Ep. 54 JR Woodward - Imitating Christ: Desire, Belonging, and the Powers

In this episode JR Woodward discusses the fruit of coaching, the importance of the spaces of belonging, and how the powers and principalities affect our imitation of Christ and effectiveness of discipleship.

JR Woodward has been passionately planting churches on the East and West Coast that value tight-knit community, life-forming discipleship, locally-rooted presence and boundary-crossing mission for over 30 years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (UK), and a Masters of Art in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is the author of Creating a Missional Culture (IVP, 2012) and co-author of The Church as Movement (IVP, 2016). His coming book, The Scandal of Leadership: Unmasking the Powers of Domination in the Church, is expected to be released in the Fall of 2022. This book is based on his experience and Ph.D. research. He co-founded the Missio Alliance and currently serves as the National Director for the V3 Church Planting Movement. He is the co-founder of the Praxis Gathering, writes for numerous websites and journals, and serves on numerous boards. He loves to surf, travel, read, skateboard as well as meet new people. He enjoys photography and film and tries to attend the Sundance Film Festival whenever he can.

JR's Recommendations:
Walter Wink
Rene Girard
William Stringfellow
Sarah Cokely
Oscar Romero

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All Nations Kansas City
The mX Platform

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.us

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Transcript

Joshua Johnson: 0:57

Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create, and the impact we can make. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. Go to shifting culture podcast.com to interact and donate. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, go to Apple podcasts and leave a rating and review, and then share it with your friends and network. Previous guests on the show have included Alan Hirsch, Pam Arland, and Shayla Visser. You could go back and listen to those episodes, and more. But today's guest is Jr. Woodward, Jr, co founder of the missio. Alliance and currently serves as the national director for the v3 church planting movement. He has been passionately planting churches on the east and west coast, that value tight knit community life forming discipleship, locally rooted presence and boundary crossing mission for over 30 years, we have a fantastic conversation around coaching, the spaces of belonging and how the powers and principalities affect us our leadership, and our Imitation of Christ. Enjoy the episode. This episode is brought to you by all nations Kansas City, all nations trains and since disciple makers all over the world, to make disciples that make disciples among neglected people. If you want to see the kingdom come, if you want to see Jesus and bodied if you want to see a movement of disciples making disciples, check out all nations at all. nations.us Join us on the leading edge. This podcast is done in association with the MX platform and 100 m publishing. Do you want to be resourced and equipped to release movement in your context? Well then connect with movement leaders and practitioners for coaching resources and training at the m x platform.com. JR, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you. Thanks for coming.

JR Woodward: 2:54

Yeah, glad to be here, man.

Joshua Johnson: 2:55

Yeah, you know, I'd love to hear your story, as you transitioned into to start in v3, and what what does that look like? Why did you say, Hey, this is where we need to go, what we need to do? What was that process like for you?

