do think community is probably the best answer to getting away from our time constraints, quote, unquote, on a Sunday morning. I don't think the answer is to make church 18 hours long. Pretty confident that would help us much.

Joshua Noel: 00:40:15

Yeah. Well, I'll say one thing and then I got another question before we get to the roundtable, roundup we got to do. But the. My grand.

One of my grandfathers got to a point in his life, the probably last at least 10 years where he was just not able to leave his house. I thank God for live streams being the thing.

Like he still had an identity with that church and wanted to experience and he didn't care about the big hillsong church he wanted to his church and the fact that he was able to have it was awesome. And I'm just so proud that, like, the church is at least doing that. I just think we should do more.

So I want to say that we talked a lot about the format.

I want to go back to the content stuff that Joe brought up before we do the roundtable, especially with like politics and stuff, because I do think there's something important there.

Especially I'm going to point to when Alligator Alcatraz was announced and they started selling T shirts to celebrate people dying in prisons or something. I don't know. I remember that coming out of morbid curiosity.

I listened to an old church that I had attended before that and it was like, really Republican. And I was like, I just kind of want to hear what they're going to say about this.

You know, I listened to the sermon, the pastor talked about why God doesn't like gay people, didn't mention Alcatraz alligator stuff at all, and then gave a nice little message about Isaiah. And I'm like, yeah, that's not relevant to where we live or this world at all.

And I mean, that goes back to the whole, hey, is the church being relative to people's regular everyday lives? And is it sometimes it's not even being regular to the world around it, much less people's everyday lives. So how much of it is a content, probably?

I know we talked a lot about format, but how much of it is like we're just talking about stuff that.

Man, I don't care how much hope you want to give me, if you're not going to talk about what's happening in the world, yeah, I'm still gonna turn into news channels to hear what's happening in the world and when they're the only one who's telling me how to feel about it. I don't know, man. I don't know. Nathan, I haven't heard you in a minute. You wanna, you wanna jump in with that?

Nathan Gilmour: 00:42:17

Yeah, I. I'll confess that I. Once again, I don't have a whole lot of answers for this.

I mean, one of the questions that arises for me, though, is again, what is the purpose of our community? And, you know, again, community is another one of those nouns that I love thinking about because it's the beginning of a conversation.

You know, I mean, if I get together with a baseball team, the purpose is fairly clear, right? If I get together with a book group A, you know, that purpose is fairly clear with a church.

I mean, if I start with St. Paul, which is where I tend to start when I think about church. You know, there.

There are these images of being an embassy and being a witness and, you know, legal and political terms that are different from a political party, that are different from an activist group.

And so, I mean, for one thing, you know, I think that it is entirely relevant to think about what's going on in Isaiah simply because Isaiah, among other things, shows us ways that God interacts with the world and the ways in which God loves the world that are going to keep us from imposing our ideas of what we want for the world on God. Right? So, I mean, I think that, you know, going back to the 8th century BC and thinking about Isaiah is still good medicine.

So having said that, I think that when we are talking about the events that occur around us, certainly prayer is someplace that I would start, right?

I would say that, you know, praying and bringing God as an agent, as a character into these situations in ways that are shaping our imagination of the situations is important because one of the things that I hear more most often is people's sense of helplessness. Right.

You know, I mean, whether we're talking about, you know, things that Republican presidents are doing or Russian premiers are doing or whoever else in the world is doing, most of us don't have the resources, the power or the weapons, frankly, to make it stop. So, I mean, you know, prayer really does make sense in those situations.

And, you know, I think that that is one of the disciplines, since we're talking about discipleship, that really does matter in these kinds of contexts right now when it comes to relevance.

I'll confess that, again, I'm a little bit torn on that, because what I want to bring, and this is partly my personality and partly, I think our calling as churches are questions for things that people assume. Right?

So, I mean, you know, if the assumption is the solution to this is to use political coercion, military coercion, so on and so forth, I want to ask, all right, you know, why is it that we jump there, Right? If people say that, you know, belonging is important, I want to ask, what does belonging actually mean?

Does it mean simply that I let you do what you're doing, you let me do what I'm doing, and as long as none of us irritates the other too much, we let each other continue to exist? Or is there something towards which that belonging, that community, is driving?

And again, that's where I really do think that going back to Isaiah, going back to St. Paul, going back to theology, really does matter. So I am, once again, I mean, you know, I'm always going to be making the case for Christian education.

I don't think it always has to take the same forms that it took 500 years ago.

But I do think that some kind of dialogue in which people's imaginations are being formed by questioning really has to be part of what we talk about when we talk about discipleship.

Joshua Noel: 00:46:01

I think for me, and I'm going to throw it to Joe here, but for me, the thing is, when I hear about church from other church leaders or pastors and whatever, usually we get this thing around, like, this is a place you come to kind of prepare for the rest of the week, or you get this language of, like, the church is the body, we're supposed to be in Christ to the world.

In either of those circumstances, if people are being tortured around Me, I had someone drug out of one of the stores I work at just ripped from their family. And I go, and you're gonna tell me, well, 800 years ago, here's what somebody said about having hope. That's cool, man.

Someone got drug out of this store. If I'm preparing for my week, how do I prepare for that? Because 800 years ago, somebody had some hope.

If I'm being the body of Christ, what do I do when I watch someone drug out from their family? That's where I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if we're being relevant. To be honest, I really don't.

And, Joe, on that happy note, since you brought up the politics of it, how it was consuming for you, I figured you probably have a little bit more to say about this. Seemed like you've thought about this before.

Joe Dea: 00:47:11

So I do. So the answer for me, the question became, why am I doing what I'm doing? What is the end goal for what I am doing?

And the reality is, I watched a lot of folks around me succumb to yelling into the void. And honestly, I don't think yelling into the void is helpful. That is my hot take for today.

