Jesus isn't merely trying to help us escape from the world he's created. He is inviting us to renewal, and he invites us to personal renewal and reconciliation. To him first and foremost, but he's also interested in renewing everything around us. He cares about everything our hands touch. I Joshua,
Joshua Johnson:hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, what happens when the gospel you are handed no longer makes sense of the pain, beauty or complexity of the world you're actually living in? In this conversation, I sit down with Nicholas McDonald, pastor and author of the light in our eyes, to explore the tensions between disillusionment and hope, escape and embodiment, cynicism and renewal. Nicholas brings a pastor's hearts a theologians depth and the honesty of someone who's wrestled with real questions and has found the freedom, beauty and hope that Jesus can bring. We talk about what 40 million people walking away from the church actually means, why so many are rejecting not Jesus but a culture of fear and power, and how the recovery of ancient practices communal faith and a more embodied gospel could help us reimagine the way forward, from Zachariah silence to Jim Henson's Muppets, from dispensational escape theology to Communion as resistance. This conversation covers a lot of ground, and all of it matters, so join us as we find the light of Christ has been present all along. Here is my conversation with Nicholas. McDonald Nicholas, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on thanks for joining me.
Unknown:Yeah, I'm really glad to be with you, Joshua. I'd
Joshua Johnson:love to know you know your book, the light in our eyes, it's fantastic, but it really takes us through a whole journey of disillusionment, deconstruction into some reconstruction, finding some hope, freedom, some love of Jesus. And so it's a whole, whole journey. Why is this fascinating to you. Why did you embark on this project to figure out where we are as a culture and how there is a way
Unknown:forward? Well, number one, we're in a bit of a moment. So 40 million people have left the church over the last 10 years. That's more people than came to faith in the first Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening and the Billy Graham crusades combined. So this is a crisis, and it's also very personal to me. So a lot of this book is about my journey. It's a book I wish someone had written for me 15 years ago, 20 years ago, as I was feeling like I had lost my way, so I had grown up in the evangelical church, and in many ways, appreciate a lot of what I grew up in. But there was a moment in my high school years where two things happened in the same season right before college. One was that I took a trip to South Africa, and I saw poverty for the first time. I mean, really destructive, people living in sheds, eating chicken broth for dinner, which was the result of apartheid, which was an ostensibly Christian movement. So that upended a lot of my categories, and came back home, and two weeks later, this is just before heading to college, my youngest brother died in a drowning accident, and I felt like at that time, it was like someone had pulled the rug out from under me, and all the categories I had for my own faith just were not fitting into the sort of bubble that I had grown up. And so for me, I felt like I'm not finding the answers to these really big, hard questions in the church. So I walked away for many years, walked away from the church. Didn't feel like the church had answers for me, and the book I needed was a book that said you are right about the problems you see. And okay, and there's so there's lots of good books saying you're right about the problems you see, but they don't offer any hope or a way forward, necessarily. And that's not their job, not academic. Books aren't meant to do that. You know, I'm thinking of great books like the color of compromise and lots of things that have exposed the ugly underbelly of this thing we've inherited. That's that's great, but it's not their job to give us hope. As a pastor, it's my job to give you some hope. I also didn't want to write a book this would not have been helpful for me at the time. If someone had said, Hey, you're wrong to walk away from the church, and here's why all of your. Objections are wrong. Oh, that would not have been helpful to me. So the voice I needed was someone saying, Hey, I affirm a lot of the things that you're seeing that are wrong in the church, and I can present to you a better, hopeful, bigger, more global, historic picture of the gospel than maybe you've experienced in your American Evangelical culture growing up. That's what I needed, and I think that's what maybe 20 million or 30 million of those 40 million people are looking
Joshua Johnson:for. Why do you think they're looking for that? One of the things that you said that you believe and you think that they're really, not really rejecting Christian orthodoxy, but they're rejecting a culture of fear and power and political entanglement, which you call bully evangelicalism. So why is it? Is it that and like, where are people at? What have you seen in the the research of, what are they walking away from, and what are they trying to hold on to? Still? Some