JR Woodward: 3:11

Yeah, well, you know, I came to faith in college right before my senior year, four years later played in my first church at Blacksburg, Virginia, at Virginia Tech, and then went to LA and planted three churches there. And so actually, I thought I was gonna go plant, thinking about planning a church in San Francisco, and I went up there had multiple conversations, I just wasn't quite sure yet. And then I was like, I'm gonna take two weeks and just try to talk to as many people as possible. So Linda Berquist is a connection that Allenhurst gave me up there. And, you know, she introduced me, she knows everybody in San Francisco. So I, I probably met with like a dozen planters, someone who claimed to 20 years to two months and from the largest to the smallest church and just try to get a sense of what was happening there. And you know, was God called me to be there. And I got a sense at that time, and that was back in 2012 2013, where it just felt like there was a lot of planters there. And there are a lot of more churches that are, are getting roots there, which was not the case before that. And I just about felt like man, like, I wonder if it'd be better for me to help these churches instead of plant something not that like, I do think like, there's a unique angle that we take, I take on planting, but like, at the same time, I just felt you know, that feeling so then my last guy I talked to brown something Tom Brown, I think he was the guy who met with the Dallas Willard, when after he wrote the the spirit of the disciplines back in I don't know, the 70s or 80s. And so he was just thinking, like, you know, Dallas was saying, I know this works for me, but see if it works for your community. So this guy was into spiritual formation super early. And I could tell because this guy had a presence about him. And he was very present to me. And so this is my last interview of the time. And he just kind of asked me questions for like a straight hour. And, and then he just reflected back, you know, I know like, I noticed when you said this, that you your face really lit up. And you know, when he talked about this and like, then he shared a story. And this is kind of the story that was pivotal for me and kind of got me into doing what I'm doing right now. You know, having been a planter in 25 years, I really only imagined myself planting the rest of my life in that sense. And but he goes apparently St. Francis was trying to discern it what he was gonna do with his future, whether he's gonna be a tenor preacher, or just stay in one place. And the way he discerned this was he went to his trusted friends and asked them to discern on his behalf. And so they went and they prayed, came back and said, We think you should be a tenor preacher. He says, Thanks for your guide. And that's what he did. And so that story kind of stuck with me. And in a way, like, I'm always about making communal decisions, I kind of really do an individual decision. But this was another level because I felt like God was saying, Well, I want you, I want you to go to your trusted friends and let them decide what your next thing is going to be. And that's a nother level of, I kind of, I wrestled with God on that a little bit, but I thought, Okay, well, who would I have do this, I thought about seven people and at least kind of one. You know, person like David Finch, who tends to, you know, go against the flow, I figured if they're all come up to the same decision, I can take it as from the Lord. And so I gave them some options. I can stay in LA and continue to plan and go to San Francisco and plant. I could train plant church planters, or maybe they have a fourth option that I'm not aware of. After some prayer, meeting together, dialoguing. They all kind of came to the same conclusion, I should help church planters. And it was it was a was a lot more than the sorbent like, it was about a month later, I got a call from the Virginia Baptist who I did some work with before kind of consulting work. They wanted me to apply for essentially what their church planning arm which is both B three. And I kind of resisted for a while because I Baptist did not have a great like missional I don't for me, reputation. You know, in fact, I had read someone did their master's degree and said that like 40% of the people, if you tell them you're about this church, they don't want to join. And I was telling John Upton, who's a director of Virginia Baptist, oh, it's only 40%. Anyway, like, Yeah, cuz, you know, today, nobody, if you're about to switch, you don't put back this in your name. And so long story short, I made an application I was still trying to discern. And it took me about a month to discern, but once I did, I called them and said, hey, you know, if that does, we'll all take it. And they didn't really offer it to me until I felt called to it, which I thought was a really cool thing. Yeah. So that's kind of was the beginning of v3, how I got there. As I kind of started to, you know, think about things. One of the things I had been thinking for a long time is that we need to move away from this kind of church planting bootcamp of seven days or five days, and move to a much longer elongated training, where people are on the ground where they get a coach or two, where we kind of go through more of a week by week thing, maybe eight months long journey, as opposed to, you know, that five thing so that's kind of that was what started and we that first year after kind of assessing the situation there, I realized every movement has, there's a there's an acronym that people use carts, you know, coaching, assessment, wait coaching, recruiting, assessment, wait, see a coaching, assessment, recruiting, training and support. And the most critical I thought to start with was a coaching. And I mean, obviously assessment along the way, recruiting you have to do but the training and coaching together, to me would be a good way to start kind of some movement. So that's how it began.

Joshua Johnson: 9:27

And it seems like, you know, coaching really got you to that place, as well, just an hour coaching session that you didn't know was going to be a coaching session. Right, right. Absolutely. Yeah. And yeah, that's the power of of coaching, isn't it is to walk with people to to really reflect what is going on in somebody and be present with somebody in it. It takes an art, what have you seen as the power of coaching as your your training church planters as they're going out? What is that, that power of coaching that you've seen?

JR Woodward: 10:04

Yeah, I think number one, like, one thing that we require of all of our coaches is that they've actually done the things that they're going to be coaching others to do. That's pretty critical. And sometimes, you know, you got good people that you'd want to bring in, but they haven't quite really done what your our training is. And so as good of a person as they are, we've had to refuse them being a part. Because I ultimately think like when it comes to, you know, like planting, you know, that people were we learn a lot by imitation, you know, and we learn a lot by what other people are doing and have done more than instruction. So imitation and immersion to me are in admission are the key elements of discipleship. Now coaching, I look at a bit different because we do some of our most of our training online, because we're, we're kind of connecting with the planters in there while they're in their local area. So they have to have a small team in the area to become a part of the training. And I think the coaches, you know, we have material that they go through the we first year, we use the church's movement book that Dan and I wrote, and, but you always have to contextualize, you know, the content. And, and so, and you have to wrestle through, you know, you know, how it might fit in your particular context. And so, coaching really does that they, they, if you're coaching from experience, you know, you can really tell that as well. So I think those are key elements, obviously, good listening, and so forth. But there's different types of coaching. And as you probably know, because we're like, I think we look at like, church planting is like, you know, if you're going to climb the Himalayas, you want somebody who's done that before. And there are some very concrete skills that you got to know if you want to survive. Yeah, and these, these are like, non negotiables. It's not just like a nice idea. One of our

Joshua Johnson: 12:03

one of our missionaries, just almost died last week on the Himalayas, since he was up in northern India, trying to just climb a mountain, just go on a hike, and he almost died. So it's important that you know what you're doing.

