Speak of shipping Jesus in everyday life.
SPEAKER_04Brilliant. Well, I'm here with Sam Aubrey, the author of the book Seven Myths About Singleness. Thanks for joining me.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me. It's great to be with you.
SPEAKER_04Brilliant. And you're in Maidenhead right now?
SPEAKER_01I am, and for those who need to know, Maidenhead is not in Kent. That's Maidstone. I'm in Berkshire, Maidenhead. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_04And I am in Eastbourne, and that is not right next to Bournemouth, even though Bournemouth has a Westbourne. Across the Bourne from Westbourne is not Eastbourne. It's a three-hour journey. So I'm glad we've got that all cleared up. Good. And you've you've been in Maidenhead for quite some time now, haven't you?
SPEAKER_01I've been here for ten years.
SPEAKER_04To begin with, working on the staff of St. Mary's, is that right? Sorry? To begin with, working on the staff of St. Mary's, is that right?
SPEAKER_01That's right. Yep. I I came here as to be the associate minister or associate pastor at St. Mary's Church and was on staff there for about seven years. Came off staff about three years ago to work with the Zacharias Trust, but I'm still based in Maidenhead.
SPEAKER_04Brilliant. And what do you do with the the Rabbi Zacharias International Ministries?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, a sort of mixture of things really. So the the main aim of the ministry is apologetics and evangelism. Um, my particular area within that is thinking through issues of human sexuality, but also more broadly trying to help with some evangelistic teaching and preaching. Um and just trying to think through how we how we engage unchurched people in the way that we do church more generally as well. Um at a time in the States where I think a lot of Christians are now waking up to the fact that the culture around them is becoming more secular and just ringing the church bell every week isn't going to suffice in terms of actually getting people in. So just trying to think through some of those challenges and and opportunities.
SPEAKER_04Where do you see the US church learning from the UK in terms of evangelism? We can we can ask the question in in the other direction uh next, but where where can where can the US learn from the UK, do you think?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think it's been now uh we've been used to being a church in a secular context for a very long time. So it's normal for us to think there are going to be visitors at church on a Sunday, there are gonna be people who don't know really what church is about, and so we I think we're naturally more sensitive to the outsider. Um it's on our radar perhaps in a way that it might not be in the US. I think because we've never been, in our living memory, the dominant kind of cultural force in our country. Um again, we've had to learn to speak the language of the outsider in the way that we do church. Whereas I think in the States there's there's quite a significant Christian subculture that's emerged that is not massively penetrable to the outsider. So um I think they could probably learn from us how to make church more outsider-friendly, more accessible, um, and less unnecessarily kind of culturally obscure.
SPEAKER_04Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's interesting. My my wife got an email from somebody from the States um because she'd just written um something about seeking help for self-harm. And uh this person was sort of surprised that um um Emma wasn't more insistent about going to see a particularly Christian counselor in in these things. And she gave sort of more general advice about going to your GP and things like that. And uh it was just interesting to sort of put myself in the shoes of the person emailing because for her, I imagine that something like a Christian counselor um would not be the rarity that it is in in the UK. And just just as a little you know, tiny example of um yeah, the the culture is just so different. I mean, depending on where you are in the States, obviously. But um Yeah, the the sort of the the thinness of the Christian community in the UK, I guess, puts us on our mettle and makes us um, I guess, have to face the task of evangelism with a bit more urgency, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Um if we don't do evangelism, we we just wait and have churches. Whereas I think in parts of the states where there's been more of a kind of Christian subculture at large, you can kind of assume people are just going to come to church anyway. So you don't have to work too hard at necessarily making the gospel engaging. In fact, you might make the gospel a little bit more palatable and then get even more people coming along.
SPEAKER_04Right, right.