Unknown:of this comes from the research. So Michael Graham and Jim Davis book The Great D churching show, statistically, most people who have walked away from the church would still hold to what we would call the tenets of evangelicalism. They would say, I still believe the Bible is authoritative. I still believe in the atonement of Jesus, and yet they're not in the church. So I think we need to ask ourselves, why? If that's not it, then why? And it's so some of it comes from research. Some of it really comes from my own experience working with college students. So I did college ministry at the University of Missouri, starting in 2016 which was quite a year to start college ministry in speaking to college students. One of the things I picked up over the years was a certain vibe that was different than the vibe I had growing up, which was this kind of pervasive cynicism, fear, anxiety, and so I always think of the one example of that I used to, as a youth pastor in the 2000 10s, make fun of the movie Tangled, because I would be poking fun at this narrative that Okay, so this, this thief, comes along, Flynn Rider, and he has all these bad habits, but he finds this, you know, woman in A tower, and then all of a sudden, those bad habits go away. It just doesn't that's not the way life works. Like this is, you've just married a kleptomaniac, and he's going to end up stealing things from your father's palace at some point. And so this was a story hotel in the 2000 10s to optimistic young, you know, millennials who'd be like, upset that I had upended that very optimistic story about marriage. I tried telling that story again to college students in 2016 and their expression was like, Duh. So what like we? We know this, this is obvious, like, we don't have hope in anything. So I had lots of conversations about this with college students and and what I was finding was that college students were looking for hope. They're looking for hope. And what they were hearing, especially in 2016 to 2020 from the evangelical world, was fear, cynicism, this kind of apocalyptic view of politics and life that assumed the world was going to get worse and worse and worse going to hell in a hand basket. I remember one of the things, I'm jumping back in time a little bit, but one of the things I heard when I was part of the trailer park church that I talk about in the book a little bit, is the pastor said, you know, the world is like a sinking Titanic, and our job is not to polish the brass and the titanics to throw life preservers to people and help them get saved. This was the default assumption of evangelical culture. The world's getting worse. We need to panic and figure out how to protect what we have. And that was exactly the opposite of what those college students needed to hear. So I'm watching them and seeing them and feeling with them how it is that they're leading the church, and they're going back to their home churches, and they're getting more of that, and it's just it's this vicious cycle of I'm looking for hope a church is offering them more fear and cynicism. That's not where I want to place my faith in hope.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, one of the things that they're offering the church was offering hope in then, is in really an optimistic view of of faith without naming the reality. So let's name the pain points, name the pain of what people have been going through. I think is important as we we walk through this so that we actually acknowledge that there is some pain, and we don't want to gloss over things. And I think some in some pockets of the church, we've glossed over a lot of the reality of life, and the good news of Jesus is that he actually impacts in the. He He touches the reality of everything, and it's can lead to something beautiful. Even the midst of suffering and pain and doubts and disillusionment, there's something beautiful there. What is the pain point? So let's name that,
Unknown:yeah. Well, that's well said, there's a lot of pessimism about life outside the church and maybe a lot of naive optimism about what is inside the church. So both of those realities are happening at the same time. I would say for me that false optimism about life in the church and pessimism. So it happened at the same church. I just mentioned the trailer park church. Well, I'll tell you one story that I think encapsulates the culture of the church. So I was working with a lot of youth, maybe 70 to 80 different high school and junior high students, and they were coming from pretty low income background, and so we would spend some time together. And now the church was a King James only church, so these are students who can barely spell their own names, and I'm trying to teach to them out of the King James Version of the Bible. I mean, that's, that's hard, that's a hard job. So, you know, I was fine trying to do it, but I had suggested to the pastor at some point, hey, maybe there's some other things we could do for these students, besides only teaching them the Bible. Obviously, I'm here to teach them the Bible, but in order for them to even read this King James Version Bible, we need to teach them how to read, and maybe there's some other things we could do to give them some more holistic help. And the pastor looked at me and said, That's not your job. Your job is to get them in here and get them saved. One particular moment that stands out to me is I was playing some Christian Rap at this church, because the rap culture that we are in as we're playing this Christian Rap youth group and I were meeting downstairs, and I hear this thunderous, sort of booming footsteps from upstairs, and I I'm like, something's gone wrong. So I start to walk up the stairs, and the pastor meets me, and he's just, he's this beet red, he's very angry. And I had no I sincerely had no idea what he could be angry about. And he listened to the music for a second, and he said, What is this crap? I said, Well, it's Christian rap. You know, I thought maybe some of these students, this is what they listened to. I thought this would be a good way to bridge the gap. And he looked at me and he said, If I can't understand it, it's not Christian which ironically became sort of my thesis statement for what evangelicalism is right now, if I can't understand it, it's not Christian, and that attitude of exclusion has almost become our default mission. We assume our mission is to protect this culture that we have, and that's kind of an ugly thing, you know. So to naming some of the things that are ugly inside the church, I was watching that happen in real time with those students, and it was hard to watch
Joshua Johnson:you walk through some of these cynical dreams that you talk about, where the church wants to do something, and it really rubs people the wrong way. People start to say, maybe that's not, not right. And so I want to walk through some of those so that we could just name some. You know, one you talk about exclusion, which guards purity by pushing people out. How is the church doing that, and what is the what does that do for people's faith?