I think 90% of the content that's being created centering around Christian nationalism and politics is useless because it's ultimately just driving emotion out of people. It's not serving anything. Now. Now, that being said, a couple of things that define parts of my personality type. I am a product of the 90s, y'.

Joshua Noel: 00:48:00

All.

Joe Dea: 00:48:01

I was raging against the machine far before I knew Jesus.

I. I fundamentally believe in question everything, interrogate everything, do not, for the love of God, just blindly walk and believe everything that's coming from the pulpit, everything that's coming from the news, everything that's being fed into you. Question everything for yourself and develop two what do I believe and why do I believe it?

Now, the other thing that influences how I think about these things. I am what you may call wildly liberal to most people. I like to believe that in some. In some areas, I am the. I am still theologically conservative in.

ly conservative now today, in: 2025

Joshua Noel: 00:48:56

Yeah.

Joe Dea: 00:48:57

I don't know. However many years ago it it. That. That.

That definition has incredibly changed as I've learned theology, as I've developed what, like the basis for my understanding and all of those kinds of things. I do think that there is an unfortunate amount of time where it becomes this game of I have to play to. When you go.

When you go to go see the Stones, right? What do you want to hear? You want to hear the Stones play their greatest hits? You don't want to play. You don't want to hear.

You don't want to hear them get experimental and all this kind of stuff. Like at this stage in the career, you want to hear the Stones play the greatest hits. And so the idea here is that I've. I've got to perform.

People came here to hear something, and I cannot deviate from playing the greatest hits. Does that sound cynical? Yes, that sounds cynical, but there's truth to it.

And the reality is there is a world where we do need to comment on the things that need commenting on. But how we do it matters. And just because we are stumbling over something does not mean that everybody is stumbling over something.

And so there's a couple of different, different layers to, to. To this. And I'll try to be very brief at all. Anybody that's listening that is a church leader, you have to understand your congregation.

You have to understand the struggles of your congregation. I was serving in a church right around when. When the.

Our president said what he said about Puerto Rico and, and all of that people in that congregation are from there. We needed to talk about it. I was serving in a church when the bombs flew what a ago. And the nuclear sites were bombed.

We needed to talk about it because people were disturbed by the fact that they woke up to news that something had happened that very well could have started another world war. The reality is sometimes we need to address the things that need addressing, but also to the leaders.

Just because it's happening doesn't mean that you need to comment on it. Just because it bothers you doesn't mean that you need to talk about it from the pulpit.

So that's where understanding the people and that's where there's shades of gray to all of this conversation.

As a congregate, you have to have some level of grace with the whole, with the whole situation to understand that the person at the front of the room has the unenviable task of leading people in a time of worship. And yes, that goes beyond just cold, dead statements about old people from the Bible.

And unfortunately, as somebody who most of my time is taught is spent teaching the Old Testament. I never thought the day would come where you could say that my academic work that I share my time in, in people ministry. I also do academic work.

I never thought the day would have Come that I would.

That my academic work would mainly be coming from the Old Testament, namely, because for a long time I couldn't stand reading the Testament, but here we are. And that a lot of times that's presented in a way that's totally detached from everything and ironic.

You all keep bringing up Isaiah in that day where the bombs were flying. That is exactly where I taught out of was Isaiah.

Because at some point, at some point, as Christians, yes, we need to acknowledge the reality of what is happening and the heartache of what is happening. And yes, for some people, that means vocalizing against tyranny and oppression and heartache and damage and all of those things.

I will not throw shade at people who are standing up and voicing themselves. Because sometimes, friends, we need to speak against. But in a lot of ways, that stands separate from the Christian call.

Our Christian call can inform those things. But we also need to remember what is home base. And home base is to say, okay, we live in a time that is tragic, but we do not despair.

As if those without hope. And so you keep saying, yeah, it's great. Somebody 800 years ago had hope. Somebody in the ancient past had hope.

These things happened in the ancient past. But also we have to remember that there is a level to all of this where we have to keep going back to the stories that we know.

We have to keep going back to the things that we have learned, the things. Because those are the things that keep us pressing forward. The truth of the hope that we have are the things that keep us pressing forward.

Because without those things, we just look at the world around us as the dark and cruel place that it absolutely can be. Yeah, I'll stop preaching.

Joshua Noel: 00:54:09

No, that was good. It's. Yeah. So for the record, I love Isaiah. I read the Bible a lot for me whenever I had my accident.

Isaiah 27:1 was just the only thing that I could remember. And I just quoted it to myself over and over and over and tell me for this for like, not relevant. Right.

Like in the day of the Lord, that his sore and great and powerful swords, I'll punish Leviathan, the sleeping serpent, the piercing serpent. Leviathan, that crooked serpent, he shall slay him. That is the sea dragon.

Joe Dea: 00:54:37

What?

Joshua Noel: 00:54:38

That's not relevant. Those I don't think I could remember. Right. And I quoted to myself over and over. And it gave me peace in that time.

And then later I found out it's the only verse in my entire pawpaw's Bible that was highlighted. I had no idea. But God works in weird ways.

And I do think those things are important, but they're only important if someone helps people make some of the connections. Sometimes it's hard for people to make those connections. I am an avid Kingdom Hearts player. I love it. People get annoyed with how much I say it.

My pastor has a drinking game where every time I say Kingdom Hearts, he has to take a drink, even if it's of water. Doesn't matter. He has to take a drink every time I say it. And he listens to this. And I'm going to say Kingdom Hearts a lot this time.

I'm sorry, Will, but so many people play it and they're like, wow, that was a fun game. I got to see some Disney characters. They didn't connect the dots. I'm playing it and, okay, so the first game is like, is my identity my spirit?