SPEAKER_01Um one of the things I've I've started encouraging um US pastors to do, which which is always good fun, is when they're talking, when I'm talking to them about trying to trying to get into the headspace of what it's like coming to your church for the very first time with no Christian background, um, is asking them to go and get a pedicure. On the fairly safe assumption, none of them have ever done anything like that before, but just how it feels walking into a place like that, not really knowing what you're doing there, feeling like everyone must know you don't belong, and you know, that feeling of being a complete outsider is how a lot of people feel coming to church for the first time. So let's let's feel what that's like and see what we can do to minimize that. We want the gospel to be what causes offense or discomfort, not the way we do our church parking or any other things.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. In Australia we do that same exercise, but we ask people to go into a bookies and place a bet. Um I I don't imagine that would work so well in in the States. I don't know. You raise more eyebrows.
SPEAKER_00Brilliantly, but anyway, we'll see.
SPEAKER_04And what do you think the UK can learn from the US in terms of reaching out?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that you know it's a bit of a cliche, but it's it's a cliche based on truth that there is just more vision in America. They they tend to think a bit more entrepreneurially, if that's a word. Um a bit more creatively, a bit more imaginatively. I think they're quicker to resource things than we often are. So I think ironically, although I think we've we the need for evangelism and outreach is more on our radar than it is in the States. I think when they do do it, they tend to do it a bit more creatively and imaginatively than we do. Um we just think purely in terms of putting on a talk of one kind or another. Um I've been impressed in the States just at seeing how they will they might do events that that kind of engage in the arts or just kind of trying to hit people on a number of fronts rather than just come and listen for half an hour and then sign up for something else or you'll listen to something else for another half an hour kind of thing. Um I think they're often stronger on some of the community side of things. Um a bit more of a culture of hospitality than we tend to have. So trying to draw people in relationally as well as engaging people in in kind of the content of what we believe. Um so yeah, I'm sure there's there's a lot we can learn from that. I think generally they're better at discipleship than we are and education within churches than we are, which I think at least means people tend to be a bit more theologically grounded and equipped than it might be the case over here.
SPEAKER_04And you were saying just uh before we uh start a recording that uh you've been starting to think in areas of uh expository apologetics, which which seems to me like that that that sounds like a quite a transatlantic enterprise, um bringing perhaps some of the some of the best of sort of uh a UK expository ministry to your apologetics ministry. What are you thinking in terms of uh expository apologetics, or as I'm now going to call it, expologetics? Does that work? Expologetics?
SPEAKER_00Let's copyright that immediately.
SPEAKER_04Your latest book.
SPEAKER_00Evangelotics. No, expologics. Expologetics.
SPEAKER_01Um Yeah. Uh well basically, so I think but because of the way, you know, that the cultural shifts that we've we've experienced over the last several years um on both sides of the Atlantic, we I just don't think you can be an ap really be a pastor without being an apologist. There are just we we've got to learn how to speak into various aspects of our cultural moment, how to commend not just the truth of the gospel, but the goodness of Jesus in a culture that increasingly thinks the Christian message is not just old-fashioned but dangerous. So I'm trying to, I would love to do more to help pastors think about that diamond of their ministry. And what I've noticed is when pastors often then do get a vision for the need for apologetics, it tends to then translate into, well, let's let's pause our sermon series, do some apologetics for a few weeks, then press unpause and resume sermon series. That can be good. It's good sometimes to to do something a bit different. But I'm thinking, well, actually, what if we used the regular ministry of the word to do apologetics? Um and my assumption is that the Bible is better at apologetics than we are.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01And so if we can as we take people through passages of scripture, books of the Bible in in our regular sermon series, how can we use the scriptures? How can we allow the scriptures to do that work of apologetics for us? So I'm working on the assumption that there's no question being asked today that hasn't already been addressed somehow in scripture. Only it's been addressed by people who are inspired by the Holy Spirit, so they're probably going to do a better job with it than we are. Um so it's trying to show how passages anticipate the kind of objections we have, the kind of issues that we have, um, and often deal with them in a very, very unembarrassed kind of way, you know. And then seeing how they how those same scriptures commend Jesus in the light of those questions and issues and difficulties.