Unknown:Yeah, that cynical dream of exclusion. Well, I think that particular pastor's words put it, put it very well, you know, if we can't understand it, it's not Christian. And so the default mission of the church becomes, if it doesn't sound like something I'm familiar with, that come if it comes outside of my cultural context, then it's not Christian so, so one of the things I talk about in the book is going to worldview camp, which was an interesting experience for me. It was a week my mom had become a Christian when I was maybe eight years old, and so she's like, I don't know this is a Christian thing. Go do it. So she has no idea what world view campus. She sends me out there, and I have no idea what it is. There were no marshmallows or campfires. I know that there's no hiking. It was Bible classes, turns out, which was a bit of a disappointment. So I get to world view camp, and what we are taught at world view camp is, there's there's a Christian way to think about everything in life. There's a Christian way to think about science. Here's the way you think about science. There's a Christian way to think about politics. Here's how you think about politics. Here there's a Christian way to think about dating. We don't date, we never date. We court each other, you know. And there's all these sort of things that I've you know as a 14 year old were a little bit compelling to me. It's like, oh, Jesus cares about all these things, but part of what deconstructed in my mind years later was going to South Africa, seeing people outside of our context, and realizing, Wait a second, a lot of those things that were called Christian. Are just a very Caucasian, Western way to think about everything. And so as I started to pull at those threads and think, Huh, maybe, maybe I don't agree with this quote, unquote, Christian political take on things. Does that mean I'm not a Christian? That's what they're saying. They're saying I don't have a Christian worldview. If I don't have a Christian worldview. Maybe I don't believe in Jesus. Maybe, maybe, if that's tied to the resurrection, but maybe the resurrection isn't a thing, you know. So all these things got bundled together in being a Christian means looking like us, being like us, thinking like us, in a way that, you know, it just unravels, you know, if you're not willing to buy into the whole subculture. It unravels. And I think a lot of the deconstruction process for folks can begin there. It's turning opinions about culture and politics and things like that into orthodoxy. Those things are not what the global, historic church has ever said. These are the important things. So it's a kind of legalism, is another way you could put it. It's a kind of legalism. But I thank you. Legalism that I think is
Joshua Johnson:pervasive. So walking through that, what are some of the things that you've learned from the global church and people around the world that has helped get you into a space of like, I'm actually rooted in something ancient, historic, and it's a global family. It doesn't always look like this white western evangelical world that that the Christian world is much bigger and broader than I thought it was.
Unknown:My first exposure to that world was I had the opportunity when I was in college to go abroad for a couple of semesters and study in England, and I was not going to a church, but some friends were and I was lonely, so I joined them at a church one Sunday, which called itself an evangelical church. But when I walked in and I heard what was being talked about just did not feel at all like the evangelicalism I had grown up in. And whatever it was they meant by evangelical was not what I had learned evangelical was there were people who had very different political viewpoints. They were very engaged with thinking about some of their third world papers. There's just a different kind of a culture there. And it made me start to think, Huh, maybe the thing that has been called the church or evangelicalism or Christianity, for me, maybe that was just one small slice of what Christianity really is. And what is fascinating is that I began to dig into the history of that word evangelical. And I found one of the things I talk about in the book is that if you go back just 150 years and you looked at what an evangelical was, that person would look like an anti Evangelical, right now, right? So, so 150 years ago, evangelicalism is about collecting orthodox groups of believers to work for what historian Richard Lovelace calls historic or he calls a spiritual, cultural and social renewal. That was the project. And so Karen swallow, prior, who's written the forward to my book, which I'm super grateful for. She in her book The Evangelical imagination, she details, all right, what did it mean to be an evangelical 150 years ago? It meant you were fighting for abolition. It meant that you were an animal rights activist, right? I mean that just does not map onto the picture. You are advocating for poor children to have an education. It was this holistic vision that Jesus wants to renew society and wants to renew individuals in him. He wants to reconcile, as Paul says, all things to himself. And yet, when you talk about those kinds of things, and Jesus being interested in those sorts of things in a American Evangelical context, well you get treated like you're a heretic. And I just began to ask, why is that? What changed? And there, there is, I can go more into this, if you want to, or we can, we can move into a separate topic. There is a whole history of why American evangelicals flipped the script on that, and why we tend to be very much out of alignment with Evangelicals around the globe. So that's one thing. And I could talk more personally about how the global, historic church is impacting me even now as well. But
Joshua Johnson:well, I think that. I think it's important for us to realize when did that happen, what was happening, and why is it different than the rest of the
Unknown:world. One turning point that I think is super helpful is you look at what the evangelical church became after the Civil War. There's a night and day difference between evangelicalism before the Civil War and after the Civil War. So there's, there's a little bit of a long, complicated history there. But essentially, what it came down to was this, before the Civil War, as I described, evangelicalism was seen as this. Somewhat optimistic, hopeful movement that Jesus wanted to renew all of society, and so that's what it was. Now, after the Civil War took place, there was a huge divide in the Protestant church in America about, how do we take care of the black population? How do we handle reparations? The southern church uninterested, the northern church mixed. And so what started to happen was, as these disagreements took place, there was a very young charismatic preacher named DL Moody who came up with a solution, and his solution, which was based on a whole theological system that was created by a man named John, John Darby. And I've got a whole, got a whole history of him in the book, but, but in essence, DL Moody's proposition was, well, what if Jesus just didn't care? What if he just didn't care about these justice issues? What if he didn't care about reparations? What if the church's mission was purely spiritual, and it was only to help people escape this earth to get to heaven? This is a new and not new idea. You can see it in early, early church heresies, actually. But this was Moody's whole proposition, and the reason why it was compelling is because he thought, well, here's how we can unite the northern and southern churches. We can commit together to this kind of spiritual renewal, but we will leave aside the social, cultural component of it. And that is how American evangelicalism became this very spiritualized movement. That is what I what I call in the book we're committed to the gospel of escape. Want to escape the earth, to go somewhere else, which is radically out of alignment with what evangelicals around the world believe. Well,