JR Woodward: 12:18

Yeah, so we kind of talked about like Sherpas and like the the need of them, and that we're equipping you in the core things that you need to know when it comes to planting a church. And so we take a equipping approach to coaching, which is kind of, you know, again, there's like, life coaching, there's other types of coaching, all of it is important, and well, but this is a trying to pass on particular competency that they can kind of enact in their local place. And part of that requires a learning process that's quite different than what most of us kind of grew up in, which is kind of usually, you know, what's in our mind going into someone else's mind. So we have like three processes to our learning formation, which is a meta learning, what's the big idea that that God's speaking to you reflective learning where you're asking questions and going deeper, but you really haven't learned until you've done an experiential learning? What are you going to do this week, as a result of what you learned? And then we start the next call with looking at did they do that? What did they experience? How was it? And so every week, and the reason why, you know, week to week over a long period of time, is because they really haven't learned until they've done something with the knowledge.

Joshua Johnson: 13:32

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right, that experience that immersion is key, you know, and as I've been coaching church planters, as I've found that coaching itself, and that reflective learning, and then putting it into practice, that week, as they're in the situation, has created a situation where we've seen a lot more fruit in our ministry, because we've actually implemented a weekly coaching, as they're doing, they're reflecting back this work, this didn't work, Where am I headed? And they have a foundation of of learning, right? So they've, they've learned they have the fundamentals, and they're able to start to implement. And so what's what does that look like? What's the big process for you to be able to get people into into those meta ideas, those big ideas? And then that experiential learning, and then the reflective with the coach, what does that process look like for planters?

JR Woodward: 14:34

Yeah, well, so like I said, we tend to, there's very little bit of reading. And we have about eight competencies that we work through, there's probably like, three to four, you know, subdivisions and each of those competencies. And so you're just really taking a very small idea reading, they, they kind of reflect on what they're getting from that we go through, or they, you know, they share their big idea. We have some reflection questions that they're already thought about and wrote up. So by the time we get to the discussion, they're already kind of, you know, have thought about it. And so they've had to read and put up their stuff before we meet on our call. I think that's pretty important. To make sure that they're engaging the material, we engage it with them reflectively and then they share their what they're willing to do this week, and then we start the next week, like I said, with looking you know, what was your experience? What did you do? How did it go? And, you know, we have about we have we usually for the first year we use two coaches, so you kind of have different perspectives. You have about six to eight planters. And obviously not everybody can talk on everything. And so you kind of key in on a few you hone in deeply and with the idea that we can all learn from this person as well and what they're doing. But that's, that's essentially the flow of the coaching call,

Joshua Johnson: 16:01

as you've seen them start to implement what they have learned. How do you assess healthy church? What is what is Church Health look like? And how do we know that we are? I mean, looking like Jesus in the middle? Yeah. Well,