SPEAKER_04Seems like you've got to have a conviction that the Bible is actually written for people, um, as as though it might actually have something to say to life, as opposed to I I do think as Christians and and particularly as sort of evangelical evangelical, you know, Christians, I think our tribe tends to think that the Bible has been written to fine-tune the discipleship of the super keen Christian. And that's you know, so that's what the Bible is for. It's really, it's really, really helpful for fine-tuning the discipleship of the super keen Christian, as opposed to here is here is a kind of a strange new world of the Bible that immerses you in a new way of looking at everything. Um and that, yeah, that it actually addresses people and humanizes us. And once you once you believe that about your the Bible, then you can you can absolutely move your way through 1 Corinthians half a chapter at a time. Um, but you will find, my goodness, doesn't 1 Corinthians address address the issues of today. Absolutely it does. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think the other thing is I think some of us work on the assumption that the Bible was written into an episode of the Waltons and the world is just different now. Um the Bible is written in the same reality that we live in, and human nature hasn't changed. There's there's cultural bits that look and feel different, but when you get behind what's actually going on, you realize it's it's the same universe that we we are inhabiting ourselves. It's not a you know, the Bible was written then and this is now, and therefore we've got some catching up to do, and something we've got to try and yank the Bible into today. And I'm thinking Doc Brown at the end of Bat to the Future trying to grab both those two cables on the clock face and somehow bring them together. Um the the Bible knows us better than we know ourselves, and it's we're in the same reality. Um when we read the Bible with with care, we see that it is speaking into the very ways in which we think today.
SPEAKER_04Yes, yes. Or another way to put that is it's it's always been equally weird across time, like it's it's always been equally a bolt from the blue and a fresh way of looking at everything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I I was teaching on on the biblical view of marriage yesterday, and and was trying to say the reason this feels so counter-cultural today is because it's always been counter-cultural in every culture.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so it's not as if we've gone from oh well, people thought the way the Bible thought, and now cultures changed, and so we're in this new era of panic. Actually, the the if if the Bible really is a voice from outside of human wisdom, we would expect it to have a level of discomfort for every single human culture. There's going to be certain things it will affirm and many significant things that it will critique and rub us up way on.
SPEAKER_04So Right. So the Egyptian and the Assyrian views of sex and marriage were totally different from the Old Testament, and vice versa. And the you know, the Greco-Roman views of sex and marriage were totally different from the New Testament, and vice versa. So the idea that we need to just get back to, you know, Bible times, well, there there weren't any sort of Bible times embedded in the culture. The cut, you know, the Bible was always preaching something different.
SPEAKER_01Um it just means when when people say today, well, you know, where we're at in culture, the Bible is unacceptable, so we kind of need to update the Bible somehow and catch it up to where culture's at. I know this was so radical, so bizarre, so unpalatable, and so glorious in the Greco Roman Roman world. It's this is it's just normal.
SPEAKER_04Right, right. And and and yet Christians can be guilty of giving that message because we can be guilty of appearing to be saying, let's get back to the Garden of Eden, which I think was somewhere around 1956. Um and that that was the golden age, um, as opposed to if we actually got back to a New Testament vision of sex and sexuality, um, it would both challenge the culture and it would challenge the church in the sorts of assumptions that we we kind of have. And I wonder whether that's a that's a kind of segue into your book, um, Seven Myths About Singleness, and whether having a kind of a countercultural vision of church that comes to us from the New Testament and not just from the 1950s and not just from the 1960s, that actually we'll we'll actually be challenged in different ways to the way that the world is challenged, but but actually maybe the church needs to repent. Um, and maybe we need to repent first uh when it comes to uh dealing with m matters of sex and marriage and singleness, would you say?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely, and and not least because when when people hark back to the so-called golden age of whenever it was, um you know, people often do imagine it was sometime in the 1950s, and you've got to think, well, maybe for white people the 1950s was quite a an easy time, but you start to look outside, you know, it's just it, you know, is this that was not a great period in Christian history on a whole nother front. So yeah, I think you're right. The um it's a question of not trying to get to to some part of historical culture that we can somehow recapture and reproduce, but allowing the New Testament to create in us a new culture, which is what Jesus ultimately was thinking about, with with his people making a new humanity, we we are to have a new culture that's going to be new in any period of history. Um and as you say, the the way in which the church is conceived of in the New Testament is is radical. And I think one of the reasons we are we are struggling uh broadly in the evangelical world with the challenges around issues of human sexuality is because we've we've under thought through and under practiced what the New Testament says church should be about. And there's a tight correlation there because so much of our confusion about sexuality is a confusion about intimacy. If we were the the church the New Testament is calling us to be, we would be feeling very, very rich in intimacy and feeling less angsty about whether we get to be sexually fulfilled or not.