Joshua Johnson:I think that's our eschatology needs. Needs a little bit of of reframing and restoring. You talk a little bit about dispensationalism. You talk about it's about escaping this earth, where we want to go to heaven when we die and the earth is going to burn, and we don't need to do anything here, because it's all going to go away anyways. So the only thing that matters is where we go. You know, when we die, hopefully we go to heaven. What's a better vision for us? A better eschatology, a better way to view what is going to happen and what our role is now in this new new Heaven and new Earth that is going to come
Unknown:the controversial part of the gospel in Paul's day. You know, if Paul had said to the Greco Roman society that Jesus mission was to help us all escape our bodies, to go off to heaven, to be perfect souls, that would not have been controversial. I mean, the Christian faith would have been far less controversial, because this was the widely believed. I mean, it was the doctrine of the day. This is Plato. This is Gnosticism. The thing that was controversial about Paul is he said, Actually, I think Jesus is interested in our bodies. He was a resurrected human being, and so Jesus project isn't to rescue us from the earth, but it's to bring renewal and restoration to all things. And that particular message, we don't realize this without the cultural context, but that side of the message got Paul in far more trouble than if he had preached what we preached today, because that was seen as crass, dirty, unethical to think about the body as a good thing, and so in the book, this is part of what I try to return us to, is that Jesus. Jesus isn't merely trying to help us escape from the world he's created. He is inviting us to renewal, and he invites us to personal renewal and reconciliation to him first and foremost, but he's also interested in renewing everything around us. He cares about everything our hands touch. Why does this matter? Well, I remember one particular conversation I talk about in the book a little bit with a student named Michael. And Michael was a college student, and he was very troubled. He's kind of an artist. He liked to create things. He was super funny. I just enjoyed him so much as a person. And so we're talking one day, and we're walking around campus, and we go up to this, this top of a building that was his favorite place to be, and it's fall time. We're looking over the beauty of creation. We can see these beautiful trees. And as Michael starts to describe to me what he pictures as the evangelical gospel, which is that none of the beautiful things we're looking at matter. He starts to describe how he felt guilty for being an artist, because that didn't feel like he was living into the mission of trying to get more kids inside of his youth group. That was the thing he was. All to be doing. He felt guilty because he liked pretty girls. And he's like, that's not, that's not spiritual enough to like pretty girls. And so we started talking about, where does all this come from? What? What do you think the story of the gospel is? And it all came back to, of course, the stories that Jesus wants to rescue us from being human, which is a, it's kind of a cruel message, actually. And so as we started to talk it through, I gave him the good news that Jesus did not want us to escape our bodies, to go elsewhere, but he wanted to renew everything, and that Jesus cared about his art, and Jesus is the designer of sexuality. And Jesus is invested in all these things and wants to bring resurrection to them. He was just like you could see tears in his eyes. And just, no one has ever told me this. No one ever told me that my body matters, that my desires matter, that my world matters, and Jesus cares about all of that. And so yeah, this, this makes an impact on on everyday life.
Joshua Johnson:It makes, it makes a huge impact on everyday life, that what what we do here, matters who we are, matters Jesus himself became one of us, became human and is still human in a resurrected body, human body, which is crazy that he's there. Do you talk about restoring ourselves? What do you mean by restoring? And why is it important that we actually restore?
Unknown:Well, one of the words I try to avoid is reconstructing faith. I'm not interested in reconstructing faith because first of all, that sounds like a lot of work. I still was the onus on me, like, Okay, I've deconstructed my faith. Now you go do all the work to reconstruct your faith. Well, I think, I think the good news is better than that, actually. So one of the one of the metaphors that I use in the book comes from a couple of conversations I've had with folks who have been going through deconstruction. And the metaphor I hear oftentimes is, well, I sort of picture Christianity like a room that has been decorated for me, and it's my job to take down the decorations I don't like and redecorate it in a way that I like. There's something beautiful about that. I think there is something true about the fact that Jesus allows you to be you. You know he doesn't ask you to fit into this particular cultural mold. But at the same time, it's a bit of a limited picture. Because when Jesus describes being part of the church, does he describe it like being in a room alone, by yourself? Thankfully, not here, right? He talks about being part of the church like, Hey, you're part of this village. You're part of this group of people. You have many houses, you have many fathers, many mothers, many brothers, many sisters, who've all come before you. There are resources in the church that can help to retell the story of the gospel to you in ways that maybe the American context gets a little bit wrong sometimes, and that that is really a huge part of my story. You know, a lot of this book is centered on the prayer of Zechariah in Luke chapter one. I had never heard this prayer growing up. No one ever prayed this prayer, but it was maybe seven years ago I started to pick up the Book of Common Prayer, which is a resource that's used all around the world by Christians all around the world. And one of the things I noticed straight away was they're praying the prayer of Zechariah every single day, all year long. And I thought, What in the What is this? This doesn't make any and as I read that prayer, I thought, well, Zechariah is simply preaching the gospel of Jesus here in a really beautiful way, and that's why we pray it every single day. But that version of the gospel that Zechariah prays, it doesn't actually square very well with the version of escape that we proclaim, and so no wonder it's been dropped from our liturgies, right? And so, so that beginning process of, okay, maybe, maybe the church is telling a story is better than the story I've been told. And can I let Jesus Church bring renewal and restoration to me, rather than me trying to figure out this whole thing by myself?