JR Woodward: 16:25

so like, I think this is kind of where one of the ways is like their understanding of the four spaces of belonging. So really key to our training, is we kind of I feel like right now, the the tail is wagging the dog in the sense that public space is kind of most people's primary space in North America. And what we do in our training is make personal space within social space, the primary, so intimate space being those three to four people, personal space, being that five to 12, social space being the 20 to 5070, or more being public space. Today, maybe 90% of people's energy goes to public spaces, right, we hope to get people before they start a public space, so they don't do it for another year or two. Yeah. And our goal, really, the first year is very simple, like our learning output is to start a discipleship core of about five to 12 people. And together, they are building a social space. So that discipleship core is a bounded set, by by invite only, so that they can actually grow deep. And the social space is oriented around mission where we hope that there's like at least 50% of the people that are non Christians. And that's what they're learning and training to build together. And the goal is, at the end of the year, they've just done that they've started a, they've gone through a discipleship pathway of eight months. And they've grown their social space to you know, 2050 people, and now they're ready to multiply. So, a healthy church, we basically move discipleship from the peripheral of what the church does, and we don't think discipleship is what you get from the pulpit. We'd like to say that, you know, not only do we imitate Jesus, the disciple, but we imitate Jesus, the disciple maker, and he clearly was oriented around his 90% was on on those 12. And he brought them in those other spaces with him. But this was his core space that he knew he was leaving it with these people to, to turn the world upside down. Yeah. And so healthy church means like, you actually have people that looking more like Jesus. Yeah, that takes discipleship that takes going in into our lives deeply. And there's that like, as opposed to one on one, which obviously, you have some of that too. But you there, I think there's a social element to that personal space that brings dynamics out that one on one never does. And so. And what makes it dynamic, too, is that they're building this social space, which is dedicated to mission. It's not just another place for community to get together. That's where we're doing mission based on your neighborhood or network, the awakeness that you're kind of trying to connect with. So that's kind of the core what we're building. So health to me, is like, people are growing in the character and competencies of Jesus, they're looking more like him, which means that they know how to live on mission well, and love others, they know how to be a community together with each other. I think we instead of asking how many people come to our service, we need to ask how many people look more like Jesus? How many people are displaying the fruit of the Spirit? If you have that you have a healthy church. Yeah, if you don't have that doesn't matter what your size is. It's not healthy.

Joshua Johnson: 19:48

Oh, well, for you, those four spaces of belonging, what's the dynamics and the interchange between those? I just found that and a lot of our movements that we're trying, you know, as for me, as somebody who leads a missions agency that wants to see church planting movements around the world, and we have church planters, for me, it seems like that social space is a missing piece. It's a missing element. And I don't know how to get there. We have these smaller communities of people doing life on life discipleship, they're learning together, they're starting to apply what they're learning. But that social space seems to be missing. How What's that interplay?

JR Woodward: 20:31

Yeah, yeah, I think this is probably the most critical element. So again, like with the discipleship space, we'd like to kind of make a strong distinction between a small group in the discipleship core Small group or often open, the sentence, of course, is not small group, you know, tends to be around kind of learning in the head knowledge. And this is about learning formation in the way that we talked about, you know, the small group doesn't tend to be that missional. And this is kind of like integrally tied to social space. So if if discipleship doesn't help people, and it means like, this kind of goes back to people will learn more by imitation as we immerse ourselves in mission than they will instruction. And so what we do is the subject court develops a rule and rhythm of life, around kind of the three elements of the Church, which is communion, community and commission. And so, community, what's a spiritual discipline that helps you connect in have a fervent love for God, community for each other, and then Commission is the mission. And so one of the things that one of the simple practices that we would encourage everybody in the discipleship corps to have is pray for five non Christians daily, and meet with one non Christian once a week over a coffee and dinner, lunch, or whatever. Now, if everybody in the discipleship core, does that, know if they can't do that, and that's what discipleship is about, hey, you know, are you dealing with a fear or whatever, it will come over with me, you can do that with me a couple of times, learn how not only you don't have to be afraid of it, but it can be quite exciting and energizing. And until and when everybody has those practices, then you have some, you know, you have some open spaces where you start to invite, like, your non Christian friends too. And I think, for me, like, there's three things to think about, you can have a connecting space, which is just where your Christian brethren, non Christian friends connect, there's not any obvious kind of spirituality to it, there's not testimonies and so forth. It's just like friends meeting each other. I mean, it could be a game night, it could be a dinner, or it could be whatever we had, when we were at UCLA, we did these taller dinners, or invited students to eat a homemade dinner for $1. And we prayed the beginning that's as spiritual as it gets, there's people connecting and so forth, then there, you have a sharing event, which is maybe a little bit more where someone does share something about maybe their own testimony or whatever. And and then the third is challenging event where that's kind of where you actually challenge people to look at where they're at with God. Now, I think like for a lot of our spaces, if we keep the that social space on a week to week or every other week basis, in the in the just the kind of connecting and sharing, that it's ideal to kind of build these bridges of like six weeks, for those who seem ready to go through a more challenging aspect of things. And I think that oftentimes that group can become the next discipleship core, starting the next social space.