SPEAKER_04Because the culture is saying that intimacy must mean sex, and therefore, to therefore to call somebody to celibacy um is to to deny their humanity, to deny their full fru flourishing. Um, you're saying, okay, if if intimacy is actually something else and something deeper uh than sex, then yeah, that's you're actually calling someone to love, you're coming, you're calling someone to intimacy when you call them to Christ.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And the Bible has much broader ways of thinking about intimacy than we do. As you say, we've so collapsed intimate intimacy and sex into each other that we can't imagine intimacy that isn't sexual. Whereas one of the things we see in the Bible and we see played out in the world around us is you can have lots and lots and lots and lots of sex and not be experiencing intimacy. That's sadly very possible. But the other thing you see is you can have lots and lots of intimacy that is nothing to do with sex. Uh, Jesus experienced deep human intimacy. Um, Paul experienced deep human intimacy. Uh the Bible gives us much broader ways of thinking about intimacy in terms of both friendship and the church being family, and we tend to barely even play lip service to those two kind of categories. And so, one of the things we need to work hard on is trying to revitalize our own experience in local church life of those forms of intimacy that the Bible commends to us. So, which means, as you're right, when uh a step away from sexual activity if we're if we're single uh for whatever reason is not a step away from love, it's a step into different categories of love that the Bible prizes very, very highly and much more highly than we tend to prize them.
SPEAKER_04So t talk me through the book then in terms of the myths that have grown up around singleness. I I take are these myths that Christians tell one another about singleness or myths in out there in the culture? What are the myths?
SPEAKER_01Actually, so I think uh we've we've imbibed more of our our culture than we think we have. So that the myths are things like singleness is just bad for you. Um it's just it's just bad. It's it's horrible, it's harmful, it's dangerous, it it sucks your humanity out of you. Um and therefore, and this is the myth number two in the book. Um you've got to have some special unusual superpower just to cope with it. So well, I'm single, but I don't have the gift of singleness, and therefore and that can very easily then become a justification for some kind of unbiblical relationship or whatever it might be. So it's God's fault, really, because he hasn't given you the gift of singleness. So trying to show how actually in the New Testament, this the state of singleness is itself so intrinsically good we can receive it as a gift from God. Just marriage is a good gift from God, and it won't do to be in a in a marriage in a difficult season and say, Well, I know I'm married, but maybe I don't have the gift of being married, so therefore this was all a big mistake.
SPEAKER_04Um chapter of 1 Corinthians, doesn't it? Uh in 1 Corinthians 7, there are those who find themselves married and don't want to be married. Um, and Paul never countenances the idea that they don't have the gift of marriage. No, they they've been given marriage, you know, receive it. And and you're saying it's equivalent with singleness. If you're single, you've been given that station in life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that itself it is a manifestation of the goodness of God. And I think again, we tend to measure the goodness of singleness or marriage by what we feel we're getting out of it, and whether we're feeling fulfilled by it. Both are given as means of service to others. So the gift of singleness isn't the gift of you feeling you can get everything you want out of life as a single person. The gift is what you can be as a single person to Christ and his purposes and his people. Um, it's a means of service and it's a very good means of service, just as is but neither is intended to be an end in itself. It's not meant to sort of it's not it's not a something that. Terminates on itself, it's meant to be something that fuels and gives us capacity to be of service to others. Even our view of what makes singleness or marriage good tends to be quite a self-centered view rather than how can this be a means by which I can bless and serve other people.