The second game is, is my identity in my memories, or am I my. Without that. It's actually this incredibly deep commentary, very philosophical. And I connect it to my life, and it gives me hope.

I actually play that game when I need hope. In the darkest times. I don't have any shade against people who don't make those connections.

But the thing is, like, when we talk about something more serious, like the Bible, if no one's helping people make connections, a lot of people are doing it. Like, they play Kingdom Hearts and they're like, that was a cool story. There was a guy who slept with some lions.

And over here, we see this guy that was kind of cool, like that Jonah dude. He seems nice. If there's no one helping them make the connections, I feel like that's where we kind of lose. Lose the rabbit.

My other thing is, like, with the news media, I think what it does and what I would like the church to do. This is just. This is my teaser for that episode.

News medias, conservative or liberal, paint the other people as the bad guy, and they're the bad guy because these people are being hurt. They use your identifying with. Oh, man. I don't want the immigrants to be hurt to make the Democrats the bad guy or the Republicans the bad guy.

In that case, I guess so. Usually the Democrats are the bad guy because your kids are being hurt. Hurt, right. But it's.

They're using victims so that they can vilify someone else. And what I think the church. What I would like to see the church do is show the victims and say, now, how do we love the victims?

Let's stop vilifying other people. Show where the love is. And that's where I think the church could have a different word in this time and maybe be more useful. Okay.

Matt, you had something you want to say before the roundup?

Matthew Thrift: 00:56:49

Yeah, yeah. No, I just wanted to weigh in a little bit on it. But no, I think I.

The biggest thing to me is that, yes, unequivocally, I do think we can use scripture, and I think you agree with that. Like, I don't think there's any aspect of what you were trying to say, anything otherwise. I know, but.

But yeah, I think scripture is exactly something that can speak into the current political climate or otherwise, whatever is going on in your communities, first and foremost, yes, I will.

I will die on the hill that pastors maybe, I can't say number one responsibility, but it is in their top responsibilities that you should be a freaking expert on the town that you live in and the people that you're talking to and all of that. I think there's very few things more important than that. I. I didn't know that until I moved to Utah.

And I had been given a book on the culture of Utah, and I was reading it on the plane flying out there, and I was like, oh, my gosh, I know absolutely nothing, and I'm supposed to work out here and help heal hurts that people have in this community. I've got to learn a lot, and then very quickly realized how drastically important that is.

But with all that being said, community, I think, is still the main, main topic. Yes. But when it comes to what the church does, I think the way that I think of it that has helped me has been similar to how education works.

Or at least my take on higher education is that most people I've talked to who are professors, who are deans in academic spaces would tell you their.

Their job is to help you learn how to think, not necessarily what to think about all of these particular circumstances or whatever else it happens to be. And of course, it's different in various education fields, but the best professors I've ever had have been helping me how to think.

Not so much what to think about those particular things.

And for me, I think a common language is one of the things that we miss with most of our communities as the church is kind of this belief that when we use a particular word, that it means the same thing that we think the hearer is taking out of our conversation. And that's not always the case. It can't be assumed anymore.

The story I had, and I'll keep it very brief, I promise to you, but the story I had is an anecdotal piece of things was a couple months ago I was speaking through, and our church is fairly split politically.

And I'm proud of that, honestly, because the many of the churches I've worked in in the past are just kind of refuges for Republicans or Democrats or whatever else. Our church currently is pretty split. But I, I had this conversation. I'm.

I'm preaching on Sunday morning, and I said something about the call to love our neighbor. And immediately after that I have, have as I've pretty much every time I've ever preached on the idea of loving your neighbor.

I've had people from both sides that come at you and they're, yes, but to love our neighbor, well, we have to do all of these things from my perspective.

And then the other side comes and says, well, actually you don't really have to love your neighbor because yada, yada, yada, and shares their input on this.

And the thing that I realized this last time, that I was reaching through it was I use the phrase love your neighbor without a whole lot more qualitative of information behind it, just kind of thinking, okay, we're all in church, we know what love your neighbor means in some sense, just using language here.

And then I had someone come up to me afterwards and they said, well, actually Glenn Beck, I was listening to his radio show and he actually corrects that common misunderstanding. Love your neighbor doesn't actually mean you have to love your neighbor. And then the same person goes on this, this talk about J.D.

vance, and they said, well, J.D. vance really breaks it down in a helpful way when he says, in order to love your neighbor, you're supposed to. Whatever he said.

I' a quote somewhere the Christian concept of love your family, then you love your neighbor, then you love your community, which is like, no, that's not a Christian concept in the least bit. It's very much so informed by outside sources. And we could get into that another time.

But my point being, if we're not clarifying what we mean with certain phrases or just assuming we're all speaking the same common language, we're probably missing a large segment of the population, missing what people are hearing. Because I could say grace in Kansas and people have one understanding of what I mean by that word.

I could say in Utah, and people had a deeply different understanding of what the word grace means and what's required to earn that grace in their circumstance versus what I'm trying to say.

And so I think it, it comes down to a, a helpful, compassionate dialogue trying to be the whole church not trying to slam dunk on each other, but still a dialogue that has to clarify what do I mean when I say any of these things? And like my entire book that we talked about at the beginning, the Enemies of the Heart book, is on Obadiah.

Not just because I wanted to be a hipster and write a book that nobody's written about, because I could hardly find anything written on Obadiah, but really, truly, because I think that book speaks to the cultural moment we're in. There's so much in that story that relates to watching as stuff does happen.

And again, I'm not the most left leaning or right leaning individual on the face of the planet. I'm about as center as you get it. But like reading through this, you read through and you're like, Obadiah is yes, the one picture.

If you're a Zionist, it's a pretty clear, easy read and you don't have to think all that much.