Joshua Johnson:Since you mentioned Zechariah, and I was going to get into just walk us through what that prayer is and how it helps
Unknown:us. Yeah, so Zechariah is prayer is a beautiful poem. Part of the reason why I love Zechariah story is because, in many ways, you meet him as someone who, I imagine him as a bit of a cynic and a skeptic. I think we can see that a little bit and his response to so he's childless. He and his wife Elizabeth, are childless, which, in ancient Israel, this is, this is an all encompassing problem. This is not a side problem. This is your wealth. This is your future. This is, this is everything. And so to be childless was seen as a curse. It was seen as being forgotten by God. And so he's really he has a miserable life, and he's very old, and he's looking at. The end of it, and he has this dream of having a child, and then at some point, this angel comes to him and says, Hey, you're gonna have a child. And his reaction is, I don't think so, right? And you can almost hear how the cynicism has calloused him and built him up. But that's I can grab onto that, right? I relate to that, like, Yeah, well, this is how I would respond this seriously. Like, I don't I don't think so. So Zechariah goes into this period of silence before his son, John the Baptist, is born. And I think in the past, I would have thought, oh, Zechariah, he's being punished for not believing right away. And maybe, maybe there's an element of being disciplined there. But actually, I think that period of silence before the promise is fulfilled. I think it's a gift. It gives Zechariah this creative space where, when he starts to speak again, he comes out with this brilliant, beautiful declaration of, here is what Jesus is coming to do. He's like the sunlight that is going to return color and life and beauty to the world. And it's this beautiful picture, not of us leaving the Earth, but of Jesus as this brilliant sun that rises on all things and brings them to life. And that picture was really captivating to me, like Jesus is like the sunrise. It's like when I'm walking around in downtown Indianapolis, and it's dark out, and I can't see anything, and then I see the sun start to rise on the horizon. All of a sudden, I can see these beautiful murals, and I can see trees, and I can see people standing up and walking their dogs. It brings everything to life again. And what if that's what Jesus came to do? And it just, it captured my imagination. And I thought, well, this is why. Why do we have this? This is what the church all around the world is singing every day. I want, I want some of that, right? That's good stuff.
Joshua Johnson:Yes, we want the light of Jesus. So take us in. So Zechariah is prayer. It helps us process our cynicism. Disillusionment brings us into a place of hope and knowing that the light of Jesus can actually make things new and can restore things, walk me through some of your own story of how did you walk through those places of cynicism and doubt into a place of hope and finding the love of Jesus and what it actually looked like in your life.
Unknown:Well, I'm very thankful I've been very lucky to have so i The irony of being burned by the church and hurt by the church, and I have a lot of that that I talk about in the book, all kinds of different bad experiences with the church, but, but the irony of not just the church but being a human is that humans are the people who scarred you, and humans are the only people who can help you, right? So, so you get scarred by communities, but you also have to get healed by communities. And so I am so thankful that I feel like I've been in several Healing Church communities over the years, of people who have the wisdom to know they can sort of see past this little blip on the screen that we call American evangelicalism, and are living into that bigger, broader story and but what's been a real privilege to me, I think being at my current church, Redeemer Indianapolis, over the last few years, is watching so many other people go through that experience of I'm no longer interested in this American subculture, but coming to Redeemer, they find something that is renewing and restoring for them. So So one guy I had the privilege to meet with over the last few years. His name is Joseph, and Joseph, he had a bad experience in the church growing up, and was part of the college campus ministry, and all of his friends deconstructed and left during the pandemic. A whole other topic of conversation is like, how isolation led to a lot of this D churching, but so, so all of Joseph's friends left, but Joseph's a little bit duty bound. Okay, so he started. He just kept coming to church, just because that's what he's supposed to do. And he's so Joseph is a very intimidating guy, super intellectual. Sometimes I'll say things and I don't, you know, I just talk sometimes. And he's like, why did you say that? I don't know, just leave me alone. I'm just daunting. It was very rigorous, but, but he had all these big, big questions, you know, and very, very analytical and super, super bright. But the really fascinating thing about Joseph is that he would say finding renewal for him, what he wanted it to be was I wanted to come to Redeemer and get all my questions and my questions answered. But the thing that I found renewal in is the fact that at Redeemer, every single week, I get down on my knees and I confess my sins in very tangible ways, and then someone feeds me communion and says, Jesus loves you. You. Yeah, it was this amazing, like, hot, you know? And the way he would put it is, he said, It's not that the questions I was asking didn't matter. It's just that, in light of Jesus love, they became quieter. There's good answers out there. Now, how's that tied to the story of renewal? Well, one of the reasons we do communion every week is because we believe that Jesus doesn't just care about your soul. He cares about your body, and he wants to love your body. And every single time you take communion, it is Jesus saying, I love you, and I want you to taste it, and I want you to drink it. I want you to experience it. And I think the only way, the only reason, maybe I'm getting controversial here, as surely I am, but I think the only reason we stepped away from delivering those physical elements with the preaching and the reading of God's word is because of this side gospel of escape, right? We need all of it. Our bodies need the love of Jesus, and our brains and our souls, everything, and so watching him go through the story of renewal and restoration that has been so sweet to just see dozens of those stories over the years, and get to bring that to those folks.