Joshua Johnson: 23:59

That discipleship core is always on mission. They're always praying for as well, because they're praying for loss people there. They're saying, Yes, I'm going to meet with lost people. And then, you know, as we're building that mission out, there's a pathway for, for the people there to multiply out into a new discipleship core. Yeah, I like like, how that have you seen that play out? In practice? As you've been been coaching and training some church planters? And can you give me an example or two? Of what Yeah, looks like? Yeah,

JR Woodward: 24:38

I I'll first kind of say this, like, it's, it takes a while for people to reorient to being church in this way. And so we encounter people at different places, you know, some that have kind of deconstructed their, what church meant to them, and they're starting to reconstruct, there's others that haven't, you know, haven't started deconstructing yet. So it kind of it all depends on where they're at in the net journey. Yeah, it's gonna take longer for people that need to, because what I found out is like, somebody can, you know, and let's say, we're kind of dialoguing coaching and someone can tell me the right things. That doesn't mean that they've owned it. And it doesn't mean that they're actually convicted about it. The only way I know they're convicted is that they, you know, their practice changes. And so, all I'm saying in our experience of coaching that we'll have, we encounter people a lot of ways and our goal is just to kind of move them a few steps. And so if we meet somebody who's they hear it and they'll say, oh my gosh, this is like, perfect. They're already oriented toward it, they become convinced of it. We you know, so there's a church in Honolulu. Led by goon straw sir she's a Korean physician, she is only planting like part time she's a physician full time well as part time to about two and a half days. She's a mother of three wife. And they started their first year focused on the discipleship core and starting a social space. She said 90% of her time was devoted to that discipleship, space, and building together with them building the social space at the end of one year. That's what they had. By year two, a number of the people in her discipleship corps, were able to start. So they started, they had three, three discipleship cores with three mid sized groups. By year three, what she said, now there's nine of them. And so this, this is probably our high example. Yeah. And it becomes because there was a deep conviction in the leader, that this particular way of doing church was important and good. And she could bring people on board with it, to be honest. There's a there's another one where we're working with churches, primarily Korean. So they come from this very big church idea. They, they came to us with the goal of kind of learning more about discipleship, now they started their public gathering, right when they entered our training, but they had like, you know, 1520, people had it, it was kind of like a personal space in this huge public space, which was felt awkward. But they did that for the whole first year of the training. And there was three guys in the church that were part of the training. It really wasn't until next year, when we had the three wives do the training, they seem to get faster than the guys. Or maybe they just needed the y's on board. But like, in with COVID, hitting, they started to realize like this public space isn't, hasn't been working number one, even before COVID. Now with COVID, we can't really do it anyway. So they were forced to start with this discipleship core. And they really worked on it. And they're working through what this pathway looks like for them. And now they've just started to do the social spaces. So they have to have these social spaces going on. But it took a long time. And so unlike goon who's kind of ready to roll, and she kind of has an apostolic prophetic thing, we're kind of dealing with a pastor teacher gifting everything slower. But like, they feel like they just become Christians, because it's the first time they're meeting their neighbors the first time. They're, they're praying for non Christians is not a part of their whole Christian life. Yeah. And so it's, uh, they're slow, but I'm excited about their progress, you know, and they're, they're moving toward it with the with great excitement. And the stories that you hear is like, you know, it's just, yeah, it's just amazing. So, you know, awesome. Is that success? You know, is that faithful? Yeah, I think like, there's something happening there. Yeah. Not as, like glamorous as the other story. But it's a it's another story that's worth sharing.

Joshua Johnson: 28:58

Yeah, that's, that's really great. You know, I'd love to switch up transition a little bit to your new book coming out. The scandal of leadership, unmasking the powers of domination in the church. It's a very tantalizing title. Where what are you going after? In this book?