SPEAKER_04Yes. I remember seeing on Twitter um a couple of years ago, it was just after gay marriage was legalized in uh the UK, and it was just a it was just uh uh a guy who I follow on his sofa with his new husband, and they were they were eating a Chinese takeaway and watching Netflix, and they were just saying, This is this is marriage. Why why would anybody you know why would anybody not want us to enjoy this? You know, and and I thought that that was really interesting. And and if that is the definition of marriage, I think he's absolutely right. That that if it's just um you know getting your favorite curry and being part man, part sofa, and in you know, binge watching Netflix together, if if that is marriage, then that's um that's absolutely um, you know, why why would anyone seek to stop anybody doing that? Of course, you you could kind of do that, but but what if marriage is caught up in a in a grander vision of self-giving and service and it's not this self-contained thing? And therefore, at the same time, the what if singleness is caught up in a grander vision for self-giving and it's not a self-contained thing? I so think that that we talk past each other because we first of all assume this self-fulfillment narrative where yeah, where it's it's it's just about me fulfilling my own desires by myself. Um and if I can co-opt you know a marriage partner, all the better to help me fulfil myself. Um but marriage, marriage and singleness are both something radically different, aren't they?
SPEAKER_01They are, and they're they're both in their own different and beautiful ways. They're both kind of eschatological things, they both point to the coming kingdom. Marriage by showing us the shape of Christ's relationship to the church, and singleness by showing us the sufficiency of that relationship, and both, therefore, within a Christian framework, should be kind of prophetic. They're both anticipations of what is going to be coming in its fullness in Christ. And you see it through that lens as well, and it just gives each a unique, extraordinary dignity and value. Each is actually amazing.
SPEAKER_04So, how how can church be uh reconfigured around this this far more biblical idea of both marriage and singleness? I remember I was I was giving a talk, this is before uh Emma and I had Ruby. So we we we would we'd been childless for 12 years before we had had Ruby. Um and so there I was, um, and I was in the front row of the church, I was going to preach later, and somebody was leading the prayers, and they said, Um, dear God, we thank you that you love all of us. You love the mums and dads, and you love the children. You love all of us who are here. And I was just thinking to myself, well, okay, well, that doesn't apply to me. And then I looked next to me, and there was um a disabled woman with her carer who was also single and childless, and and I just thought to myself, oh, the entire front row is not loved by God in this prayer. You know, it's like, God, you you know, you love all of us here, the mums and dads and the children.
SPEAKER_03And you're like, hmm.
SPEAKER_04Um so what is it that we as as churches need to do to reconfigure our thinking and our practice around uh marriage and singleness?
SPEAKER_01Um, I think it's it's rethinking or rediscovering what the Bible says both about church and about family, and the very significant interlocking between those two categories. So we tend to speak of church being family because it's it's just part of the the language we've received and we we just use instinctively. Um I remember John Stott saying in in one of his books that if if our churches aren't actually treating one another as family, we have no business calling our church a family.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01Um Ed Shaw has said in in his book that often we use the language of family because it makes us sound friendly. But if we're not actually acting as a family, again we're we're falling short of what the New Testament's calling us to. So it's thinking through if we whether we have our own nuclear or biological family or not, it's thinking through what does it mean that these brothers and sisters with whom I gather really are brothers and sisters on a Sunday. How can we how can we so conduct ourselves in a way that makes that a a felt uh experience in our church life? Um so it's it that's not then downplaying or minimizing the significance of of the biological family, which which we may or may not have. It's simply saying that that biological family is itself uh intertwined with and inseparable from a wider spiritual family, and therefore the value between the two shouldn't be uh utterly rigid and fixed and this kind of unbridgeable chasm. So and I think one of the the difficulties is certainly in southern England and I suspect many other parts of West Western culture as well, is that we've we've been trained to think that the the nuclear family is meant to be self-contained and self-sufficient, it's the basic unit in which you do life, and therefore it's become the basic unit in which you do church life. And therefore, someone who doesn't have a nuclear family then doesn't quite fit into society, culture, or into church. So we've we've got to kind of rebuild our our view of church and family, I think, from the ground up. And it it should be the case, Jesus, I like always come back to Mark 10 about giving people a hundredfold of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Jesus is saying that if we if becoming a disciple means we we lose certain aspects of the family life we had before we knew him, he is promising us a hundredfold more family in this age, not just in the age to come. And the way most of us do church, we're calling him a liar. Because he is saying someone who whose conversion sadly cuts them off, perhaps from their own community, should feel through the local church that they now have far more family and community and intimacy than they ever had before. But we've so bound our view of love and intimacy and community up either with our romantic other half or with our biological family that we don't then have any category for it outside of those things. Um I think we've got a lot of work to do, a lot of rethinking to do, and there's just tons of scripture we're just not reading, or we uh we're just kind of treating that family language as some somehow being token or honorary and not actually real.