But if we're trying to be genuine description, trying to see what else is happening here, you're gaining this insight that, like, hey, silence can be a sin as well, just sitting by and watching things happen. So, yes, we do need to speak to injustice in the world, otherwise we still have slavery.

Like, like we can't just say, okay, it's fine to be silent at all times and not talk about it, but we need scripture to be the guide, in my opinion, that grounds us in what is true and what is not true, not just whatever. Because I am just as likely as anyone else to be misled by my political thoughts. Like, that's, that's the truth.

We all are human, but we need to stay grounded in God's word. So that's my answer.

Joshua Noel: 01:03:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot there. You've convinced me. We're gonna be adding like hallelujahs, Amen and clapping to the soundtrack that I can use.

But, man, we're an hour in and this is what happens without tj. We're an hour in and haven't got to the roundtable roundup yet. So you guys know the drill. We do this.

Every round table discussion has to have a roundup. I'm gonna give you four questions. Everybody gets to answer one of them and only one. And no one can respond till the round up is complete.

I think we've answered most of these questions already, so this could be interesting. I'm gonna read them off, you guys. Whenever I call on you, just repeat the question you're answering, then answer it. So Here we go.

A, could the solution to this, to this issue just be that our churches need a focus. Focus more on small groups and discipleship structures?

B, do we think churches that have more gatherings or programs outside of Sunday have an easier time with this?

C. Would it mitigate the problem if our churches were doing more to train the laity to interpret scripture for themselves or to rely more on church tradition as a lens to view scripture and world events through?

D. In a world where people are getting their information from a huge plurality of sources, podcasts, social media, media, tv, etc, could it be that the church just needs to be more creative in its methods of communicating? Again, I do think we answered a lot of these, but we're gonna do it anyway. Joe, I'm gonna call on you first, man. What are you thinking here?

Joe Dea: 01:04:38

So I'm gonna. I'm gonna force myself to stretch and go with the. Go with the cre. The. The last one, because the other three are.

Are all things that I think in some way shape or form I've already commented on in this episode. I don't know as though creativity is necessarily the answer. Can it be good? Yes.

When paired with the idea of relevance and speaking to the people that are in your congregation, when not filtered through the lens of anything, grounding creativity can look like the 87th church program that is, you know, at the movies and, you know, has. Has people dressed up and has all kinds of whatever decorations and all of that sort of stuff, all in the name of creativity.

And so I think, yes, yes, creativity can be good, but the foundations of is it there for the people, for the community, have to be there in order for it to be any kind of successful at an impact level.

Joshua Noel: 01:05:59

All right, Nathan, I'll let you go first. Pick your question.

Joe Dea: 01:06:04

I feel.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:06:05

Take question C, because I think that.

Joshua Noel: 01:06:07

Could you repeat the question so that listeners.

Matthew Thrift: 01:06:11

Yeah.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:06:12

Would it mitigate the problem if our churches were doing more to train the laity to interpret scripture for themselves or to rely more on church tradition as a lens to view scripture and world events through. I am all about democratizing Christian traditions, including traditions of scriptural interpretation.

And this, honestly, is one of the things that I'd like to see more of.

Joshua Noel: 01:06:31

Of.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:06:32

And I'm not sure what the form should take.

So I think that there definitely should be a dialogical element to the life of this embassy, of this foreign kingdom, because I think that being heard is as important as hearing when you are gathering with the faithful. Right.

So I think that, you know, whether that takes the form of small Groups, which I never really been part of, Sunday school, which I've been part of a bunch, or whether it takes some other form that, you know, we haven't imagined yet. I think that as a complement to the oratorical part of the gathering, I think that the dialogical is going to be very important.

So the oratorical, of course, is where one person speaks to the group, usually interpret interpreting scriptures. I think that is not the place for commentary on current events.

To go back to our earlier conversations, I think that that dialogical space, whatever form that takes, Sunday school, small groups, whatever else, we call it pub theology, some people have done. Right.

I think that's the place to do the current event kind of stuff, because I want to hear what people have to say first and then respond to that rather than simply be another talking head coming at them. Because then we run into the problem that kind of of, you know, precipitated this. This episode. I'm only a talking head for the length of a sermon.

There's talking heads who get a lot more hours than I do. But those talking heads don't listen to the people. If I'm actually listening to them first, I think that could be different.

Joshua Noel: 01:08:05

Okay, I like that. Matt, pick your poison. Which question you going with?

Matthew Thrift: 01:08:10

Yeah, first I just said definitely agree with both of these guys on a lot of what they said. I would go with.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:08:16

Oh, man, you're not allowed to respond. You're not allowed to respond.

Matthew Thrift: 01:08:26

I'll go with C. That same one about. Or. Sorry, not C. I'll go with the one about creativity. Whichever one that was. Let me see. Sorry.

Joshua Noel: 01:08:37

I can read it for you if you want.

D. It's just there's a huge variety of sources out there with podcast, social media, tv, etc, and just asking if the church needs to be more creative in our method of communicating.

Matthew Thrift: 01:08:49

Yep, thank you. I'll take that one. My thoughts on it are that I do think this one could be greatly helpful.

I think that in order for it to work, it requires that we are actually genuinely creative, which is not something that the church has proven to be particularly great at in recent history, but we used to be really darn good at it. Like, you go to the Sistine Chapel and you're like, wow, this is. This is art. You go to all of these things and you see that we were once creative.

So I would say I think creativity could be a huge tool that we could use, but we have to actually elevate curious creativity. Maybe things that make us a little more uncomfortable than just A dogmatic box to put things in.

Because current Christian creativity bums me out way more often than it inspires me. I don't need to see God's not dead. 17. But I guess there won't be one now. Sorry, no shots fired in any particular direction on that one.