JR Woodward: 29:18

Yeah. So yeah, and I'll try to explain the title to like, obviously, we have a leadership crisis in the church in North America. And it's probably the case all over the world. And so what I'm trying to do, and I think a lot of it deals with a misuse of power in various ways. And so I'm trying to give a deeper diagnosis to the problem of domineering leadership in the church. And the way that I'm trying to go about it, is I think that the the pot, our misuse of power is all wrapped up in powers. And when I say the powers, I'm talking about Satan demonic and the principalities and powers. Yeah, I think we, we don't usually go there because we don't have a real good understanding of that. I think either people have a pre modern view, or they may have a modern view, or whatever type of view they have of the powers, but I don't think our understanding the power is shapes anything about the life that we lead in, in a general way. And so I really take quite a bit of time, understanding the power is and there is a fresh perspective that I wanted to give on each of these elements. And so and in maybe the one the concrete way, they that they affect leaders, I define leadership as identity praxis, you know, like what we do in Our methodology and tell us where, where we're going and where we're taking the congregation. And at each of those three points, the powers are at work to subvert our leadership. And so, Stringfellow talks about the principalities and powers. But by the way, I think is the only part of the powers that can be redeemed. I don't see redemption for the Devil or the demonic. I think those are like, actually, you know, anyway, the, that's an important distinction, but the principalities and powers would you see, closets are redeemed. And, and so you have image he talks about, like, there's, every every one of us has an image, there's two people or two entities that go by the same name, you know, there's Joshua, the person in Joshua the image, where he uses a, the, the Maryland rollers, Monroe, the person male, unrolled the image, the image seeks to possess us until we fully give ourselves over to the image instead of living into our image of God. And this is the weakest of the principalities, but nonetheless powerful. So for example, when you if you've listened to the rise and fall of Maurice Hill, and you kind of look at the Mark Driscoll story, you know, there came a point where it to me is very clear, that he was possessed by his image, instead of living in his image of God, he was the brand, he spent$200,000, to get his book on the bestseller list, like, this was an image that had fully grabbed him and possessed him. And then you have the church, or the institution could be the church, it could be other things for, you know, you could take like, you know, with, so you have institution and ideology are the other two elements. And by the way, the image kind of correlates, I correlate it to identity, I, institution to the, to the practice, and the tell us to, to the ideology. And what's interesting is I see when I examine the, the temptations of Christ, by the way, like something that we don't give enough attention to, before anybody goes on ministry, how are what are they doing, it's an encounter with the powers, right? And it's, you know, Jesus is baptized. The father says, you know, this is my son in whom I'm well pleased, and the spirit drives them into the desert or wilderness. And the first temptation is like, you know, turn this rock into bread. Right before he says that, though, the devil says, If you are the Son of God, in other words, he was going right after his identity, yeah, because that is the core element of us. Like if we are not grounded in Christ, if our identity is not secure, and that's really the beginning of the Lord's Prayer rooted identity, then we are basically at the devil's mercy, like, we will just do, we will, we will be bit possessed by our image instead, because we will kind of we will imitate our heroes. And if it's not Jesus, we will fall into all kinds of, you know, disastrous places. So the second by way of Luke was, you know, I'll give you all these kingdoms. And this is kind of the Zeki Lu causes the, you know, the temptation of power. And it's kind of how we use our power. And I think if our identities not secure if our tell us is messed up, our power is going to be messed up as well. The third temptation, he calls little calls it a religious temptation, because Jesus is at the top of the temple. And even at this point, the second time the devil says, If you are the Son of God, doesn't the scripture say to yourself from the temple, the angels will catch you. Now he's using the Bible to tempt Jesus. And so he calls us a religious temptation or an ideological religious temptation. And I basically, string fellows in Rene Girard, understanding ideology is like ideology. I think many of us are captive to ideology without knowing it. And when we're captive by ideology, it affects the way that we read Scripture. So even like Paul, before he came to Christ, the way he read Scripture caused him to, you know, be accompaniment to the violence against the church itself. That was his understanding of Scripture. Yeah. And he could probably knew the Scripture better than all of us, you know. And but he had an ideological reading of it. And so we don't realize that we were kept it to ideology, but I think one of the ways that Charles has read over captured the ideology is when we we create the enemy as a way of creating our own sense of belonging, or we demonize the other and and So if we build community by demonizing the other, I think we can know that we're off the path of Jesus, Jesus was willing to become the forgiving victim. And he's calling us into that space as well.

Joshua Johnson: 35:59

It sounds fascinating, you know, I was a couple of weeks ago, sitting around a table with a bunch of church leaders, and we were talking about, about power dynamics and power and, you know, as, as men over women, white over colored Yeah, what are all these different powers? And if we actually get some, some different power dynamic, one of the questions was, how if say, somebody else in the church has more power than the other? How do we not not have the same sense of our past? And go a different way? Because usually, a lot of times when, you know, as I read Miroslav off and others about, what does it look like when people subjugate people, then then those oppressed people get power? They usually oppress others. And so in the midst of that dynamic, one of the things that I thought that was missing in our discussion was that the discussion of identity, and I think what you have, have said, as that is that core that image that identity, and I think you're you're really on to something I love, what you did here to be able to, to balance those powers, how can we balance those powers and not see the other as as evil and subjugate people? And