Joshua Johnson:So much of this conversation, it's been about an embodied gospel, and not just an intellectual or escape gospel, but it is embodied like our bodies matter what we do here matters the beauty and the justice, the peace of God in the city matters in our community. It all comes together like it's all he's here with us. How do we move towards embodiment like, what does that look like for for you, how do we how are we aware of our bodies, where we're at and what we do matters? What does that look like for such a rationalistic, heady type of culture that we live in?
Unknown:So we do that on Sunday mornings. I would say through, you know, we use our bodies in worship. At Redeemer, we stand up, we sit down, we kneel, we take communion. One of the things I love about the way we embody even our worship service is my friend Kyle. He's an artist here in Indianapolis, and one of the weird, quirky things about our church is that we have a sanctuary that's attached to a giant art gallery that houses artists from all over Indianapolis, most of them, some of them are Christians. Most of them aren't. So when you walk around the church, it's not precious moments. It's sort of like will make you go, Oh, wow. I didn't know that should be next door to a sanctuary. So as a wild place, we also have so many wonderful, weird, wonky artists that are part of our congregation. And one of the things that Kyle has helped me to see is that when we're going through seasons, like literal seasons, fall, winter, spring, summer, this is God teaching us about who he is. And so we were doing a series on the Incarnation one one year. This is actually last year. And one of the really tactile, beautiful, bodily things we did was we asked our artists to, all right, help us think about the incarnation. And so we walk into our sanctuary and we have 3d sculptures of pregnant women, and it's like, I mean, it's wild, you know, and it's all DNA woodwork. It almost took me aback, like, whoa, whoa, this, should this be in the sanctuary? But it was this beautiful reminder that these are all things that Jesus had and was a part of, you know, and he cared about all those things. And what Kyle would say is, okay, you don't have to be part of a church with lots of artists to have that experience. If you just, if you just pick up a very basic version of the book of commoner prayer, it will walk you through the year and help you think about, Okay, what does the season mean? Let's, let's live the story of Jesus. Let's think about the incarnation and the dead of winter. Let's think about the resurrection when all the other flowers are springing forth in spring. It's a very simple thing, but even following the church calendar has been this very embodied way for me to pray where you know, as I'm thinking about a psalm, I can step outside and I can think about what is creation doing right now? Is telling the story of Jesus, and so that would be another practice that I found super, super healing for me to think about embodied faith. I think one of the things that can really help us to embody the gospel is recovering the practice of hospitality. And by hospitality, I don't mean a fancy spread that impresses all your friends. I mean just this expectation, really, that the early church had, you know, one of the qualifications for being a pastor in the early church was, Are you hospitable? Which actually, back in those days, man, do you let poor people live with you? And so that's, you know. That was but that was a requirement that you you open your home, that you're with other people. And so one of the stories I tell is my friend Luke. He he and I met at college ministry one year in the hall and the dining hall. And is pretty random, but Luke was not a Christian. He had left the church years before he graduated high school, and as we started talking, I invited him to a Bible study. He said, Okay, fine, I'll come. But there was one particular night where I had this I loved my freshmen. They were kind of weird and awkward though. I said, Hey guys, it's really cool that we meet for Bible study. Like, really, really cool. But there's other cool things we could do, like talk to each other. And so I said, What would you guys like to do just as a community? And I said, Well, I only make pizzas at your house. And so I said, Fine. And so I put together this pizza party. Luke, who was not a Christian, came over to the pizza party, and I just thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever done. It was a weird night. So we had maybe just seven or eight freshmen at my house were making pizzas. You know, students are talking to me about their math homework, and one student is over talking to my dog because he doesn't want to talk to people. And the whole thing, I'm thinking, this is a terrible failure of an event, like, what am I doing here? But years later, when I talked to Luke, he became a Christian in a really radical, beautiful way, I asked him, you know, Luke, what? What really moved the needle for you on wanting to become a Christian? Probably, like a sermon I preach, right? Or probably like a really cool Bible study they put together. And he said, Yeah, that stuff was good. But he's like, you know, it was the pizza night at your house. That's what really sold it. For me. It's just like only God could put this weird community together. I think, I think there might be something to it, but, you know, that's what it was. It was just embodying the gospel in a place we're just, we're eating together, being humans together, which is, it's kind of a rare thing in our era of people being stuck to their phones. So just, just creating spaces like that, I think