But with that being said, at the end of the day, like, creativity is necessary, like, I. I think it could be a really good mode of action for us to take. However, we need to be good at it. We need to lean into new creative sources potentially.

Joshua Noel: 01:10:03

Yeah, Actual creativity. Not rip off. I'm responding. Nathan's gonna yell at me. Okay, man, we're just gonna only do half of the questions. I'm sorry, guys.

Because I'm also gonna pick C. Would it help to mitigate the problem if our churches were doing more to train the lady to interpret scripture for themselves or to rely on church tradition as a lens to view scripture and world events through? I agree with some of the stuff that was said or maybe everything I said earlier.

So I'm going to add to that, even though I'm kind of breaking the rules, but it's fine. I do think it's helpful, but I also, I. I really think it goes back to identity. It is only helpful if that's where their identity is.

I think a lot of the issue is people go to church and they see their pastor kneeling to one political party or the other or one person or the other, and they hear their pastor listens to Fox News or MSNBC and they go, okay, well, that's what he listens to. I'm gonna listen to that. And guess what? There it is. I think a lot of his. Our leadership is also being discipled by these very same things.

And people have figured that out, so they just listen to that. I know a pastor who most of his sermons just repeating what Al Mohler said on his podcast throughout the week. Why not just listen to the podcast?

I think a lot of people figured that out and it's really about identity if they feel an identity with something. Kingdom Hearts fans is another good example, since I am one. I know people, people who identify as Kingdom Hearts fans. Guess what?

They know when the next tweet comes out, the second it comes out. Not because they're. That's where they're getting their information from, but because that's what they care about.

We need to get people to actually identify with the church. Otherwise they don't care what the church's view on world events are. They're gonna care if that's their identity.

And I think we've dropped the ball on identity. So that's, that's my rant for the round table roundup. And now that it's not done, we are able to respond to what someone said during the roundtable.

Did anybody want to, want to take any shots, respond, add, applaud, anybody?

Joe Dea: 01:11:54

So I think we're at a, I think we're at a, at a weird spot in this episode because I haven't necessarily, I think there are some aspects of what Nathan said that I think would need to be fully baked in the oven. But I, I, I think there's, there's a lot of common, common ground.

And Josh, I've only disag with two of the things that you've said throughout this entire episode. So I feel like that's a record. So yeah, I'm gonna, so, so c. To, to go back to that one is, is very much a huge part of my wheelhouse.

A couple of years ago, the guys that I broadcast with and I were doing a series of let's define, let's define these words sort of sort of thing in a live stream format.

And we realized, man, a lot of what we're, a lot of what we're drawing on, a lot of the biblical definitions of these things are all found in the Old Testament. And we're finding people asking us kind of basic questions about the, about the Old Testament.

Well, basic to a point where if you understand scripture, it's basic. And then we realized, oh, we're looking at it through the wrong lens.

We're looking at it through the lens of somebody who's been, who's, who's been steeped in this, who spent time with this, who's been educated with this. So what was our, our answer?

We literally go through the, we're going through the entirety of the Old Testament in live stream format, line by line, verse by verse, word by word, and reading it on the air and talking about it on the air. We're in Second Samuel currently. It has been, it's a lot of time was spent in Genesis.

We literally spent like, like going, going at, of, at a purposefully brisk pace. We were, we went through, we went through like six months of Genesis.

But I think there's a lot of need to help people have the tools and, and, and the, to put in the reps to say what do I believe about the Old Testament and why do I believe it?

Because a very large amount of people when it comes to the Old Testament believe that there is a juxtaposition between the angry Old Testament, go nice new test New Testament Jesus, the Old, the, the Old Testament God was pro war and bloodshed and sacrifice and all of this kind of stuff. And generally, if that's how you think about God, and I'm just, I'm just speaking from my own personal experience here.

The folks that I see, that I see draw that delineation tend to be the same people who think of Jesus in terms of a raging hippie who, who think of him almost like, like a Zen Buddhist sort of, sort of deal. It.

There's, there's a lot of unhealthy foundational pieces that get put onto the framework of what, the understanding of God in Jesus and what it means to be a Christian that come from a misunderstanding or a mishandling of Scripture. And so I don't think that this is a good idea. I think this is necessity. And I would fundamentally believe. And I say this, I say this, this.

It's going to sound harsh and it's going to sound angry, but I mean this with a heart of grace because you don't understand pastoring until you've pastored. That's just the reality of it. It's easy to armchair quarterback.

I know I used to do it and then I became one and I realized, yo, 90% of the time, this sucks. Like this, this vocation sucks. If we're just being honest about it, it's hard. If you're not doing that, then you are so dis.

You are so showing a disservice to your congregates or to the people that you are shepherding because you're, you're sending somebody out with a loaded gun and not teaching them how to use it.

And that's how you get people wielding scripture as a weapon, or you get all of these conspiracy theories or you get all of these malformed versions of, of theology.

When we come to understand that theology is not a dirty word and it's not just for the person at the front of the room, then we can start to develop some things. We can start to develop some thoughts. We can start to process these things.

Joshua Noel: 01:16:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Heavy stuff. But I'm not a pastor and I think I still agree with Joe. I say I'm not a veteran. I'm not like a vocational pastor. I should say.

Did anybody else have anything they wanted to add with the roundtable stuff?

Nathan Gilmour: 01:16:37

If I could just add to the two responses about creativity.

I think that both of you have very good points that we need to be good at it, and also that it needs some kind of grounding in something intelligibly theological. And to that I would add, part of that theology is going to be on that discipleship level and thinking about concrete practices.

And I know I'm kind of repeating my own thing right now, but it's what I'm thinking about right now. So. So I'm kind of trying out different configurations of it.