JR Woodward: 37:33

was that Yeah, yeah. So I think this requires probably more than we can do in a couple of minutes here. But like, I think, so one of the guys that I study and interact with is guiding Rene Jarrar, who is a French cultural anthropologist, and he, you know, he taught at Johns Hopkins a bunch of different places at Stanford. He got his first PhD in Paris, he's a French guy. Second PhD in the US has seven confirmed PhDs from seven different countries in that six in Europe and one in Canada. I'm just trying to say he's a brainiac. And, and he kind of converses with Freud, and Nietzsche, and Levi Strauss, and all of these people, as opposed to, you know, different theologians. And he basically made three discoveries that I think are important for us to understand, we're going to kind of because, because, like you said that like, whatever groups, if there is, rivalry between groups, I, that's what I want us to understand. Because rivalry will kind of create doubles, and then we just mimic what the other group is doing. And that's why over the centuries, you know, one group gets power and other groups power and everybody acts the same way. Yeah, because we're imitating what the other group did. So what, and this is kind of his first discovery was this. And that was from reading like what separates out like Shakespeare. It does. Yes, ski Proust. And these great authors when he called novelist from what he called the romantic his first book, and the French title was The romantic lie the novelistic truth, the romantic lie was that our desires, we create our own desires, so whatever the object of our desire is, we just desire it, and will to being what all of the great authors did, and this is what he learned from them. Because what makes a great author, whatever they're writing feels real to life, like we can, we can see ourselves in it, right? A good movie, a good book. All the great writers eventually in their writing came to a place where desire was not like the straight line, but it was a triangle. Meaning that our desires are gained through our models, whoever we look up to, we imitate their desires. So here's the thing. So if we imitate their desire, let's kind of put this on the bring this into the church context. Let's say you're a lead pastor, or let's say someone's a lead pastor. It not just that they're the lead pastor, but they desire to be the lead pastor. Now, if anybody looks up to them, they will desire to be the lead pastor. Well, what happens here is that the leader becomes an obstacle to the disciple getting what they desire, the very desire that they gave them. This is a scandal. The word scandalous that Jesus uses is the obstacle, same word, the scandal of leadership is that's what I'm talking about. Well, the scandal of leadership is that when we have unhealthy desires, and our disciples imitate that desire, it will bring us into unconsciously subconsciously in rivalry with the leader, and so are now now this rivalry and if there's multiple, like scandals, in other words, multiple disciples getting that same desire, what that creates is a mimetic crisis and an emetic crisis, what happens is, everybody goes against everybody. Now, in ancient days, before there was even any judicial branch or law, really, you know, primitive people. What happened at this point is the second discovery that Gerard came with, and that is the scapegoat mechanism. And this is a mechanism that kind of kicks in, it's fairly random. And they, the medically, the, the, the whole community lands on a scapegoat. Yeah. And in the beginning, they killed that person. And, and while it's all kind of random, the scapegoat tended to have common characteristics, they were either very weak, or the form or, or they were a minority, you know, these types of things, because one of the, or it could be the king, it could be the leader, the commonality between those at the bottom, and those at the top is their, they both have one step in the community. And they also are differentiated enough that they have a foot outside of the community. So by killing them, it doesn't kind of create revenge, but rather, it creates a peace among the community until the process kind of repeats itself all over again. And so the the scapegoat mechanism is the second thing that happens. And so you'll see this, even though we have the intelligence of the scapegoat now, yeah, we know that kind of this happens. But the third discovery that he came up with, and this is what actually made this kind of Frenchmen who is this deep philosopher, who, by the way, brought the whole post modernism to America, because he hosted the conference at John Hopkins with Derrida and all of the postmodern thinkers, because he was in that level of thinking. He in His third book kind of very came out as a Christian, even though he became a Christian, right in his first book, as he was kind of studying this thing and realize he was a victim of this kind of mimetic desire. And but the third thing that he discovered was that that Jesus became the willing scapegoat, right, the first, the Jews, and the Romans scapegoated him. And by the way, before Jesus, for the way this scapegoating work is everybody had to consider you guilty, there was no innocence in the scapegoat, the scapegoat, everybody considered guilty. And this is why even the disciples could not identify with Jesus anymore, because they got caught in the mimetic contagion of the crowd. And so even Peter denied Him to a 13 year old girl, think about what that meant in that time. So Jesus willingly becomes a scapegoat in order to reveal the scapegoat mechanism that's happened since the very beginning, since since Cain and Abel, that's really where we see it first happened, and so he's revealing. And that's also kind of the breaking loose of the powers that are at work. And so a lot of what I'm saying is like, we, we probably are always mimicking the power structures that we have seen, and we haven't broken out of them. And the only way that George says that we can overcome the powers is to imitate Jesus. Now when I say that, like that sounds like nice and easy kind of idea here. But like, and here's the thing like Jesus, the only way that he could overcome the powers in the temptations, was to imitate the Father. And that's why you know, I can I can only do what I see the Father doing, I can only say what the father's like he was imitating the father and when we imitate Christ, we will also kind of, you know, have a connection to the Father in the same way. Yeah, I think this is where it comes to Philippians. Two, and understanding better the kinetic journey that he went on, and obedience and humility and ultimately becoming this forgiving victim that we have to learn. And we learn it from a guy who's in jail who's facing death. And he's trying to say this. He firstly let's do this as a model. Then he lifts up Timothy, then he lifts up at Pepperdine knees, and then he lifts up himself is a different way of doing leadership, a different way of belonging and a different way of being. And it comes down to all of us get our sense of identity from the group that we belong to, or that we feel we belong to the most. And our, in our belonging is connected to our rationality. We actually see things you know, that's why we you know, our whatever is true to us or fake news to us, is ultimately about the group that we primarily belong to. Yeah. So our belonging affects our rationality and what I think Paul has challenged us to like, do you really belong to Christ. And what we have in Philippians is there's a, there's two leaders that are have entered into mimetic rivalry. And the way that Paul is trying to resolve that is through first look at Jesus have this mind that was in Christ, look at some other good examples, and then look at my example, and follow me, because the only way out of that is through imitation of good models, instead of bad models.