Joshua Johnson:hospitality and food is so important. It's so important to the gospel and to our faith. That's why I love like the story of on the Emmaus Road, where Jesus encounters these disciples. They don't know who he is. They call him foreigner, stranger, like he's not even and so here's this random foreigner that are walking with them, and they invite them in to stay. And you know, it was through the breaking of the bread, it was through the meal that that they discover it was Jesus. Jesus is there with us. This is just common practice. It's like you have a foreigner among you, you invite them in, you let them stay like this is it's hospitality, but then you actually see Jesus in the midst of it. And so even the story of your your pizza party, which seems silly, like Jesus was there with people talking to dogs, and, you know, all the stuff. And I so I just love the picture like that, hospitality and eating with people does more than we ever think it could,
Unknown:absolutely and part of the moral of that story is we should throw more parties. They don't have to be good parties. It was kind of a bad party, but yeah, Jesus was there, and he was working in Luke's heart. And really it goes back to that, as you said, Joshua, so Well, this embodied vision of the gospel. Jesus cares about us being with each other in real life. And I love that story in Luke, because it's one of those moments where, you know, I preached on that particular passage a couple of years ago, and it blew my mind studying it, because what I realized Luke was doing this is, as he's transitioning to writing the book of Acts, and what he is saying, and this is going to connect both of our stories together. Is he's saying, I am still going to be with you through the bread and the wine. So when you break that together, how does me being with you? It's a it's an ingenious way for Luke to communicate that when you break bread together and take communion together, Jesus will be present. So as one of my favorite stories,
Joshua Johnson:yeah, it's so good. So we've talked about some cynical dreams. We've talked about reasons why people are disillusioned or deconstructing, and you actually walk through stages, which is really helpful the beginning your book. So I want people go read that. I think it's really helpful for for you, as you're thinking through people leaving or de churching and what it looks like. But we haven't talked about the Jesus dreams. And so what are some of these dreams of Jesus? These Jesus dreams for us that bring us some hope, that give us a new vision, or revision us and restore us into what the gospel looks like and what Jesus is doing here and now.
Unknown:The three words that I use to describe Jesus dreams are. Jesus dreams about love, he dreams about freedom, and he dreams about beauty. Those are words that I feel like we can all resonate with, right? We dream about those things, but really, what I'm doing, once again, is I'm just stealing from church history on those three particular categories. Jesus is our priest who's come to show us his embodied love. He is our Prophet who's come to give us true freedom, and he is our King who's come to bring beauty to the world, his Shalom and by bringing his justice and so and so. This is but this is also when I talk to people who are leaving the church, I think sometimes we in the church think if people are leaving the church, it's because they have these desires for things that Jesus doesn't have. I think I want to say, I think Jesus does have those things, and I think they're better and truer than the versions that we're pursuing out there, but we as the church have got to say, hey, Jesus has that hope that you're looking for it's not you're not going to find it by pursuing love, the way the world pursues love or freedom, the way the world pursues freedom or beauty, the way the world pursues beauty. But those are things Jesus actually cares about, and so I want to point you back to what Jesus says about those things. So for example, when we talk about freedom. Freedom is a big word that folks use when they talk about deconstruction. I want to be my truest best self. And I think the church tends to say, No, you shouldn't be your truest best self. Well, I think what Jesus would say is, I do want you to be your truest and best self, but the way you do that, you're not going to find the resources to do that inside of yourself. You're going to find the resources to do that when you are connected to me. And so one of my favorite stories that has helped me to get around my head, around this particular dream of Jesus, is I'm a huge Jim Henson fan, huge Muppets fan. I've seen everything Muppets, even the weird stuff, the super I go deep on Dark Crystal labyrinth, all of it. I mean, it goes deep, but there's this beautiful story in Jim Henson's biography where he's talking about taking the Muppet Show on the road. So the Muppet Show is sort of the way that Jim Henson became Jim Henson, in many ways. And so he's taking the Muppet Show on the road, and he has all these Muppets that are putting these skits together. It's like a Saturday Night Live with Muppets, and nothing is working. I can't get anything to work. So Fauci the bear, he's he's just telling bad jokes. And Gonzo, he's doing stunts. We don't know why it's not coming together. And so Jim Henson is watching these skits, and they're all falling apart, and he can't understand why they're not landing. And then he has this idea, which is to take one of his Sesame Street characters, which is the character which was actually just Jim Henson, it was just him in Muppet form, Kermit the Frog, and he puts Kermit the Frog in the middle of all these skits. And everybody on set said, everything just clicked. Every single Muppet became themselves because Kermit was on stage. So what I want to say to someone who's leaving the church in the aim of freedom is I want to say, I want you to have freedom, but you will not have freedom until Jesus is center stage in your life. He can bring you that freedom that you're looking for out there, but can truly only be found in the words in the life of Jesus. And so that's one dream. We could talk about all Jesus dreams, but I think that's, you know, that's, I think that's the task right now, is to say Jesus loves your dreams. He actually thinks that your dreams are too small, not too big. He cares about those things, but you can only find them through him. Our