But what I would like to see is less creativity that takes as its paradigm the unidirectional transmission of content and more creativity that asks, how can we arrange our space, how can we arrange our time, how can we arrange our gatherings so that we are hearing the people, responding to the people, and then also doing the oratory. Right. Because, I mean, I think that, you know, Josh, I want to take your critique seriously, because I think it is a genuine and a real critique.

And I think part of what's going on there is the preacher shows up and simply just talks at the people and doesn't actually hear what they are thinking about.

So, I mean, if they are concerned about ICE raids, if they are concerned about the Iraq bombing, if they are concerned about abortion policy, if they are concerned about whatever else, there's no space for that to actually inform what's going on in the gathering. Which is why I think that our creativity needs to include the dialogue as well as the oratory.

Joshua Noel: 01:18:06

So is that. Is this the key then? We talked a lot about community, identity, all this kind of stuff. Is it just like, Sundays?

We need to just add that dialogue a bit. It's gonna fix everything.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:18:18

Well, we need to add it for the sake of that witness and for the sake of being that embassy. Right.

So, I mean, one of the things I don't want to do is say, okay, I used to be a philosophy professor, so let's make church more like a philosophy seminar. Although I think that would be awesome.

Joshua Noel: 01:18:32

Yeah.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:18:33

But I want to say, what is it about dialogue that actually reflects the nature of the reign of God? Right. And I think part of the answer to that is that God does want to hear from more than the person up front. And so when we gather as God's.

As the body of Christ. Pardon me, you know, how can we incorporate that into our gatherings as that body? So, you know, I mean, I. I always.

I always want it to be a theological conversation, because one of the things that worries me the most is when we take what I call a Machiavellian approach to church, which is to say, what kinds of good can the church do for Something that is more ultimate than the church. You know, for Machiavelli, that's the political. That's the polity. Right. The city or the empire, whatever.

For some people, that's the individual person. Right. I want to say, all right, let's keep it theological, let's keep it missional, and with those things in mind, let's have that conversation.

That doesn't solve the problem, but I think it articulates where the problem lies in ways that remain more open to God speaking to the process.

Joshua Noel: 01:19:42

Yeah, I like that. Well, Nathan, I know you have to go in a little bit. Did you want to go ahead and tell the audience goodbye or anything or.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:19:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll go and do my God moment, even though it's out of sequence. And I apologize for that.

But I've just got to celebrate with you guys and also with your listeners, the bureaucratic swamp that is getting your second career teacher certification in the state of Georgia. I have finished it. I got my email just a few days ago. I have a renewable teacher's license at this point.

You know, I have to do something really stupid for them to take that away from me. I don't plan to do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, that's just a big celebration for me.

Joshua Noel: 01:20:25

That's awesome. Yeah, I'm glad you shared that. That's awesome. Nathan, man, it's always so good to have you. Thanks for.

For hanging around and sharing that with us and hopefully we'll have you. Have you again soon. I really like this dialogue bit. I kind of want to chase that rabbit, but.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:20:40

Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, Josh, I mean, I look for your emails, man. Anytime you invite me, I'm going to try to get on here.

Joshua Noel: 01:20:45

I'm just going to start inviting you to weird stuff that makes no sense. Actually, we are doing one about poop, so whole church poop episode is coming out. I'll invite you.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:20:54

I'm betting I gotta be careful what I wish for.

Joshua Noel: 01:20:57

Joe.

Nathan Gilmour: 01:20:57

I love you, Matt. I love you, listeners. I love you. But I do have to. Peace out.

Joshua Noel: 01:21:02

All right, see you.

All right, well, Nathan gave us a really cool practical action, so I think it'd be cool if we could go ahead and jump to kind of some of that stuff and just he mentioned dialogue, adding that kind of to our Sunday routines maybe, so that we're actually having communication there.

What other actions can you guys think of that it's like, as far as, like, if community and identity is the key that we all kind of agreed about, how do we build community, Joe.

Joe Dea: 01:21:30

I think yes, and amen to everything that Nate said. Part of that is we really are very bad at categorizing people. And I see it all the time.

Time nationalists this, maga, maga, Christians that, white this, this, that. Like, there's so many boxes that we so readily dump people into. And the reality is there are some perfectly fine individuals that voted for Trump.

There are some perfectly fine individuals that don't believe the same things that you do about XYZ policy. Take your pick. There's 52 different flavors. You can fill in the blank. It's fine. And we need to, at a practical level, stop vilifying everybody.

And this kind of goes to something that you said, but I would take it a step, a step beyond where you took it. Josh, you talked about showing the victims.

I'm all for showing how to love victims, but I'm also all for showing how to love people who stand diametrically opposed to you. That's the important part of all of it. The victims are important. I'm not saying that they're not.

But we're very good at holding other people as our enemy. We are very good at prioritizing enemies over loving our neighbors. And how do we defend against enemies rather than love our neighbors?

And that is where I think so much of this discourse and so much of these.

These divisions fall short, is they're so focused on how do we combat the enemy, and they're not focused on how are we actually displaying Christ in all of this.

And that's where I think accepting that a person is not evil because they do things that you disagree with or they disagree with you or whatever the case may be, and you level that playing field at an image of God level, at an imago DEI level, and then start the conversation, which there's a lot of heavy lifting after that. There's a lot of intense conversation that has to happen after that. I'm not saying there's not, but if you're starting point, point is skewed.

Then how you view the person throughout the conversation, throughout the discourse, throughout any communication, is also going to be skewed. So you have to start there before you go into the dialogue piece and.

Joshua Noel: 01:23:52

All of that, I'll give one. That's not politics. I'm going to give my God moment early, too, because I think it's relevant to what Joe just said.

I'm in a very unfortunate and challenging situation right now where I am close to a lot of people who used to attend a church that I Had occasionally helped with in Greenville, who they recently came out publicly of a sex scandal with their youth worker that involves someone who used to be in their youth group and terrible stuff, just terrible stuff.