SPEAKER_04So, what can we do with that? Besides, besides buying your book, obviously, out out at the end of the month. But uh, what's what what are some of the practical things that you think?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think well, there's lots of things. So um it it's something we need to, it's a concept, a biblical concept, a massive biblical concept. We need to inhabit in our own headspace, so that we actually okay, these people around you are Zaria Butterfield. The blood of Christ is thicker than the blood of biology. So, therefore, what are ways in which we can be doing life together more than we have been? Actually, her book on hospitality is is extraordinarily helpful. So the gospel comes with a house key is which I love, and that that's her basic point is saying, well, you know, if if you really are family, then why do I only see you once every three months and and get the kind of Instagram version of your family life rather than the reality of of what life is like for you. So opening up our everyday life to to other people in our in our church family as well will help people to feel like family. Recognizing that if we've got kids that as even if we're we're wonderfully godly Christian parents, we're not going to be all the things our children need us to be, and they are gonna need the input and wisdom and example of other people in the church family too. Um not least because any two parents have their own shared blind spots, their own shared weaknesses, and allowing the wider church family to have input into family life will have a great moderating effect against that. Um it'll just make our kids a bit less weak. Um, I think there's lots of things we can do. I think us singles, we often feel like we're passive and it's up to everybody else to invite us around. But actually, I think we can take more initiative in in wanting to um not just with families but with other singles, create a community, create a sense of being known, of of trying to do life together as well. So in my in my more imaginative days, I I think through I think about how I wonder if the church could lead culture in redesigning what housing looks like. And rather than it just being about the couple and having a place to have TV dinners or the family and and having our kind of self-contained place where we pull up the drawbridge each each day and have our little family unit, is whether there are whether there is scope for more communal forms of living that that don't obliterate the the unique place of the nuclear family, but just allow a little more interaction between that and the wider spiritual family. So I think there's there's lots of things we can do, but the the most significant thing is is let's kind of forget what we think we know about church. Let's open the New Testament again and allow it to speak to us and see see what we would do differently if we were starting with a blank sheet of paper and the New Testament. Not to disregard church history or anything like that, but just to think through in our own Western context, what are our blind spots when it comes to church life and and what correction do we need from the New Testament? It might be that we get some of that correction by looking at how non-Western churches do that do church life and thinking, oh wow, this this is a whole massive area of life we've neglected. So all those sorts of things.
SPEAKER_04So to bring the conversation back full circle, I I I guess it's it's kind of this idea of the strange new world of the Bible confronting us again and again and again and calling us to a kind of a repentance that's not the way of life that is natural to us in the 21st century, but that actually in all its differentness becomes incredibly attractive, uh, and attractive even to a world that that thinks it knows what intimacy is and thinks it knows what belonging community really is. But but maybe if if we can grasp this uh this vision for a for New Testament belonging, then uh actually that that kind of community becomes our best apologetic back to the culture.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I think I think it could be one of the key things the Lord uses to help us reach people today.
SPEAKER_04Well, thank you for getting us thinking about that then, Sam. And and uh because I I I think it really is exciting and dangerous and hard and difficult and all those things, but um but very, very necessary. So uh yeah, thank you for all that you're doing in this area. And um and if people want to get get hold of the book, uh what should they do?
SPEAKER_01Um it comes out at the end of February, end of this month, so it'll be available in the usual um websites and places where you normally get on the interweb people. Yeah. Google it twenty eighth.
SPEAKER_04February twenty eighth, fantastic. Yeah, brilliant. Well, Sam Aubrey, thanks so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for having me.