Joshua Johnson:culture finds, finds who we are inside of ourselves, and not from outside, not from Jesus or the community of God. We find who we are on the inside. And I think we're struggling to figure out how we can do that and what to do, but this vision of like restoring, like walking through the ancient tradition that we have in the church, and it's, you know, centuries old that we're here, then we can stand firm and be rooted in something is, is really, I think, miraculous for us, especially in our day and age and our culture, where everything comes from the inside. You said that, hey, you're hurt by community, but you could only be healed in community. You could only be healed actually, from what comes from outside of you, not from inside of you. And so that's one of the things that it's, I think, a difficult thing to move people from trying to find who they are from the inside to say it actually takes you connecting with people on the outside and with with what true community is, and what Jesus actually says, and the actual story of the Bible and the scripture, and not just what our own little culture thinks and feels. I have a couple of questions for you. Nicholas, one I would love to know, what is your hope for the light in your eyes, if you talk to your readers, what do you hope that they would get from that?
Unknown:I want to have a conversation with you. That was the conversation I wish someone had had with me 15 years ago. I want to I want you to feel the fact that your concerns and some of the things you feel discomfort in from your particular context are probably valid, right? So I do want to say that period like they're probably valid. And yet I also want to say to you that Jesus, Jesus was disillusioned in many ways with the religious institutions around him. And Jesus said, Hey, your dreams are too small. I have bigger dreams for you, and I want you to find hope. I want you to find hope in Jesus. Because I do think a lot of us are like Zechariah. We're just that. We've been hurt too many times. We've had our expectations unmet too many times. Many of us have experienced real abuse and trauma from a church that says your body doesn't matter. Those things go together. Guess what? If the story of the Gospel is that your body doesn't matter, that is a culture ripe for abuse, and so many of us have felt that and seen that, and yet Jesus cares about your story, cares about your body, and he wants to give you hope
Joshua Johnson:if you go back to your 21 year old self. Nicholas, what advice would you give? I
Unknown:think I would say, Stop trying to write a book right now. I don't know that's You don't know anything. That would be one thing. I think probably what I said to you earlier, I think I would say you experienced a lot of hurt by people, and yet you're only going to find healing through people, you know, good, trusted, safe people, and so don't walk away from community, but find the right
Joshua Johnson:community. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend,
Unknown:yes, a book I'm reading right now. There's a book by Dan Danielle called the meaning of singleness, and we have been preaching on singleness in our church, and this book is just blowing my mind, because what she's doing, essentially, she's saying, Okay, here's where evangelicalism now isn't right now on marriage and singleness. Here's what the church through history has always said about these things. And she's coming at this from a reformed evangelical standpoint, and kind of saying, I think we're maybe way out of line and seeing the beauty of singleness and the beauty of marriage and what these things even mean in the first place. And I love a book like this, because it situates you where you are, and then it says, And here's actually a better, bigger, more beautiful vision of what Jesus has for people who are single and people who are married, and I've just found myself challenged and inspired, and it's made me convicted at times, and it's been fantastic, so would highly recommend
Joshua Johnson:so go get the light in our eyes. Nicholas is a great writer. He's funny, he's relatable, he walks through things. He's actually highly intelligent in a lot of these things as well. So there's actually deep wisdom in this book, but it's actually a fun book to read. It's not just something you have to get through to get to the meat, but it's actually a fun book. So go get this book. It is great. Nicholas, Is there anywhere else you'd like to point people to?
Unknown:Yeah, if you want to connect with me online, you can do that at my substack called the bard owl, B, A, R, D, and I write weekly posts, and it's a place where I also actually giving out some more resources for the book if you're a subscriber. So it's good place to get discussion guides and some supplemental content as well.
Joshua Johnson:Great. Well, check out Nicholas, substack, the Bard, owl and Nicholas. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for walking us through this de churching, disillusionment, deconstruction, but then walking us through a there is some cynicism, there's some pain, there is some hurt, there are some real things that have happened and it's real and it's valid, but there is actually some hope in Jesus and he has a bigger story and a better story for us and a bigger dream and a better dream for us. It was a fantastic conversation. Really enjoyed talking to you. So thank you so much,
Unknown:and it as well. Thanks. Joshua. You