I won't go too much into detail here because I don't know how much it is actually appropriate and, and you know, this is a family friendly show for the most part. But I'm asking people for advice like how do I go to these people who are victims?

How do I talk to this man's family who's going to be impacted by this?

How do I love my friends who used to go to that church who no longer do, but like old wounds are opened up because they're seeing that this church is still hurting people? I'm getting a lot of good advice on that stuff.

I'm finding though, a lot of people have a really hard time giving advice on, like, hey, here's the thing. I knew the guy who committed these sins who was abusing somebody. How do I love that guy? And there's not a lot of good advice out there on that.

There's a lot of good advice on how to speak truth to power. He's already been outed by the church. He's already been outed by everybody. How do I love him now? I don't know. I'm still wrestling with that.

And on that positive note, Faster, Matt, man, if you had to give just a, just another practical action. What do we do to create this identity, this community that we were all talking about?

Matthew Thrift: 01:25:26

Yeah, first and foremost, absolutely agree with Joe. I think we have to see people as people first. I know I was talking with my dad a while ago and I love him dearly. He's a great guy.

Wonderful Christian man too, for all the, for anyone wondering.

But we were talking and he works in a blue collar field and he was talking about someone at point one work who is complaining about quote unquote, blue haired baristas.

And I said, dad, you guys live in rural Maryland and you drive an hour into work where you work with a bunch of ex military machinists and I have never seen you drink Starbucks in my entire life. Where are you encountering blue haired baristas? It's not, not a thing you're encountering.

And we were able to get through a little bit of the layers of that and kind of say, hey, look like these are people you're talking about. Like I know legitimate blue haired baristas, some of them aren't even liberal. But that's beside the point too.

Like it, the the characterization needs to stop. I think that's undoubtedly true. My practical advice would be, I think service is a hugely underutilized piece of the Christian church world. We.

We've gotten so focused on the Sunday service that we've forgotten in a lot of cases about communal service together.

And I think it's a lot easier to see your Democrat or your Republican or your whatever else neighbor when we're talking politics, but across racial lines, across any other division that exists in the world, it's easier to see that person as a person when you are being an example of the hands of feet of Christ working alongside that person. So go. If, if there's any programming, and I am not a huge advise, more church programming guy, but if there's.

There's any programming, I do advise it is go find places to serve in your community. Find the need that's there, because I promise it's there.

Get your feet on the ground and get your people involved because they are going to love each other more, working alongside each other.

They're going to love the homeless person that they're speaking to and see them as a human being when they're serving with that person, showing that person kindness or whatever else. Ministry, whatever other opportunity. Opportunity it is. I think service is a huge thing we should get more involved in.

Joshua Noel: 01:27:36

Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Both of you guys, I need those Amen, hallelujah buttons. I don't know what I'm doing with the sound bar over here, but.

But this is prelude to what the next round table can be like. It's gonna be wild. But if everybody took the advice given here, we start seeing one another as humans. We're doing more service together.

We have dialogue, parts of our services. What changes would we see in the church and in the world around us? Maybe, Pastor Matt, you want to go ahead and take that one?

Matthew Thrift: 01:28:08

Yeah. I think church services would be longer.

Joshua Noel: 01:28:12

Yeah, yeah.

Matthew Thrift: 01:28:13

That's not, not a good or a bad thing. It's just a true thing.

I, I think that the, the reality though, of the change would be, I would hope and firmly do believe that if people saw people as human beings, if, if people served together, I've seen in ministry where that does in fact lead to families that haven't had Thanksgiving together before because of political difference, all of a sudden can eat Thanksgiving dinner again. Dads that have broken relationships with their kids could be able to have mending in those relationships with their kids.

Like when you start to remember, remember that we're actually probably a lot closer to each other on a lot of these conversations than we tend to assume first, right off the bat, I, I think when you lose the, the accusatory language and the name calling and all of the bullying that's become so popular in the world that we live in, you start to remember, hey, there's actually people that I love that I have pretty, pretty important disagreements with, but still I love them. Like, like, I, I think we could see a lot of bettered relationships within the church and outside if, if we embrace some of those things.

Joshua Noel: 01:29:24

Yeah. Yeah. Joe, anything to add or.

Joe Dea: 01:29:27

I mean, I, I'll, I'll second all of that. The, the hopeful part of me want, wants to believe that at scale, beautiful things happen when we start to see each other.

Other, because at that, at that point, when we're seeing each other at the, at image bearer levels, you know, we're looking at people in the same tense that God looks at people. That's the idea here. And I, I've seen in some of my own relationships where I have had to prioritize the relationship.

Like, I like the way that you, that, that you put that mat of some pretty important disagreements. I, I have some, Some, Some pretty key ones with them.

But choosing love mattered for preserving the relationship and that, that in a lot of ways kept me grounded because I didn't have the, the, the, the latitude to be able to just think about it abstractly. I had to think about this in a very application level.

Joshua Noel: 01:30:39

Yeah. Yeah, man. Good stuff though. Yeah, definitely a challenging episode for you guys this week, but as always, we are going to do our grad moment.

I am bad at doing TJ's bits, keeping us on track and running through the outline. I don't know how to do any of this, so my only Godmo. It is a challenge to remember to keep praying that TJ never has a head headache ever again.

Joe, do you want to go ahead and do you have a God moment you'd like to share with us real quick?

Joe Dea: 01:31:08

Yeah, I'll keep this, I'll keep this brief, but I want to. It's very in line with everything that Matt said about service and all of that.

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by a group that is an offshoot of the sbc.