Joshua Johnson: 46:11

Wow. That's fascinating. And I'm, I'm excited to dive deeper into that, and continue to walk people through this, these ideas. And I think if we could start to get a different perspective and different models and we and imitate Christ, I think we could actually see a different result than we've been seeing that there. And so I'm excited. For this new book, when's it will be

JR Woodward: 46:41

October? I think it's October is over.

Joshua Johnson: 46:45

You're getting me getting me excited.

JR Woodward: 46:48

I'm in the middle of finishing the final chapter. added a few more chapters, and then you're good.

Joshua Johnson: 46:54

Yeah. That's good. I'm really excited. Well, there's, yeah, go ahead.

JR Woodward: 46:59

So the scandal of leadership in the first scandal is that when we become a scandal to those were discipling, but the opposite way is following the scandalous way of Christ. And it is a scandal to in the current world that we live in.

Joshua Johnson: 47:11

Yeah, that's true. That's very true. You know, a couple of questions here, that one I like to ask, if you could go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

JR Woodward: 47:22

Ah, you know, I would say, Read, you know, widely, you know, read, read things that are different than what you believe, you know, kind of expand your thinking, your critical thinking, and just, and, you know, I think, I think our you know, I was very passionate for Christ at that time. So, I would say that, that's probably been one of the more important things for me, you know,

Joshua Johnson: 47:51

yeah. That's good. So, with that, anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend?

JR Woodward: 47:59

Well, I most of my reading is kind of been in the realm of my current book. So my three primary people that I connect with is Walter weak in his trilogy on the powers. Rene Girard has about 20 books. And Wayne Stringfellow has about 16 books. So I kind of like to go deep with people that I feel like are, are deep themselves. And yeah, so I'm also I've enjoyed Sarah Coakley, and some of her kind of systematic theology. And one of the examples I'm going to use as a kind of modern example, to follow that I feel like understands kinetic, spirituality and leadership is Oscar Romero, and who, ultimately, in his quest to follow Christ was shot as he was giving mass. And in his his story in El Salvador is quite interesting,

Joshua Johnson: 49:01

huh? That's good. Yeah. Where can people find you? Anything, anything? People about?

JR Woodward: 49:13

Yeah, like, I'm not as socially geared right now, because I'm my writing K. But like, I do tweet sometimes at Dream Awakener. And I don't really blog much anymore, but I do have my old blogs on Jr woodward.com. And at v3 movement. Sometimes I'll do an article here and there. But yeah, right now, I'm like, I'm not as social media engaged, but I probably will start once I get out of my writing cave.

Joshua Johnson: 49:46

Yeah, that's good. Well, Jr, it was just a pleasure to talk to you. And it was fascinating for me to, to talk through these four spaces of belonging and how we can actually start to multiply church and to be on mission together, and then really talk about the powers and how we can start to imitate Christ in the midst of things and get better models. So thank you very much. It was just Yeah, it was a pleasure. It was great. Thanks.

JR Woodward: 50:13

Good to see you, man. Thanks.