For those of you that have been keeping track at home and have been following the variety of different appearances that I have shown that I have made on this show fundamentally understand what the, the significance of saying that I pastor or that I, that I partnered on a project with a group from the sbc, but I did and the idea was it's all community based. A whole bunch of churches from outside the area come to or came.

Came to my area, all with the idea that it's just about being the hands and feet of Jesus. It's not about high theology. It's not about Baptist this or that or the other other.

It's not, it's not even about evangelism in the classic, in the, in the American sense. Yeah, it's, it's, it's about service. It's about loving on an area.

And my name was dropped as, as a local area pastor that's very oriented towards community and loving on people in the application level. And I was very hesitant at first, but decided, you know what, what? They're going to throw manpower and money at this.

And I'm used to doing things with five bucks and a Tic Tac. All right, game on. And so we did. And I'll just leave it at this.

The people that we were able to serve, the impact that happened, it's just, it, it chokes me up.

Joshua Noel: 01:32:48

That's awesome.

Joe Dea: 01:32:49

Yeah. Just wild to see all of these people from all over the place.

Not about not wanting anything, not about proving anything, not about anything other than just coming to love and do. Good work, man.

Joshua Noel: 01:33:04

Yeah, that hallelujah button again. All right, Matt, good luck following that. Where's your God moment at, bro?

Matthew Thrift: 01:33:14

If I could live up to that one. First off, Josh done a great job this episode. Don't. Don't rag on yourself. Second off, with that being said, my God moment, I've got a couple of them.

But I think the big one, the one I'll share here is I went this past weekend out to Oklahoma City. We have a once a year where we all gather together as Mennonite brethren churches for our main conference.

And then on what that's once every two years. And then the off year we get together as our district and I'm still relatively new.

I've been in the, the denomination for six and a half years, but in my church here in the Southern district for a year. So I'm still learning a lot of things and a lot of people and kind of how the culture works here.

And it was really cool to kind of be out there and get to know people. So that's part of it. But a even bigger thing was we had speaker that came in that works for.

He's one of the main guys over at Barna Research and shared a lot of things in my, my experiences. He even acknowledged at the beginning of his talk was that people refer to Barna as bad news. Barna.

Because they've always got all these really sad statistics and some of their points. I certainly don't agree with every single thing that Barna does, but at the end of the day, it was.

It was very encouraging because he was sharing just kind of of this message of, hey, people are.

Maybe church attendance has declined recently, but people are more spiritually curious than they've ever been before in the history of us taking these surveys. People are using tarot cards and crystals and all of these things.

And we could look at that as like, bad or his encouragement was we could look at this as a gateway to have a conversation to be curious and to talk about that. And the reason I think particularly that it was a God moment for me is I am very used to those conversations.

And I mean this with a lot of grace and wonderful. I love these guys, but a lot of the other pastors in our district maybe not as comfortable with those conversations.

I mean, some of the guys I know personally are. Are definitely more akin. But I've heard other stories and they were all very, very welcoming and accepting of those ideas.

And we actually had a lot of conversation similar to the lines of this conversation in. In that weekend. And it was just a big encouragement to me and my family. It was nice to be out there and spend some time, even if it was, man.

Joshua Noel: 01:35:33

Nice. That's awesome, though. Yeah, man. Also, I didn't mention earlier, earlier for.

For mainly because I forgot, but, you know, sometimes we do the roundtable, I just like to point out. So I'm like Lutheran, former Pentecostal. We have the Mennonite brother Pastor Brethren. Pastor Nathan Gilmore is part of the Church of the Nazarene.

Joe is a pastor of like seven different denominations. I think I'm just gonna call him SBC now. I don't know. I won't do that. Joe might find a way to travel here to fight me.

Joe Dea: 01:36:06

Don't do that. Don't do that. I've taken to the term personally of interdenominational rather than non denominational. Interdenominational.

Joshua Noel: 01:36:16

Yeah. Okay. I dig it. I dig it. So, yeah, Roundtable. Yes. We were all white guys, but I do think we had a. We had a good, A good spread here. So still.

Yeah, yeah, I'm proud of this. I remember when I grew up, it was crazy to think a Pentecostal would talk to a Baptist. For my family, it just wasn't something that happened.

So seeing this as a regular part of my life is. It's great. I'm blessed that I was able to take it for granted for a minute and glad that I remembered.

So, guys, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, an enemy, or a cousin. Especially your cousins.

That's important because they're more likely to listen because they're related to you and they're afraid you're gonna ask them at Thanksgiving. That's gonna be awkward. So they'll listen just to avoid that. Also, I don't chat with us on on Discord.

I don't think anyone uses our Discord server, including us. So if you jump on there, that'd be fun for me. I'll jump. I'll get on the Discord and be like, wait a minute, I forgot about the whole church server.

You could be the first one. Just surprise me. You be it, listener. Also, check out the other shows on the Amazon Podcast Network. Network.

Oh, I said it just feels like there was supposed to be another word there. Podcast Network. We have my Stimuli Life, the brand. Tonight we got Friday Night Frights. Joe and Christian Ashley are on that. Since my ecology.

Me Will are both. Me will too, but me and DJ are both on that. So check these other shows out. We have a lot of fun with everything we do on the network.

And thank you for listening to this show specifically, we hope you enjoyed it. Next week we're going to be talking with. That's not true. Yeah, it is. Okay.

Dr. Jeanette Ock about her contribution to the New Testament in Color, a multi ethnic Bible commentary.

After that, Russ Petrus and Olivia Haste from Catholic Women Preach will be returning to the show to discuss what the new Pope might mean for their ministry. Then we're going to be talking with Brian Ricker about his book Hell Bent and the dangers of bad theology around the doctrine of hell. Hell.

Finally, at the end of season one, we'll be talking to Francis Chan. He just doesn't know about it, so you gotta tell him. It's all on you guys. Until next time.